As the article points out, El Salvador is using this as a way to bootstrap improvements in energy distribution and transmission.
El Salvador's original point for mining Bitcoin was that the area where the power was made it hard to get that power to other places. Mining Bitcoin enabled making money off of that isolated power source and creating an economic zone near the volcano which would be supported by the people working on the project.
It is what is making it economically viable to develop this energy source. If the blockchain is a waste of energy as you say, then when it becomes worthless the infrastructure will exist to produce this energy and use it for other purposes such as PC gaming and ironing shirts. Without it though this energy source wouldn't exist, so why not let the dumb people get duped into paying to produce renewable infrastructure? And if it turns out it's not a waste of energy and you're wrong, all is still well. It's a win win.
No, it’s not. Considering it as an alternative at the current FIAT system consume way less and it’s way more secure than the not “climate arson” PoS oligarchy.
The fiat system is used by the entire global economy, bitcoin uses more Energy than my country (Ireland) and probably couldn't serve the needs of a country 5% its size.
It can scale consuming the same amount of energy. But you already know that.
BTW you’re always focusing on this energy consumption topic that you’re becoming annoying.
Do pls your own research: there are thousands of situations that benefit on a daily basis of using PoW as energy store of value. Not in the west world where you live, obviously.
The amount of energy consumed is a function of the price of the crypto. The more people who use Bitcoin the higher the demand (and hence price) for Bitcoin becomes, making it financially viable to pump even more computing power into mining for coins.
You find it annoying that people bring up the energy consumption because you know you don't have a fix for it.
POW has been used socially by humans forever. It's an important part of trust. It needs to be digitized. Grow up and make the current system better if you don't like it.
You can't make the current system better, its designed to be as wasteful as possible. If I somehow managed to implement something that made the hashing use half as much electricity, it wouldn't result in any reduction of power usage, instead it would just double the number of hashes and then the difficulty increases to account for that.
This isn't difficult to understand if you had thought about it for more than 5 minutes.
I wonder if Samson Mow is still doing PR for the company behind this, Blockstream? I know Greg Maxwell, previous head of their social engineering team, got replaced but I thought they were done with this supporting 3rd world dictator stuff.
