I thought Bitcoin was bad for the environment. Now I'm not so sure.

I looked in my freezer for proof of steak and saw none there. :(

I loved that the video attracted the famed crypto bot shillers and their fake threads.

Correction from 6:41 onwards: efficiency gains in mining don’t have much impact on energy consumption. As we build more powerful computers, mining automatically becomes harder. So energy consumption is roughly determined by the value of a block reward, not by the technology used for mining. This is an example of the fallacy of “costs determine prices” when the causal pathway is in fact the reverse.

Hey Sabina. Seems like you forgot to mention that ASICs becoming more energy efficient doesn't really reduce electricity consumption at all, because when most miners get better hardware, difficulty increases. No matter how fast and energy efficient the chips are, the algorithm will keep increasing the difficulty, so that no more than 1 block is produced per 10 minutes on average. If chips get twice as efficient, the difficulty also increases 2x, so they end up consuming the same amount of energy per block.

It's amazing how bots invade the comments section as soon as anything crypto related is discussed -.- fucking irritating.

There is something called the rebound effect. Improving efficiency hardly ever reduces energy consumption over all, because the savings are used elsewhere.

Interesting Bitcoin summary. However, your thinking is off in one particular instance. The efficiency of bitcoin is completely irrelevant, as the algorithm only allows for 1 block every 10 minutes on average. So the only thing relevant is how much worth in resources you're willing to throw at it (mining). If you get more "efficient", the only thing that does is increase the difficulty for everyone, including you.

The debate between proof of work and proof of stake is more nuanced than one requires less energy.

'Anyone has access to energy can turn it into money' Certainly easier than having an industry and producing something useful to sell...

I think an important part often missed is, that Bitcoin mining creates a huge demand for those ASIC miners, which have no other useful application and create insane amounts of electronic waste.

Proof of Work does not mean that the number 'works'. It refers to the actual literal work put into the cryptographic problem. It is a feature, not a bug. Proof of Stake is antithetical to this notion.

A pretty good run down. Unfortunately, when it comes to manipulation and attack vectors, Proof of Stake is significantly less secure than the more energy demanding Proof of Work system.

Yet another great explanation of a topic that is barely- or mis-understood by most of us. However, your description of "proof of work" seems a bit off. It is not demonstrating that the large number solution "works", but that you have "put in the work" to find it (once found, it is easy to demonstrate that it works). This means that you have demonstrated your effort in obtaining it. The "proof of stake" replaces the proof of work with a demonstration that you have "skin in the game", and are not a casual miner with little at risk. At least this is my current understanding of these two crypto currency methods.

Roger Ver is a Bitcoin Cash proponent, don’t use him as a Bitcoin reference 🤦‍♂️

I know this is a science commutation channel and not an economics or personal finance channel but I feel the need to mention the desire to protect one’s saving a from inflation is a motivation here too

proof of stake favor the players with a big amount to put to stake. Manipulation is easier under proof of stake. Could you compare how much energy the banking sector use? How much gold? I'd argue that the biggest use case of bitcoin is a store value object with high salability properties.

Proof of work provides stronger guarantees than proof of stake. With proof of work it is verifiably impossible to rewrite the ledger history such that in 1000 years they will know it has never been revised because it would require there to have been time to do all that work twice. With proof of stake it's possible for all the people with the majority of the stake to agree to rewrite the chain completely and they will leave no evidence of that (only looking at the chain itself).

1:52 - The calculations don't REQUIRE that much energy. It's setup so that the difficulty adjusts based on how much computing power the entire system throws at it. For an instance, the system would work just fine with 10 miners or a million, paying out the same total of coins each day. The reason it's using so much energy is because people consider it profitable. If the price was lower, fewer would be incentivized to run it.

As someone deeply familiar with the matter (working in it professionally), big kudos for getting almost all nuances exactly right, and simply not jumping to any hysterical conclusions. Two things I'd like to add: Proof of Stake simply has inferior game theory properties, which means it (at least in theory) can fail over time due to participants playing politics and other games like it. In Bitcoiner's minds it simply will not work as a base for a lasting global monetary system. Moreover it has a terrible property of basically printing more money for people who already have most money in the system (sounds familiar?). In PoW no one gets money for free, ever. Also at some point it was said that "miners needs to get twice as efficient every 4 years". That's not the case. There is nothing forcing miners to become more efficient. They do only because of the competition.

Please do a comparison between the energy use of Bitcoin's proof of work algorithm verses the traditional banking network.