Bitcoin / Bitcoins / Crypto Currency

Mining creates blocks. Transactions depend on blocks. Without the block, the transaction doesn't happen. You can't separate the energy used to create the block from the transactions and say the transaction cost is something else. It's like saying the cost of moving train passengers from London to Edinburgh is just the cost of printing and stamping their ticket.

Oh, ninja edit on your part, removing the "Why is that bollocks?" bit.

It’s a shame that’s all you took from it.

It wasn't. There's more bollocks.

It’s a shame that’s all you took from it.

So, you kicked this off by wondering how much it costs to get gold out of the ground and counting the cost of the lights being left on in offices as part of the cost of fiat currency. But you followed it up with an article in which the second of the two arguments is titled

Mining Bitcoin Consumes a lot More Energy Than Using It

and claims that the energy cost of Bitcoin is almost all used to create coins and has nothing do with transactions.

Because that's a hugely hypocritical argument for you to be endorsing. It's also bullshit.

1. Proof of Work is necessary to create blocks.
   
2. Transactions depend upon blocks.
   
3. Creating a block currently also creates coin, although that will stop one day.
   
4. Even after the final coins have been created, blocks will still be being mined because that's how transactions are logged and (unless Proof of Work is replaced or somebody proves NP = P) the computational cost of transactions will still be rising.
   
   

The other argument in the article is also crap but not such blatantly, delusionally wrong crap. Bitcoin mining could form symbiotic partnerships with green energy or carbon neutral plans but right now it isn't because there's no incentive. Even if they did, most of the energy would be going on mining an not to the rest of the world. BTC would be massively increasing the energy requirements of the world economy and the whole of the rest of the economy using the smallest portion. It's not a good thing to pair BTC mining with carbon capture/offset schemes either - it creates an ongoing incentive for the damaging energy creation technologies (e.g. coal mining) to continue, when the existing climate change conventions are based on phasing them out.

Not to say that there might not be a way to make BTC a useful rather than a damaging energy client, but all that article does is repeat the same vague, hand-wavy hopes that Bitcoin bros spout every day to try and evade the argument.