This is based on something someone else said to me recently, though I wrote it it doesn't necessarily mean I wholeheartedly agree with what is written, it is more of a debating platform.For a world which is about to face an enormous threat to civilisation's growth and survival - climate change - the obscene energy usage of Bitcoin miners is a problem. In 2016 Motherboard modelled[1] that, pessimistically, the Bitcoin network could require 14 GW of energy to supply all the miners in action, that is, 14 gigajoules per second or 14 billion joules per second.
For context, 14 gigajoules is - in the UK anyway - equal to just over 16.1 million McDonalds' hamburgers worth of energy per second. That's a lot of hamburgers. (simplified, of course)
The world is already experiencing an exponential growth in population and therefore energy consumption, and energy is already going to limit the future's economic growth[2]. If we want to prevent this happening we need to seriously decrease our global energy consumption, and Bitcoin needs to be a part of this, either through changing the hashing method/protocol or centralisation/regulation (one being more desirable than the other). In addition, Bitcoin mining is generally focused in places where renewable energy is not taking nearly as much of a hold as in developed countries, e.g. Russia, Brazil, China, and so the effect of the energy consumption in those areas is worsened. I couldn't find a reliable source I trust to back that up, however.
What is your response to the question in the title?
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[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020
[2]: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/61/1/19/303944/Energetic-Limits-to-Economic-Growth
