Though youtube is mostly doing 'useful' work in the process, bitcoins consume energy by existing.

YouTube has probably wasted more human energy and potential than any other platform. I mean, don't get me wrong, I could crush a video of a monkey riding on a Segway right now. But it's an endless stream of videos algorithmically presented to be maximally addictive. Fun times, and the people on here are probably the ones that can most resist the siren lure of a beautiful teenager pouting at the camera or someone opening a box of consumer electronics. But, first do no harm.

The electricity angle on BTC is, let's admit it, pretty dumb. If people were worried about CO2, like, for reals, we would be talking about concrete, and trying to find something less CO2y for our roads. People want to talk about culture, and approve or disapprove of what they like or dislike. So yeah, if you don't like Bitcoin and want to sniff at it, go ahead and stuff a plastic straw in its nose and call it a seaturtle. You can tweet about it on a platform that uses a comparable amount of electricity, and cause a few servers to get spun up to get your trending hashtag to the concerned masses.

If you actually givea crap about CO2 (unlikely, but possible), become a materials scientist, or advocate for the funding thereof, or fight for more nuclear powerplants. Stop making your ethical decisions based on aesthetics.

I presume most people who use Bitcoin consider the wealth made from it useful.

Do people "use" bitcoins? Right now it seems like something your betting on will eventually be useful.

Bitcoin holders don’t want Bitcoin to be useful for spending or transacting, or even selling. Previous attempts to increase the block size, a trivial modification, have failed to gain traction.

They only want Bitcoin useful for two things: Buying and holding. These actions drive the price up. As long as no one is using or selling Bitcoin, the price stays high.

Between the high transaction fees ($8 right now), the deflationary nature, and the “HODL” narrative, everything about Bitcoin was designed to disincentivize actually using it. It’s designed for hoarding and speculating.

This true for everyone who profited from pollution such as many oil tycoon/deforestation/etc, but they are not typically held in high regards.

Most people don't use Bitcoin, and most who use it (from what I see), just want to sell it at a higher price than they bought it. Only a minority of Bitcoin users use it for anything practical like payments.

The same could be argued for a Ponzi scheme: it is useful for the people at the top that have taken money from others, and not so useful for the people that have lost money by buying in later on.

The more interesting question is what value Bitcoin has created for society besides acting as a speculative good.

The people who hold btc consider the wealth made from it useful. BTC functions precisely as well as a payments system if the price is cut by 99%.

They never claimed Bitcoin had “absolutely no use at all”

The point is that Bitcoin is designed to be inherently power-inefficient. Proof of work systems rely on the work being both difficult to calculate and useless.

Even if Bitcoin transactions went to 0 tomorrow, the system would still consume more energy than Argentina just to keep everyone’s balance.

Worse yet, it the power consumption goes up every year because the system incentivized it.

> Even if Bitcoin transactions went to 0 tomorrow, the system would still consume more energy than Argentina just to keep everyone’s balance.

Do you have to do proof of work when there are no transactions?

My understanding was that the PoW was done to place transactions on the block chain. If nothing has changed, nothing has to be done. The entire system can be offline and archived if we have 0 transactions.

Sure, provided everyone agrees there have been no transactions and what the end result was. The PoW is necessary to ensure this consensus, but it would indeed become obsolete if people found a different way to form a consensus of the final state (ending bitcoin).

I assumed by him saying youtube was 'useful' by serving content and saying bitcoins merely exist, he was implying bitcoins do no useful work at all - simply not true.

The parent claims Bitcoin is not using the power for useful work. Which is entirely true. The vast vast vast majority of electricity for Bitcoin goes to hashing random numbers where the output has no value.

Your first link seems to imply that bandwidth use is the same as data center use. YouTube and other streaming platforms are generally served from edge locations and use last mile bandwidth and do not constitute large CPU costs when compared to bandwidth.

This comparison is almost certainly off by orders of magnitude.

The article itself is Whataboutism.