Except that's not how it works. This adoption has a massive impact on acceptance of Bitcoin. If we assume Bitcoin is a mistake for humanity - this clearly is a great wrongdoing. A smaller wrongdoing would be buying Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin or making positive comments about Bitcoin on HN. Sadly, all these are economically justified (for now).
An empty bitcoin block and a full bitcoin block use the same amount of energy
Your dissertation seems to be unrelated to this conversation. Your topic sentence says “thats not an argument.” Or “thats not how it works” and proceeds to not disprove that at all, derailing every conversation with something completely unrelated
Isn't it pretty awesome that as a bunch of environmental activists, we are ok with golf greens and almond exports? Ok with tankers which spill oil by the lake-full and intense deforestation? But when it comes to proof of work crypto - suddenly it's a veil of FUD?
How can you find fault with someone trying to make more money? This is capitalism at work. Not saying the energy argument for crypto is moot, but it is certainly blown way the heck out of proportion. Let's regulate lithium mining while we are at it, no?
Economic advantage is a like gas in a vacuum, it will spread everywhere it can, until it cannot.
Many things in the world use a lot of energy, even inefficiently.
But it's hard for me to think of another thing that makes a worldwide competition for who can waste the most energy, with a massive crowdfunded prize every 10 minutes, and the crowd that has paid into the system to fund the prizes so far wants me to join in funding it so the prize can get bigger.
Edit: for example, take Cathie Wood's claim that Bitcoin will be worth $500,000. If that happens before 2024, that would make the reward for the winner of the useless-hashing race $3.1 million plus change, every 10 minutes. Awesome!!! That kind of money can buy a lot of useless-hashing ASICs and energy to run them. The smart miner had better spend most of it that way, just to be able to keep up with the others in the race.
The appropriate answer (widely accepted by economists [0]) is a carbon tax and dividend, such that the externality is assigned a proportionate price signal. This additional price burden would be factored into the Proof of Work, and might provide additional incentive to migrate to Proof of Stake, or a low-energy Proof of Work algo. (This might eventually happen anyway, due to competitive pressures of transaction costs).
We can argue until the cows come home about which energy expenses increase human well-being, and which are “wasteful” (Adam Smith hated opera and thought it was a waste of money), but the only fair answer is to ask individuals and firms to pay their fair share proportional to usage, be it crypto mining or cloud marketing analytics or Christmas lights.
