PoW is throwing away electricity for the sake of it, and resists getting more efficient. If the goal is for the bitcoin network to cost $1M to do a single double spend, then PoW has to use $1M worth of electricity every 10 minutes.
Let's say we live in a future where we suddenly have 10x as much electricity. Due to supply and demand, electricity now costs 10% of what it did before.
Dryers etc all keep using the same amount of electricity with no issue, but bitcoin has a problem: it's now really cheap to double spend unless bitcoin uses 10x as much electricity. So of course, it does.
There's a similar proper with making things more efficient. If we make a christmas light more efficient (make it use an LED instead of an incandescent bulb or whatever), christmas lights will use less electricity.
If we make ASICs or GPUs more efficient, then people will just have to run more of them, or else bitcoin will be less secure.
I think this is a real and notable difference, and I think that's enough of a justification to consider a ban.
Even clothes dryer seem to be using less energy than Bitcoin. If you run the dryer for an hour each week, you're at 12-15kWh per month, which is 1-2% of your average household energy usage in the US, Canada or the EU. Now households at most around a third of the electricity in cold countries with a decent amount of electric heating for which dryers are much less, but let's run with it. That still sets the upper bound to 0.6%, which incidentally is the same as bitcoin.
And best of all, someone complaining that this is clearly a wasteful scam and being told back, "how much energy did videocassettes and magazines consume, huh?"
Well, let's see
>Bright lights strung on American trees, rooftops and lawns account for 6.63 billion kilowatt hours of electricity consumption every year [1]
>Bitcoin mining consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. [2]
Huh. That's at least the same order of magnitude, at any rate.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countr... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-u...
If the amount of throughput and everything else remains constant while more and more computers are in a zero-sum arms race to waste electricity to solve a useless hash problem, then it is by definition not useful except for “securing the network”.
And if you can secure a network some other way, then it definitely becomes better by any arbitrary order of magnitude, assuming your utility function doesn’t place infinite value on securing 10 transactions a second with to over 99.9999% certainty and willing to waste all the world’s electricity to do it.
Literally even if you value all other uses of electricity put together as 1/100000 of securing Bitcoin then in a few years banning PoW becomes the right move.
But I imagine it will be like the war on drugs — impossible to totally eradicate, since mining rewards become more lucrative every year forever. Until bitcoin blackouts are frequent in the first world, msot people won’t care though.
Imagine if people asked how many emails (SMTP), conversations (VOIP) or websites (HTTP) the Internet can ever handle pet second and the answer was 10, no matter how many computers joined the network. Because every time you had to make progress, everything went through one bottleneck called a miner. Would this be the topology you want to reward with ever-more-valuable rewards?
Imagine if BitTorrent worked this way, and every computer would seed every file. And maximalists said that this was the ONLY AND BEST WAY.
Also aren't each of those used by significantly more people than Bitcoin? So the per capita use is less and they scale better?
Also how are you estimating cost of porn? Viewing cost? Generation cost?
These discussions should talk about the ratio between a certain measure of productivity (e.g. GDP generated for the country) to the energy use; energy on its own does not mean much. I'm sure worldwide food production consumes more energy than Bitcoin.
Other than that, a problem with POW (at least as implemented in Bitcoin) is that technological advances won't result in less energy consumption as it's mostly a function of (price of Bitcoin, price of energy).
Our legislators and regulators, because that's their job.
Just like we ban heroin, regulate over the counter drugs, and tax alcohol.
Mining BTC is a waste of everyone's time.
Electricity production is partly socialized - and - we're literally facing a kind of global crisis.
Ban it, and let the Cryto Warriers figure out other, better ways (of which there are numerous) for allocating magic numbers.
