New research estimates that the 34 largest Bitcoin mining operations in the United States consumed more electricity in 2022 than all of Los Angeles combined. 85% of the electricity came from fossil fuels and exposed 1.9 million Americans to more than 0.1 μg/m3 of additional PM2.5 pollution.

[u/shiruken]

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58287-3

[u/efstajas]

It's important to note that Bitcoin soaks up as much energy as it does primarily because it relies on proof-of-work to secure itself. The second largest public blockchain, Ethereum, successfully transitioned to proof-of-stake in 2022, which slashed its energy consumption by over 99.99%, and it now consumes comparatively negligible amounts of power. That's because unlike PoW, PoS does not rely on expensive computation to secure the chain. Instead, it relies (greatly simplified) on validators (the actors in the network watching the chain for validity) staking significant value, which will get slashed if the validator is found to misbehave by the rest of the network. In return, validators receive rewards according to the size of their stake.

While there are risks with PoS, given how battle-tested it is at this point, Bitcoin could (and in my humble opinion eventually must) go through this same transition.

[u/greiton → u/efstajas]

it is still a bad idea economically to have a speculative currency. no one should be getting rich or losing everything by having money in their pocket so to speak. actual currency transactions require stability and security. and no block chain product has emerged on a large scale that meets these fundamental requirements.

until it does, they are still just digital beanie babies.

[u/camisado84 → u/[deleted]]

BTC was 100k in November of last year, its at 85K this year. The USD index in the same range has changed less than ~3%.

Literally everything you said does not seem to be true outsdie of BTC having variance, as with anything that is traded.

[u/Cautious_Parsley_898 → u/camisado84]

It will likely become more stable in 2140, when the last Bitcoin is mines. But it might also lose interest and drop at that point (if it makes it to that point in the first place)

[u/Areshian → u/Cautious_Parsley_898]

2140? I’m not sure if Bitcoin would really be a thing then, who knows what can replace it. I’m not even sure if society/civilization as we know it will be there. That being said, there is a good chance there is a baby alive today that may survive until 2140 if the situation is right (no WW3 stuff)

[u/sammog → u/efstajas]

It can be argued that the value of bitcoin is tied to its energy usage. It costs some amount of electricity to farm, that's a real world value attached to the otherwise purely speculative currency - if the coin was worth less than the electricity needed to mine it, people wouldn't mine it.

Since the creator of the coin also has at least a million coins themselves, it seems unlikely they would transition to a lower cost model and risk devaluing their coins.

It's dumb and it sucks, but it seems like the only people who could actually change it so people aren't just burning away piles of fuel on nothing, are the same people with an incentive to not change it.

[u/Harfatum → u/sammog]

I get the framing but I think even that is a bit of a non sequitur.

I've seen someone say that BTC is "stored energy" in the same way as feces is "stored food".

[u/Mynsare → u/efstajas]

It still serves no purpose but greed, so the energy it consumes is still excessive and wasteful, regardless of how less it consumes compared to bitcoin.

[u/Areshian → u/efstajas]

Even when using POS, it is still terrible inefficient compared to traditional computing systems, by several orders of magnitude. Sure, it is many orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin, but there is still a level of replication that is completely overkill. There are thousands of nodes and millions of of validators all of them basically doing the same operations