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In Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells notes Bitcoin's huge energy footprint ("more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined") and asserts that

a simple change to the algorithm could eliminate that Bitcoin footprint entirely

Is this true? My understanding of Bitcoin mining is that it must, of necessity, be extremely computationally expensive, and therefore also extremely energetically expensive.

Is there, in fact a change ("simple" or otherwise) that could dramatically reduce Bitcoin's energy footprint, while still preserving its essential computational complexity?

orome
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    Bitcoin's energy consumption is because it is a "proof of work" based crypto-currency. There are others which do not use proof of work, but it is a handy way to make it hard to fake. Of course, you could agree an algorithm change - there have been forks in the past - but then you lose the proof of work. To be honest, it has been proven to be so insecure so far, the best bet would be to remove it and use any of the other cryptocurrencies :-) You should ask this over on the Bitcoin Stack Exchange site - you can get vast amounts of detail there :-) – Rory Alsop May 03 '19 at 19:35
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    My close vote is that this isn't notable - nobody is challenging it. It's just how cryptocurrencies are built. – Rory Alsop May 03 '19 at 19:37
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    @RoryAlsop "A claim is 'notable' when a significant number of people believe it is true." By that criteria, this claim is notable. The questioner is not required to find people who are questioning the claim. Your first comment looks a lot like an unreferenced answer in the comments. https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2506/what-is-a-notable-claim – BobTheAverage May 03 '19 at 23:44
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    I get that Bob, however, this isn't even a belief. It literally is just "change the code, and different things will happen" – Rory Alsop May 04 '19 at 10:35
  • @RoryAlsop The claim is pretty vague, but it is specific enough to be answerable. The claimant suggests that something specific could happen if the bitcoin code was remade. – BobTheAverage May 04 '19 at 13:33
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    You won't get good answers here. Read and ask on https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/. –  May 04 '19 at 16:16
  • I think the objective part of this question is whether there are alternative designs for cryptocurrencies that don't use so much energy, and the answer is yes, there certainly are, and there are many cryptocurrencies based on such designs. They have various pros and cons compared to Bitcoin. In principle one could create an alternate version of Bitcoin that used a different approach. But the more important part of the question is subjective: would such a change be "simple"? Would the resulting new currency still deserve to be called "Bitcoin"? [...] – Nate Eldredge May 05 '19 at 03:48
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    There's also the point that, due to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin, anyone could make such a change, but nobody could force other users to adopt the change. – Nate Eldredge May 05 '19 at 03:49
  • The suggested alternative of proof of work that costs so much energy is proof of stake. The discussion about whether proof of stake provides the necessery guarantees is a theoretical discussion that would be better have had at bitcoin.SE then here at skeptics.SE. – Christian May 07 '19 at 09:33

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