This quote from a friend of mine, posted with the linked article, kind of sums up my feelings about Bitcoin.
"I think it's a testament to us as a species that we've managed to create a way to generate profit with all the environmental effects of heavy industry but without actually producing either goods or services."
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-global-warming/
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Bitcoin emits the equivalent of 17.7 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, a big middle finger to Earth’s climate and anyone who enjoys things like coastlines, forests, and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases. Refracted through a different metaphor, the Bitcoin P2P network is essentially a distributed superintelligence utterly dedicated to generating bitcoins, so of course it wants to convert all the energy (and therefore matter) in the universe into bitcoin.
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The SHA-256 algorithm is designed, intentionally, to be so hard that it requires brute-force computing. Try as many computational answers as you can, as fast as you can. Which means you have to keep your computer turned on all the time, running the fan to cool off your hot, overclocked processor. “The energy consumption is a security feature. It’s a good thing,” Sirer says.
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bitcoin miners are now building ASIC clouds in places where electricity is cheap, like Iceland (where thermal energy is plentiful) or China (where electricity is underwritten by the government and bitcoin is a good way to speculate without regulation). Because that’s where they can bring more servers online to mine more bitcoin.
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