[Cryptography] One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

The fact that it is taking $100 worth of electricity per BitCoin
transaction is in fact significant.

What it is proving is precisely the fact that BitCoin is not a
functioning payment system, let alone a currency. It is simply a
digital asset that people are fighting over. It is the electronic
equivalent of valuable baseball or magic the gathering cards.

As ever, we have the chopped logic which means that everything must be
interpreted in the sense most favorable to bitcoin. BitCoin ideology
is founded on the premise that it will one day replace the global
payments system. Thus the fact that the use of BitCoin for actual
payments is negligible is not a small detail that can be hand waved
away, it utterly demolishes the original premise.

Proof of work is not essential to the running of a notary log. Surety
managed just fine before BitCoin was invented. Last week we saw people
pushing the name 'hashgraph' to describe an alternative technique. I
see this as some very smart people who have invested heavily in
Blockchain technology looking for a way to decouple from the BitCoin
bubble before it bursts.

Of course the bubble will burst, they always do. At the current rate,
there will be more BitCoin than USD within two years.I haven't done
the sums recently but we are surely past the point where BitCoin has
exceeded the total amount of USD in specie. Two years after that,
there will be more BitCoin than there is money of all types.

Of course it is very easy for people to convince themselves that they
are creating money by sitting in their basement running a mining rig.
The fact that other people don't 'get it' is taken as proof that the
miner is really really smart and the critics are not.

Sound familiar? It is the same effect that has people voting for Trump.