WARNING: BITCOIN MINING IS GOING TO EAT THE WORLD’S ELECTRICITY SUPPLY. READ WHY BELOW.

I realized something very sad this year.

I used to think that Bitcoin was a poor currency, and if someone just made one that was actually scalable and better, then this whole first-gen system would fizzle out, like Friendster or AskJeeves in the presence of better technology.

But no. You see, Satoshi had us all fooled with the title of his paper: “A peer to peer cash system.” FORGET about Bitcoin being a currency. It is a store of value. And it has all the features you’d ever need to store value and not have it be diluted. There is nothing that needs to be improved over and above those features, and that is its killer app: being a black hole of value. Constantly growing versus fiat.

You see, just like gold, Bitcoin is a store of value becaus others say it is. It has reached critical mass and mindshare for “storing value” even from companies now. From here on out, even if a better system arises, if it becomes a sidechain of bitcoin that locks up the coins, then there will be less and less “unlocked” coins, and therefore each coin will be more valuable. Also, bitcoins are constantly lost as dust or misplaced private keys or other things. And so the supply shrinks.

But bitcoin is divisible into extremely tiny pieces (satoshis) so this merely helps one bitcoin get more and more valuable. You can’t kill bitcoin by making something better because even if 1/1000th of it remains, it will actually just be more valuable. The scarcer bitcoin gets, the pricier bitcoin gets, like the Hulk.

Ok so what does it mean for electricity consumption? Here is where the sad part comes in! You see, bitcoin miners are rewarded in bitcoin, and as long as the price of bitcoin outpaces the halvings, mining rewards will grow.

Read the story again, and extrapolate. The year is 2035, and households are fighting for electricity against bitcoin miners, who are easily winning. Governments trying to ban bitcoin mining meet similar fate to Mexican governments trying to ban the drug cartels’ activity, that is to say their families are threatened and they do not have power anymore to stop it, etc. Their feeble attempts to print money fall short of the ever growing rewards.

Everything in the article about bitcoin using “only” 6% is misunderstanding the expontnential function. In 2021 those stats are outdated and the Bitcoin network consumes more electricity than half the world’s countries. We are five minutes to midnight. By the time we realize it’s consuming more than half the world combined, it will be too late to stop this activity. It will be “too sweet” and too financial lucrative.

If you think we can stop it as a society, then let’s see how we have done with killing off insects, reducing biodiversity and species, polluting the world with plastic and pumping greenhouse gases into the air. Take that last one for example — have we been able to make a reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions, or merely their rate of growth?

What exactly will change between now and 2035, or 2135 that will make bitcoing mining NOT be more economical valuable than, say, airconditioning homes?

Change my mind. Prove me wrong.