5 ms·

The amount of energy used on heating and cooling is several magnitudes larger than whole mining for bitcoin. It's not a monster, it just sounds ridiculously bi

The amount of energy used on heating and cooling is several magnitudes larger than whole mining for bitcoin. It's not a monster, it just sounds ridiculously big, but Internet uses more. Airplanes use magnitudes more, even cow farts are much bigger than CO2 footprint of Bitcoin.

ajross 9y ago
The point is that bitcoin valuation is driven as a bubble. Inbound coin purchasers are expecting another hundredfold increase over the next two years. So there goes your "several orders of magnitude" right there. Again, it will crash, so this won't happen. But the community expectation (even if the community doesn't realize it) of bitcoin absolutely is that it will eat all the world's electricity.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  There is a lot of certainty in your statement for a bunch of guesses.
- gfodor 9y ago
  People have been saying it will crash for almost a decade now. You need a catalyst for a crash. You need a reason for the majority of market participants to throw their hands up and say "you know what, this bitcoin thing is never going to be useful." We've been waiting for a long time for that catalyst, and if anything I think it's been receding further off into the distance as bitcoin becomes more, not less, established as a mainstream technology.
  - ajross 9y ago
    How about: "It's eating all the world's electricity so everyone banned it" as a reason for the crash? Look, I can't tell you the future. I don't know when or how any better than people knew when the dot com crash or real estate crisis would hit. But people in the late 90's and mid 00's absolutely could see that the relevant markets were inflating in unsustainable ways, and absolutely did predict a "crash". This is no different. Bitcoin is growing in an unsustainable way (c.f. literally eating all the world's electricity if it continues). That never ends well.
    - nlperguiy 9y ago
      I'm not sure you're aware of the real numbers? The amount of energy used for heating and cooling is extremely huge. Bitcoin is probably 0.0x% of that amount. Internet is 2% of the whole CO2 emissions, heating and cooling is more than 30%. The industry pollution of China is so big you can't see their impact on CO2 emissions from their cars or their agriculture. The estimates for Bitcoin, as much as they sound big, they really are not. Cost in energy per transaction can only fall down with TPS increase (which is something lightning network, or bigger blocksize can do).
      - jacobr 9y ago
        > The amount of energy used for heating and cooling is extremely huge. With the additional benefit that it keeps people warm/cool? Can you please tell me why you are not interested in solving this problem? My guess is that it is impossible to do with Bitcoin, and people dismissing the energy problems want to protect their investment rather than develop better technologies.
        nlperguiy 9y ago
        > With the additional benefit that it keeps people warm/cool? Most of that energy is wasted because of the architecture and irrational desire of 24/7 comfort AC blasting at the coolest setting. > Can you please tell me why you are not interested in solving this problem? My guess is that it is impossible to do with Bitcoin, and people dismissing the energy problems want to protect their investment rather than develop better technologies. Problem is solved easily by clean energy sources. There are bigger problems to solve, like heating and cooling, like CO2 footprint of animal agriculture, like deforestation of Amazon forest for Argentinian and Brazilian steak etc. We are here mostly programmers, we don't profile the code and then optimize the fastest function, but the biggest bottleneck. Bitcoin is no where near the bottleneck and all scaling solutions will require less energy per transaction. Problem is also automagically solved by the market. If mining gets to expensive to do, miners will figure out how to use less energy. For example, market is not solving all of the above environmental problems because, for example, there is not fair market in animal agriculture.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    Bitcoin has had plenty of speculative bubbles and plenty of crashes, the reason it keeps on working instead of being abandoned is because it is actually useful, regardless of how much of the market cap is driven by speculation. "Bitcoin is a tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme."
  - NickM 9y ago
    Owning a Bitcoin offers no value to the holder other than the ability to buy something with it, but in almost every case imaginable there is a better alternative to Bitcoin out there. Usually it's much easier and safer to just use a credit card or a check or a bank transfer (or, heck, physical cash), but even in the case of illegal activities, you're probably better off using a different cryptocurrency that's less traceable. The people who keep buying into BTC because they think it's fundamentally more useful than fiat currency are in a very small minority. Most of the people buying BTC are viewing it as a speculative investment, but the only reason they're buying it as an investment is because it keeps going up, and the only reason it keeps going up is because people keep investing in it. If it starts going down for some reason, even a little bit, the positive feedback loop could easily switch to a negative one and the bubble will pop. All the investors will start selling at once to try and reap their profits before it falls further. Also, part of the reason the bubble has gone on for so long is that historically it's been difficult to short BTC. This may change with the advent of Bitcoin futures markets....
- jstanley 9y ago
  > the community expectation I consider myself a member of the bitcoin community, and I absolutely do not believe it will increase 100x within 2 years. I think this bubble is going to crash.
arcticfox 9y ago
> even cow farts are much bigger than CO2 footprint of Bitcoin. It sounds like you're trying to joke about "cow farts" but they're a well-known massive source of pollution, I don't think it's a flattering comparison > but Internet uses more So the most important innovation of this century, used by billions of people daily, uses more energy than a financial network doing only ~400,000 transactions per day? If Bitcoin were to replace the entire financial sector, sure, it would be worth the energy expenditure. But as it is, there are solutions thousands of times more efficient for all of the problems Bitcoin tries to solve.
- jstanley 9y ago
  > there are solutions thousands of times more efficient for all of the problems Bitcoin tries to solve. No there aren't. Just because you don't agree with the validity of some of the problems bitcoin tries to solve doesn't mean it's not trying to solve them. I don't actually know what you have in mind, but if you name some of the more efficient alternatives to bitcoin, I'll tell you which problems they're failing to solve.
  - arcticfox 9y ago
    What property does Bitcoin have that doesn't have a more efficient solution? Between proof-of-stake solutions and the traditional financial system, as far as I know Bitcoin doesn't solve anything more efficiently, from transaction processing rate to distributed consensus.
    - kang 9y ago
      Proof-of-stake has many problems like nothing-at-stake problem etc.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Alt coins that don't waste as much energy solve all the same problems. Bitcoin the first of a new breed, but that just means it's unlikely for the first implementation to win.
  - 9y ago
mey 9y ago
Compare apples to apples. Take the entire worlds banking infrastructure for credit card processing and banking. (Getting an estimate for that would be an interesting exercise). How does that stack up to the energy usage of bitcoin adjusted for total value, transaction volume, etc. Dismissing it as not a problem or potential problem by pointing out even bigger problems doesn't make it not a problem. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- mikeash 9y ago
  The difference in transaction volumes is striking. The US financial industry alone does millions of transactions per second, whereas Bitcoin manages about 3.
stonogo 9y ago
"X is not bad because Y is worse" is an ethically bankrupt approach to values clarification.
mikeash 9y ago
As it stands right now, Bitcoin's energy use isn't particularly problematic. But that's because Bitcoin is really small. The worry isn't so much that Bitcoin is destroying the planet now, but that if it grows to match the scale of a "real" currency (as its proponents keep saying it will!), its energy usage will become dangerously large.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
> "The amount of energy used on heating and cooling is several magnitudes larger than whole mining for bitcoin" Not only that, but some entrepreneurs are selling bitcoin miners as heaters that make money! :)

ajross 9y ago

The point is that bitcoin valuation is driven as a bubble. Inbound coin purchasers are expecting another hundredfold increase over the next two years. So there goes your "several orders of magnitude" right there. Again, it will crash, so this won't happen. But the community expectation (even if the community doesn't realize it) of bitcoin absolutely is that it will eat all the world's electricity.

Frogolocalypse 9y ago
There is a lot of certainty in your statement for a bunch of guesses.
gfodor 9y ago
People have been saying it will crash for almost a decade now. You need a catalyst for a crash. You need a reason for the majority of market participants to throw their hands up and say "you know what, this bitcoin thing is never going to be useful." We've been waiting for a long time for that catalyst, and if anything I think it's been receding further off into the distance as bitcoin becomes more, not less, established as a mainstream technology.
- ajross 9y ago
  How about: "It's eating all the world's electricity so everyone banned it" as a reason for the crash? Look, I can't tell you the future. I don't know when or how any better than people knew when the dot com crash or real estate crisis would hit. But people in the late 90's and mid 00's absolutely could see that the relevant markets were inflating in unsustainable ways, and absolutely did predict a "crash". This is no different. Bitcoin is growing in an unsustainable way (c.f. literally eating all the world's electricity if it continues). That never ends well.
  - nlperguiy 9y ago
    I'm not sure you're aware of the real numbers? The amount of energy used for heating and cooling is extremely huge. Bitcoin is probably 0.0x% of that amount. Internet is 2% of the whole CO2 emissions, heating and cooling is more than 30%. The industry pollution of China is so big you can't see their impact on CO2 emissions from their cars or their agriculture. The estimates for Bitcoin, as much as they sound big, they really are not. Cost in energy per transaction can only fall down with TPS increase (which is something lightning network, or bigger blocksize can do).
    - jacobr 9y ago
      > The amount of energy used for heating and cooling is extremely huge. With the additional benefit that it keeps people warm/cool? Can you please tell me why you are not interested in solving this problem? My guess is that it is impossible to do with Bitcoin, and people dismissing the energy problems want to protect their investment rather than develop better technologies.
      - nlperguiy 9y ago
        > With the additional benefit that it keeps people warm/cool? Most of that energy is wasted because of the architecture and irrational desire of 24/7 comfort AC blasting at the coolest setting. > Can you please tell me why you are not interested in solving this problem? My guess is that it is impossible to do with Bitcoin, and people dismissing the energy problems want to protect their investment rather than develop better technologies. Problem is solved easily by clean energy sources. There are bigger problems to solve, like heating and cooling, like CO2 footprint of animal agriculture, like deforestation of Amazon forest for Argentinian and Brazilian steak etc. We are here mostly programmers, we don't profile the code and then optimize the fastest function, but the biggest bottleneck. Bitcoin is no where near the bottleneck and all scaling solutions will require less energy per transaction. Problem is also automagically solved by the market. If mining gets to expensive to do, miners will figure out how to use less energy. For example, market is not solving all of the above environmental problems because, for example, there is not fair market in animal agriculture.
- jstanley 9y ago
  Bitcoin has had plenty of speculative bubbles and plenty of crashes, the reason it keeps on working instead of being abandoned is because it is actually useful, regardless of how much of the market cap is driven by speculation. "Bitcoin is a tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme."
- NickM 9y ago
  Owning a Bitcoin offers no value to the holder other than the ability to buy something with it, but in almost every case imaginable there is a better alternative to Bitcoin out there. Usually it's much easier and safer to just use a credit card or a check or a bank transfer (or, heck, physical cash), but even in the case of illegal activities, you're probably better off using a different cryptocurrency that's less traceable. The people who keep buying into BTC because they think it's fundamentally more useful than fiat currency are in a very small minority. Most of the people buying BTC are viewing it as a speculative investment, but the only reason they're buying it as an investment is because it keeps going up, and the only reason it keeps going up is because people keep investing in it. If it starts going down for some reason, even a little bit, the positive feedback loop could easily switch to a negative one and the bubble will pop. All the investors will start selling at once to try and reap their profits before it falls further. Also, part of the reason the bubble has gone on for so long is that historically it's been difficult to short BTC. This may change with the advent of Bitcoin futures markets....
jstanley 9y ago
> the community expectation I consider myself a member of the bitcoin community, and I absolutely do not believe it will increase 100x within 2 years. I think this bubble is going to crash.

arcticfox 9y ago

> even cow farts are much bigger than CO2 footprint of Bitcoin. It sounds like you're trying to joke about "cow farts" but they're a well-known massive source of pollution, I don't think it's a flattering comparison > but Internet uses more So the most important innovation of this century, used by billions of people daily, uses more energy than a financial network doing only ~400,000 transactions per day? If Bitcoin were to replace the entire financial sector, sure, it would be worth the energy expenditure. But as it is, there are solutions thousands of times more efficient for all of the problems Bitcoin tries to solve.

jstanley 9y ago
> there are solutions thousands of times more efficient for all of the problems Bitcoin tries to solve. No there aren't. Just because you don't agree with the validity of some of the problems bitcoin tries to solve doesn't mean it's not trying to solve them. I don't actually know what you have in mind, but if you name some of the more efficient alternatives to bitcoin, I'll tell you which problems they're failing to solve.
- arcticfox 9y ago
  What property does Bitcoin have that doesn't have a more efficient solution? Between proof-of-stake solutions and the traditional financial system, as far as I know Bitcoin doesn't solve anything more efficiently, from transaction processing rate to distributed consensus.
  - kang 9y ago
    Proof-of-stake has many problems like nothing-at-stake problem etc.
- Retric 9y ago
  Alt coins that don't waste as much energy solve all the same problems. Bitcoin the first of a new breed, but that just means it's unlikely for the first implementation to win.
- 9y ago

mey 9y ago

Compare apples to apples. Take the entire worlds banking infrastructure for credit card processing and banking. (Getting an estimate for that would be an interesting exercise). How does that stack up to the energy usage of bitcoin adjusted for total value, transaction volume, etc. Dismissing it as not a problem or potential problem by pointing out even bigger problems doesn't make it not a problem. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

mikeash 9y ago
The difference in transaction volumes is striking. The US financial industry alone does millions of transactions per second, whereas Bitcoin manages about 3.

stonogo 9y ago

"X is not bad because Y is worse" is an ethically bankrupt approach to values clarification.

mikeash 9y ago

As it stands right now, Bitcoin's energy use isn't particularly problematic. But that's because Bitcoin is really small. The worry isn't so much that Bitcoin is destroying the planet now, but that if it grows to match the scale of a "real" currency (as its proponents keep saying it will!), its energy usage will become dangerously large.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

> "The amount of energy used on heating and cooling is several magnitudes larger than whole mining for bitcoin" Not only that, but some entrepreneurs are selling bitcoin miners as heaters that make money! :)