One funeral at a time

Given the countless number of articles about the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network, I also started to suffer from a certain FOMO to write something about it. The unaffordable know-it-all in me hates it when someone is wrong on the internet, so there was no other option than to write this blog post. A discussion I had recently on this topic made me feel like putting my thoughts on paper because I think it’s clearer this way. I will paraphrase excerpts from this discussion to get my point across. For the impatient, there is a TLDR at the end.

Een nederlandstalige versie van deze post kan hier worden teruggevonden.

There is enough energy to go around

-> Bitcoin consumes too much energy, it is not good for the climate.

<- Bitcoin does indeed consume a lot of energy, but energy can come from climate-friendly sources.

-> It doesn’t matter, we have to live more energy-efficient anyway.

<- ?

Encouraged by politicians who think it is a good idea to shut down nuclear power plants to build gas plants in their place, some people think that “we should all live more frugally”. This is fundamentally wrong. To take this argument to its absurd extreme, the best scenario for “the planet” is if all people were to commit harakiri at the same time. What should we do then? I think the s-word has already been abused way too much to fulfill political agendas, but we must produce as much energy as possible in a sustainable way. We must then consume this energy in an efficient way, to create maximum prosperity for a maximum of people.

We must produce by:

• Building nuclear power plants
• Installing solar panels
• Building wind farms
• But mainly by building nuclear power plants and not dismantling them

My nuclear energy plea is one for another blog post, but you have already noticed that I am a fan. We must consume by banning things from life that inherently emit greenhouse gases:

• Not eating meat
• Move around with purely electric means of transport

So to summarize: it is our moral duty to consume as much energy as possible in a sustainable way, because that is the only way to create as much wealth as possible for as many people as possible. Producing energy from fossil fuels creates wealth in the short term, but destroys it in the longer term. Anyone can use this energy then use it for whatever they please, be it Christmas lights, GPU rendering, or mining bitcoins. A personal opinion about the usefulness of some activity that is carried out with the energy is no longer relevant at that moment.

Whataboutism versus the Nirvana Fallacy

<- The classical system also uses alot of energy

-> Another favourite of the bitcoin mob: whataboutisms.

A frequently heard counter argument used by bitcoin advocates in the energy debate is that the classic financial system also uses a lot of energy. A striking example is that the European Central bank literally prints money and hands it out to oil giants.

This is correct, but it is also a fallacy: this is called whataboutism. Whataboutism is not a valid argument, because it says nothing about what one is actually trying to defend.

Whataboutisms can however be used to illustrate the invalidity of another argument. That “other argument” in this case is a Nirvana Fallacy. This fallacy consists of attacking an idea on the grounds that it is not perfect. An alternative is presented that would be better, but upon closer examination, this alternative turns out to be a purely theoretical construction and can never exist in the real world. In this case, the user is trying to argue that bitcoin wouldn’t be necessary at all in a world where:

• Central banks stop creating grotesque inequality to maintain the political status quo
• Central banks will stop illegally sponsoring the fossil fuel industry
• The Americans will stop creating terrorists by committing war crimes in the Middle East to maintain their oil-dollar-empire
• The Americans don’t want to put a man in jail for life for exposing said war crimes
• The bank accounts of political dissidents in Spain, China, Turkey, Venezuela, and all other countries in the world are not frozen or confiscated because they engage in democratic opposition.
• The rainforest is not destroyed in Africa to make pits from which shiny stones are brought up and transported to Switzerland to be stored again in a pit in the ground.
• Real estate prices are not reaching absurd levels due to the policies of the above-mentioned central banks, making it impossible for more and more young people and immigrants to ever own a home.

Unfortunately, that is not our world as all these things are the harsh reality today.

It has long become clear to me that there cannot be a purely political or military solution to all of the above problems, and that the only way is to think out of the box and accept that bitcoin can be a possible solution, and that the energy consumption in that case is a reasonable price to pay.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

-> Bitcoin is only used as a casino to enrich insiders

-> All stories about bitcoin being used for good are fabricated

In this part I would like to give an anthology of feel-good stories to offer a bit of counterweight to anyone who proclaims that bitcoin is only used for speculation and enriching early adopters.

• Wikileaks, an organization that is the embodiment of the free press and a healthy democratic society, an organization which has exposed countless horrific organized crimes committed by governments around the world, was banned in 2010 by US government pressure from virtually all traditional ways of raising money. Years later they thanked the US government, because because of this they decided to bet on Bitcoin as early as 2010, causing the financial situation of the organization today to look very favourable. (This decision was criticized by bitcoin’s inventor in a famous post, one of the last they posted before their disappearance.)
• In 2017, the Pineapple Fund donated more than 5000 BTC or $ 50 million at the time to various charities.
• Bitcoin is being used more and more every day by Latin Americans to escape the economic disasters that are unfolding on the continent
• The organization behind Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalni has received a record amount of support in bitcoin after his arrest by the Russian authorities.
• Fans of the memecoin Doge raised enough money to get the Jamaican bobsleigh team a ticket to the Olympics

Well this was it. Maybe I convinced you, maybe not. To be honest, I don’t really care. I know bitcoin will eventually triumph, and I am inspired by the words of the physicist Max Planck:

Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, dass ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, dass ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und dass die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist.

Max Plank, Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie, 1948

TLDR

I lied, there is no tldr. Just read the post.