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I like to point people to this page: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

The breakdown in cost pr. Transaction really drives home what a ludicrous system it is. Bitcoin is a fantastic example of a great invention put to horrible use.

I live in Kurdistan (Iran) because of sanctions if it was not for crypto buying something online would have been one of the most difficult things i could do. i should have used middleman that give no guarantee to their services and suck. so I'm glad for crypto that i can receive my revenue and buy things. and instantly send money.

note: i read the comments and all of them argue against it because of its energy consumption. I don't find any of them convincing crypto has been good to me and i want it to be good for others too. The only thing that i care about are pedos and drug dealers which makes very upset because it's very true, they use it and i wish there was a way to track them.

Crypto should have stayed a silly tech demo that nerds used to trade with eachother for pizza.

Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies don't have a value assigned like normal currency. That means you almost never pay in bitcoin but in the bitcoin trading value of some currency. Instead of $5 you pay the current trading value of $5 in bitcoin. That is why it doesn't work as a currency and people are complaining about how they struggle with crypto volatility. No one really thinks about how many bitcoins they have just how much that is worth in "real" money.

> If you don’t want people to rewrite history, you have to be wasting tons and tons of resources 24/7, 365. And that’s why Bitcoin burns as much power as a significant country.

No, Bitcoin burns that much power because it has become the top speculative asset.

But it only became that after maybe 8 years. Before that it actually functioned more like a currency (amongst other things, for buying illicit goods online).

And what makes Bitcoin ideal for speculation is its capped emission where every 4 years the amount emitted is halved, encouraging FOMO.

I agree most cryptocurrency should die in a fire, including all the ones made to enrich their creators, which is the vast majority of them.

The few that do not allow their creators any financial gain, and those that strongly discourage speculation by having the same amount emitted every year, do not need to die.

Note that most of the 'Bitcoin anti-sustainability FUD' comes from a 2019 study published by cambridge university. The studies very heavily critisized, and in 2025 cambridge themselves revised their own models and admitted overestimation and model correction. The article is from 2022 and probably not up to date.

I would also highlight that most knowledge and mental models around Bitcoin and the ecosystem seem to be stuck in 2021 - but after the AI hype took over, there have been slow improvements and developments that go mostly unnoticed, also here on HN. I.e. the lightning network is evolving too, making anonyous (to a certain extend), sub-second, off-chain transactions possible at way better efficiency regarding energy. With other developments like Bitcoin Taproot (Schnorr signatures), async and trampoline payments on the horizon fir lightning, we can expect even better anonymity and ease of use for lightning network within the next 1-2 years.

Most comments, reasoning, papers etc. older than 3-4 years should be taken with a grain of salt, as it is a rapidly evolving and changing field. Probably the same applies to AI progress (especially the debatable energy consumption around AI).

(2022)

So does this mean that AI will absorb all the cryptocurrency compute when "we" collectively realize that crypto was so much rectal sunshine?

… they’re not wrong

It will.

Oh it will.