We literally are mining coal to burn it in powerplants to energize servers and GPUS to waste clock cycles to find "coins".
The world is the realm and how we use its people and resources matters, especially when its to just create more entropy faster then natural systems.
This is not to say that proof of work is the best consensus algorithm, but given it's age, the fact that Bitcoin has stood up so well to the test of time is a testament to it's viability as a consensus protocol.
I'm curious to know what the carbon footprint of a human is, that way we can compare it to the GPUs doing an equivalent amount of work (which I think will be tricky to determine in the first place).
> The world is the realm and how we use its people and resources matters, especially when its to just create more entropy faster then natural systems
if anything, we're pushing entropy away, we're tending towards order not away.
A RX480 uses 160W on average according to TomsHardware, mining might pull more but lets use that as a conservative example.
A Mining Rig, decent one, might have 4 cards and pull 100Watts for itself (conservative estimate).
That puts the total power of the rig at 750Watts (approximately)
This will yield a hashrate of about 20MH/s for each card or 80MH/s for the entire thing (atleast from what I can tell)
So the right has about 0.7KWh per hour for 80MH/s, which yields about 0.35kg of CO2 every hour.
Ethereum has a total of 120TH/s or about 1'500'000 of these mining rigs. Which means the total carbon footprint estimate of Ethereum is about 525'000 kg or 525 Tons each HOUR. And that is using my conservative estimates.
The entire year (ass. 365 days incorrectly) is 191'625'000, or about 191 kilotons of CO2.
To comparison, a single person uses about 6 to 8 tons o CO2 per year so Ethereum alone produces as much CO2 per year as 191'000 people combined.
>if anything, we're pushing entropy away, we're tending towards order not away.
What order? Burning any fuel is literally increasing entropy. If you break a wineglass you increase entropy. If you repair the broken wineglass you still increased entropy. Entropy inevitably goes up and you can maybe delay it by putting in massive amounts of energy compared to the entropy saved.
Assuming those estimates are correct (I haven't verified it), I think it's hard for me to believe that there are fewer than 191K people working to manage an equivalent number of financial transactions in USD.
I tried this wolfram query: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+people+workin...
Yes, we are increasing entropy outside of ourselves but not within, if the population of humans is increasing, humans have acquired more negentropy from the environment and are "winning" against entropy as they get better at extracting energy from the environment, we'll run out of energy in the form of fossil fuels soon, so we'll have to find another source of energy, because we need more energy to decrease entropy.
Let me be clear(er) in saying that I don't support burning fossil fuels, I think OP linked mining bitcoins directly to burning coal -- we're mixing two very separate arguments here. Burning fossil fuels for generation of electricity is a topic on its own.
And the legacy systems from barter to bitcoin are all still around.
That said, I don't think it's right to just short the connection between "coal" and "bitcoin", we aren't mining coal to get bitcoins, it just so happens that majority of the electricity generated is through coal and mining uses electricity, so does our conversation on the internet.
> And the legacy systems from barter to bitcoin are all still around.
I'm not sure I get your point here. At some point, money of any form will be exchanged for goods or services.
