Bitcoin's Enormous Energy Costs May Prove to Be Its Biggest Risk
People are always quick to point out that this is just what it takes to build a trustless and decentralized currency, which is probably correct, but it&#x27;s not clear whether such an extreme level of trustlessness is even necessary (if you are not a crypto-libertarian on principle).<p>The benchmark for Bitcoin are normal financial transactions as they exist today (and work quite well, most of the time). So the question really is: Are you ready to have humanity spend the additional energy consumption of a country (or many countries if Bitcoin were to scale up) to run a system that offers only very limited throughput (relative to established systems) and hasn&#x27;t even proven yet that it&#x27;s even a viable alternative to fiat money from an economic perspective? Not to mention the scaling issues that come with such broadcast protocol.<p>I don&#x27;t really see the widespread use, at least as envisioned by Bitcoin proponents. If it&#x27;s just the decentralized aspect and transparency that you want, you can relax your trust assumptions and implement something like a distributed ledger with known identities which doesn&#x27;t need proof-of-work to prevent sybil attacks (identities which of course would have to be certified in some way, unfortunate).<p>Oh well, it&#x27;s still a very cool technology, but I hope for the planet&#x27;s sake that cryptocurrencies stay in their niche of anonymous transactions for those who actually need it.