Topic: Ecology and Bitcoin: Is Bitcoin green ? (Read 2205 times)

I am with you that the qualifier "green" is now so loaded by big business propagande that it has become an anti-concept.
However I am trying to drive the point home that Bitcoin's invention leads to a more sustainable economy while the multiplication of altcoin networks do not necessarily achieve the same.

Green isn't green. Green is an attempt by big business to make things look like big business is becoming green.

True green means the dissolving of big business, big industry, everyone going back to farm away from the big cities, and letting nature heal the wounds big business has hurt it with,

I agree that Primecoin is not the answer.

I'm not sure that power spent on mining altcoins would be better spent on mining Bitcoin. I suspect that switching wouldn't benefit Bitcoin significantly. More important is whether the altcoin has any social value. If it doesn't, and is just a ponzi scheme, then that's the reason not to mine it, and the power argument doesn't matter.

I suspect the real answer is proof-of-stake. Sure, the value of Bitcoin is such that we can justify the resources of mining it, but a good POS altcoin could have the same value and be hugely cheaper to mine.

It is also important to take into account that this energy is used both to issue new bitcoins AND to process transactions. VISA/Mastercard also have huge power consuming data centers. It is just impossible to calculate each and every resource required for gold or USD to work. But I highly doubt that Bitcoin is more power consuming since it cuts down many processing steps and becoming more and more specialized like any other competitive market.
To make a fair comparison you need to research how much energy is used running the dollar. Per $ of value do dollars use more energy or do bitcoins?

A friend of mine brought to y attention a blog post that is challenging Bitcoin power consumption as misallocation of resources: the article suggests that hashing algorithms that provide "useful" computing resources (a la primecoin) instead of just SHA256 would be preferrable.
The claim is ludicrous and ignores the design objectives of Bitcoin, namely security and decentralization.

Security:
If the hashing results have some commercial or desirable applications, then the opportunity cost of a 51% attack is lower.

Decentralization:
If the hashing results have some commercial or desirable applications, then the incentives for mining pools to stay away from the 51% market share mark are removed: the drop in the value of the coins due to excessive centralization could be compensated by the byproducts of the mining activity.

In general, the kind of criticism found in the article ignores the high environmental cost of the status quo : logistics of handling bank notes, carbon footprint of the trips to the bank, to notaries or other intermediaries, redundant data centers of the 300 Billion payment industry, etc..

The argument of the article is completely off target: instead, there is a valid environmental case against alt-coins because alternate crypto-currency networks consume incremental power without providing any incremental gain in the level of protection against double spend attacks and/or centralization.
In other words, we would be better off if the computing power consumption was concentrated on the bitcoin network instead of being spread on multiple, less secure altcoins.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts about this frequently asked question (Is Bitcoin green ?).