1) Bitcoin mining has a pretty horrible carbon footprint. ("but so does ..." doesn't eradicate this argument)
2) similar to the author's point that advocates can't tell the difference between "store" and "medium" of value, I can't tell you the number of arguments I've gotten in with people who equate a "store of value" to be the same thing as the "increase in value"
3) It's a 1% wet dream. Make money, potentially hidden income, avoid taxation? No money paid into the welfare state? WIN!
>1) Bitcoin mining has a pretty horrible carbon footprint. ("but so does ..." doesn't eradicate this argument)
From a logical standpoint, "so does X" (e.g gold mining) very much does eradicate this as an argument against BitCoin, unless there is some Y which has less carbon footprint than either. If there is not, then the carbon footprint it's an necessary evil, and a constant through all similar systems.
The correct question would be "What's the carbon footprint" of the money creation activity of an elected government -- since, you know, they don't only do that.
And an even better question would also ask, "What's the carbon footprint of not having a government creating more money?"
printing dollars is done by keynesians to artificially inflate consumption. Which means, burning more oil, making more plastics, mining more (physical) metals, using more agriculture, etc, etc, etc,. I shudder to think of sustainability impact of currency manipulation.
Actually, for your first point, you have to compare the carbon footprint of bitcoin to the carbon footprint of the alternative. What is the carbon footprint of all the different transaction processing systems run by Mastercard, Visa, Amex, etc? What about if you add in the cost of the massive mainframes that handle ACH transfers? The cost of printing millions of archaic paper checks?
I'm not saying bitcoin replaces all those things (it certainly doesn't), but it aims to.
The other systems aren't based around grinding CPUs at 100% power utilization for days/weeks/months doing worthless busy work. Unless your power comes from a zero-carbon-footprint renewable resource, it's pretty ugly.
The Bitcoin network doesn't require CEOs to burn jet fuel to visit their associates for catered meals; it doesn't require metal to be pressed into little discs, or trees to be pressed into little rectangles, and then distributed via combustion engine; it doesn't require receipts to be printed, duplicated, stored, and finally destroyed; it doesn't require millions of humans to commute to HVAC supported cubes to keep the system running.
So we're all back to hoarding money under our mattresses?
There will always be central banking infrastructure controlled by billionaires who are more socially important than you. We can't just "go decentralized." An average person is too busy to even remember their password to gmail is "password456" and not "password123."
High hardware utilization is a good thing for efficiency because that enables ASICs to be produced that are growing increasingly more efficient.
Right now one of the main metrics people use when evaluating the profitability mining hardware is Ghash/Watt, so the market is naturally incentivizing low OpEx and therefore less power usage (per transaction processed not the nominal amount of power used).
Also, it's actually more efficient to have a smaller number of machines running at full utilization 24x7 than the typical massive datacenter that averages around 20-30% utilization [0]. That's because modern servers consume nearly as much power at 20-30% utilization as they do at 100%.
It cant be "worthless" and simultaneously have the whole system based around it. If you want to use bitcoin and the "worthless" work is what allows bitcoin to exist, then it has worth.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Bitcoin network already costs more than those mainframes in terms of carbon footprint - after all, the Bitcoin network is basically the world's largest supercomputer [0].
On top of that, you have to consider that those systems offer much more value than just a barebones ledger as the core of Bitcoin does. If you add in all those companies building stuff on top of Bitcoin, the comparison starts to become less favorable.
[0] Purely monetary terms are obviously different. The vendors of those systems inflate prices ridiculously because they can - banks have traditionally not been under much pressure to operate efficiently in this arena.
I'd argue that value / footprint (edit: had this backward) generated is higher for legacy systems than Bitcoin. (Unless you can totally eliminate CPU and GPU mining)
The only way you can make money off something like a currency is if demand > supply. What determines the supply? Solving problems with machines and energy only the 1% can afford. What determines the demand? The early bitcoin adopters hyping the "currency" so that they can later offload their bitcoins to bigger fools once they have made a good investment return.
Since miners will eventually only be able to compete based cost of their electricity mining will be driven to places with extremely cheap electricity. I don't know if that will always correlate with "clean" energy, but it seems like it would. For example, the recently announced Bitcoin mining operation in Iceland, where cheap geothermal and hydroelectric electricity and plenty of cold air for cooling is available: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/morning-agenda-the-bi...
If the heat from mining can be reclaimed for other purposes (heating homes, etc), then the effective carbon footprint is reduced even further.
2) similar to the author's point that advocates can't tell the difference between "store" and "medium" of value, I can't tell you the number of arguments I've gotten in with people who equate a "store of value" to be the same thing as the "increase in value"
3) It's a 1% wet dream. Make money, potentially hidden income, avoid taxation? No money paid into the welfare state? WIN!