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to the extent it's taking away from mining gold, it's a positive thing
by vasilipupkin 8y ago
to the extent it's taking away from mining gold, it's a positive thing
- dfee 8y agoI don’t follow. Can you explain?
- vasilipupkin 8y agogold mining uses a ton of energy, more than bitcoin mining. To the extent that people substitute gold for bitcoin in financial portfolios, this is positive since net energy waste is lower.
- moocow01 8y agoHow do you know that gold mining uses more energy than bitcoin mining?
- vasilipupkin 8y agoI mean, I don't know it for sure, that's why I said "to the extent..." but here is one article https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-is-greener-than-its-critics-think https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-i...
- JBReefer 8y agoGonna need a lot of citations to believe that
- vasilipupkin 8y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-is-greener-than-its-critics-think https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-i...
- mikeash 8y agoIt seems like a bad comparison, since you don’t need to mine gold just to move it around. Transferring ownership can be accomplished for the amount of energy it takes to send a small electronic message.
- vasilipupkin 8y agoto move it around you need trucks which use gasoline
- mikeash 8y agoYou don’t need to move it to transfer ownership of it.
- vasilipupkin 8y agoby that logic, same thing applies to bitcoin. on a centralized exchange ownershp is just an entry in the database
- mikeash 8y agoIt would apply to bitcoin if that were the usual way to transfer it, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case.
- vasilipupkin 8y agowhat do you mean? most bitcoin volume is done on centralized exchanges, so that's exactly the usual way of trading it.
- mikeash 8y agoFrom some quick searching around, volume on the exchanges is around 500,000/day while volume on the blockchain is over a million. If that’s accurate (and it may not be, I’m not an expert on this and the sources I found might suck) then most volume is on the blockchain by a pretty good margin. I don’t know how much gold is actually shifted around physically, but the trading volume in a year is several times the actual amount of gold that has been mined, so I suspect the proportion of that which involves physical movement is tiny.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago40% of gold consumed is in investments, 50% in jewelry, and 10% in industry, so I'm not totally sure how it works out in terms of energy per unit of gold, but it's likely some mining of gold would be necessary even if you stopped using gold for jewelry and investing. But you could get rid of bitcoin (and other crypto currencies) without any real impact.
- vasilipupkin 8y agoperhaps. you could get rid of most of things in our society without much impact, since we basically need food, water and shelter. but lots of things are nice to have, so that's kinda irrelevant
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoI think cryptocurrencies have very few practical applications at the moment. So getting rid of them would have much less effect than getting rid of gold for example.
- vasilipupkin 8y agoyes, that's because they are 10 years old as opposed to 10,000, but I am not sure where you are going with this. At the very minimum, getting rid of them would cause investor losses of hundreds of billions.