Bitcoin Lurk

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4) “Bitcoin Wastes Energy”
The Bitcoin network currently uses as much energy as a small country. This naturally brings up environmental concerns, especially as it grows.

Similarly, gold mining uses a ton of energy. For each gold coin, a ton of money, energy, and time went into exploration for deposits, developing a mine, and then processing countless tons of rock with heavy equipment to get a few grams of gold per ton. Then, it has to be purified and minted into bars and coins, and transported.

It takes several tons of processed rock to get each 1-ounce gold coin, and thousands of tons of processed rock for each good delivery gold bar. The amount of energy that goes into a small unit of gold is immense.

In fact, that energy is what gives gold value, and what made it internationally recognized as money for thousands of years. Gold is basically concentrated energy, concentrated work, as a dense store of value that does not erode with time.

There’s no limit to how many dollars, euros, or yen we can print, however. Banks multiply them all the time with a stroke of a keyboard. Likewise, industrial metals like iron are very common as well; we have no shortage of them. Gold, however, is very rare, and when found, it takes a ton of energy and time to get into pure form. And then we have to spend more energy transporting, securing, and verifying it from time to time.

However, the world does that anyway, because it derives value from it compared to the value that it had to put in to get it. Gold mining and refining requires energy, but in turn, central banks, institutions, investors, and consumers obtain a scarce store of value, or jewelry, or industrial applications from the rare metal.

Similarly, Bitcoin takes a lot of energy, but that’s because it has so much computing power constantly securing its protocol, compared to countless other cryptocurrencies that are easy to attack or insufficiently decentralized.

Visa uses much less energy than Bitcoin, but it requires complete centralization and is built on top of an abundant fiat currency. Litecoin uses much less energy than Bitcoin as well, but it’s easier for a well-capitalized group to attack.

The question then becomes whether that energy associated with Bitcoin is put to good use. Does Bitcoin justify its energy usage? Does it add enough value?

So far, the market says it does and I agree. A decentralized digital monetary system, separate from any sovereign entity, with a rules-based monetary policy and inherent scarcity, gives people around the world a choice, which some of them use to store value in, and/or use to transmit that value to others.

Those of us in developed markets that haven’t experienced rapid inflation for decades may not see the need for it, but countless people in emerging markets have experienced many instances of severe inflation in their lifetimes, and tend to get the concept more quickly.
Furthermore, a significant portion of the energy that Bitcoin uses could otherwise be wasted. Bitcoin miners seek out the absolute cheapest sources of electricity in the world, which usually means energy that was developed for one reason or another, but that doesn’t currently have sufficient demand, and would therefore be wasted.

Examples of this include over-built hydroelectric dams in certain regions of China, or stranded oil and gas wells in North America. Bitcoin mining equipment is mobile, and thus can be put near wherever the cheapest source of energy is, to arbitrage it and give a purpose to that stranded energy production.

Bitcoin mining converts the output from those cheap stranded sources of energy into something that currently has monetary value.