Should we be concerned about the environmental impact of bitcoin & proof of work?

Bitcoin is much more energy efficient than we often give it credit for. Here is a short rebuttal on the environmental concerns of bitcoin & proof of work:

1. Proof of work mining scales independently from how much bitcoin is transacted. Mining is used to secure the network. We can take the existing amount of mining and energy being used to secure the network, and scale bitcoin to serve the global economy. With few caveats, mining doesn’t really need to scale at this point unless it’s profitable. With lightning network and off chain transactions coming, the amount of energy per transaction will continue to decrease vastly overtime.

2. The traditional banking system uses an enormous amount of energy. Orders of magnitude more than bitcoin. The majority of this energy is directed specifically at keeping people’s assets secure and overcoming fraud in a way that doesn’t scale as well or as cost effectively. Bitcoin solves this. With security guards, trucks, vaults, security systems, alarm systems, credit checking systems, identity checking and fraud preventing systems, massive data centers to check if there is fraud happening, reversing and trying to overcome massive losses from 5-10% of those transactions being fraud, bitcoin is actually much more efficient.

Lastly, bitcoin is programmable money. We can do countless things that are simply impossible within the current system.