I wouldn't deny that power requiment is indeed a pain area for lot of miners and China is cracking down on it heavily. We have also seen few instances where miners tried to steal power from the main grid to increase their profitability. But can you please look at the volume of such instances? A single instance in China, doesn't really describe the picture of the world. This is just an exception!

If a company has taken proper license to operate a mining farm, they had definitely given a power requirement estimate to their local power supply authorities. If a certain mining company is not  having license to run mining operations, they would certainly be closed down by the local enforcement agencies! If someone is doing something illegal, will crypto community take the responsibility of it? Certainly  no!

There are lot of other mining companies being operated worldwide. All of them require energy to run. How many similar instances you have seen?

China is not the world! Their communist government  is not really friendly about bitcoin and other cryptos since its inception. We must not decide on the basis of an incident that happened in China!

Bitcoin does have in fact problems in energy consumption. And knowing that China is the country warning Bitcoin miners could be a threat to the network, not now but maybe after a few years, if the PoW system won't be improved. Since more than half of the Bitcoin's Network is located in China, it could bring a critical hit to Bitcoin.

Though there is a chance that Chinese Government announced such news with political reasons. They are known to currently making their own cryptocurrency, and may just wanted to have something that could pin down Bitcoin to effectively ban it in their country.

I think the issue is not really waste of electricity but lack of supply meaning to say that consumption coming from Bitcoin mining has already affected the supply intended for regular consumers and business community. That means that Bitcoin mining operators must be thinking of relocating somewhere where there is a clear excess of power which they can availed of. For sure, when there is a shortage of power, there will really be a big issue because the government will have a tendency to sacrifice Bitcoin mining business.

Taking this seriously, there are many cryptocurrencies ever launched and it is in fact evident that bitcoin do really utilizes more power consumption than other. If we are to devise a better solution, it is much easier if we focus on codes rather than focus on a bigger aspect which is improving power generation. Because it will cost allot but I think if we could both develop these technologies, it is quite better.

It might be an issue in that particular part of China, but the Chinese brought it on themselves by offering extremely low electricity rates to miners (which is the reason mining got concentrated in China).

In other parts of the world it's different. Iceland's electricity is entirely geothermal and they've got a lot of miners too. And parts of Europe are developing an excess of wind energy and miners are benefitting from that too.

I don't think anyone actually says excessive energy is not an issue. Energy consumption will always be an issue, but not the issue that it is being presented as. First of all, the cost-benefit analysis is seldom fair and seldom comprehensive. True, the energy usage is significant, but the benefit of decentralised security, which makes a hack economically unviable for a bad actor, that is priceless and possibly worth far more than the associated costs.

And governments cracking down on miners isn't a reflection of them draining power, it's a reflection of miners simply not giving back their due, or not paying the price they should be. Any industry draining energy will get the same attention from any state if you don't pay up or if you're using subsidies meant for other sectors.

Talking bout efficiency...
So they raided 20 homes and a merchant for every 2 mining machines they've found, not even counting factories or mines.

This way they will have to raid all of China and still not get their hand of half of the mining gear there.


No, coal if actually damn efficient, that's why power cost in China is that cheap.
Good old coal is dirt cheap and coal power plants are easy to be built and maintained, the only drawback is that you can't make it environment friendly without large investments.
But in terms of pure costs, nothing beats coal and nuclear.
Without government subsidies, solar and wind would stand no chance.

PoW is no doubt what secures the bitcoin network from attacks but at the cost of too much power and expensive hardware. PoW in my opinion is only bad thing satoshi implemented while designing bitcoin network. If Vitalik Buterin can think about PoS then why don’t that be proposed by satoshi in the start or something similar to that. With growing complexity mining will intensify and we will see more such crackdowns.

Okay, first I want to say that I find it weird that you quote a case in China to prove your point. Those who talk about problems with mining often push the ecological thing, and I truly support that, but China is not a good example. While I remember there've been articles specifically saying that China is against mining for ecological reasons, this is ridiculous, since it's one of the biggest polluters in the world talking, and clearly China has other real reasons to be against Bitcoin.
As for mining in general, it seems hard to determine whether it's an ecological problem or not, I've seen conflicting research on that matter.
When someone's mining coins illegally and this is causing problems for other people, it should definitely be stopped. But I don't think it's realistic to think Bitcoin would become PoS, and neither does it seem realistic that electricity consumption will reduce. So I think we have to work on more eco-friendly ways of consuming energy.