Yeah, go back at traditional system, much much much worse for the environment 

environmental impact??

compared to the resources needed to print FIAT then the fuel costs to transport it from the mint to the banks. further transports to the ATMS. thats alot of natural resources

then as people spend it. more resources to to transport FIAT from shops to the banks.

let alone all the costs of resourses for all the bank staff, the leaflets and paper contracts and every other detail related to dealing with fiat. even down to the environmental costs of producing credit/debit cards needs to be included in the fiat environmental impact, to fully compare to bitcoin.

FIAT=1g of resources compared to bitcoin 30-70g? pfft as if

bitcoins environmental impact is sooooooooo much less. that video only talks about the electricity bill of fiat. not the fuel costs for transport or the ink costs paper costs.

flawed presentation but atleast its the first stepping stone to anyone who actually is interested in showing that bitcoin is more environmentally friendly.

I believe that in a few years, Bitcoin will be the most environmentally friendly option to move money. Here is my reasoning. Please tell me if anything is flawed.

In a perfectly competitive environment, the price of the last marketed product equals its cost of production. I consider Bitcoin mining a competitive industry, so the previous statement does apply to the Bitcoin network.

The cost of production is not only energy consumption, but also the research and development to obtain more efficient mining hardware. I would expect the cost of production of bitcoins to gradually move from energy consumption to jobs and investment in the hardware industry. We may soon be seeing this with the arrival of next generation ASICs.

Finally, once most bitcoins are mined (in around 20 years), and all mining profit comes from transaction fees from highly competitive miners (keeping fees as low as possible, no creation of new bitcoins), moving (bitcoin) money will be cheaper and presumably as environmentally efficient as you can get, more than any other money transacting business. Is my reasoning correct?  

Has the inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, started his machine again?

The main flaw in his reasoning comes in when he calculates the energy consumption of a single Bitcoin transaction (5...10 kWh), extrapolates that to all of Germany's electronic transactions (17 billion) and concludes that Bitcoin would need 85...170 TWh of electricity for Germany alone.
This logic is flawed because the energy cost is per block and never per transaction. In theory you could stuff a billion transactions into a single huge block and it would still use about the same energy to find the corresponding hash, as it does for a single transaction (at a given difficulty level).

The reasoning is about as sound as multiplying the value of all financial transactions in the EU by the weight of a single Euro coin and concluding that there's simply not enough metal in the world to run an economy on the Euro.

Also, the Bitcoin network currently greatly subsidizes mining by having a really high block reward - this makes Bitcoin transactions currently much more secure than would be justified by the amount of money transfered alone, but it also means a much higher energy consumption. This is however only a bootstrapping issue and with the block reward decreasing we'll have a much better energy footprint.

Finally, upcoming changes like for example transaction replacement makes it possible for most transactions to be settled outside the blockchain without sacrificing security and without requiring mega-blocks.

Except in this case the idea of Proof Of Stake (ppcoin) is relevant, because it claims to solve the problem of having to use proof of work in the long run.

If I understand correctly, he says:

• energy cost to maintain EUR cash: 5 TWh
• energy cost to run Bitcoin currently: 0.043 TWh

hmmm.

why does he say it in such a weird way: "25 or 50 minutes of electrical power consumption of germany to produce 1 million coins".

he might then also say it takes 70 hours of electrical power consumption of germany to keep EUR cash floating around.

It is obvious the creator of that video has no understanding of anything beyond basic math. 

Obligatory XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/605/

Troll much?

I discussed in an other thread about how to use a more "usefull" algorithm for proof of work.

Folding protein would be a good candidate, but as I mentioned it's not easy to tweak it into doing what SHA-256 can do.

The key difference is that SHA-256 (or any other digest algorithm, for that matter) allows the miner to identify himself into the digest.  By doing so, it is not possible to "steel" the work of other.

Basically with digests the hash of the coinbase transaction is in the proof of work.   So its author can publish it and noone can use it to forge an other proof of work with an other coinbase transaction.  It's tough to imagine something similar with protein folding.

Yet I proposed something.

Let imagine we have a list of polypeptides whose we are interested in knowing their three-dimensional structure.  I guess this basically consists in knowing which conformation of their rotational angles (because from what I know there is a rotational degree of freedom for each peptid link, right?) gives the lowest energy.

My idea is that instead of working on each of these polypeptides brutally, as if there were all as important, each miner takes a preference list order, which would be the exact translation of the coinbase transaction.

So he tries to find a lowest geometric conformation for each polypetide (as compared to the previously known lowest ones), but with a amelioration factor (the ratio between the new lowest divided by the previous lowest) that would decrease in the exact very order of the list mentioned above.

By doing so, when publishing the result, it will be difficult if not impossible to re-use those results, since they are computed in a very specific performance order.  They will be usefull for scientists (they do indeed give a better known geometrical conformation), but useless for other miners willing to create an other proof of work for an other preference list order.