7 ms·

All I can think of is the careless environmental impact of all that dirty electricity consumption. For, let's be honest, a mostly speculative activity. One cry

All I can think of is the careless environmental impact of all that dirty electricity consumption. For, let's be honest, a mostly speculative activity. One cryptocurrency crashes, another gets hyped up, and the computational cycle repeats. When will it end.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
Is the energy expended in crypto currency mining less valuable than that expended by the traditional financial sector?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  It seems likely that crypto currencies transfer much less value per kilowatt-hour consumed.
- nodesocket 9y ago
  With general stocks though at least you're investing in companies which make products, hire people, and hopefully stimulate the overall economy. A few Chinese guys in an old apartment building wasting power and compute/GPU resources... Not so much.
  - sand500 9y ago
    How does investing in a stock benefit a company unless you are buying from that company directly?
    - hueving 9y ago
      By supporting the share price when they want to have a secondary offering.
    - PacketPaul 9y ago
      The purpose (and only purpose) of the company is to increase shareholder value. That is done via dividend and stock price appreciation. Buying the stock of a company increases demand of that stock and hopefully share price.
      - sand500 9y ago
        Sounds like all the electricity spent on buying and selling stocks isn't doing any good for the planet either.
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Honestly, it isn't. Personally, I see all of those energy spending as upkeep - some amount you have to waste in order for the system to work. The difference between regular money and crypto money is that the upkeep of the former is mostly tied to physical reality and doesn't influence the value of money itself. In case of the latter, however, all that energy waste is a) completely arbitrary, and b) directly tied into the value of money (the more power you burn, the more you earn, and one party burning hard means other have to do as well, for the blockchain to stay secure). Or in TL;DR: cryptocurrencies directly incentivize wasting energy. Regular money does not.
  - mrb 9y ago
    You are wrong. The cryptocurrency industry is also made of real companies hiring real people. For example as of Sep 2015 there were 729 Bitcoin companies employing thousands of people: https://venturescannerinsights.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/the-state-of-bitcoin-in-six-visuals/ https://venturescannerinsights.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/the-...
    - Fej 9y ago
      You can't seriously be comparing those <1000 companies to the entire rest of the world economy. Cryptocurrency doesn't even register as a drop in the metaphorical bucket.
      - mhluongo 9y ago
        That's like saying any small vertical in the stock market shouldn't be compared to the wntire rest of the economy. Well no, and that's not the comparison being made.
      - mrb 9y ago
        That's not the comparison I'm making. Compare the ratio of energy spent over jobs created. It makes sense to spend a few hundred megawatts on a system that created thousands of jobs.
        MereInterest 9y ago
        Jobs created is a complete misdirection. Productive jobs created is the correct measure. I could pay thousands of people to repeatedly dig holes and fill them in, and it would be an utter waste. I don't believe that Bitcoin serves a useful purpose, and so until convinced otherwise, I consider Bitcoin jobs as less useful than the hole-digging jobs. At least the hole-diggers don't waste electricity in the process.
        mrb 9y ago
        Bitcoin does serve a useful purpose! It is perhaps not obvious to someone like you who don't seem to be a user. Or if you can't imagine how Bitcoin can help improve the world, you are probably only considering your little bubble, and not thinking about the other 7 billion human beings who are much less fortunate than you, economically, professionally, politically, financially. Overall, Bitcoin reduces friction, enables transactions that would not otherwise take place, and protects people from losing their cash/savings in various situations. Here are just a few examples of problems of the existing financial system that Bitcoin solves: - Credit card being denied while in a foreign country because the system accidentally tagged it as fraudulent - Merchants unable to sell online and accept credit cards due to their market segment encountering high CC fraud - Person unable to quickly and cheaply send remittance to family in foreign country - Countries confiscating savings accounts of citizens (eg. Cyprus in 2014) - Countries running their currency to the ground (Venezuela in 2017, Zimbabwe hyperinflation, USSR collapse, etc) - DEA stealing innocent people carrying cash thanks to civil forfeiture laws (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/07/dea-asset-forfeiture-joseph-rivers_n_7231744.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/07/dea-asset-forfeitur... http://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from-innocent/ http://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from-...) - Bitcoin helping Chinese bypass GFW censorship (https://www.larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-with-government-help/ https://www.larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-wit...) - Paypal freezing for months the account of someone asking for donations for an expensive medical treatment (quite a few news stories about similar situations) I could go on and on.
- hueving 9y ago
  Of course it's much less valuable. The crypto currencies are intentionally difficult to mine, wasting vast amounts of energy. A small mining company could probably process all of Visa's transactions which outnumber transactions on bitcoin by at least an order of magnitude.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - notgood 9y ago
    That doesn't make sense; you are comparing the creation of a currency against the usage of other. The finance sector includes the creation of cash (its paper, price of counterfeit measures); the transportation of cash (think ATMs), the materials needed for creating debit and credit cards, including their chips, the equipment to protect banks from being robbed (think big steel security safes) along many other resources to make such industry work.
    - rspeer 9y ago
      This is a common knee-jerk response that doesn't make any sense. None of that stops Bitcoin from being wasteful, and most of it is still necessary if Bitcoin is used more. Are you claiming that Bitcoin replaces physical security? How would it do that? Why doesn't someone just walk in and take your computer? And if you're concerned about the creation of small computer chips (why would you be concerned about this), I assure you that Bitcoin is using more of them.
      - notgood 9y ago
        >None of that stops Bitcoin from being wasteful, and most of it is still necessary if Bitcoin is used more What? If used more we wouldn't even need to transform it to any other currency, its because is _not_ used more that it is usually needed to convert it to something else. >"How would it do that? Why doesn't someone just walk in and take your computer?" No, someone cannot walk in because he doesn't even know where to walk in, its the same reason Satoshi is extremely rich despite the curiosity of millions to know about him, but no-one even knows his real name or anything at all; we don't even know which country he lives in; so yeah it does replace physical security; at least to a significant extent. >And if you're concerned about the creation of small computer chips (why would you be concerned about this), I assure you that Bitcoin is using more of them. It was just an example of the millions of resources that are wasted by the finance industry, a lot that include transportation (gasoline/ fossil fuels which is way way worse than most sources of electricity gpus are using)
- jayd16 9y ago
  The whole concept is underpinned by enforced, auto-scaled busywork.
bdcravens 9y ago
Think of all the SF/SV pollution caused by wastefully funded startups building the next Uber for ice cream or whatever.
- soVeryTired 9y ago
  Tu Quoque
  - abalone 9y ago
    More like false equivalence. What makes the cryptocurrency carbon footprint particularly wasteful is that, if we're being honest, its primary use is currency speculation.
    - Taek 9y ago
      Primary use today, sure. But cryptocurrency has more practical application every year, and there are a lot of compelling reasons to believe that major economic players will switch to decentralized currency (not private blockchains, the public ones) in the next 10-20 years. If during the dotcom bubble internet startups had required something similar (provable waste), people would have said the same thing you are. But here we see that the internet clearly was a trillion dollar industry, just that most dotcom startups were too early and poorly managed speculative vehicles. Decentralized cryptocurrency will be a trillion dollar industry, and that's trillions in annual recurring revenue I'm talking about, not trillions in total market cap. It's just today we've seen the speculation get ahead of the technology.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
kpcyrd 9y ago
1) Run your miner on green energy 2) Green energy demand increases 3) More green energy 4) Save the world
- zer0tonin 9y ago
  That's not exactly how it works.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Hmm... so let's try another (likely absurd) approach: What about: the government promises bitcoins mined with solar energy will be free of tax. Solar panels bought for mining bitcoins will be half-subsidized by the govt. For the next two years, at least. Huge solar farms spin up as everyone wants to mine as much as they can on cheap energy. Two years pass, govt says it's end of the Bitcoin subsidy; miners fold, cheap used solar panels flood the market...

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

Is the energy expended in crypto currency mining less valuable than that expended by the traditional financial sector?

maxerickson 9y ago
It seems likely that crypto currencies transfer much less value per kilowatt-hour consumed.
nodesocket 9y ago
With general stocks though at least you're investing in companies which make products, hire people, and hopefully stimulate the overall economy. A few Chinese guys in an old apartment building wasting power and compute/GPU resources... Not so much.
- sand500 9y ago
  How does investing in a stock benefit a company unless you are buying from that company directly?
  - hueving 9y ago
    By supporting the share price when they want to have a secondary offering.
  - PacketPaul 9y ago
    The purpose (and only purpose) of the company is to increase shareholder value. That is done via dividend and stock price appreciation. Buying the stock of a company increases demand of that stock and hopefully share price.
    - sand500 9y ago
      Sounds like all the electricity spent on buying and selling stocks isn't doing any good for the planet either.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Honestly, it isn't. Personally, I see all of those energy spending as upkeep - some amount you have to waste in order for the system to work. The difference between regular money and crypto money is that the upkeep of the former is mostly tied to physical reality and doesn't influence the value of money itself. In case of the latter, however, all that energy waste is a) completely arbitrary, and b) directly tied into the value of money (the more power you burn, the more you earn, and one party burning hard means other have to do as well, for the blockchain to stay secure). Or in TL;DR: cryptocurrencies directly incentivize wasting energy. Regular money does not.
- mrb 9y ago
  You are wrong. The cryptocurrency industry is also made of real companies hiring real people. For example as of Sep 2015 there were 729 Bitcoin companies employing thousands of people: https://venturescannerinsights.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/the-state-of-bitcoin-in-six-visuals/ https://venturescannerinsights.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/the-...
  - Fej 9y ago
    You can't seriously be comparing those <1000 companies to the entire rest of the world economy. Cryptocurrency doesn't even register as a drop in the metaphorical bucket.
    - mhluongo 9y ago
      That's like saying any small vertical in the stock market shouldn't be compared to the wntire rest of the economy. Well no, and that's not the comparison being made.
    - mrb 9y ago
      That's not the comparison I'm making. Compare the ratio of energy spent over jobs created. It makes sense to spend a few hundred megawatts on a system that created thousands of jobs.
      - MereInterest 9y ago
        Jobs created is a complete misdirection. Productive jobs created is the correct measure. I could pay thousands of people to repeatedly dig holes and fill them in, and it would be an utter waste. I don't believe that Bitcoin serves a useful purpose, and so until convinced otherwise, I consider Bitcoin jobs as less useful than the hole-digging jobs. At least the hole-diggers don't waste electricity in the process.
        mrb 9y ago
        Bitcoin does serve a useful purpose! It is perhaps not obvious to someone like you who don't seem to be a user. Or if you can't imagine how Bitcoin can help improve the world, you are probably only considering your little bubble, and not thinking about the other 7 billion human beings who are much less fortunate than you, economically, professionally, politically, financially. Overall, Bitcoin reduces friction, enables transactions that would not otherwise take place, and protects people from losing their cash/savings in various situations. Here are just a few examples of problems of the existing financial system that Bitcoin solves: - Credit card being denied while in a foreign country because the system accidentally tagged it as fraudulent - Merchants unable to sell online and accept credit cards due to their market segment encountering high CC fraud - Person unable to quickly and cheaply send remittance to family in foreign country - Countries confiscating savings accounts of citizens (eg. Cyprus in 2014) - Countries running their currency to the ground (Venezuela in 2017, Zimbabwe hyperinflation, USSR collapse, etc) - DEA stealing innocent people carrying cash thanks to civil forfeiture laws (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/07/dea-asset-forfeiture-joseph-rivers_n_7231744.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/07/dea-asset-forfeitur... http://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from-innocent/ http://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from-...) - Bitcoin helping Chinese bypass GFW censorship (https://www.larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-with-government-help/ https://www.larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-wit...) - Paypal freezing for months the account of someone asking for donations for an expensive medical treatment (quite a few news stories about similar situations) I could go on and on.
hueving 9y ago
Of course it's much less valuable. The crypto currencies are intentionally difficult to mine, wasting vast amounts of energy. A small mining company could probably process all of Visa's transactions which outnumber transactions on bitcoin by at least an order of magnitude.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- notgood 9y ago
  That doesn't make sense; you are comparing the creation of a currency against the usage of other. The finance sector includes the creation of cash (its paper, price of counterfeit measures); the transportation of cash (think ATMs), the materials needed for creating debit and credit cards, including their chips, the equipment to protect banks from being robbed (think big steel security safes) along many other resources to make such industry work.
  - rspeer 9y ago
    This is a common knee-jerk response that doesn't make any sense. None of that stops Bitcoin from being wasteful, and most of it is still necessary if Bitcoin is used more. Are you claiming that Bitcoin replaces physical security? How would it do that? Why doesn't someone just walk in and take your computer? And if you're concerned about the creation of small computer chips (why would you be concerned about this), I assure you that Bitcoin is using more of them.
    - notgood 9y ago
      >None of that stops Bitcoin from being wasteful, and most of it is still necessary if Bitcoin is used more What? If used more we wouldn't even need to transform it to any other currency, its because is _not_ used more that it is usually needed to convert it to something else. >"How would it do that? Why doesn't someone just walk in and take your computer?" No, someone cannot walk in because he doesn't even know where to walk in, its the same reason Satoshi is extremely rich despite the curiosity of millions to know about him, but no-one even knows his real name or anything at all; we don't even know which country he lives in; so yeah it does replace physical security; at least to a significant extent. >And if you're concerned about the creation of small computer chips (why would you be concerned about this), I assure you that Bitcoin is using more of them. It was just an example of the millions of resources that are wasted by the finance industry, a lot that include transportation (gasoline/ fossil fuels which is way way worse than most sources of electricity gpus are using)
jayd16 9y ago
The whole concept is underpinned by enforced, auto-scaled busywork.

bdcravens 9y ago

Think of all the SF/SV pollution caused by wastefully funded startups building the next Uber for ice cream or whatever.

soVeryTired 9y ago
Tu Quoque
- abalone 9y ago
  More like false equivalence. What makes the cryptocurrency carbon footprint particularly wasteful is that, if we're being honest, its primary use is currency speculation.
  - Taek 9y ago
    Primary use today, sure. But cryptocurrency has more practical application every year, and there are a lot of compelling reasons to believe that major economic players will switch to decentralized currency (not private blockchains, the public ones) in the next 10-20 years. If during the dotcom bubble internet startups had required something similar (provable waste), people would have said the same thing you are. But here we see that the internet clearly was a trillion dollar industry, just that most dotcom startups were too early and poorly managed speculative vehicles. Decentralized cryptocurrency will be a trillion dollar industry, and that's trillions in annual recurring revenue I'm talking about, not trillions in total market cap. It's just today we've seen the speculation get ahead of the technology.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

kpcyrd 9y ago

1) Run your miner on green energy 2) Green energy demand increases 3) More green energy 4) Save the world

zer0tonin 9y ago
That's not exactly how it works.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Hmm... so let's try another (likely absurd) approach: What about: the government promises bitcoins mined with solar energy will be free of tax. Solar panels bought for mining bitcoins will be half-subsidized by the govt. For the next two years, at least. Huge solar farms spin up as everyone wants to mine as much as they can on cheap energy. Two years pass, govt says it's end of the Bitcoin subsidy; miners fold, cheap used solar panels flood the market...