8 ms·

What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?

robert_foss 6y ago
Yes, but not with Bitcoin. Etherium is currently moving from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/
- bfgoodrich 6y ago
  Hasn't Ethereum been moving to proof-of-stake for years now? It seems like something that is never going to actually happen, but is always held as redeeming.
- latchkey 6y ago
  Ethereum [sic] is moving to PoS from PoW, but ETH doesn't suffer the same growth issue that BTC does because its hash algo is effectively tied to its hardware. It can run on PoW indefinitely and will likely do so for several more years until PoS is fully ready. There are a few asic's for ETH, but the hash algo is fundamentally executed through memory. Even if you build an asic for ETH, you are always tied to the speed of memory. Therefore, a GPU is going to be the most ROI efficient mechanism for a long time (asics cost more to build than a commodity GPU) and even more so, older GPUs work just as well from a ROI perspective because newer GPUs are more expensive. This means ETH does not see the same hashrate growth (and energy usage) as BTC, while maintaining the same level of security. The vast majority of energy usage for blockchains, is green energy hydropower using excess power from facilities that already exist. Why? Because this is the lowest cost and prior to this current bull run, was the only way to be profitable.
  - addaon 6y ago
    > asics cost more to build than a commodity GPU Why would this be true? The R&D costs of a commodity GPU can be amortized across more customers than an ASIC, and the same is somewhat true for capital costs (masks, etc) -- but the manufacturing cost of an ASIC should be at worst the same as a GPU (with one fewer middleman adding a margin on top of those costs), and in general cheaper (since die size can be reduced, or an older process can be used).
    - latchkey 6y ago
      Technically, a GPU is an ASIC. It really boils down to economy of scale. AMD can produce chips (and solutions) at much more scale (and thus far less expensive) than relatively small Innosilicon can. AMD has closer relationships to the fabs. It also is other factors that go into this. Like the critical memory controller component. AMD owns the patents. AMD can also buy memory chips in larger bulk (and thus less expensive). Also, the R&D on GPU's is an already amortized cost. They already exist. ASICs have to be engineered from the ground up and do what GPU's already do. At the end of the day, this is also beneficial because GPU's can be repurposed, while sha256 ASICs are just e-waste every time a new round of smaller nm tech comes out.
  - echelon 6y ago
    Is Ethereum going to be worth more than Bitcoin (market cap) when people realize how technologically superior it is?
    - latchkey 6y ago
      If I could predict the future, I'd be rich already! =)
      - echelon 6y ago
        True, but sometimes a preponderance of smart opinions helps predict the shape of the future. (Or where I want to put my money :P)
        latchkey 6y ago
        Strong opinion warning then. I see a place for both BTC and ETH. BTC is digital gold (yes, I know HN hates that, but short of a better set of words, it is what it is.) The thing that, in my opinion, disconnects ETH from BTC is CeFi/DeFi. It really is the programmable money... but not money in the context of a currency every day people spend. I'm talking about money in the context of "institutional money". Like the trading desks in Wall Street. Where money goes to use in making more money. All those crazy algo's that people use to pool funds and hedge and trade are getting created out in the open now and solidified (see the pun?) in code. That is where ETH shines. The amount of development and innovation happening there, at 'move fast and break things' speed is literally amazing. Heavy emphasis on 'break' because these things are getting hacked almost daily. But just like crypto exchanges (which used to get hacked daily), it'll settle down eventually. Interestingly, as soon as I could (Nov 6th), I bought $100 each of BTC and ETH on paypal within minutes of each other. A little experiment. Today, the ETH is worth 5.5% more and both are up a combined 32%. I don't think people are paying close enough attention to this difference because they are blinded by the 32%.
paulgb 6y ago
There can’t be progress as long as it uses proof-of-work, and it would take a fork to change that so it almost certainly won’t happen. Any improvements to the efficiency of proof of work will be countered by a difficulty adjustment, by design.
xiphias2 6y ago
BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output, its depends on energy creation though (just like any other form of money). The Paris agreement was a big step moving humanity towards sustainable energy. US made progress in voting for a politician who promised to join the Paris agreement again. We'll see whether it will really happen.
- zpeti 6y ago
  The Paris agreement was not enforceable, and the US is one of the countries that has actually done most to reduce carbon output. But hey, at least the rest of world leaders are virtue signaling about their greenness, that’ll help the planet!
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    US leadership was actively pushing for rolling back energy standards (that California was fighting for quite strongly). US has achieved a lot (especially Tesla) _despite_ the leadership working against it for a long time.
    - j0ba 6y ago
      True. Unfortunately many still think a centrally planned system of picking winners and losers is superior to the free market, but luckily the past 4 years was enough to send capable entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk into the stratosphere (and beyond).
      - leogiertz 6y ago
        I don’t know, we all owe Germany quite a bit for their solar subsidies.
- haram_masala 6y ago
  > BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output I’m not sure I follow this (admittedly I don’t know much about how BTC actually works). Doesn’t mining also serve the purpose of verifying transactions?
zpeti 6y ago
Ah HN, where the utopian cyberpunk dreaming of a decentralized uncontrollable currency meets the utopian environmentalist to whom any cause is evil that uses carbon.
aresant 6y ago
Lightning and similar are making steady progress which would reduce the carbon footprint somewhat I'm more interested in the variety of "energy recovery" startups out there - eg https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ - that are harvesting wasted energy to mine cryptocurrencies
- paulgb 6y ago
  > Lightning and similar are making steady progress which would reduce the carbon footprint They might bring down transaction fees, but most of the money in mining is from block rewards, which depends on the market price of Bitcoin rather than transaction volume.
  - zadler 6y ago
    At the moment this is true, however it is conceivable that tx fees could pay for the network in the future. At current prices, each tx would cost about 50 dollars to produce 125,000 dollars each block, as the block reward does today. This is not unreasonable if the market cap of Bitcoin continues to increase and it is used as a settlement layer with smaller transactions taking place on second layers like lightning or Ethereum.
ttul 6y ago
My understanding is that a great deal of Bitcoin mining takes place in corrupt jurisdictions where power can be obtained for free from power producers that have been captured through bribes and other forms of revenue sharing with officials. That power is not necessarily carbon free. It seems to me that the nature of Bitcoin as a pseudonymous currency actually facilitates and encourages illicit power stealing arrangements like this. In other words, it’s pretty easy for me to just send you some of my freshly minted BTC from the mining farm your company is powering, and nobody is likely to ever find out. Unless corruption can be rooted out (highly unlikely), there will be no incentive for Bitcoin mining energy to come from legitimate sources, never mind clean sources.
- thrower23423423 6y ago
  Hmm. I'm surprised BTC isn't mined in India - a country with an extremely high power leakage, and provides free electricity for 'farmers'.
  - ChainOfFools 6y ago
    There has to be a goldilocks zone where high power theft and corruption is balanced with reasonable physical security and guarantee of stable power delivery, or your miners will short out the entire town supply, if they aren't simply stolen first. Also thy need cooling and are very noisy, attracting attention.
    - ttul 6y ago
      For example, the country of Georgia: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/how-the-tiny-nation-of-georgia-became-a-bitcoin-behemoth https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/...
- analog31 6y ago
  Does this represent Bitcoin serving as a tool of government monetary policy, like the dollar, but a different government? Could those governments pull the plug on bitcoin?
modeless 6y ago
> Has any progress been made The carbon footprint is funded by the block reward which is halved every 4 years until it dwindles to nothing. Progress is slow, but inexorable.
- fidelramos 6y ago
  Not just the block reward, Bitcoin miners also receive the sum of the fees of the transactions included on each block. The idea with the progressively diminishing block reward is that transaction fees will represent a larger share of miners profits as time passes.
  - modeless 6y ago
    The block reward dominates by far. Transaction fees are paid directly by users. They will not pay more than the actual value they derive from the use of the network.
Bobblebobble 6y ago
The carbon footprint is estimated to be 37Mt CO2 per year, similar to New Zealand, and BTC represents close to half of the current global data centre electricity use. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
- webinvest 6y ago
  Are you implying that if they only bombed New Zealand, they would sufficiently offset all of Bitcoin’s current energy usage? Are there countries are worth bombing for the carbon credits?
sorenjan 6y ago
I don't know what the carbon footprint is, but Cambridge University estimates the annualised consumption at the moment to be 87.02 TWh. https://cbeci.org/ https://cbeci.org/
kpaystaxes 6y ago
Bitcoin can actually be used to aid growth in rewewables and mitigate carbon emissions. A couple examples: (1) "bitcoin batteries" which can be a reliable consumer of renewable energy during otherwise low-demand periods and (2) replacing natural gas flaring with bitcoin mines. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/layer1-launches-bitcoin-batteries-to-stabilize-energy-grids-by-releasing-electricity-to-meet-market-demand-301063984.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/layer1-launches-bit... https://www.crusoeenergy.com/news-and-media/2020/1/10/denver-business-journal https://www.crusoeenergy.com/news-and-media/2020/1/10/denver...
SI_Rob 6y ago
The entire point of Bitcoin is that you irreversibly give up something you value in exchange for creating a Bitcoin in return. The Bitcoin now stands for that lost value, and there is now a corresponding psychological motive to replace the valuable thing that was lost (electricity, and all that goes with it including environmental impact) by mentally investing that loss in the Bitcoin token. So you protect it, you support the network that it exists within, you talk it up to your social circle, you do everything you can to make it as valuable to others as it is to you. All of these activities also take time and resources, aggravating the impact of the original loss commitment. You do this because someday you want to give it to someone else, whom you've convinced of its worth, in order for them give you back the value you lost by creating it. There is no "environmental mitigation" for Bitcoin's energy use, this behavior (or a permutation of it in term of other forms of irreversibly burned value, like time* ) is an essential property of cryptocurrency, without which it would cease to exist. Disclaimer I hold Bitcoin, not because I think it is a new form of money or "decentralized" in any way that matters (quite the opposite in fact), but because it is possibly the most clever and subtle ruse to access the gambling instinct in a demographic whose constituents commonly believe themselves to be "above" playing the lottery or falling for Ponzi schemes. Yes, the irony is not lost on me. Still, this is a huge untapped market. * also a bit of a dodge as IIRC POS still requires keeping a machine running even if it's not dedicating all cycles to the staking algo. Anything that "recovers value" from the process of "burning value" defeats the entire purpose of burning value to create psychological motivation to mentally allocate it to the token it replaces. Which, incidentally, is why you won't see much growth from cryptos that try to do something "useful" (like fold proteins) while also standing as a counter for burned value. If running the algo is more useful for A, because A is in a position to monetize the work outside the currency being created, than it is for B, who can't use the data or results from the work algo, why would B prefer to support that crypto over another whose work algo is equally useless for all?
- jariel 6y ago
  "There is no "environmental mitigation" for Bitcoin's energy use, this behavior ... is an essential property of cryptocurrency, without which it would cease to exist." This is based on the false premise that energy, or anything else needs to be given up in exchange for crypto, or any other form of currency. We could create a zillion cryptos out of thin air and just hand them out. That's one way to do it. Central banks do it another way. The 'energy' thing is just nonsense, it's just something that happens to be baked into this specific form of BTC generation.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rojeee 6y ago
Indeed, I'm surprised that large corporations are buying in at this point. I wonder what their corporate social responsibility departments think about it...?
yrral 6y ago
Back in the days where all our electricity came from fossil fuels, I completely agree that marginal electricity usage was bad for the environment. However I think that thought has persisted with us even though it is no longer true 100% of the time. With renewables sometimes the marginal cost of electricity to our environment is near 0 or even negative (eg, during periods of higher winds and lower demand.) I predict that in the future as bitcoin mining becomes more and more of an efficiency game that you will see bitcoin mining be kind of a load balancer the grid, effectively turning off during peak demand (or low supply) times and contributing to the base load during regular times. For example, it may even help the economics of building new wind plants. Eg, currently it may not be profitable to build a new wind plant because base load is too low that the excess power generated would need to be sold off at 0 or even negative prices. However if bitcoin mining could be turned on during these times and off during periods of high demand, there will need to be fewer peaker plants in operation and it would positively affect the economics of opening a new wind plant. Bitcoin mining only cares about the cost of electricity at a given time, it is not like most other electricity demands that are very time based. With the large variance of electricity generation by renewables, I think bitcoin can in the future help smooth demand according to the real supply/demand curve. It's kind of like a different implementation of the Tesla utility grid batteries. Instead of deploying power, you force the grid to build more renewable capacity (that the miners are paying for) that you use except in peak periods, where you turn off and effectively provide the grid with more power.
dontTango 6y ago
I'm considering getting a mining rig to heat my house as an alternative to gas.
varajelle 6y ago
Every day, about 900 bitcoins are mined. So computing power for about 900*20k = $1.8m per day is "wasted". The more the price of bitcoin, the more energy is going to be used. Every 4 years, the amount of bitcoin created per day is divided by 2.
shakezula 6y ago
ETH2 is moving towards Proof of Stake and that should be a major step forward in reducing the energy consumption without making any major security trade offs.

robert_foss 6y ago

Yes, but not with Bitcoin. Etherium is currently moving from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/

bfgoodrich 6y ago
Hasn't Ethereum been moving to proof-of-stake for years now? It seems like something that is never going to actually happen, but is always held as redeeming.
latchkey 6y ago
Ethereum [sic] is moving to PoS from PoW, but ETH doesn't suffer the same growth issue that BTC does because its hash algo is effectively tied to its hardware. It can run on PoW indefinitely and will likely do so for several more years until PoS is fully ready. There are a few asic's for ETH, but the hash algo is fundamentally executed through memory. Even if you build an asic for ETH, you are always tied to the speed of memory. Therefore, a GPU is going to be the most ROI efficient mechanism for a long time (asics cost more to build than a commodity GPU) and even more so, older GPUs work just as well from a ROI perspective because newer GPUs are more expensive. This means ETH does not see the same hashrate growth (and energy usage) as BTC, while maintaining the same level of security. The vast majority of energy usage for blockchains, is green energy hydropower using excess power from facilities that already exist. Why? Because this is the lowest cost and prior to this current bull run, was the only way to be profitable.
- addaon 6y ago
  > asics cost more to build than a commodity GPU Why would this be true? The R&D costs of a commodity GPU can be amortized across more customers than an ASIC, and the same is somewhat true for capital costs (masks, etc) -- but the manufacturing cost of an ASIC should be at worst the same as a GPU (with one fewer middleman adding a margin on top of those costs), and in general cheaper (since die size can be reduced, or an older process can be used).
  - latchkey 6y ago
    Technically, a GPU is an ASIC. It really boils down to economy of scale. AMD can produce chips (and solutions) at much more scale (and thus far less expensive) than relatively small Innosilicon can. AMD has closer relationships to the fabs. It also is other factors that go into this. Like the critical memory controller component. AMD owns the patents. AMD can also buy memory chips in larger bulk (and thus less expensive). Also, the R&D on GPU's is an already amortized cost. They already exist. ASICs have to be engineered from the ground up and do what GPU's already do. At the end of the day, this is also beneficial because GPU's can be repurposed, while sha256 ASICs are just e-waste every time a new round of smaller nm tech comes out.
- echelon 6y ago
  Is Ethereum going to be worth more than Bitcoin (market cap) when people realize how technologically superior it is?
  - latchkey 6y ago
    If I could predict the future, I'd be rich already! =)
    - echelon 6y ago
      True, but sometimes a preponderance of smart opinions helps predict the shape of the future. (Or where I want to put my money :P)
      - latchkey 6y ago
        Strong opinion warning then. I see a place for both BTC and ETH. BTC is digital gold (yes, I know HN hates that, but short of a better set of words, it is what it is.) The thing that, in my opinion, disconnects ETH from BTC is CeFi/DeFi. It really is the programmable money... but not money in the context of a currency every day people spend. I'm talking about money in the context of "institutional money". Like the trading desks in Wall Street. Where money goes to use in making more money. All those crazy algo's that people use to pool funds and hedge and trade are getting created out in the open now and solidified (see the pun?) in code. That is where ETH shines. The amount of development and innovation happening there, at 'move fast and break things' speed is literally amazing. Heavy emphasis on 'break' because these things are getting hacked almost daily. But just like crypto exchanges (which used to get hacked daily), it'll settle down eventually. Interestingly, as soon as I could (Nov 6th), I bought $100 each of BTC and ETH on paypal within minutes of each other. A little experiment. Today, the ETH is worth 5.5% more and both are up a combined 32%. I don't think people are paying close enough attention to this difference because they are blinded by the 32%.

paulgb 6y ago

There can’t be progress as long as it uses proof-of-work, and it would take a fork to change that so it almost certainly won’t happen. Any improvements to the efficiency of proof of work will be countered by a difficulty adjustment, by design.

xiphias2 6y ago

BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output, its depends on energy creation though (just like any other form of money). The Paris agreement was a big step moving humanity towards sustainable energy. US made progress in voting for a politician who promised to join the Paris agreement again. We'll see whether it will really happen.

zpeti 6y ago
The Paris agreement was not enforceable, and the US is one of the countries that has actually done most to reduce carbon output. But hey, at least the rest of world leaders are virtue signaling about their greenness, that’ll help the planet!
- xiphias2 6y ago
  US leadership was actively pushing for rolling back energy standards (that California was fighting for quite strongly). US has achieved a lot (especially Tesla) _despite_ the leadership working against it for a long time.
  - j0ba 6y ago
    True. Unfortunately many still think a centrally planned system of picking winners and losers is superior to the free market, but luckily the past 4 years was enough to send capable entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk into the stratosphere (and beyond).
    - leogiertz 6y ago
      I don’t know, we all owe Germany quite a bit for their solar subsidies.
haram_masala 6y ago
> BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output I’m not sure I follow this (admittedly I don’t know much about how BTC actually works). Doesn’t mining also serve the purpose of verifying transactions?

zpeti 6y ago

Ah HN, where the utopian cyberpunk dreaming of a decentralized uncontrollable currency meets the utopian environmentalist to whom any cause is evil that uses carbon.

aresant 6y ago

Lightning and similar are making steady progress which would reduce the carbon footprint somewhat I'm more interested in the variety of "energy recovery" startups out there - eg https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ - that are harvesting wasted energy to mine cryptocurrencies

paulgb 6y ago
> Lightning and similar are making steady progress which would reduce the carbon footprint They might bring down transaction fees, but most of the money in mining is from block rewards, which depends on the market price of Bitcoin rather than transaction volume.
- zadler 6y ago
  At the moment this is true, however it is conceivable that tx fees could pay for the network in the future. At current prices, each tx would cost about 50 dollars to produce 125,000 dollars each block, as the block reward does today. This is not unreasonable if the market cap of Bitcoin continues to increase and it is used as a settlement layer with smaller transactions taking place on second layers like lightning or Ethereum.

ttul 6y ago

My understanding is that a great deal of Bitcoin mining takes place in corrupt jurisdictions where power can be obtained for free from power producers that have been captured through bribes and other forms of revenue sharing with officials. That power is not necessarily carbon free. It seems to me that the nature of Bitcoin as a pseudonymous currency actually facilitates and encourages illicit power stealing arrangements like this. In other words, it’s pretty easy for me to just send you some of my freshly minted BTC from the mining farm your company is powering, and nobody is likely to ever find out. Unless corruption can be rooted out (highly unlikely), there will be no incentive for Bitcoin mining energy to come from legitimate sources, never mind clean sources.

thrower23423423 6y ago
Hmm. I'm surprised BTC isn't mined in India - a country with an extremely high power leakage, and provides free electricity for 'farmers'.
- ChainOfFools 6y ago
  There has to be a goldilocks zone where high power theft and corruption is balanced with reasonable physical security and guarantee of stable power delivery, or your miners will short out the entire town supply, if they aren't simply stolen first. Also thy need cooling and are very noisy, attracting attention.
  - ttul 6y ago
    For example, the country of Georgia: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/how-the-tiny-nation-of-georgia-became-a-bitcoin-behemoth https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/...
analog31 6y ago
Does this represent Bitcoin serving as a tool of government monetary policy, like the dollar, but a different government? Could those governments pull the plug on bitcoin?

modeless 6y ago

> Has any progress been made The carbon footprint is funded by the block reward which is halved every 4 years until it dwindles to nothing. Progress is slow, but inexorable.

fidelramos 6y ago
Not just the block reward, Bitcoin miners also receive the sum of the fees of the transactions included on each block. The idea with the progressively diminishing block reward is that transaction fees will represent a larger share of miners profits as time passes.
- modeless 6y ago
  The block reward dominates by far. Transaction fees are paid directly by users. They will not pay more than the actual value they derive from the use of the network.

Bobblebobble 6y ago

The carbon footprint is estimated to be 37Mt CO2 per year, similar to New Zealand, and BTC represents close to half of the current global data centre electricity use. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

webinvest 6y ago
Are you implying that if they only bombed New Zealand, they would sufficiently offset all of Bitcoin’s current energy usage? Are there countries are worth bombing for the carbon credits?

sorenjan 6y ago

I don't know what the carbon footprint is, but Cambridge University estimates the annualised consumption at the moment to be 87.02 TWh. https://cbeci.org/ https://cbeci.org/

kpaystaxes 6y ago

Bitcoin can actually be used to aid growth in rewewables and mitigate carbon emissions. A couple examples: (1) "bitcoin batteries" which can be a reliable consumer of renewable energy during otherwise low-demand periods and (2) replacing natural gas flaring with bitcoin mines. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/layer1-launches-bitcoin-batteries-to-stabilize-energy-grids-by-releasing-electricity-to-meet-market-demand-301063984.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/layer1-launches-bit... https://www.crusoeenergy.com/news-and-media/2020/1/10/denver-business-journal https://www.crusoeenergy.com/news-and-media/2020/1/10/denver...

SI_Rob 6y ago

The entire point of Bitcoin is that you irreversibly give up something you value in exchange for creating a Bitcoin in return. The Bitcoin now stands for that lost value, and there is now a corresponding psychological motive to replace the valuable thing that was lost (electricity, and all that goes with it including environmental impact) by mentally investing that loss in the Bitcoin token. So you protect it, you support the network that it exists within, you talk it up to your social circle, you do everything you can to make it as valuable to others as it is to you. All of these activities also take time and resources, aggravating the impact of the original loss commitment. You do this because someday you want to give it to someone else, whom you've convinced of its worth, in order for them give you back the value you lost by creating it. There is no "environmental mitigation" for Bitcoin's energy use, this behavior (or a permutation of it in term of other forms of irreversibly burned value, like time* ) is an essential property of cryptocurrency, without which it would cease to exist. Disclaimer I hold Bitcoin, not because I think it is a new form of money or "decentralized" in any way that matters (quite the opposite in fact), but because it is possibly the most clever and subtle ruse to access the gambling instinct in a demographic whose constituents commonly believe themselves to be "above" playing the lottery or falling for Ponzi schemes. Yes, the irony is not lost on me. Still, this is a huge untapped market. * also a bit of a dodge as IIRC POS still requires keeping a machine running even if it's not dedicating all cycles to the staking algo. Anything that "recovers value" from the process of "burning value" defeats the entire purpose of burning value to create psychological motivation to mentally allocate it to the token it replaces. Which, incidentally, is why you won't see much growth from cryptos that try to do something "useful" (like fold proteins) while also standing as a counter for burned value. If running the algo is more useful for A, because A is in a position to monetize the work outside the currency being created, than it is for B, who can't use the data or results from the work algo, why would B prefer to support that crypto over another whose work algo is equally useless for all?

jariel 6y ago
"There is no "environmental mitigation" for Bitcoin's energy use, this behavior ... is an essential property of cryptocurrency, without which it would cease to exist." This is based on the false premise that energy, or anything else needs to be given up in exchange for crypto, or any other form of currency. We could create a zillion cryptos out of thin air and just hand them out. That's one way to do it. Central banks do it another way. The 'energy' thing is just nonsense, it's just something that happens to be baked into this specific form of BTC generation.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rojeee 6y ago

Indeed, I'm surprised that large corporations are buying in at this point. I wonder what their corporate social responsibility departments think about it...?

yrral 6y ago

Back in the days where all our electricity came from fossil fuels, I completely agree that marginal electricity usage was bad for the environment. However I think that thought has persisted with us even though it is no longer true 100% of the time. With renewables sometimes the marginal cost of electricity to our environment is near 0 or even negative (eg, during periods of higher winds and lower demand.) I predict that in the future as bitcoin mining becomes more and more of an efficiency game that you will see bitcoin mining be kind of a load balancer the grid, effectively turning off during peak demand (or low supply) times and contributing to the base load during regular times. For example, it may even help the economics of building new wind plants. Eg, currently it may not be profitable to build a new wind plant because base load is too low that the excess power generated would need to be sold off at 0 or even negative prices. However if bitcoin mining could be turned on during these times and off during periods of high demand, there will need to be fewer peaker plants in operation and it would positively affect the economics of opening a new wind plant. Bitcoin mining only cares about the cost of electricity at a given time, it is not like most other electricity demands that are very time based. With the large variance of electricity generation by renewables, I think bitcoin can in the future help smooth demand according to the real supply/demand curve. It's kind of like a different implementation of the Tesla utility grid batteries. Instead of deploying power, you force the grid to build more renewable capacity (that the miners are paying for) that you use except in peak periods, where you turn off and effectively provide the grid with more power.

dontTango 6y ago

I'm considering getting a mining rig to heat my house as an alternative to gas.

varajelle 6y ago

Every day, about 900 bitcoins are mined. So computing power for about 900*20k = $1.8m per day is "wasted". The more the price of bitcoin, the more energy is going to be used. Every 4 years, the amount of bitcoin created per day is divided by 2.

shakezula 6y ago

ETH2 is moving towards Proof of Stake and that should be a major step forward in reducing the energy consumption without making any major security trade offs.