FUDsters Now Call Bitcoin ‘A Giant Smoldering Chernobyl Sitting at the Heart of Silicon Valley’

The bull market is also the season of FUD.

As we reported, lately, Bitcoin has seen the reappearance of the same old FUD. First came Tether (USDT), which was renewed after its labeling as “Doomsday Machine,” but the FUD is actually full of “misunderstanding and conspiracy,” as per on-chain analyst Willy Woo.

As Tether executives have been clarifying, again and again, the printing and flow of USDT are simply based on demand, and with stablecoins are being used instead of the US Dollars — basic market mechanics are in play.

As for NYDAG's investigation, it is regarding the fraud committed by the company, making untrue claims about the reserves backing Tether. What matters is “odds of Tether bringing bitcoin down are close to zero,” said economist and trader Alex Kruger.

While the market is fighting the old Tether FUD, people want to discuss the environmental cost of bitcoin, labeling it as “a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley.”

“Bitcoin mining is essentially a fucked up version of Candy Crush,” which consumes “*nation-state* levels of energy to keep it all running,” argues Stephen Diehl, a software engineer, and writer.

Thread. Bitcoin is an utter abomination, rooted in libertarian/propertarian ideology, designed to undermine the social fabric, and grotesquely damaging to the environment. Criminalize Bitcoin! https://t.co/ysANFYNBgA

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) January 18, 2021

As Neerja Aggarwal of Coin Center noted in 2019, with very little data available on the amount of electricity consumed in securing the Bitcoin network, it leads researchers to “make assumptions to fill in gaps in their estimates. This can lead to alarming headlines like, “Bitcoin Mining on Track to Consume All of the World’s Energy by 2020.”’

And now, Diehl advises to bring changes by not buying Bitcoin, do not have exposure to companies involved with crypto, and of course, tell your friends to not buy it as well.

He also feels this is politically solvable as “In the next administration, Biden could stop the Bitcoin Waste Problem with the stroke of a pen.”

But not only is Bitcoin a trustless system that is helping people escape the blunder of fiat debasement, but it also consumes electricity less than that used in gold mining and paper currency minting.

22/ Bitcoin’s utilization of the electrical capacity consumes magnitudes less electricity than existing fiat systems which not only have power requirements banking infrastructure, but the military and political machina. The energy tradeoff is a “net positive” outcome. pic.twitter.com/LgvM6RFPPr

— Dan Held (@danheld) January 18, 2021

As we reported, Russian oil giant Gazprom Neft, a subsidiary of state-owned natural gas giant Gazprom, is also powering Bitcoin mining through natural gas with an added benefit of utilizing the CO2 that gets freed during oil drilling, a liability for companies.

Companies like Boden Business Agency, which have partnered with Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) and the Luleå University of Technology, are actually working on making bitcoin mining through clean energy sustainable.