7 ms·

Use of Bitcoin causes around 22 megatons in CO2 emissions annually

34 points by vixen99 7y ago

justaaron 7y ago
This needs to be pushed into the public eye more. There's a lot of green-washing going on in crypto-currency publicity, as of late, and it needs to be emphasized how the MODEL is fundamentally broken. (Example: Proof of work complexity quadrupling in 2018 alone.) It's socially irresponsible, at this juncture in time, to be promoting such schemes. At this point in history it's abundantly clear that "alternative islands" cannot avoid confronting the "mainstream morass" as the "mainstream morass" is currently on a direct collision course with life itself.
- throwaway857384 7y ago
  How much pollution does gold mining produce? How much pollution does printing money produce? How much electricity (pollution) does visa use? How much pollution does any service we take for granted produce? I'm not saying bitcoins CO2 product is good or bad, just that there are so many things that create so much CO2 that we never question or consider.
  - justaaron 7y ago
    Tell me more about the exponentially increasing pollution/costs of printing money, please. Tell me more about strawman arguments. I specifically alleged that "proof of work" is a bad idea.
    - jraedisch 7y ago
      A more economical solution that keeps all of Bitcoin's benefits would be nice, but it is not clear at all, whether that is possible. By forbidding Bitcoin large countries might make a dent in its adoption curve and push the problem back a couple of years, but that won't be a long term solution. Sooner or later we will probably have a globally accepted uninflatable reserve currency that uses a lot of energy, until another genius finds a more economical way to keep our savings safe.
      - jraedisch 7y ago
        Some bitcoiners would also argue that saving will lead to more informed and contemplated spending, thus reducing waste. Some are already saving a lot because they are expecting benefits in the future, a feeling which might have gotten lost in the recent past.
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    I think you're being disingenuous. Bitcoin is fundamentally different from all of those other things in that it is deliberately designed to be as inefficient as possible. Proof of Work is a Red Queen's Race[0] where the difficulty keeps escalating and you have to keep pumping in more energy or else risk somebody else executing a 51% attack against you. Not only do miners and printers work to make their processes more efficient and cheaper, but once the gold coins are minted or paper money is printed, they can be used for N transactions at extremely low cost per-transaction. Contrast this with bitcoin where EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION has to be bundled in a block, so every single transaction involves more energy than an average household uses in a week[1]. Imagine burning a whole tank of gasoline to pay for a cup of coffee and you'll start to see why Bitcoin is an ecological atrocity. -- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race [1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele... [2] https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin
    - nyanloutre 7y ago
      You forget that it would use the same energy to produce a 1MB block than a 1GB block
      - teh_infallible 7y ago
        So few people understand this. Doubling blocksize doubles the capacity, and therefore the efficiency of the network.
        zaarn 7y ago
        At the current efficiency level, the capacity would have to grow thousand-fold before it even approaches the efficiency needed. Not even lightning would provide the amount of capacity required IMO.
      - UncleMeat 7y ago
        And we've seen how controversial block size changes are.
  - wtdata 7y ago
    Again this tired strawman argument? Gold mining produces several orders of magnitude less CO2 pollution than Bitcoin. Besides that, gold mining processes are ever increasingly more efficient, while Bitcoin, by design, is every increasingly less efficient to mine.
- Lordarminius 7y ago
  It is socially irresponsible to promote the best alternative we have to fiat currency and the looming disaster that is fractional reserve banking ?
  - NotPaidToPost 7y ago
    Well if that's the best alternative to fiat money it only shows how fiat money will stay with us for a long, long time...
    - justaaron 7y ago
      It surely ISN'T proof-of-work blockchain crypto-currencies as currently implemented. I suppose that there is really very little pressure upon current crypto-currency implementations to alter their fundamentally flawed idea, as long as the currency can "pay for" itself LOL Externalities. They have successfully externalized the problems they are causing on to everyone else.
    - Lordarminius 7y ago
      The point that bears emphasizing is that Bitcoin is the harbinger of a new paradigm. It is the prototype of a technology and it's associated ecosystem designed to replace the current monetary model. There is no doubt in my mind or amongst those who closely follow cryptocurrencies that some other other digital coin with better technology will come along eventually and displace bitcoin. I agree this will take time, but it will not be a 'long long time'. Fiat may disappear almost completely in 50 to 100 years.
      - Junk_Collector 7y ago
        No cryptocurrency can replace fiat currency until it solves the use of force problem unless you think that there will suddenly be a world where you don't have to pay taxes.
        seibelj 7y ago
        If the philosophy you believe is that cryptocurrency will eventually replace fiat, the argument is that you would convert your crypto to fiat when you need to pay taxes. This is similar to a gold bug that trades their gold into fiat at tax time. You pay a fee for the privilege but in return you aren’t wiped out by runaway inflation. I love the cryptocurrency arguments on HN because they are melting pots of philosophy and arguments of fundamentals that question the very foundations of our modern economy. Very fun reading!
throwaway857384 7y ago
Negative press in anticipation of FaceBook-Coin?
nyanloutre 7y ago
That's not so bad considering that it would use the same power even with 100 time the current user base Also the methodology used to get the miners IP is very questionable
- perseusmandate 7y ago
  IPs are crucial to understanding the actual carbon output. Often times analyses are simplified to the point that they discount that miners are using uncommonly cheap power sources like Icelandic geothermal
cjbenedikt 7y ago
Anyone mentioned training one (1) AI model creates as much CO2 as 5 cars over their life time...??? Nope? Just saying....
- dTal 7y ago
  How big of an AI model? By my figuring, a car uses about a thousand gigajoules, or $20,000 worth of gasoline, over its lifetime, American gas prices. Depending on where you buy your electricity, that comes out to 10 to 20 grand's worth of power (gasoline is relatively expensive per joule). So this figure implies that training an AI model costs 100 grand in electricity. Is that right? Because I thought "training an AI model" was more of a "1 week on a single GPU" kind of thing.
- imtringued 7y ago
  The comparison is completely arbitrary. Big AI models require more resources than economy cars because an AI model can serve millions of users whereas the economy car only serves one. What if we stop talking about economy cars? It is only fair to compare a "lamborghini" AI model to a real lamborghini and suddenly the situation is reversed.
- hedora 7y ago
  Where did you get this number? A really, really big (like the biggest FAANG had last year) ML cluster would use at most four or five DGX-N’s to train a model, because that is the current scaling limit for CNNs. Each draw 3500W: https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx1-user-guide/introduction-to-dgx1.html#topic_hwspec-power https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx1-user-guide/introduction-to-... 3500 * 5 is 17,500W. A US space heater maxes out at 1600 watts. Training for a week (5 days) is 2100 kWh, which is less than 60 gallons of gasoline, or 2-6 tanks of gas, depending on your vehicle: https://www.convertunits.com/from/kWh/to/gallon+%5BU.S.%5D+of+automotive+gasoline https://www.convertunits.com/from/kWh/to/gallon+%5BU.S.%5D+o...
perseusmandate 7y ago
Given the razor thin margins of BTC the miners are heavily incented to use the cheapest energy possible. And as miners exploit cheaper energy they deploy more ASICs, raising difficulty and decreasing margins for the remainder. As such miners switch to economical power sources faster than perhaps any other industry and many operations have relocated accordingly As of 2019, the absolute cheapest subsidy free energy in the world is Chilean solar power. In the next 5 years solar will indisputably become the cheapest if you consider the proliferation in China, Saudi Arabia's plans ect. What is unique about mining vs almost everything else is that location is irrelevant. It doesn't need to be connected to any supply chain or residential areas. Accordingly we are seeing heavy investment to exploit areas that are very well suited to wind and solar but are hard to connect to the grid, meaning there is currently no demand even though there is potential supply. One such project is in Morocco If BTC has merit as a network it will have staying power well past 10 years, at which point the carbon output should be null.
- yvdriess 7y ago
  With the additional caveat that even if the production of renewables is not emitting CO2, the production of the equipment, installation and maintenance is.
  - perseusmandate 7y ago
    True but that's probably 2 orders less. Ideally it would be done with electric vehicles at carbon neutral factories
- drcross 7y ago
  In an ideal scenario global solar power generation would be over produced so that it would still be of a considerable supply for wintertime use. All the summer over production could be moved to bitcoin mining, or hydrogen creation resulting in ad-hoc, free, follow the sun bitcoin mining or hydrogen storage. When summer switches to winter in the northern hemisphere then the southern hemisphere takes up the load.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
erentz 7y ago
This argument is so misguided and I’m surprised whenever it comes up how many people bite. How many megatons of CO2 are released globally every year due to people setting their air con to 72 when they could just deal with it being at 76. Or heat their homes in winter to 75 when they could just put an extra layer on and heat it to 70. The point is energy is there to be used and people will choose to use it however it suits them for whatever they like within the confines of what they think is a reasonable use of their money. Bitcoin is no different. But these articles and the comments are all about attacking Bitcoin with an attitude that we should prohibit this particular use of energy. The correct thing to do is to properly price in the externalities to energy so that all uses are effected and if a use is then truly bad it will be priced out, or at worst it’ll at least pay for its environmental cost (such as setting your thermostat too high).
- darkcha0s 7y ago
  One thing you are missing- bitcoin doesn't solve any problem. We have currency, and the currency in its form today doesn't need to waste electricity as part of its inner-workings (I'm aware it takes energy to produce). AC and its power consumption is a necessary evil in some places to make livable conditions. Bitcoin doesn't have that fallback; I can pay for my coffee without creating CO2, just by using cash. No one here is saying we should forbid/outlaw/block bitcoin because of its CO2 emissions. People are just seeing it as another reason to not blindly buy into the hype.
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    > No one here is saying we should forbid/outlaw/block bitcoin because of its CO2 emissions. I am. I'll make that case. Proof-of-work cryptocurrency should be banned for the same reason truck drivers idling diesel engines in cities should be banned: It harms the environment and produces nothing useful for society. If these crypocurrency developers are such geniuses, and cryptocurrency is really solving a critical problem, then banning PoW will spur innovation in alternative mechanisms like proof-of-stake or proof-of-luck [0] to meet those use cases with far less ecological devastation. [0] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/249.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/249.pdf
durdleturtle 7y ago
This is why blockchain is a bad technology. It inherently has excessive overhead and the benefits (decentralization) don't pan out in practice.
Proven 7y ago
First, it doesn't matter. Second, it didn't have to be that way... Help dismantle central banking and introduce ban on budget deficits - that will make Bitcoin unnecessary!
XalvinX 7y ago
I'm getting really tired of these kind of non-news stories. This is a drop in the bucket. How about this instead: "Suburban Moms generate XXX Gigatons in CO2 emissions annually by washing loads of clothes and dishes in half-full machines" Humans waste so much energy that focussing on bitcoins really just fuels conspiracy theories more than anything else... Imagine all the useless neon signs in the world, burning insane amounts of coal.
XalvinX 7y ago
How much does use of Facebook cause worldwide? I'd bet it is more.
bytematic 7y ago
Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption: Czech Republic[0] -- -[0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
rini17 7y ago
I propose that this is primarily a failure to invent ways to use surplus electricity in places with poor infrastructure.

34 points by vixen99 7y ago

This needs to be pushed into the public eye more. There's a lot of green-washing going on in crypto-currency publicity, as of late, and it needs to be emphasized how the MODEL is fundamentally broken. (Example: Proof of work complexity quadrupling in 2018 alone.) It's socially irresponsible, at this juncture in time, to be promoting such schemes. At this point in history it's abundantly clear that "alternative islands" cannot avoid confronting the "mainstream morass" as the "mainstream morass" is currently on a direct collision course with life itself.

throwaway857384 7y ago
How much pollution does gold mining produce? How much pollution does printing money produce? How much electricity (pollution) does visa use? How much pollution does any service we take for granted produce? I'm not saying bitcoins CO2 product is good or bad, just that there are so many things that create so much CO2 that we never question or consider.
- justaaron 7y ago
  Tell me more about the exponentially increasing pollution/costs of printing money, please. Tell me more about strawman arguments. I specifically alleged that "proof of work" is a bad idea.
  - jraedisch 7y ago
    A more economical solution that keeps all of Bitcoin's benefits would be nice, but it is not clear at all, whether that is possible. By forbidding Bitcoin large countries might make a dent in its adoption curve and push the problem back a couple of years, but that won't be a long term solution. Sooner or later we will probably have a globally accepted uninflatable reserve currency that uses a lot of energy, until another genius finds a more economical way to keep our savings safe.
    - jraedisch 7y ago
      Some bitcoiners would also argue that saving will lead to more informed and contemplated spending, thus reducing waste. Some are already saving a lot because they are expecting benefits in the future, a feeling which might have gotten lost in the recent past.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  I think you're being disingenuous. Bitcoin is fundamentally different from all of those other things in that it is deliberately designed to be as inefficient as possible. Proof of Work is a Red Queen's Race[0] where the difficulty keeps escalating and you have to keep pumping in more energy or else risk somebody else executing a 51% attack against you. Not only do miners and printers work to make their processes more efficient and cheaper, but once the gold coins are minted or paper money is printed, they can be used for N transactions at extremely low cost per-transaction. Contrast this with bitcoin where EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION has to be bundled in a block, so every single transaction involves more energy than an average household uses in a week[1]. Imagine burning a whole tank of gasoline to pay for a cup of coffee and you'll start to see why Bitcoin is an ecological atrocity. -- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race [1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele... [2] https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin
  - nyanloutre 7y ago
    You forget that it would use the same energy to produce a 1MB block than a 1GB block
    - teh_infallible 7y ago
      So few people understand this. Doubling blocksize doubles the capacity, and therefore the efficiency of the network.
      - zaarn 7y ago
        At the current efficiency level, the capacity would have to grow thousand-fold before it even approaches the efficiency needed. Not even lightning would provide the amount of capacity required IMO.
    - UncleMeat 7y ago
      And we've seen how controversial block size changes are.
- wtdata 7y ago
  Again this tired strawman argument? Gold mining produces several orders of magnitude less CO2 pollution than Bitcoin. Besides that, gold mining processes are ever increasingly more efficient, while Bitcoin, by design, is every increasingly less efficient to mine.
Lordarminius 7y ago
It is socially irresponsible to promote the best alternative we have to fiat currency and the looming disaster that is fractional reserve banking ?
- NotPaidToPost 7y ago
  Well if that's the best alternative to fiat money it only shows how fiat money will stay with us for a long, long time...
  - justaaron 7y ago
    It surely ISN'T proof-of-work blockchain crypto-currencies as currently implemented. I suppose that there is really very little pressure upon current crypto-currency implementations to alter their fundamentally flawed idea, as long as the currency can "pay for" itself LOL Externalities. They have successfully externalized the problems they are causing on to everyone else.
  - Lordarminius 7y ago
    The point that bears emphasizing is that Bitcoin is the harbinger of a new paradigm. It is the prototype of a technology and it's associated ecosystem designed to replace the current monetary model. There is no doubt in my mind or amongst those who closely follow cryptocurrencies that some other other digital coin with better technology will come along eventually and displace bitcoin. I agree this will take time, but it will not be a 'long long time'. Fiat may disappear almost completely in 50 to 100 years.
    - Junk_Collector 7y ago
      No cryptocurrency can replace fiat currency until it solves the use of force problem unless you think that there will suddenly be a world where you don't have to pay taxes.
      - seibelj 7y ago
        If the philosophy you believe is that cryptocurrency will eventually replace fiat, the argument is that you would convert your crypto to fiat when you need to pay taxes. This is similar to a gold bug that trades their gold into fiat at tax time. You pay a fee for the privilege but in return you aren’t wiped out by runaway inflation. I love the cryptocurrency arguments on HN because they are melting pots of philosophy and arguments of fundamentals that question the very foundations of our modern economy. Very fun reading!

throwaway857384 7y ago

Negative press in anticipation of FaceBook-Coin?

nyanloutre 7y ago

That's not so bad considering that it would use the same power even with 100 time the current user base Also the methodology used to get the miners IP is very questionable

perseusmandate 7y ago
IPs are crucial to understanding the actual carbon output. Often times analyses are simplified to the point that they discount that miners are using uncommonly cheap power sources like Icelandic geothermal

cjbenedikt 7y ago

Anyone mentioned training one (1) AI model creates as much CO2 as 5 cars over their life time...??? Nope? Just saying....

dTal 7y ago
How big of an AI model? By my figuring, a car uses about a thousand gigajoules, or $20,000 worth of gasoline, over its lifetime, American gas prices. Depending on where you buy your electricity, that comes out to 10 to 20 grand's worth of power (gasoline is relatively expensive per joule). So this figure implies that training an AI model costs 100 grand in electricity. Is that right? Because I thought "training an AI model" was more of a "1 week on a single GPU" kind of thing.
imtringued 7y ago
The comparison is completely arbitrary. Big AI models require more resources than economy cars because an AI model can serve millions of users whereas the economy car only serves one. What if we stop talking about economy cars? It is only fair to compare a "lamborghini" AI model to a real lamborghini and suddenly the situation is reversed.
hedora 7y ago
Where did you get this number? A really, really big (like the biggest FAANG had last year) ML cluster would use at most four or five DGX-N’s to train a model, because that is the current scaling limit for CNNs. Each draw 3500W: https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx1-user-guide/introduction-to-dgx1.html#topic_hwspec-power https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx1-user-guide/introduction-to-... 3500 * 5 is 17,500W. A US space heater maxes out at 1600 watts. Training for a week (5 days) is 2100 kWh, which is less than 60 gallons of gasoline, or 2-6 tanks of gas, depending on your vehicle: https://www.convertunits.com/from/kWh/to/gallon+%5BU.S.%5D+of+automotive+gasoline https://www.convertunits.com/from/kWh/to/gallon+%5BU.S.%5D+o...

perseusmandate 7y ago

Given the razor thin margins of BTC the miners are heavily incented to use the cheapest energy possible. And as miners exploit cheaper energy they deploy more ASICs, raising difficulty and decreasing margins for the remainder. As such miners switch to economical power sources faster than perhaps any other industry and many operations have relocated accordingly As of 2019, the absolute cheapest subsidy free energy in the world is Chilean solar power. In the next 5 years solar will indisputably become the cheapest if you consider the proliferation in China, Saudi Arabia's plans ect. What is unique about mining vs almost everything else is that location is irrelevant. It doesn't need to be connected to any supply chain or residential areas. Accordingly we are seeing heavy investment to exploit areas that are very well suited to wind and solar but are hard to connect to the grid, meaning there is currently no demand even though there is potential supply. One such project is in Morocco If BTC has merit as a network it will have staying power well past 10 years, at which point the carbon output should be null.

yvdriess 7y ago
With the additional caveat that even if the production of renewables is not emitting CO2, the production of the equipment, installation and maintenance is.
- perseusmandate 7y ago
  True but that's probably 2 orders less. Ideally it would be done with electric vehicles at carbon neutral factories
drcross 7y ago
In an ideal scenario global solar power generation would be over produced so that it would still be of a considerable supply for wintertime use. All the summer over production could be moved to bitcoin mining, or hydrogen creation resulting in ad-hoc, free, follow the sun bitcoin mining or hydrogen storage. When summer switches to winter in the northern hemisphere then the southern hemisphere takes up the load.
ForHackernews 7y ago

erentz 7y ago

This argument is so misguided and I’m surprised whenever it comes up how many people bite. How many megatons of CO2 are released globally every year due to people setting their air con to 72 when they could just deal with it being at 76. Or heat their homes in winter to 75 when they could just put an extra layer on and heat it to 70. The point is energy is there to be used and people will choose to use it however it suits them for whatever they like within the confines of what they think is a reasonable use of their money. Bitcoin is no different. But these articles and the comments are all about attacking Bitcoin with an attitude that we should prohibit this particular use of energy. The correct thing to do is to properly price in the externalities to energy so that all uses are effected and if a use is then truly bad it will be priced out, or at worst it’ll at least pay for its environmental cost (such as setting your thermostat too high).

darkcha0s 7y ago
One thing you are missing- bitcoin doesn't solve any problem. We have currency, and the currency in its form today doesn't need to waste electricity as part of its inner-workings (I'm aware it takes energy to produce). AC and its power consumption is a necessary evil in some places to make livable conditions. Bitcoin doesn't have that fallback; I can pay for my coffee without creating CO2, just by using cash. No one here is saying we should forbid/outlaw/block bitcoin because of its CO2 emissions. People are just seeing it as another reason to not blindly buy into the hype.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  > No one here is saying we should forbid/outlaw/block bitcoin because of its CO2 emissions. I am. I'll make that case. Proof-of-work cryptocurrency should be banned for the same reason truck drivers idling diesel engines in cities should be banned: It harms the environment and produces nothing useful for society. If these crypocurrency developers are such geniuses, and cryptocurrency is really solving a critical problem, then banning PoW will spur innovation in alternative mechanisms like proof-of-stake or proof-of-luck [0] to meet those use cases with far less ecological devastation. [0] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/249.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/249.pdf

durdleturtle 7y ago

This is why blockchain is a bad technology. It inherently has excessive overhead and the benefits (decentralization) don't pan out in practice.

Proven 7y ago

First, it doesn't matter. Second, it didn't have to be that way... Help dismantle central banking and introduce ban on budget deficits - that will make Bitcoin unnecessary!

XalvinX 7y ago

I'm getting really tired of these kind of non-news stories. This is a drop in the bucket. How about this instead: "Suburban Moms generate XXX Gigatons in CO2 emissions annually by washing loads of clothes and dishes in half-full machines" Humans waste so much energy that focussing on bitcoins really just fuels conspiracy theories more than anything else... Imagine all the useless neon signs in the world, burning insane amounts of coal.

XalvinX 7y ago

How much does use of Facebook cause worldwide? I'd bet it is more.

bytematic 7y ago

Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption: Czech Republic[0] -- -[0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

rini17 7y ago

I propose that this is primarily a failure to invent ways to use surplus electricity in places with poor infrastructure.