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If you have even the slightest concern about global warming or the environment overall, you should consider Bitcoin a horrible mistake we should be trying to er

If you have even the slightest concern about global warming or the environment overall, you should consider Bitcoin a horrible mistake we should be trying to eradicate. It's a currency backed by willingness to waste electricity doing useless work. And worse, as it gets more popular, the willingness and price will continue to drive higher. Hopefully China recognizes that this is in odds with their efforts to clean up their environment, and crushes Bitcoin fast before the damage is too catastrophic.

benmowa 9y ago
I couldn't find anything but I wonder how global energy consumption changes on track with the predicted bitcoin processing growth? are we talking 1% of global power consumption in 10 years or 10%?
- petertodd 9y ago
  It's possible to estimate an upper bound based on the dollar value of the BTC miners receive as revenue from inflation (subsidy) and transaction fees. The inflation rate in Bitcoin drops over time; transaction fees will likely increase, although not in proportion to the total economic value of transactions (and other uses) secured by Bitcoin (bitcoin is not "backed by energy", it is secured by energy expenditure). Currently miner revenue is less than $7 million/day. It's a bit tricky to convert that into, say, CO2 emitted as miners tend to use the cheapest possible sources of energy, which are stranded renewable resources like hydroelectricity dams built in places distant from consumers (apparently China among others have built a lot of uneconomic dams for various political reasons). The PoW security model doesn't require the amount of energy destroyed to increase indefinitely as a percentage of total value secured. Rather, the amount of energy destroyed by PoW simply has to be more than the highest funded attacker can afford. That's easy to do, as attackers who would attack via PoW are few and far between - as your attacker gets more powerful (governments) there are much cheaper attacks that can be done than naively attacking PoW directly. In any case, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the amount of CO2 emitted by Bitcoin mining operations is dwarfed by the amount of CO2 emitted by plane travel associated with people attending Bitcoin conferences...
  - danmaz74 9y ago
    > Rather, the amount of energy destroyed by PoW simply has to be more than the highest funded attacker can afford. Miners don't measure or care for how much an attacker can afford. They will simply continue adding mining hardware and increase electricity usage as long as they can turn a profit, which depends mostly on: * the marginal cost of electricity * the amortization cost of the hardware * the price of BTC * the difficulty
- elif 9y ago
  If you calculate power usage for the global hash rate as if it were produced by, on average, 2-generation old mining hardware @0.51 W/Gh, you end up with 0.017% of average global electricity production (3x more than last year). If you extrapolate an unconstrained tripling of production every year, you will (to my surprise) arrive at your 10% estimate. However, if we assume the last year's additional capacity was on modern hardware (5x more efficient), miners are presently using 0.0005% of global production, and after 10 years of unconstrained annual tripling would only account for 0.295% Further advancements in efficiency or a slowing of the growth rate from 300% annually seem like likely diminishing factors.
  - sobani 9y ago
    In the end it doesn't matter how efficient the mining ends up being. All that matters is the price of electricity. Assuming efficiency gains level out and thus the cycle of buying new hardware to keep up approaches infinity length, the only major cost left is electricity use. So in that case the energy used is dependent on (transaction fees * bitcoin price) / (energy price) So to get a % of all energy usage, you need to know the future energy usage, the future energy price, the future bitcoin price and the future amount that will be spend on transaction fees. I'm sure the future energy usage and price have good forecasts available. Then you're left with the bitcoin price and fees (both which are dependent on popularity (which in turn is dependent on price and fees)), but good luck forecasting that.
elif 9y ago
How does your categorical criticism not also apply to things like barbie-doll manufacturing facilities? Also, it does not take into account the potential for value being removed from dollars (denominator and subsidizing currency of big oil, big war, big agra, etc.) and being given irrevocably to the proletariat who are actually concerned about climate change.
- JustAnotherPat 9y ago
  lol
- puranjay 9y ago
  > irrevocably to the proletariat Yes, a currency that is so hard to understand that even seasoned technocrats can't figure it out is perfect for the proletariat. Cryptocurrencies are yet another example of wealth transfer from educated elite to another educated elite. There is nothing "democratic" about it. It requires a tech expertise which 95% of the planet doesn't have to even accept/make a payment. Forget about "mining" it - 99.5% of the world's population doesn't have the knowledge or the resources for it.
  - verroq 9y ago
    Computers at some point was technology that 95% of the planet doesn't understand.
    - y4mi 9y ago
      Do you consider accessing Facebook as 'understanding computers'? If not, this number hasn't changed that much...
      - rublev 9y ago
        Do you consider having a wallet as 'understanding bitcoin'? If not, this number hasn't changed that much... We can do this all day. You don't need to understand anything other than downloading a wallet, storing your coins there, and being able to send them anywhere instantly.
joshvm 9y ago
I think it's not entirely valid to say it's useless. Perhaps overly energy intensive, but the whole point of mining is to verify the blockchain, it's not a mindless calculation (though it is artificially inefficient). This is supposedly what the Ethereum proof of stake will fix. The problem is that you have two competing goals: you want fast hashes to keep transactions quick, but since you incentivise hashing, you don't want people to be able to exploit it to print money. Currently, we have around 6M Thash/s. If you pretend that it's all using an Antminer S9 (1.3kW/14Thash) you end up with around half a gigawatt of power running the Bitcoin network. So over a year that's about 4.4TWh per year. In reality, few people have S9's and it's more like 15TWh per year. China alone uses around 4000TWh per year for comparison. That is a staggering amount of power, but the global power consumption is perhaps 1/1000 of China's (or the US's for that matter) annual energy usage. What is the equivalent for, say, VISA or Mastercard processing? Somewhere there are a bunch of enormous datacentres which are processing transactions. I would imagine a lot less (my back of the envelope suggests around 1GWh/year). EDIT: Actually they have VISA's consumption here, so I wasn't far off: http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption. I estimated each data centre (x2 with a back up each) to use 8MW of power - they have 2x diesel generators quoted at 4MW. That works out to around 0.25GWh of power per datacentre per year. I assumed that there's probably more overhead elsewhere in the system (i.e. POS readers, etc.) and doubled it. I don't know if their analysis accounts for the fact that each centre has a backup running simultaneously. Also because people seem to be getting the wrong end of the stick here: where did I say that Bitcoin is comparable to VISA? I'm putting the numbers there to show how massively disparate the two networks are. Partly out of curiosity, and partly because you can't just quote one number without a reference point and I think a large finance company is a good place to look. Nor am I saying that bitcoin's inefficiency is somehow justified - it uses more energy than a small country.
- bpodgursky 9y ago
  First -- that's even worse because VISA powers probably 1/3 of all modern commerce. Bitcoin is a hobby of the .01%. And even if that wasn't the case, it's not comparable because bitcoin is _fundamentally backed_ by the willingness to waste electricity. This is very important, and I feel like people gloss over this. If VISA figured out how to run their datacenters without electricity, they would do it in a heartbeat, and it would have no impact on the amount of processing being done -- they'd just do the work cheaper, and it would be great. If bitcoin mining got more energy efficient, THERE WOULD BE MORE MINERS BECAUSE COSTS DROP. The amount of money miners are willing to waste on hardware and electricity is fundamentally tied to the price, and as the costs go down, it's easier to fight for the fixed-sum payout. This will never change. As bitcoin gets more popular, a proportionally large amount of electricity is WORTH BEING WASTED. It is a fundamentally broken model, if you are trying not to rape the environment.
bvod 9y ago
This is completely irrelevant to the article, where they use hydroelectric power to mine bitcoins. But even if they used nonrenewable soures, the negative impact on the environment shouldn't be faulted to bitcoin. It's the energy sector's fault for prioritizing harmful energy to renewable energy. And even so, using energy to mine bitcoins isn't wasting the energy, it's turning the energy to real value. Just because it's not physical currency doesn't mean it isn't real - it has advantages (and disadvantages) to physical money. The electricity/algorithms cost create these features. And when countries ban cryptocurrencies, they would only do so on the guise of global warming, but more accurate and unspoken reasons would be that it gives too much power (anonymity) to the people.
- bpodgursky 9y ago
  Electricity is fungible. The clean hydropower would be used somewhere else if not wasted on BC.
  - placeybordeaux 9y ago
    Minus the transportation costs.
  - resf 9y ago
    Electricity is not perfectly fungible because of infrastructure costs and transmission losses. The nature of mining as a competition for the cheapest electricity means that miners will naturally move towards areas where the electricity is not in demand.
    - bpodgursky 9y ago
      They are using electricity to do computation. Even if, hypothetically, the electricity could not be transported elsewhere (and that's not realistic), if hypothetically manufacturing could not be set up there (and that's exactly what normally happens), the electricity could be used to do computation which is _actually useful_, which is why companies set up datacenters in the middle of nowhere with cheap electricity.
tondoter 9y ago
I think it's great there is an authoritarian government in china hellbent on destroying the environment and the world, destroying manufacturing in other democratic countries, destroying their social fabrics and society and jobs. And we keep buying short lived shit from china to help them do so.
parsingmeta 9y ago
I really think it's amazing that we have this authoritarian China that is hellbent on destroying the environment in the world, destroying manufacturing and jobs and society in other democratic countries, and guess what, we keep buying crap that don't last long from China.
placeybordeaux 9y ago
Ironically the best way to get bitcoin to switch away from proof of work would be to silently acquire 51% share of the mining pool and start voting for proof of stake instead of proof of work.
- vernon99 9y ago
  That's not exactly how it works as there's no voting per se. That would basically lead to a fork.
mazlix 9y ago
But it's work to prevent armored cars (often diesel) transporting cash. Or potentially large portions of banking and minting systems which as a whole expends plenty of energy. You can't just look at the cost without weighing the benefit. You could say you don't think that is likely to happen, but spending energy to attempt to save more energy down the road isn't a clear mistake– it would just be a failed ambitious attempt to reduce waste.
jriot 9y ago
Do you not think that mining metal, the minting process etc... is not waste?
- mplewis 9y ago
  Who said anything about metal? Physical cash is dying.
  - jriot 9y ago
    It is still used and being produced. Cash will not being dying anytime soon. People are using Bitcoin for many reasons, one of them being privacy, cash provides privacy.
    - virtuabhi 9y ago
      It is a myth that Bitcoin provides privacy. Bitcoin is pseudonymous. With external knowledge, it is possible to detemine the identity of users. And you have to give your real-world information if you want to convert Bitcoins to $$.
      - jimmaswell 9y ago
        There are a few Bitcoin "ATM"'s out there that dispense cash for BTC or let you buy BTC for cash. The latest one I read about took your picture and required an ID, but some out there probably don't, and a motivated individual could steal an ID and just not show the camera their face.
stale2002 9y ago
It cost money to run a finance system. What you are arguing, effectively, is that if you care about stopping global warming, then lets cut the electricity to every single bank in the world. Some finance systems cause global warming because of the air conditioning systems running in their buildings. And others, like bitcoin, cause it via mining.
sauronlord 9y ago
Next time you go to the movies... consider it useless entertainment not worth the electricity.
pyroinferno 9y ago
China isn't trying to clean the environment. The Paris Climate Agreement lets China get away with polluting more since they're considered a developing country. Not only that, they get paid by the first world countries who signed the agreement in the hopes that they will be developed faster. You have to be an absolute idiot to believe that a country with such an awful track of human rights violations would sign it out of the goodness of their heart.
jimmaswell 9y ago
The article said it's largely run on hydroelectric power, which would seem to mean it's not hurting the environment that much.
aphextron 9y ago
Mining Bitcoin is completely analogous to mining for gold. Was all of the effort and energy put into gold mining "wasted"? Perhaps, but the economic liquidity it provides has value in and of itself. I'd argue it's quite high, given that money supplies are only going to tighten in the future.

benmowa 9y ago

I couldn't find anything but I wonder how global energy consumption changes on track with the predicted bitcoin processing growth? are we talking 1% of global power consumption in 10 years or 10%?

petertodd 9y ago
It's possible to estimate an upper bound based on the dollar value of the BTC miners receive as revenue from inflation (subsidy) and transaction fees. The inflation rate in Bitcoin drops over time; transaction fees will likely increase, although not in proportion to the total economic value of transactions (and other uses) secured by Bitcoin (bitcoin is not "backed by energy", it is secured by energy expenditure). Currently miner revenue is less than $7 million/day. It's a bit tricky to convert that into, say, CO2 emitted as miners tend to use the cheapest possible sources of energy, which are stranded renewable resources like hydroelectricity dams built in places distant from consumers (apparently China among others have built a lot of uneconomic dams for various political reasons). The PoW security model doesn't require the amount of energy destroyed to increase indefinitely as a percentage of total value secured. Rather, the amount of energy destroyed by PoW simply has to be more than the highest funded attacker can afford. That's easy to do, as attackers who would attack via PoW are few and far between - as your attacker gets more powerful (governments) there are much cheaper attacks that can be done than naively attacking PoW directly. In any case, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the amount of CO2 emitted by Bitcoin mining operations is dwarfed by the amount of CO2 emitted by plane travel associated with people attending Bitcoin conferences...
- danmaz74 9y ago
  > Rather, the amount of energy destroyed by PoW simply has to be more than the highest funded attacker can afford. Miners don't measure or care for how much an attacker can afford. They will simply continue adding mining hardware and increase electricity usage as long as they can turn a profit, which depends mostly on: * the marginal cost of electricity * the amortization cost of the hardware * the price of BTC * the difficulty
elif 9y ago
If you calculate power usage for the global hash rate as if it were produced by, on average, 2-generation old mining hardware @0.51 W/Gh, you end up with 0.017% of average global electricity production (3x more than last year). If you extrapolate an unconstrained tripling of production every year, you will (to my surprise) arrive at your 10% estimate. However, if we assume the last year's additional capacity was on modern hardware (5x more efficient), miners are presently using 0.0005% of global production, and after 10 years of unconstrained annual tripling would only account for 0.295% Further advancements in efficiency or a slowing of the growth rate from 300% annually seem like likely diminishing factors.
- sobani 9y ago
  In the end it doesn't matter how efficient the mining ends up being. All that matters is the price of electricity. Assuming efficiency gains level out and thus the cycle of buying new hardware to keep up approaches infinity length, the only major cost left is electricity use. So in that case the energy used is dependent on (transaction fees * bitcoin price) / (energy price) So to get a % of all energy usage, you need to know the future energy usage, the future energy price, the future bitcoin price and the future amount that will be spend on transaction fees. I'm sure the future energy usage and price have good forecasts available. Then you're left with the bitcoin price and fees (both which are dependent on popularity (which in turn is dependent on price and fees)), but good luck forecasting that.

elif 9y ago

How does your categorical criticism not also apply to things like barbie-doll manufacturing facilities? Also, it does not take into account the potential for value being removed from dollars (denominator and subsidizing currency of big oil, big war, big agra, etc.) and being given irrevocably to the proletariat who are actually concerned about climate change.

JustAnotherPat 9y ago
lol
puranjay 9y ago
> irrevocably to the proletariat Yes, a currency that is so hard to understand that even seasoned technocrats can't figure it out is perfect for the proletariat. Cryptocurrencies are yet another example of wealth transfer from educated elite to another educated elite. There is nothing "democratic" about it. It requires a tech expertise which 95% of the planet doesn't have to even accept/make a payment. Forget about "mining" it - 99.5% of the world's population doesn't have the knowledge or the resources for it.
- verroq 9y ago
  Computers at some point was technology that 95% of the planet doesn't understand.
  - y4mi 9y ago
    Do you consider accessing Facebook as 'understanding computers'? If not, this number hasn't changed that much...
    - rublev 9y ago
      Do you consider having a wallet as 'understanding bitcoin'? If not, this number hasn't changed that much... We can do this all day. You don't need to understand anything other than downloading a wallet, storing your coins there, and being able to send them anywhere instantly.

joshvm 9y ago

I think it's not entirely valid to say it's useless. Perhaps overly energy intensive, but the whole point of mining is to verify the blockchain, it's not a mindless calculation (though it is artificially inefficient). This is supposedly what the Ethereum proof of stake will fix. The problem is that you have two competing goals: you want fast hashes to keep transactions quick, but since you incentivise hashing, you don't want people to be able to exploit it to print money. Currently, we have around 6M Thash/s. If you pretend that it's all using an Antminer S9 (1.3kW/14Thash) you end up with around half a gigawatt of power running the Bitcoin network. So over a year that's about 4.4TWh per year. In reality, few people have S9's and it's more like 15TWh per year. China alone uses around 4000TWh per year for comparison. That is a staggering amount of power, but the global power consumption is perhaps 1/1000 of China's (or the US's for that matter) annual energy usage. What is the equivalent for, say, VISA or Mastercard processing? Somewhere there are a bunch of enormous datacentres which are processing transactions. I would imagine a lot less (my back of the envelope suggests around 1GWh/year). EDIT: Actually they have VISA's consumption here, so I wasn't far off: http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption. I estimated each data centre (x2 with a back up each) to use 8MW of power - they have 2x diesel generators quoted at 4MW. That works out to around 0.25GWh of power per datacentre per year. I assumed that there's probably more overhead elsewhere in the system (i.e. POS readers, etc.) and doubled it. I don't know if their analysis accounts for the fact that each centre has a backup running simultaneously. Also because people seem to be getting the wrong end of the stick here: where did I say that Bitcoin is comparable to VISA? I'm putting the numbers there to show how massively disparate the two networks are. Partly out of curiosity, and partly because you can't just quote one number without a reference point and I think a large finance company is a good place to look. Nor am I saying that bitcoin's inefficiency is somehow justified - it uses more energy than a small country.

bpodgursky 9y ago
First -- that's even worse because VISA powers probably 1/3 of all modern commerce. Bitcoin is a hobby of the .01%. And even if that wasn't the case, it's not comparable because bitcoin is _fundamentally backed_ by the willingness to waste electricity. This is very important, and I feel like people gloss over this. If VISA figured out how to run their datacenters without electricity, they would do it in a heartbeat, and it would have no impact on the amount of processing being done -- they'd just do the work cheaper, and it would be great. If bitcoin mining got more energy efficient, THERE WOULD BE MORE MINERS BECAUSE COSTS DROP. The amount of money miners are willing to waste on hardware and electricity is fundamentally tied to the price, and as the costs go down, it's easier to fight for the fixed-sum payout. This will never change. As bitcoin gets more popular, a proportionally large amount of electricity is WORTH BEING WASTED. It is a fundamentally broken model, if you are trying not to rape the environment.

bvod 9y ago

This is completely irrelevant to the article, where they use hydroelectric power to mine bitcoins. But even if they used nonrenewable soures, the negative impact on the environment shouldn't be faulted to bitcoin. It's the energy sector's fault for prioritizing harmful energy to renewable energy. And even so, using energy to mine bitcoins isn't wasting the energy, it's turning the energy to real value. Just because it's not physical currency doesn't mean it isn't real - it has advantages (and disadvantages) to physical money. The electricity/algorithms cost create these features. And when countries ban cryptocurrencies, they would only do so on the guise of global warming, but more accurate and unspoken reasons would be that it gives too much power (anonymity) to the people.

bpodgursky 9y ago
Electricity is fungible. The clean hydropower would be used somewhere else if not wasted on BC.
- placeybordeaux 9y ago
  Minus the transportation costs.
- resf 9y ago
  Electricity is not perfectly fungible because of infrastructure costs and transmission losses. The nature of mining as a competition for the cheapest electricity means that miners will naturally move towards areas where the electricity is not in demand.
  - bpodgursky 9y ago
    They are using electricity to do computation. Even if, hypothetically, the electricity could not be transported elsewhere (and that's not realistic), if hypothetically manufacturing could not be set up there (and that's exactly what normally happens), the electricity could be used to do computation which is _actually useful_, which is why companies set up datacenters in the middle of nowhere with cheap electricity.

tondoter 9y ago

I think it's great there is an authoritarian government in china hellbent on destroying the environment and the world, destroying manufacturing in other democratic countries, destroying their social fabrics and society and jobs. And we keep buying short lived shit from china to help them do so.

parsingmeta 9y ago

I really think it's amazing that we have this authoritarian China that is hellbent on destroying the environment in the world, destroying manufacturing and jobs and society in other democratic countries, and guess what, we keep buying crap that don't last long from China.

placeybordeaux 9y ago

Ironically the best way to get bitcoin to switch away from proof of work would be to silently acquire 51% share of the mining pool and start voting for proof of stake instead of proof of work.

vernon99 9y ago
That's not exactly how it works as there's no voting per se. That would basically lead to a fork.

mazlix 9y ago

But it's work to prevent armored cars (often diesel) transporting cash. Or potentially large portions of banking and minting systems which as a whole expends plenty of energy. You can't just look at the cost without weighing the benefit. You could say you don't think that is likely to happen, but spending energy to attempt to save more energy down the road isn't a clear mistake– it would just be a failed ambitious attempt to reduce waste.

jriot 9y ago

Do you not think that mining metal, the minting process etc... is not waste?

mplewis 9y ago
Who said anything about metal? Physical cash is dying.
- jriot 9y ago
  It is still used and being produced. Cash will not being dying anytime soon. People are using Bitcoin for many reasons, one of them being privacy, cash provides privacy.
  - virtuabhi 9y ago
    It is a myth that Bitcoin provides privacy. Bitcoin is pseudonymous. With external knowledge, it is possible to detemine the identity of users. And you have to give your real-world information if you want to convert Bitcoins to $$.
    - jimmaswell 9y ago
      There are a few Bitcoin "ATM"'s out there that dispense cash for BTC or let you buy BTC for cash. The latest one I read about took your picture and required an ID, but some out there probably don't, and a motivated individual could steal an ID and just not show the camera their face.

stale2002 9y ago

It cost money to run a finance system. What you are arguing, effectively, is that if you care about stopping global warming, then lets cut the electricity to every single bank in the world. Some finance systems cause global warming because of the air conditioning systems running in their buildings. And others, like bitcoin, cause it via mining.

sauronlord 9y ago

Next time you go to the movies... consider it useless entertainment not worth the electricity.

pyroinferno 9y ago

China isn't trying to clean the environment. The Paris Climate Agreement lets China get away with polluting more since they're considered a developing country. Not only that, they get paid by the first world countries who signed the agreement in the hopes that they will be developed faster. You have to be an absolute idiot to believe that a country with such an awful track of human rights violations would sign it out of the goodness of their heart.

jimmaswell 9y ago

The article said it's largely run on hydroelectric power, which would seem to mean it's not hurting the environment that much.

aphextron 9y ago

Mining Bitcoin is completely analogous to mining for gold. Was all of the effort and energy put into gold mining "wasted"? Perhaps, but the economic liquidity it provides has value in and of itself. I'd argue it's quite high, given that money supplies are only going to tighten in the future.