7 ms·

The Environmental Cost of Bitcoin

86 points by merlinscholz 6y ago

Hamuko 6y ago
>The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several million US households. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (https://cbeci.org/ https://cbeci.org/), it actually wastes about 115 TWh annually now. They even have a comparison page where you can see that the network sits between United Arab Emirates (113 TWh) and Argentina (121 TWh) in annual energy use.
- api 6y ago
  This has to now far exceed China’s ghost cities and Dubai’s doomed megaprojects as the greatest waste of resources in recent history, though it still has a way to go to match the US/USSR arms race. That one would be tough to beat, though you could argue that it’s waste is offset a bit by the technological spinoff it generated. Meanwhile space exploration and life extension struggle to attract funding. Humans are merely clever, not intelligent. If we were actually intelligent we would understand the systems in which we embed ourselves instead of being at the mercy of them.
  - Closi 6y ago
    It shows that it’s bad when we are even trying to compare it to the Cold War, and the conclusion is that at least the Cold War had some positives!
    - api 6y ago
      To be fair cryptocurrency has subsidized a fair bit of interesting cryptography research, but holy crap could that have been done so much more cheaply by just paying some universities to staff up with cryptographers and giving them some challenges. You could probably have founded and fully endowed dozens of top tier universities for what we have wasted on this. Another good thing to look at for perspective: how many startups could we have seeded and venture funded for the money literally burned by cryptocurrency? Cancer. Pure cancer.
      - DonHopkins 6y ago
        All that coal burnt to mine Bitcoin literally causes cancer, birth defects, neurological issues, pollution, and global warming, not to mention widespread cult-like stupidity, fraudulent shilling, shady business practices, irresponsible gambling, and other personally and environmentally self-destructive behavior.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I'd like to see the estimates in the coming months. Lots of people report exchanges having less and less bitcoins, allegedly due to people storing their wealth and not being interested by transactions anymore. I may be naive but it could mean the network will become underutilized for a little whiel.
  - whomst 6y ago
    The amount of power the Bitcoin network uses is proportional to the number of miners, independent of the number of transactions. it is designed to have one block per ten minutes and adjusts the "difficulty" to match. As long as the price of Bitcoin keeps going up, I can't imagine mining will become less popular.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    The average transaction costs around $16 USD. I'm not sure what you mean by the network becoming underutilized but bitcoin's tiny transaction throughput is in high demand. Also what do you mean by "exchanges having less and less bitcoin" and what are you basing that on? Most people unfortunately don't transfer what they have out of exchanges in the first place, even less so with transaction costs being enormous.
    - nightski 6y ago
      What type of transaction? Are you taking $16 in fees? Or do you mean energy cost for mining that transaction into a block? Fees are definitely not that high. On Gemini for example I can buy $100 of bitcoin for $0.15 (as a one off example for a USD->BTC transaction).
      - jsf01 6y ago
        The average transaction fee refers to the cost in btc to make a transfer. That amount is then converted to usd to make it easier to comprehend. Such fees go up during periods of high strain on the network and as people choose to pay more to get their transactions through quickly. https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  "Wastes" I don't think you are using that word correctly. Would you say that all the electricity used by Chase bank is "wasted". What an absolutely nonsensical use if the word. Bitcoin USES electricity to secure financial transactions. Just because YOU think those particular financial transactions are being over valued does not mean resources were wasted to make them. Really, lol!
- mcbuilder 6y ago
  When I actually held bitcoins back in 2012 I always made the comparison to the amount of energy needed to transport physical bills in armored cars, hire security guards, build giant vaults, printing presses, etc. Back then it seemed a reasonable comparison to make, but then the actual power consumption numbers seem very small back then by comparison. I also remember Satoshi saying in the white paper that people in temperate climates might would be the miners because the excess heat could be used to heat homes in the winter. Again I don't see the sort of environmental responsibility currently.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    I somehow don't see myself buying a $4000 ASIC to mine Bitcoin in my home and paying like 280€ per month in electricity for it even though it was -20°C Friday.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > When I actually held bitcoins back in 2012 I always made the comparison to the amount of energy needed to transport physical bills in armored cars, hire security guards, build giant vaults, printing presses, etc. Back then it seemed a reasonable comparison to make When I saw such comparisons, I always countered with two points: - One, energy expenditure on Bitcoin network grows superlinearly; - Two, all the expenditure for trucks, vaults, presses, etc. and management for it is considered upkeep. It takes money from the pockets of people who would prefer to keep it. So these costs are ruthlessly optimized down to minimum. If printing or transporting bills could be made free, financial institutions would jump at it. Meanwhile, in Bitcoin, burning energy is a core part of securing the network, and it's being periodically adjusted towards more waste. If mining could be made free, the network would collapse. These points paint a quite different trajectory over time for Bitcoin's energy use vs. fiat energy use. And it seems to pan out.
  - DemocracyFTW 6y ago
    > I don't see the sort of environmental responsibility curren<strike>tly</strike>cy fixed that for ya. The good thing about heating your home in the winter with excess thermal energy caused by cryptomining is that in summer you can either stuff all that heat into bags and save it for winter, sell it in town to people who have a sauna at home, or send it to the opposite hemisphere where people are freezing. /s
DonHopkins 6y ago
Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal to the rest of the world via the atmosphere.
Ceezy 6y ago
My biggest concern is that there is still NO useful bitcoin app existing today. Every bitcoin is about helping you dealing with bitcoin...
- spurdoman77 6y ago
  What is a bitcoin "app"? For me it is useful enough that I can buy fancy designer drugs online with it.
- ASpaceCowboi 6y ago
  Can you elaborate more on what would be a useful app in terms of Bitcoin? Or do you mean like an educational tool helping teach how/why/what is bitcoin/blockchain?
  - booleandilemma 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application
- kingo55 6y ago
  Is digital gold not enough as an application?
brighton36 6y ago
Bitcoin is a thneed. Everyone needs a thneed.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  And Bitcoin mining is wiping out all the Truffula trees, which take ten months to germinate, ten years to sprout, and another ten years to become fully grown.
- DemocracyFTW 6y ago
  You'll be amazed, you'll be nonplussed / It tastes like bread without the crust / Grooms your hair when it gets must / Rids your home of dismal dust / It's a natural, it's a must / Eliminates carburetor rust / Everybody do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do need a Thneed
corty 6y ago
Old news. The far more interesting question is what to do about it. The OP has some suggestions, but I have some more radical ones: - put carbon taxes on BTC/fiat exchanges - outlaw mining - outlaw BTC transactions - put economic pressure on other countries to do the same Basically, there is no benefit to the world that cannot be done with far more energy-efficient means, e.g centralized currency or proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies. Proof of work needs to go, sooner rather than later.
- shawnz 6y ago
  Would proof-of-stake systems ever have been developed if proof-of-work systems didn't come around first to build widespread trust in cryptocurrencies? If not, then you could say that the energy consumed up til now by proof-of-work systems was essential to the development of proof-of-stake systems. I think that OP is strawmanning Bitcoin as it exists today into being the end goal of all cryptocurrency technology when really it's just the very first stepping stone.
  - corty 6y ago
    Coal was burnt to get to our current level of industrialisation. A lot of steel for wind turbines was smelted with coke. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find better ways and get rid of the old polluting methods. And no, I'm not strawmanning to get rid of all cryptocurrencies. I'm naming a concrete problem with a part of them (the older, legacy, proof-of-work ones) that needs to be corrected by changing to better ones. That your investments might suffer is tragic of course. But the same goes for all the coal miners...
    - shawnz 6y ago
      Agreed, I am eager to see the widespread adoption of proof-of-stake technologies to improve the efficiency of cryptocurrencies. The inefficiencies of proof-of-work aren't something to be happy about obviously, except insofar as they enabled cryptocurrency technology that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. And to be clear, I was referring to OP the author of the twitter thread.
- 6y ago
reedf1 6y ago
To put this 78 TWh number into perspective, humanity consumed roughly 160,000 TWh in 2017. That's 0.005% of humanities total energy expenditure in 2017.
- CJefferson 6y ago
  Firstly 0.05% I think. Secondly, if you just compare to electricity output (25,000) you get to 0.3%, which puts it ahead of many countries.
- saddlerustle 6y ago
  78TWh is also about the annual electricity consumption of a couple large aluminum smelters.
ASpaceCowboi 6y ago
I 100% agree on Bitcoin. But for Ethereum transitioning to Eth 2.0, can't that be debatable? Because ETH 2.0, uses a proof of stake, rather than roof of work?
Jugurtha 6y ago
Pigovian tax[0]. Excerpt: >A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (costs not included in the market price). The tax is intended to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome (a market failure), and does so by being set equal to the external marginal cost of the negative externalities. - [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
- 1ark 6y ago
  Thanks! I did not know this term. This is also the only argument that makes sense. Governments don't seem so keen on implementing though, because of many reasons. Airplanes were flying empty in, at least, beginning of Covid because of bureaucracy ffs!
  - Jugurtha 6y ago
    Wouldn't that be offloaded to the sector that is producing the negative externality? If you are mining, you are using electricity. If that electricity is coming from fossil energy, then that tax is already paid. If you are mining in a country that generates its energy with solar power, doesn't the argument of "bitcoin bad" become shaky?
    - 1ark 6y ago
      "Bitcoin bad" is already shaky. If we as a society care about these energy problems we need to start fixing it in the beginning of the supply chain and work our way to the end.
jonstaab 6y ago
I used to worry about this question too. But how much energy has mining gold cost? Was it worth it? Will bitcoin have a similar impact? I imagine the answer is more, yes, and yes.
- phtrivier 6y ago
  At least Gold has industrial usage, beyond the "store of value" and jewelry part ? The premise of the OP is that bitcoin is not worth the cost. I tend to agree, though I can understand the appeal of decentralized currency.
- Quenty 6y ago
  Turns out, about 10x less than Bitcoin, (this article seems to imply 25 million GJ per a year of energy mining/processing gold, and the Twitter thread implies 280 million GJ per a year in Bitcoin. https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-production https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-producti... Except Bitcoin also creates electronic waste, including gold, and, I would argue, is not at the scale that gold is at, as an influencing factor on the economy.
  - jonstaab 6y ago
    Well, over the same time period, but gold has been mined for thousands of years, and for a long time much less efficiently. And bitcoin mining will decelerate as halving occurs, until the last coin is mined in a bit over 100 years' time.
    - tromp 6y ago
      Increasing fees are expected to make up for the repeated halving of block subsidy, as is necessary to maintain network security (and one of the major reasons why Bitcoin constrains block size). Within another 4 halvings, fees should start to dominate.
saddlerustle 6y ago
> A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh That sounds like a lot, but it's about $10 worth of electricity for the miners. Another comparison might be that that's about how much electricity it takes to smelt 4kg of aluminum. I don't think it's meaningful to think in terms of "waste" wrt energy consumption any more than gold mining is "waste". Most of the energy generating capacity would not have been turned on if it wasn't going to be used for mining bitcoin. The only useful framing is in terms of externalities, but it turns out the cheapest forms of energy generation (underutilised hydro and solar in china) tend to be zero carbon. Using energy isn't bad, emitting carbon is bad.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  Still, there are plenty of coins that don’t rely on this “waste”, and even big ones that are moving away from it, such as Etherium. If Bitcoin was a PoS system, the underutilized electricity could be going towards something else, like protein folding.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Mining for gold produces something that can be used in for example electronics. Mining for Bitcoin produces something that can be sold to speculators or be used to pay for drugs and assassinations. And most of that mining (~65%) is in China where 65% of the electricity production is with coal.
  - saddlerustle 6y ago
    The largest mines in china don't use coal, because coal is more expensive than hydro.
  - opinologo 6y ago
    that's ridiculous. You are forgetting (among many) about the impacts of a decentralised currency for the billions of people without access to bank accounts or a stable currency.
dashtiarian 6y ago
Iranian government is mining bitcoin and causing countrywide power shortages. It's also burning mazut in power plants and polluting the environment. Currently 8% of the world's bitcoin are mined in Iran (which has 1% of the world's population and 0.5% of world's GDP). I don't know if it's behalf of China or not yet but this must be stopped.
- saddlerustle 6y ago
  The only reason bitcoin mining happens in Iran is because the price of electricity is artificially low because of government subsidies. It seems to me that country with power shortages shouldn't be subsidising power consumption and then getting mad when people take advantage of it.
  - dashtiarian 6y ago
    Nope. People are not taking advantage of anything. Do you live in Iran? Majority of bitcoin is mined in containers. Civilians do not have access to megawatt power supplies. Civialns also can't import such containers. Electricity may be cheaper but graphic cards and ASICs certainly are not. TDLR; people don't have access to mining equipment or power source required. Rulers do.
atweiden 6y ago
If Bitcoin becomes global reserve currency, governments won't be able to conjure money out of thin air to finance wars of aggression. And — sans inflation — prices of all things will decrease over time in absolute (BTC) terms. This could put a major dent in consumerism, as owning BTC will be seen as preferable to owning any other asset, particularly depreciating assets e.g. consumer goods, housing and cars. The above dynamics could more than offset Bitcoin's carbon footprint. But even if it doesn't, humans are driven by self-interest and every single individual on this planet has the financial incentive not to be left behind. You basically just have no option but to invest in bitcoin. And the longer it takes you to figure this out, the more costly it will be for you.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  That's really funny. Bitcoin - the ultimate in speculative assets, a money transfer system so good it couldn't even power a small country's day-to-day transactions, while wasting the energy of a medium country, industry and all - the solution to consumerism and world peace.
  - atweiden 6y ago
    > the ultimate in speculative assets You could've earned +10% ROI in 2020 by holding AUD instead of USD. Every currency is backed by thin air, including Bitcoin. The average lifespan of govt-issued currency is ~100 years. > a money transfer system so good it couldn't even power a small country's day-to-day transactions You most likely utilize a credit card or bank card for your day-to-day transactions. Nothing would change about this with Bitcoin entering the picture. > the solution to consumerism and world peace I made no mention of "world peace". Just because governments couldn't conjure money out of thin air to finance war machines doesn't mean there will be peace on earth. But taking away the money tree from governments around the globe changes the game completely. It is also true that — sans inflation — absolute prices of goods and services decrease, which disincentivizes consumption.
    - xondono 6y ago
      >You could've earned +10% ROI in 2020 by holding AUD instead of USD. And that would put you under the SP500 and the NASDAQ. Bitcoin in the same span did +286%. > You most likely utilize a credit card or bank card for your day-to-day transactions. Nothing would change about this with Bitcoin entering the picture. What’s the point of Bitcoin then? Because at the level of transactions Bitcoin can handle, we would have a bunch of central bank-like entities trading Bitcoin between themselves and a shit ton of intermediaries. > Just because governments couldn't conjure money out of thin air to finance war machines doesn't mean there will be peace on earth. But taking away the money tree from governments around the globe changes the game completely. That is not in any way a given. With all this intermediaries it’s not that hard to create “money out of thin air” through various schemes and leverage. If you don’t interface with the network directly, your supposed guarantees go out the window, fast. And the global network today can’t possibly handle the daily interactions in any big city.
nmlnn 6y ago
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy. Bitcoin consumes energy waste. The global market for adding bitcoin blocks is as competitive as it is possible to get. No barriers to entry, no one even has to know who or where you are. As such only miners who can secure the cheapest energy survive. Excess hydro capacity in China during rainy season; capturing flared gas from shale oil fields in the US; geothermal in Iceland; any source of stranded or wasted energy.. bitcoin mining will soak it up. Bitcoin mining using fossil fuels is simply not cost competitive. This "#hashes => #GWh => #tonnes CO2", is broken logic full of unsubstantiated assumptions made by bitcoin haters.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Preposterous logic. Any energy used has to be made up with other sources. The idea that all bitcoin miners are public-spirited eco-warriors is pure imagination.
  - kingo55 6y ago
    This may surprise you: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitcoin-mining-is-being-touted-as-a-solution-to-gas-flaring https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitco... Rather than venting greenhouse gases produced from the oil and gas mining process, they use it to mine Bitcoin. Sure this results in some CO2, but that's a lot better than venting straight methane.
  - nmlnn 6y ago
    It's not like excess hydro power in China is stored anywhere. It's literally wasted.. why do you care if people use it to mine bitcoin? How is it cutting in to the energy that other people can use?
- corty 6y ago
  That is full of broken assumptions and excuses. Bitcoin mining drives up the cost of those "waste" energy forms. Excess hydro capacity can be used for electrolysis to hydrogen, hydrogen can also be produced from flared gas. Which can then be used to produce low-carbon-emission steel with hydrogen as a reduction agent. Bitcoin mining makes all that more expensive, less likely and risky, because setting up a few miners is quick and easy. Running a steel mill or electrolysis plant is expensive and longterm. Too risky if bitcoin miners might buy all the cheap intermittent power you planned with.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
londons_explore 6y ago
This analysis assumes miners use a selection of currently available mining rigs. I think we should consider the fact that many of the biggest miners might have access to unreleased mining hardware which performs substantially better in terms of $/watt. If they did, they would make massive profits. If they sold their more efficient mining hardware to the general public, the lost profits would far outweigh the money earned by selling more efficient mining hardware.
stubbornboi 6y ago
is it just me or somebody sold their bitcoin? and needs it *Crashed* immidiately...
rendall 6y ago
A moral conclusion is baked into the formulation of the issue, that Bitcoin "wastes" energy, but it can be applied to almost anything: gold mining "wastes" energy, circulating hard currency "wastes" energy, social media "wastes" energy, any waste at all wastes energy To my mind "Bitcoin is a problem" is a reductionist take on the larger environmental issue of reducing emissions, and it shortcuts the larger philosophical issue of whether and how we decide whether some particular use of energy is wrong or right Perhaps a solution would be to make electricity for bitcoin mining alone more expensive, or by the same token, mandate subsidies for "good" uses, like food and medical production. Or would doing this cause unintended consequences worse than the original "problem" of Bitcoin? But to my mind Bitcoin being a "waste" or bad is not yet established just by citing its admittedly massive scale of energy use

86 points by merlinscholz 6y ago

>The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several million US households. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (https://cbeci.org/ https://cbeci.org/), it actually wastes about 115 TWh annually now. They even have a comparison page where you can see that the network sits between United Arab Emirates (113 TWh) and Argentina (121 TWh) in annual energy use.

api 6y ago
This has to now far exceed China’s ghost cities and Dubai’s doomed megaprojects as the greatest waste of resources in recent history, though it still has a way to go to match the US/USSR arms race. That one would be tough to beat, though you could argue that it’s waste is offset a bit by the technological spinoff it generated. Meanwhile space exploration and life extension struggle to attract funding. Humans are merely clever, not intelligent. If we were actually intelligent we would understand the systems in which we embed ourselves instead of being at the mercy of them.
- Closi 6y ago
  It shows that it’s bad when we are even trying to compare it to the Cold War, and the conclusion is that at least the Cold War had some positives!
  - api 6y ago
    To be fair cryptocurrency has subsidized a fair bit of interesting cryptography research, but holy crap could that have been done so much more cheaply by just paying some universities to staff up with cryptographers and giving them some challenges. You could probably have founded and fully endowed dozens of top tier universities for what we have wasted on this. Another good thing to look at for perspective: how many startups could we have seeded and venture funded for the money literally burned by cryptocurrency? Cancer. Pure cancer.
    - DonHopkins 6y ago
      All that coal burnt to mine Bitcoin literally causes cancer, birth defects, neurological issues, pollution, and global warming, not to mention widespread cult-like stupidity, fraudulent shilling, shady business practices, irresponsible gambling, and other personally and environmentally self-destructive behavior.
agumonkey 6y ago
I'd like to see the estimates in the coming months. Lots of people report exchanges having less and less bitcoins, allegedly due to people storing their wealth and not being interested by transactions anymore. I may be naive but it could mean the network will become underutilized for a little whiel.
- whomst 6y ago
  The amount of power the Bitcoin network uses is proportional to the number of miners, independent of the number of transactions. it is designed to have one block per ten minutes and adjusts the "difficulty" to match. As long as the price of Bitcoin keeps going up, I can't imagine mining will become less popular.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  The average transaction costs around $16 USD. I'm not sure what you mean by the network becoming underutilized but bitcoin's tiny transaction throughput is in high demand. Also what do you mean by "exchanges having less and less bitcoin" and what are you basing that on? Most people unfortunately don't transfer what they have out of exchanges in the first place, even less so with transaction costs being enormous.
  - nightski 6y ago
    What type of transaction? Are you taking $16 in fees? Or do you mean energy cost for mining that transaction into a block? Fees are definitely not that high. On Gemini for example I can buy $100 of bitcoin for $0.15 (as a one off example for a USD->BTC transaction).
    - jsf01 6y ago
      The average transaction fee refers to the cost in btc to make a transfer. That amount is then converted to usd to make it easier to comprehend. Such fees go up during periods of high strain on the network and as people choose to pay more to get their transactions through quickly. https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
UShouldBWorking 6y ago
"Wastes" I don't think you are using that word correctly. Would you say that all the electricity used by Chase bank is "wasted". What an absolutely nonsensical use if the word. Bitcoin USES electricity to secure financial transactions. Just because YOU think those particular financial transactions are being over valued does not mean resources were wasted to make them. Really, lol!
mcbuilder 6y ago
When I actually held bitcoins back in 2012 I always made the comparison to the amount of energy needed to transport physical bills in armored cars, hire security guards, build giant vaults, printing presses, etc. Back then it seemed a reasonable comparison to make, but then the actual power consumption numbers seem very small back then by comparison. I also remember Satoshi saying in the white paper that people in temperate climates might would be the miners because the excess heat could be used to heat homes in the winter. Again I don't see the sort of environmental responsibility currently.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  I somehow don't see myself buying a $4000 ASIC to mine Bitcoin in my home and paying like 280€ per month in electricity for it even though it was -20°C Friday.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > When I actually held bitcoins back in 2012 I always made the comparison to the amount of energy needed to transport physical bills in armored cars, hire security guards, build giant vaults, printing presses, etc. Back then it seemed a reasonable comparison to make When I saw such comparisons, I always countered with two points: - One, energy expenditure on Bitcoin network grows superlinearly; - Two, all the expenditure for trucks, vaults, presses, etc. and management for it is considered upkeep. It takes money from the pockets of people who would prefer to keep it. So these costs are ruthlessly optimized down to minimum. If printing or transporting bills could be made free, financial institutions would jump at it. Meanwhile, in Bitcoin, burning energy is a core part of securing the network, and it's being periodically adjusted towards more waste. If mining could be made free, the network would collapse. These points paint a quite different trajectory over time for Bitcoin's energy use vs. fiat energy use. And it seems to pan out.
- DemocracyFTW 6y ago
  > I don't see the sort of environmental responsibility curren<strike>tly</strike>cy fixed that for ya. The good thing about heating your home in the winter with excess thermal energy caused by cryptomining is that in summer you can either stuff all that heat into bags and save it for winter, sell it in town to people who have a sauna at home, or send it to the opposite hemisphere where people are freezing. /s

DonHopkins 6y ago

Bitcoin is China's way of exporting coal to the rest of the world via the atmosphere.

Ceezy 6y ago

My biggest concern is that there is still NO useful bitcoin app existing today. Every bitcoin is about helping you dealing with bitcoin...

spurdoman77 6y ago
What is a bitcoin "app"? For me it is useful enough that I can buy fancy designer drugs online with it.
ASpaceCowboi 6y ago
Can you elaborate more on what would be a useful app in terms of Bitcoin? Or do you mean like an educational tool helping teach how/why/what is bitcoin/blockchain?
- booleandilemma 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application
kingo55 6y ago
Is digital gold not enough as an application?

brighton36 6y ago

Bitcoin is a thneed. Everyone needs a thneed.

DonHopkins 6y ago
And Bitcoin mining is wiping out all the Truffula trees, which take ten months to germinate, ten years to sprout, and another ten years to become fully grown.
DemocracyFTW 6y ago
You'll be amazed, you'll be nonplussed / It tastes like bread without the crust / Grooms your hair when it gets must / Rids your home of dismal dust / It's a natural, it's a must / Eliminates carburetor rust / Everybody do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do need a Thneed

corty 6y ago

Old news. The far more interesting question is what to do about it. The OP has some suggestions, but I have some more radical ones: - put carbon taxes on BTC/fiat exchanges - outlaw mining - outlaw BTC transactions - put economic pressure on other countries to do the same Basically, there is no benefit to the world that cannot be done with far more energy-efficient means, e.g centralized currency or proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies. Proof of work needs to go, sooner rather than later.

shawnz 6y ago
Would proof-of-stake systems ever have been developed if proof-of-work systems didn't come around first to build widespread trust in cryptocurrencies? If not, then you could say that the energy consumed up til now by proof-of-work systems was essential to the development of proof-of-stake systems. I think that OP is strawmanning Bitcoin as it exists today into being the end goal of all cryptocurrency technology when really it's just the very first stepping stone.
- corty 6y ago
  Coal was burnt to get to our current level of industrialisation. A lot of steel for wind turbines was smelted with coke. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find better ways and get rid of the old polluting methods. And no, I'm not strawmanning to get rid of all cryptocurrencies. I'm naming a concrete problem with a part of them (the older, legacy, proof-of-work ones) that needs to be corrected by changing to better ones. That your investments might suffer is tragic of course. But the same goes for all the coal miners...
  - shawnz 6y ago
    Agreed, I am eager to see the widespread adoption of proof-of-stake technologies to improve the efficiency of cryptocurrencies. The inefficiencies of proof-of-work aren't something to be happy about obviously, except insofar as they enabled cryptocurrency technology that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. And to be clear, I was referring to OP the author of the twitter thread.
6y ago

reedf1 6y ago

To put this 78 TWh number into perspective, humanity consumed roughly 160,000 TWh in 2017. That's 0.005% of humanities total energy expenditure in 2017.

CJefferson 6y ago
Firstly 0.05% I think. Secondly, if you just compare to electricity output (25,000) you get to 0.3%, which puts it ahead of many countries.
saddlerustle 6y ago
78TWh is also about the annual electricity consumption of a couple large aluminum smelters.

ASpaceCowboi 6y ago

I 100% agree on Bitcoin. But for Ethereum transitioning to Eth 2.0, can't that be debatable? Because ETH 2.0, uses a proof of stake, rather than roof of work?

Jugurtha 6y ago

Pigovian tax[0]. Excerpt: >A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (costs not included in the market price). The tax is intended to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome (a market failure), and does so by being set equal to the external marginal cost of the negative externalities. - [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

1ark 6y ago
Thanks! I did not know this term. This is also the only argument that makes sense. Governments don't seem so keen on implementing though, because of many reasons. Airplanes were flying empty in, at least, beginning of Covid because of bureaucracy ffs!
- Jugurtha 6y ago
  Wouldn't that be offloaded to the sector that is producing the negative externality? If you are mining, you are using electricity. If that electricity is coming from fossil energy, then that tax is already paid. If you are mining in a country that generates its energy with solar power, doesn't the argument of "bitcoin bad" become shaky?
  - 1ark 6y ago
    "Bitcoin bad" is already shaky. If we as a society care about these energy problems we need to start fixing it in the beginning of the supply chain and work our way to the end.

jonstaab 6y ago

I used to worry about this question too. But how much energy has mining gold cost? Was it worth it? Will bitcoin have a similar impact? I imagine the answer is more, yes, and yes.

phtrivier 6y ago
At least Gold has industrial usage, beyond the "store of value" and jewelry part ? The premise of the OP is that bitcoin is not worth the cost. I tend to agree, though I can understand the appeal of decentralized currency.
Quenty 6y ago
Turns out, about 10x less than Bitcoin, (this article seems to imply 25 million GJ per a year of energy mining/processing gold, and the Twitter thread implies 280 million GJ per a year in Bitcoin. https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-production https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-producti... Except Bitcoin also creates electronic waste, including gold, and, I would argue, is not at the scale that gold is at, as an influencing factor on the economy.
- jonstaab 6y ago
  Well, over the same time period, but gold has been mined for thousands of years, and for a long time much less efficiently. And bitcoin mining will decelerate as halving occurs, until the last coin is mined in a bit over 100 years' time.
  - tromp 6y ago
    Increasing fees are expected to make up for the repeated halving of block subsidy, as is necessary to maintain network security (and one of the major reasons why Bitcoin constrains block size). Within another 4 halvings, fees should start to dominate.

saddlerustle 6y ago

> A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh That sounds like a lot, but it's about $10 worth of electricity for the miners. Another comparison might be that that's about how much electricity it takes to smelt 4kg of aluminum. I don't think it's meaningful to think in terms of "waste" wrt energy consumption any more than gold mining is "waste". Most of the energy generating capacity would not have been turned on if it wasn't going to be used for mining bitcoin. The only useful framing is in terms of externalities, but it turns out the cheapest forms of energy generation (underutilised hydro and solar in china) tend to be zero carbon. Using energy isn't bad, emitting carbon is bad.

jtsiskin 6y ago
Still, there are plenty of coins that don’t rely on this “waste”, and even big ones that are moving away from it, such as Etherium. If Bitcoin was a PoS system, the underutilized electricity could be going towards something else, like protein folding.
- deleted 6y ago
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Hamuko 6y ago
Mining for gold produces something that can be used in for example electronics. Mining for Bitcoin produces something that can be sold to speculators or be used to pay for drugs and assassinations. And most of that mining (~65%) is in China where 65% of the electricity production is with coal.
- saddlerustle 6y ago
  The largest mines in china don't use coal, because coal is more expensive than hydro.
- opinologo 6y ago
  that's ridiculous. You are forgetting (among many) about the impacts of a decentralised currency for the billions of people without access to bank accounts or a stable currency.

dashtiarian 6y ago

Iranian government is mining bitcoin and causing countrywide power shortages. It's also burning mazut in power plants and polluting the environment. Currently 8% of the world's bitcoin are mined in Iran (which has 1% of the world's population and 0.5% of world's GDP). I don't know if it's behalf of China or not yet but this must be stopped.

saddlerustle 6y ago
The only reason bitcoin mining happens in Iran is because the price of electricity is artificially low because of government subsidies. It seems to me that country with power shortages shouldn't be subsidising power consumption and then getting mad when people take advantage of it.
- dashtiarian 6y ago
  Nope. People are not taking advantage of anything. Do you live in Iran? Majority of bitcoin is mined in containers. Civilians do not have access to megawatt power supplies. Civialns also can't import such containers. Electricity may be cheaper but graphic cards and ASICs certainly are not. TDLR; people don't have access to mining equipment or power source required. Rulers do.

atweiden 6y ago

If Bitcoin becomes global reserve currency, governments won't be able to conjure money out of thin air to finance wars of aggression. And — sans inflation — prices of all things will decrease over time in absolute (BTC) terms. This could put a major dent in consumerism, as owning BTC will be seen as preferable to owning any other asset, particularly depreciating assets e.g. consumer goods, housing and cars. The above dynamics could more than offset Bitcoin's carbon footprint. But even if it doesn't, humans are driven by self-interest and every single individual on this planet has the financial incentive not to be left behind. You basically just have no option but to invest in bitcoin. And the longer it takes you to figure this out, the more costly it will be for you.

tsimionescu 6y ago
That's really funny. Bitcoin - the ultimate in speculative assets, a money transfer system so good it couldn't even power a small country's day-to-day transactions, while wasting the energy of a medium country, industry and all - the solution to consumerism and world peace.
- atweiden 6y ago
  > the ultimate in speculative assets You could've earned +10% ROI in 2020 by holding AUD instead of USD. Every currency is backed by thin air, including Bitcoin. The average lifespan of govt-issued currency is ~100 years. > a money transfer system so good it couldn't even power a small country's day-to-day transactions You most likely utilize a credit card or bank card for your day-to-day transactions. Nothing would change about this with Bitcoin entering the picture. > the solution to consumerism and world peace I made no mention of "world peace". Just because governments couldn't conjure money out of thin air to finance war machines doesn't mean there will be peace on earth. But taking away the money tree from governments around the globe changes the game completely. It is also true that — sans inflation — absolute prices of goods and services decrease, which disincentivizes consumption.
  - xondono 6y ago
    >You could've earned +10% ROI in 2020 by holding AUD instead of USD. And that would put you under the SP500 and the NASDAQ. Bitcoin in the same span did +286%. > You most likely utilize a credit card or bank card for your day-to-day transactions. Nothing would change about this with Bitcoin entering the picture. What’s the point of Bitcoin then? Because at the level of transactions Bitcoin can handle, we would have a bunch of central bank-like entities trading Bitcoin between themselves and a shit ton of intermediaries. > Just because governments couldn't conjure money out of thin air to finance war machines doesn't mean there will be peace on earth. But taking away the money tree from governments around the globe changes the game completely. That is not in any way a given. With all this intermediaries it’s not that hard to create “money out of thin air” through various schemes and leverage. If you don’t interface with the network directly, your supposed guarantees go out the window, fast. And the global network today can’t possibly handle the daily interactions in any big city.

nmlnn 6y ago

Bitcoin doesn't waste energy. Bitcoin consumes energy waste. The global market for adding bitcoin blocks is as competitive as it is possible to get. No barriers to entry, no one even has to know who or where you are. As such only miners who can secure the cheapest energy survive. Excess hydro capacity in China during rainy season; capturing flared gas from shale oil fields in the US; geothermal in Iceland; any source of stranded or wasted energy.. bitcoin mining will soak it up. Bitcoin mining using fossil fuels is simply not cost competitive. This "#hashes => #GWh => #tonnes CO2", is broken logic full of unsubstantiated assumptions made by bitcoin haters.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Preposterous logic. Any energy used has to be made up with other sources. The idea that all bitcoin miners are public-spirited eco-warriors is pure imagination.
- kingo55 6y ago
  This may surprise you: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitcoin-mining-is-being-touted-as-a-solution-to-gas-flaring https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitco... Rather than venting greenhouse gases produced from the oil and gas mining process, they use it to mine Bitcoin. Sure this results in some CO2, but that's a lot better than venting straight methane.
- nmlnn 6y ago
  It's not like excess hydro power in China is stored anywhere. It's literally wasted.. why do you care if people use it to mine bitcoin? How is it cutting in to the energy that other people can use?
corty 6y ago
That is full of broken assumptions and excuses. Bitcoin mining drives up the cost of those "waste" energy forms. Excess hydro capacity can be used for electrolysis to hydrogen, hydrogen can also be produced from flared gas. Which can then be used to produce low-carbon-emission steel with hydrogen as a reduction agent. Bitcoin mining makes all that more expensive, less likely and risky, because setting up a few miners is quick and easy. Running a steel mill or electrolysis plant is expensive and longterm. Too risky if bitcoin miners might buy all the cheap intermittent power you planned with.

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londons_explore 6y ago

This analysis assumes miners use a selection of currently available mining rigs. I think we should consider the fact that many of the biggest miners might have access to unreleased mining hardware which performs substantially better in terms of $/watt. If they did, they would make massive profits. If they sold their more efficient mining hardware to the general public, the lost profits would far outweigh the money earned by selling more efficient mining hardware.

stubbornboi 6y ago

is it just me or somebody sold their bitcoin? and needs it *Crashed* immidiately...

rendall 6y ago

A moral conclusion is baked into the formulation of the issue, that Bitcoin "wastes" energy, but it can be applied to almost anything: gold mining "wastes" energy, circulating hard currency "wastes" energy, social media "wastes" energy, any waste at all wastes energy To my mind "Bitcoin is a problem" is a reductionist take on the larger environmental issue of reducing emissions, and it shortcuts the larger philosophical issue of whether and how we decide whether some particular use of energy is wrong or right Perhaps a solution would be to make electricity for bitcoin mining alone more expensive, or by the same token, mandate subsidies for "good" uses, like food and medical production. Or would doing this cause unintended consequences worse than the original "problem" of Bitcoin? But to my mind Bitcoin being a "waste" or bad is not yet established just by citing its admittedly massive scale of energy use