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Talking about clean-energy yet failing to compare CO2 emissions but merely refer to GWhrs is totally missing the point. Several big Bitcoin miners are setup ne
by kbody 9y ago
Talking about clean-energy yet failing to compare CO2 emissions but merely refer to GWhrs is totally missing the point.
Several big Bitcoin miners are setup near or just being powered by hydroelectric dams or other renewable energy sources. And all of them of course target low costs, which a lot of times means that there's an oversupply of power in essence helping in some cases use energy that would go to waste otherwise.
You have to compare the gold or bank industry's to Bitcoin's mining emissions. Gold is constrained by the gold mines positions, uses oil a lot, unless someone does a proper study, all this articles are just sensationalistic articles by clueless journos hunting pageviews and likes.
Sidenote, funny how this is filled under "Currency Manipulation"
- barrkel 9y agoI don't believe that energy would "go to waste otherwise"; if it was priced low enough (and it should be, if it's going to waste), it would make economic sense to build distribution infrastructure, and it wouldn't be going to waste any more. Energy is really fungible, one of the most fungible commodities. Hydro can easily substitute for coal, oil, gas and nuclear elsewhere. This makes your defence especially weak.
- sremani 9y agoIf you said, the miners are near wind-farms, then I would eat up your statement about oversupply. For hydro more or less, that is electricity that could be used for something else but being burnt. I am not sure about Chinese miners being near hydro-electric some may be and some may be not, but over all its complete waste of energy. When it comes to energy efficiency nothing beats centralized. I do understand the motivation behind decentralized, but you pay the price! Hopefully Proof of Stake with reduced power consumption becomes a norm, but I am skeptical.
- jcranmer 9y agoWhich do you think uses more computing hardware, every Bitcoin miner in the world, or the VISA payment network? Even today, the answer is quite clearly the total Bitcoin mining network--now consider expanding the scale of Bitcoin transactions to the VISA network, a 1000× scale increase. Almost by definition, cryptocurrency requires spending useless energy. In electronic transactions as they exist today, you essentially only have to update the tables in two institution's databases (plus all the replication and backups that entails). A cryptocurrency requires everybody to record their transaction--and do a bunch of useless cryptography to to ensure that they do so. Asking how much emissions it costs to mine the gold or grow the cotton to satisfy my paycheck is misleading. Exactly 0 joules were spent: no gold needed to be mined, nor coins minted, nor dollar bills printed to satisfy the electronic transactions to decrement a number at my employer's bank and increment the number at my personal bank appropriately.
- hossbeast 9y agoIt uses more energy, but means you don't have to trust anyone to transact. It remains to be seen just how much that property is worth. (Quite alot, I suspect).