Bitcoin an environmental disaster?

[wopwop]

Once the bitcoin block reward gets to 0. Only the most efficient miners will be running (let's call them power plants). This is bad, because transaction fees will all go into the hands of those few efficient miners (ie. power plants owned by govs). Who will eventually have significant amounts of bitcoins to manipulate inflation and deflation in the economy. Basicly it's back to 1800's gold system but with bitcoins.

So very long term, bitcoin looks very bad, and very short term as well due to high energy costs vs low economy activity (at these hot aired bitcoin prices).

To start with a solution to these problems, a new bitcoin 2.0 must be developed without the current mining structure.

[ralree]

Been seeing this floating around the web lately:

http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/04/14/2234251/is-bitcoin-mining-a-real-world-environmental-problem?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed

Apparently since Bitcoin didn't completely crash they have nothing better to attack.

So, how does a bunch of computers (the only thing Bitcoin needs to function), which could be powered by any matter of wind, geothermal, solar, and other clean means that are already available right now, compare to:

Deforrestation for fiat note creation
Mining of precious metals often with toxic byproducts and land errosion that are mismanaged at great environmental cost (at a loss as the copper used to mint pennies is more valuable than the penny is as currency, for example)
All of the fuel and manpower needed to do both, maintenance of the big machinery, etc

The time and energy impact to continuously mint new fiat currency as it is lost or destroyed
Environmental impact of all of the trucks and armored cars needed to transport it
Human manpower required to transport and maintain it

You tell me which one is the real disaster environmentally. Bitcoin would free us of all of this infrastructure and the need to feed it real world materials, effort, and energy in place of something that could be done in a sustainable way with green energy sources (again, the tech is already here for this). Sure, there is a certain cost in creating new computers as well, though in the long run Bitcoin would do far less damage, at least once in place with the backing of renewable energy, all the computer has to do is be turned on after that and lasts much longer than the creation/destruction cycle of fiat currency which is unsustainable. It is true that the power demand will only increase, however one point not covered is these machines are about to get much more efficient as well with ASICs and the like.

Sad the media has to spin things like that when they are so completely untrue.

How much does it cost to run credit card processing?  I'm sure there's no servers or anything involved with that.  Banks don't use any power at all, do they?  I'm sure the heating and cooling systems of tens of thousands of buildings in the US isn't having any impact on the environment at all...

[benjamindees]

I want to know why there is this assumption that it is Bitcoin which is the "environmental disaster" for simply making economic use of completely legal fossil fuels.

If you want to assign moral agency, look to the ones actually causing the environmental destruction and the governments that actively promote it.  Bitcoin runs just fine on renewables.