The energy consumption of BTC mining has caused so much concern to the public that some are attempting to outlaw Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining altogether.
But the energy consumption Is a problem with BTC, not with the real Bitcoin, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV). BTC is not the real Bitcoin according to the original Satoshi’s design. See BTC and Bitcoin, what is the real difference?
These public and even legislative reactions are not only nearsighted, but in fact completely blind because the energy efficiency of the real Bitcoin is not a theory but a verifiable reality.
If people find it too hard to understand why PoW is the only way to prevent corruption in principle (and therefore is worth keeping even if it were less energy favorable), at least they should look at the actual performances, and find why the real PoW is superbly energy-efficient. See for example, Independent report finds that BSV is the greenest Bitcoin blockchain.
Fact: The real Bitcoin (BSV) is green, because it is energy efficient when measured by utility.
BSV is already many times more energy efficient than BTC if measured by the number of actual transactions powered by per-unit energy, and the difference is bound to increase further in the future with no practical ceiling (see The Economics of Bitcoin Mining; and Unbounded layer 1 scalability).
BSV is already also vastly more energy efficient than the current banking and financial systems, and the gap continues to increase.
Everything needs energy, so it’s just a matter of efficiency. Before calling a certain system “wasteful” in its energy use, one must realize that efficiency and wastefulness are economic concepts, and they must be compared in the context of economic utilities.
In the context of Bitcoin, one must compare energy consumption levels and efficiencies of BTC and BSV in terms of utilities, and also be mindful of energy consumption levels and efficiencies of the existing system such as bank and financial systems, and government information systems.
There are fundamental differences between BSV and BTC, even though both use Proof-of-Work (PoW). It is important to differentiate different types of PoW systems by asking the following question:
Exactly what kind of work is being performed by a PoW system?
With BTC, almost all work is hashing. Almost all power goes to block hashing which has zero extrinsic utility.
With BSV, however, increasingly greater portion of the energy will be used for processing actual economic and business transactions, rather than hashing.
It is expected that eventually most computation performed by BSV nodes will be transaction processing (not just payments but broader computation including data processing, assets tokenization, smart contracts, AI, and parallel computing, etc), with hashing being just supplemental.
If a case could even be made for the energy efficiency of BTC which uses 99% of its energy consumption for hashing competition and less than 1% for utility computation, just imagine how favorable it will be for BSV which will have these proportions reversed!
As of February 2023, BSV consumes 1/500th of the energy of BTC but processes more than 10 times the transactions of BTC daily.
In the future, BSV may consume about the same amount of energy as BTC does today, but process a million times or even a billion times more transactions than BTC.
That is a picture of ‘greenness’. It’s not complicated.
For another discussion, I recommend an article written by John Pitts: BitCoin’s Green: BitCoin will MASSIVELY reduce the computational grid’s electric power consumption.
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