Bitcoin actually helps to incentivize the provisioning of renewables on the grid by evening out demand curves. Keep in mind that banking, finance, remittance services, all have an energy cost too, it just doesn’t make headlines because it’s not new or novel.
https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6x_nfuNigI8
We could literally bank the energy in hydrogen to even the curves and be infinitely better off.
Incentivizing renewables by demanding energy consumption. It’s a waste. Not wasting evergy at all is better that than incentivizing renewables. It does something poorly that nobody needed at huge cost. Nothing crypto should be considered legal tender.
It enables me to send money to anybody anywhere on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees. And I can send that money to anybody even if they have an unstable banking system, no banking system at all (billions of people), or their banking system excludes them due to their gender, sexuality, or status as a political dissident. Venmo can’t do that, Paypal can’t do that, my bank can’t do that. It has a clear fiscal policy of a 21 million coin cap. It has faced attacks and attempted bans from nation states and world powers, yet it has reliably performed this function of sending money around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, without a single hack, without a single bank holiday or failure or any kind. It has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP. It is more widely adopted than most national currencies. It can’t be controlled, debased, or inflated by any corrupt central bank. It actually has use and value. You may not use it, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t get immense use out of it.
And it does this with <1% of global electricity usage, almost entirely from renewables since miners chase the cheapest electricity which comes from renewables and times of non-peak demand. Moving money around costs energy no matter how you do it. For a network that moves trillions of dollars every year, that’s a pretty small amount of energy to do it with.
Bitcoin used to be valuable as permissionless peer-to-peer currency, but then it was ruined when it zoomed in price. Nobody transacts with it anymore, because it is a StOrE oF vAlUe.
The energy thing is a solvable problem, once Bitcoiners see the problem. BTC’s PoW algorithm simply doesn’t scale. The devs could slot in a new algorithm if they wanted to, and dramatically reduce BTC’s power footprint. But they see the large energy expenditure as a feature, because they can say that all that energy is being used to secure the network.