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Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C: study from 2018
- pstrateman 6y agoThere's been a number of articles and papers on this topic, but I've yet to see one that attempted to look at the energy mix miners use. It's virtually entirely renewables, hydro, wind, solar. Bitcoin mining is a perfectly elastic operation, one of the only energy consumers that will turn off when rates are high.
- mod 6y ago> The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard
- pstrateman 6y agoThey assert that without making any attempt to analyze the energy mix of the miners. They just assume that they're running on the world average energy mix, which they most definitely are not.
- mod 6y agoIt is my understanding that they are talking about literal, physical waste (perhaps miners that quit working). Not waste of energy.
- afavour 6y agoI’d be interested to see a citation on that. But even still, couldn’t those renewables be used for other applications if Bitcoin isn’t using them? > will turn off when rates are high But doesn’t Bitcoin directly contribute to rates rising? Supply and demand, and all that.
- pstrateman 6y agoI'm the citation, I've done large scale mining. Storage exceeds the value of the energy now and for the foreseeable future. The energy being used is largely not wasted, it's simply excess.
- yardstick 6y agoI didn’t realise miners were that sensitive to electricity pricing. Does this make a 51% attack easier if you can spike power prices in key mining regions? Also is there a good graph somewhere showing BTC online mining capacity over time?
- lern_too_spel 6y agoIt's even easier than that. Since the majority of mining happens in China, the CCP can control the chain by fiat.
- xg15 6y agoI don't think this would really make a difference: Even if miners work only with renewable energy, they waste energy that could be used for other things. I think the unique thing with bitcoin (and what offsets them from other large-scale energy consumers) is that the technology is intentionally spending as much energy as possible - at it's core, bitcoin mining is quite literally a race about who can access the most energy. As such I see the environmental danger in bitcoin in a potential to undo efficiency wins everywhere else: If we make the rest of the economy more energy efficient, then the surplus energy could be used to grow the economy without impacting the climate or might not even need to be produced at all. Now there are incentives to dump this energy into crypto-mining instead.
- ancientworldnow 6y agoActually this ramping up and down when the price is profitable is good for utilities who need to keep power supply and demand in check. When electricity is cheap to produce, they need demand to go up to balance the grid - sort of the opposite of peaker plants when demand outpaces supply. This is partially why a few electrical companies run their own Bitcoin mining farms.
- xg15 6y agoOr they could invest in storage technologies so that the surplus electricity can be given back when there is excess demand instead of simply vanishing.
- pstrateman 6y agoThe storage costs more than the energy does. It's not worth doing except in places where utility rates are artificially inflated to make it worth doing (CA/NY).
- xg15 6y agoIt's not worth doing this for the energy company with market prices. This doesn't mean it wouldn't be useful for society as a whole if done.
- frongpik 6y agoUpvoting so HN could see this nonsense. Such claims must be backed by a peer reviewed paper with authors and data.
- digitallimes 6y agoI concur.
- zepto 6y agoLike all the other claims about bitcoin?
- erulabs 6y agoErm, yes: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=peer+reviewed+papers+on+bitcoin&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=peer+reviewed+papers+on...
- zepto 6y agoThere are some papers about Bitcoin. So what? Almost no claims about Bitcoin made on social media are ever supported by them. Is there a paper that refutes the global warming claim, or shows it to be flawed?
- makeworld 6y agoThe tweet links to a paper published in Nature. What's missing for you?
- nirushiv 6y agoWhy do they consider Square and Paypal dirty companies? Do they support Bitcoin?
- tomComb 6y agoI'm finding Eth2 attractive because of its move to Proof Of Stake which addresses the concern raised in this tweet. I believe that energy usage was one of the motivations for them making that change.
- jtsiskin 6y agoFor sure. It’s the “green” option at this point.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoIt is so shameful for people to characterize resource use as “waste” like this. Not surprised to see more sanctimonious nonsense from Stephen Diehl, the same guy who thinks all us programmers not using functional languages are neanderthals still in “the bloodletting and leeches” era of software engineering. This really is beyond the pale. Stephen sounds like a total crackpot here. How much “waste” does Pixar’s renderfarm generate when creating artistic cinema that people want? How much “waste” does Sony’s Playstation Network generate distributing games people want? How much “waste” does the sum total of plastic surgery create?
- superkuh 6y agoI agree. How much waste do fiat currencies generate protecting their themselves with standing armies (or the alliances with a country that has one)? Far more than the amount of energy used to secure bitcoin currency against other nation states using proof of work.
- wwtrv 6y agoIregardless of what ones opinion on maintaining standing armies might be usually it creates significant added value (unlike mining bitcoin) for the economy. All those people in the military or working in industries producing for the military have to be paid etc.
- eeZah7Ux 6y agoAll traditional currencies are backed by military might and the constant threat of war. If a cryptocurrency could decrease such centralization of power and consequent waste of human lives, money and energy it would be excellent. However, bitcoin has no mechanism to democratize banking - on the contrary, the more wealth you have the more mining you can afford doing. This makes the whole conversation fall into whataboutism.
- wwtrv 6y agoPixar and PSN provide actual value to some people, while mining bitcoin is completely superfluous (not saying that bitcoin itself is necessarily useless but that the same result can be reached without wasting as much energy needlessly)
- Toutouxc 6y ago> TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do. Nope, lost me there. I'm all for having deep discussions about Bitcoin and the environment and the undeniable fact that Bitcoin mining wastes energy, but not with a person that refuses to understand how value works. Things have value if and only if there are people that believe it has value. There is no other principle. No "inherent" value, no guarantees, nothing. Everything is exactly as valuable as the majority of people perceive it to be. Dollars, gold, food, Justin Bieber, freedom, Bitcoin. You may not agree, but then it's still happening, only without you. If you don't sell Bitcoin, you're not the supply and you don't have a say. If you don't buy Bitcoin, you're not the demand and you don't have a say.
- xg15 6y agoYou could say the exact same thing about pyramid schemes.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoGold has a modest industrial usage. Fiat is backed by a government in control of resources or a military. Bitcoin is fiat without anyone to guarantee anything. Considering the impact of mining it may touch everyone we can all make our voices heard. No need to buy or sell to justify expressing oneself.
- bhickey 6y agoBitcoin is useful for funneling money to the DPRK and scamming libertarians.
- eddietejeda 6y agoThere are lots of issues with bitcoin, but the inherent value one is the least interesting. Clearly, some people think there is value. That's it.
- erulabs 6y agoNothing in life is free. While I concur BTC mining is expensive (and I'm a huge fan of movements to Proof-of-Stake (Vitalik is a genius)), I'd love to see a comparison to the movement of gold. Large sums of gold are regularly moved on passenger planes, not to even start on the environmental cost of minting, coining, holding and protecting gold stores. All energy expenditure == global warming, but that doesn't mean no energy should be spent. As one of my favorite humorist/economist/lecturers, Jeffrey A. Tucker, somewhat trolling-ly put it: "Sometimes conserving is not a good idea. There are some life activities that cry out for the expenditure of resources, even in the most generous possible way."
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoIrrelevant equivalencies. What has gold to do with anything? Hard to imagine anything more colossally wasteful than burning precious energy sources for ... imaginary points.
- erulabs 6y agoMy understanding of the world suggests that the value of gold and the value of bitcoin are equally "imaginary". Should humans not spend energy on their imaginations?
- jakelazaroff 6y agoExcept gold is intrinsically useful. You can use it to create physical items that do things. Bitcoin's only value is imaginary.
- ddek 6y agoWell, yes, but that completely misses the point. Bitcoin is currency, and you can reason that all currencies solely have imaginary value. We only value dollar bills because of an intricate system of promises that assures us we can exchange them for things. Bitcoin is no different.
- nmlnn 6y agoBitcoin 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.
- Fellshard 6y agoI think both can be true. Specifically, Bitcoin mining would itself encourage greater energy production; it doesn't merely skim off the excess energy, as you suggest. It generates its own market forces, it's not merely floating above them.
- xg15 6y agoIndeed. This reminds me of the cobra effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- cjbprime 6y agoWhile that's plausible, I'd still agree with the parent comment in general -- it's true that it's not cost-effective to mine using fossil fuels (you would lose money doing it), and this alone requires a different way of talking about the issue.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago> Bitcoin mining would itself encourage greater energy production Bitcoin does not generate energy - it consumes it. And the world does not benefit from any encouragement to produce and consume more energy.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
- Muromec 6y agoSo 72 TWh per year in electricity is between 3 and 5 billions of dollars. Which is a lot, but the question is — should it be compared with electricity bills and environmental footprint of Visa Inc. or with a budget of U.S. military?
- spiorf 6y agoWhy does every article about this talks about the energy per transaction? Energy spent is completely independent from the number of transactions.
- ajkdhcb2 6y agoExactly. This is the key point. All fear-mongering about cryptomining energy usage is based on this completely invalid logic.
- dgellow 6y agoAs a way to make it somehow relatable to readers
- spiorf 6y agoBut it's wrong. It's like making car efficiency relatable by saying that a car can go 180km/h using 5 airbags.
- twiss 6y agoTransactions are what makes Bitcoin useful (in theory) for "normal people". Thus it is fair to evaluate the entire Bitcoin network in terms of how much energy it takes versus (i.e. divided by) how many transactions it handles.
- spiorf 6y agoIt's still wrong a wrong comparison. Bitcoin network's energy is expended for securing the block. It means that to revert a 1 hour-old transaction, an attacker would have to consume double the energy the whole bitcoin network expended in that hour. More energy expended == more security. Number of TX is totally irrelevant.
- wmf 6y agoOn second thought, never mind.
- 6y ago
- rjbwork 6y agoPersonally I'm mining on my new gaming PC right now instead of running my heater when I'm not doing anything intensive. I wonder if decentralizing the hardware into people's homes or putting it in very cold places that need to generate heat during winter would be a way to cut down on some of the excessive waste of energy and thus emissions. EDIT: Some good points down below WRT heat pumps. I have a window unit AC/Heater for just my room so that I don't need to run the whole house's AC/Heater the vast majority of the time. I'm not sure about heat pumps in such a small scale. Would it be more efficient to run a heat pump for a whole house than to mine to heat my one room?
- ognarb 6y agoDo you realize that PC are not as energy efficient as an heater?
- api 6y agoA PC is a resistance heater. Only thing more efficient is a heat pump.
- gubby 6y agoBoth PCs and fan heaters are 100% efficient at producing heat.
- spiorf 6y agoActually, the "inefficiency" of everything is converted to heat. So, a PC is more efficient because it does useful work in the meantime.
- rjbwork 6y agoHow so? I was under the impression that all energy consumed by computers gets turned into waste heat, which is exactly what a heater does.
- gamegoblin 6y agoWhile that's arguably better than simply running an electric radiator, it's far more expensive than natural gas heating or a heat pump.
- jude- 6y agoSince when does Bitcoin have to use greenhouse gas-emitting sources of power?
- ognarb 6y agoSince the time where most of the Bitcoin "farm" are in Mongolia using electricity from coal energy plants.
- nmlnn 6y ago*Citation Needed
- tadzik_ 6y agoNone of the farms analyzed in the article are in Mongolia: https://github.com/Camilo-Mora/Bitcoin/blob/master/Katie_TableS2.csv https://github.com/Camilo-Mora/Bitcoin/blob/master/Katie_Tab...
- Acrobatic_Road 6y agothey are mostly in western chinese provinces like yunnan and sichuan where hydroelectric power is common. Miners in (inner) mongolia are using geothermal.
- tadzik_ 6y agoExactly. Every article about this seems to cut corners when it comes to this very thing. Even in this one, the small print admits that they averaged the amount of CO2 produced by power plants in a given country, skipping over the fact that cryptocurrency farms will gravitate towards cheap energy sources for obvious economic reasons, which makes them much more likely to be using hydropower than coal, for instance.
- viraptor 6y agoIt doesn't matter for a limited supply of energy. If we have hydro power available as well as coal, Bitcoin miners being located near hydro means that they hog that supply. Energy that could supply other uses is now not available and uses which previously relied on coal still rely on coal (because the usage only creeps up).
- johndevor 6y agoHow is work on proof of stake going?
- Tzela 6y agohttps://sci-hub.st/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8 https://sci-hub.st/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8
- spiorf 6y agoThis is completely wrong. They scaled energy with number of transactions. > At each time step, CO2e emissions for the given number of transactions were estimated based on the emissions generated to mine that number of transactions in 2017. Bitcoin network does not work that way. Energy is spent securing the blockchain, not per transaction.
- imtringued 6y agoThe amount of energy wasted depends on how high the block reward and the transaction fees are. The block reward is going down over time and transaction fees are unlikely to grow beyond a practical maximum.
- tromp 6y agoTransaction fees will have to go up to compensate, else Bitcoin will become insecure as its resistance to 51% attacks falls below critical levels. See discussion at [1]. [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5306354.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5306354.0
- Rochus 6y agoYou mean peer reviewers of Nature did a bad job?
- matzab 6y agoThis was a Comment (dated October 2018), not a paper.
- louloulou 6y ago$8.99? How do I read the paper in order to comment on it?
- np_tedious 6y agoEmploying thousands of human beings and computers and offices for processing simple transactions is wasteful too. Both using a bank (with outdated system) and "being your own bank" cost energy
- jayd16 6y agoYou realize those humans are doing other things besides manually calculating electronic transactions, right?
- np_tedious 6y agoYes of course. It's a matter of efficiency. Certainly they aren't doing so optimally. I'm not even trying to make any claims on magnitude. Just saying it's pretty clear if shipping/housing gold changes to bitcoin, if some amount of finance activity changes to Ethereum or some kind of DeFi, then this is not purely additive. It's replacing, and the article doesn't account for this
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- ojagodzinski 6y agoReally? 9USD for single article? Is this the same article as in here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328581842_Bitcoin_emissions_alone_could_push_global_warming_above_2C https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328581842_Bitcoin_e... (free)?
- cherlin 6y agoIf this is the case, we're doomed. The only salvation I can see is if Proof-Of-Work is changed for something else...
- jeanlucas 6y agoIt's from 2018 and has been discussed many many times. Funny how fast it got to the front-page today. Is that what we call FUD? News to try and scare people from a specific company or technology? There's literally no new arguments, just fear mongering.
- hkt 6y agoFear of global warming ending civilization. No biggie though, eh
- spiorf 6y agoIgnore the millions of 1-ton chunks of metal that move 1 person slower than a bike on average. It's the bitcoin network's fault.
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- hkt 6y agoNo disagreement about cars. Bikes and bike infra are cheaper, healthier and less deadly in all senses of the term. Electric bikes are great too. So are three wheelers. But that is whataboutery: bitcoin is still extremely bad.
- TomSwirly 6y agoBoth cars and bitcoin are insanely wasteful. Ever heard of "whataboutism"?
- hkt 6y agoHere in the UK we call it "whataboutery"
- nailk 6y agoHow high banking skyscrapers have pushed global warming? Why should I pay $50 (about 1000 kWh) for a swift transaction?
- ajuc 6y agoBitcoin isn't a replacement for them in practice.
- psychlops 6y agoWe are supposed to assume it's carbon neutral because it's too complex to calculate.
- umanwizard 6y agoIrrelevant because wire transfers are only a tiny fraction of what banks do. Bitcoin is not a replacement for banking; it’s a replacement for physical gold. A banking system would still have to be built on top of it.
- formalsystem 6y agoI find this kind of argument bizarre - if something is valuable to humans they will use energy for it whether it's for transportation, watching the Kardashians or mining Bitcoin. Saying one application of energy is moral and another is amoral neglects that people essentially vote with their time and energy what to consume it on. If an application that uses a lot of energy is very valuable to people than it's a competitive advantage to also service that need with cheap energy. Having sound money is not at odds with the environment.
- noja 6y agoSo your argument is that if people want to do something, they should be allowed to?
- formalsystem 6y agoThe alternative of stack-ranking what constitutes a good or bad use of energy doesn't seem particularly feasible to me. If energy is cheap, abundant and clean you don't need to create such good/bad energy list.
- viraptor 6y agoThat's not the situation we're in though. It may be fairly abundant, but neither cheap nor clean on average. And we're still decades away from closing the most polluting sources.
- arghwhat 6y agoIf it was all abundant wind-power, sure. Denmark, famous for its wind farms and for having too much renewable energy at times, only has 6.1GW of wind capacity, which is is a few gigawatt short for the Bitcoin network. So no, there isn't an abundance of energy when you decide to throw it all away as fast as you can.
- Closi 6y agoBut energy isn’t cheap, abundant or clean? Also because of how the Bitcoin algorithm and economics work, if energy is cheap then the market will scale up mining thus the Bitcoin algorithm will scale up difficulty. Cheap energy results in more energy waste from Bitcoin.
- _Microft 6y ago“Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders”, https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
- brettermeier 6y ago:D good one
- webwielder2 6y agoHow do crypto emissions compare with professional car racing?
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoNot even close. Professional car racing is a vanishingly small contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Even twenty race cars running a 1-hour race doesn't even hold a candle to the average commuter driving their car back and forth to work for a year.
- throwaway_1237 6y agoPeople are just salty they didn’t HODL.
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- agilob 6y agoHow much energy is consumed by AC systems in USA only? How many ACs are in bank branches, supermarkets and all offices? Please somebody compare AC is USA only to all bitcoin miners.
- matzab 6y agoWhy?
- agilob 6y agoBecause every month media are happy to bash on bitcoin energy consumption, but no one wants to talk about working ACs in banks during non-working hours or poor housing insulation like single glass windows or uninsulated bricks. I'm sure these cause more energy waste then Bitcoin mining. I know Bitcoin is wasting it for nothing as there are faster and zero-mining (and zero fees) cryptocurrencies that eliminated that problem, but please someone with enough knowledge estimate energy waste from AC in US banks during non-working hours.
- hkt 6y agoI enjoyed reading this comment almost immediately after reading one above about how people live in places that are too cold and they should move to warmer climates. Ha.
- Tepix 6y agoWhataboutism?
- semitones 6y agoI agree that the large energy expenditure required (along with other mining costs, transaction fees, transaction latencies, etc.) to maintain the Bitcoin network ultimately makes it non-tenable for permanent financial infrastructure . However, I think the article could have made that point without completely discrediting the value Bitcoin provides by calling it a "collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do"... I believe Bitcoin has served its purpose by being a pioneer, w.r.t popularizing an application of an immutable distributed ledger. However, it's not the one we should use. Ethereum's model (proof of stake) allows for most if not all of the uses of Bitcoin, without the non-scalable energy requirements and transaction costs, along with smart contracts, which have many potentially revolutionary applications (voting, public records, etc.). We could have our cake and eat it too..
- Rochus 6y agoNot surprised. There are also a few other popular technologies that eat up a lot of energy unnecessarily, see e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320436353_Energy_efficiency_across_programming_languages_how_do_energy_time_and_memory_relate https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320436353_Energy_ef...
- mudlus 6y agoMoral Panic FUD
- frongpik 6y agoWith their calculations, energy wasted on ads would push that warming by another 2500 C.
- Bran-den 6y agoWow. Is this actually facts?
- rglover 6y agoOne of the many reasons why we need to get over our fear of nuclear power (speaking centric to the U.S.) and focus on safety innovation in that area. It could solve the energy and pollution problems quickly and efficiently, making things like this a non-issue. The whole global warming and climate change problem could be solved (while also stimulating the economy through job creation), but economic and political incentive to not solve the problem thwarts any real progress. If you're curious or skeptical, it's worth considering the arguments of people like Michael Shellenberger[1] and Alex Epstein[2]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19/stop-letting-your-ridiculous-fears-of-nuclear-waste-kill-the-planet/?sh=6655029562e2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19... [2] https://energytalkingpoints.com/energy-q-a/ https://energytalkingpoints.com/energy-q-a/
- jbotz 6y ago> it's worth considering the arguments of people like Michael Shellenberger I'm sympathetic to the argument for nuclear energy as part of the answer to global warming, but... Schellenberger? No, sorry, it's not worth considering his arguments for anything. His arguments go like this... - We don't need to worry about the Amazon burning and being cut down because it's not actually the "lungs of the world" - We don't need to worry about sea-level rise because the Netherlands - Burning wood is much worse than burning petroleum, so let's keep burning petroleum Etc. Schellenberger is an idiot trying to be an iconoclast... and failing miserably because the icons he's tilting at are windmills. Let's leave Schellenberger out of this.
- rglover 6y agoInstead of character attacking him, can you present real arguments backed by data? This line of argumentation is not constructive.
- moultano 6y agoThe guy is a troll. The last nuclear power plant built in the US took 40 years to come fully online and has never made money. Meanwhile solar is going through a moore's law like cost reduction and is cheaper than coal in most places. Geothermal has a much better chance of supplying baseload power than nuclear does at this point.
- CryptoGhost 6y agoLots of Bitcoin critics really struggle with the subjective theory of value (which is also the basis of Marginalism and modern mainstream economics). Nobody believes in stuff like labor or intrinsic values outside of a few marxist holdouts.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoThe obvious solution here is to use resulting heat for heating. Humans live in a lot of places where you need heating to survive anyway. Currently we use 'dumb' heating, where heat is generated without any useful computation. This can be painlessly replaced with 'smart' heating, when heat is a result of mining. Any home appliance like iron or heater can do some useful work (and even earn some spare change while at it).
- The_Colonel 6y agoHeating with electricity is pretty expensive / inefficient. This is going after symptoms instead of trying to tackle the real issue - we should find / use a better solution than PoW (such as PoS) for decentralized currencies.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoIf you are worried about global warming, you don't really have alternatives to heating with electricity. Or you suggest burning some gas, releasing all that CO2 into the atmosphere?
- The_Colonel 6y agoThe alternative is e.g. heat pump - you still use electricity, but get much better efficiency than just simple electric resistance heating.
- eeZah7Ux 6y agoNo. If a millions of electric heaters had a bitcoin miner in them that runs "for free" the difficulty of mining would would skyroket accordingly. The "value" of the mining is based on the sacrifice of something else, in this case energy, unfortunately.
- cjbprime 6y agoThis should have a (2018) in the title. As I understand it, Bitcoin mining rewards are now so low that it's unprofitable to use fossil fuels to mine -- you will pay more for the electricity than you receive through the reward. Hence a lot of people moving their miners to somewhere in the world with unused excess renewable (e.g. hydroelectric) power and setting up there.
- Tepix 6y agoYou may have missed the fact that bitcoin went up in price by a lot recently. Whenever that happens, bitcoin mining usually becomes a lot more attractive for a while.
- spiorf 6y agoFor the casual observer, yes. For a "professional" miner, price swings are irrelevant. The same quantity of bitcoin is mined independently of the price. Bitcoins mined in March are worth the same of bitcoin mined today even if price is 10x now. And in March the same hardware mined more bitcoins than now. Big miners are datacenter sized now, and such things are not built during a bull run.
- Tepix 6y agoUnless the professional miner can pay all her bills with BTC, it is very much relevant.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago> somewhere in the world with unused excess renewable (e.g. hydroelectric) power and setting up there. It's true that miners are relocating to locations where energy can be purchased at lower prices. It's not true that there are large reserves of unused, excess power that would otherwise go to waste if not for these miners putting it to use. Power companies everywhere are experts at sending energy around the interconnected power grid. Miners running profitable operations have zero desire to establish expensive mining operations and only run them in narrow windows of excess energy capacity, such as peak wind and sun days. The narrative that mining is relegated to purely unused, renewable energy capacity is an attempt to whitewash the massive power sink that is cryptocurrency mining.
- codingprograms 6y agoPropaganda
- jesusthatsgreat 6y agoanother crypto hit piece promoted by hackernews
- lawwantsin17 6y agoBitcoin mining doesn't have emissions. Producing energy does. And emission producing energy is on it's way out. So, fuck right off.
- jude- 6y agoSo, pass laws requiring crypto mining to use 100% renewable energy? Sounds like a win-win to me -- no greenhouse gases from crypto mining, and lots of investment opportunities for high-power green tech.
- godmode2019 6y agoSounds better than the ending of the interglacial period we are currently in within a ice age. Let's hope mean revision is not dogma.
- dane-pgp 6y ago> the ending of the interglacial period we are currently in If you're worried about the next ice age, I think we have more pressing matters as a species than an event that isn't due for another 23,000 to 50,000 years.[0] To borrow an analogy, that's a bit like worrying about over-population on Mars 500 years from now, while nuclear weapons are being detonated in enough major cities to annihilate human civilisation in the next 0.5 years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation#Next_glacial_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation#Next_gla...
- tunesmith 6y agoI don't understand why everyone is arguing about whether their CO2 emissions are less than from some other source, when the whole point is we need to be carbon neutral within the next 15 years. Average CO2 emissions per US Citizen as of 2018 is 16.6 tonnes. Go buy your carbon offsets while they're cheap - less than $9/tonne over at cooleffects.org, which is what I used yesterday.
- EndXA 6y agoNote that three articles were published in response to this one (linked as 'Matters Arising' in the top part of the article), and they all appear to criticize the methodology that was used here. The key objections from the first such article [1] are as follows (quoted verbatim, though the article itself obviously contains more details): > First, the use of transactions as the driver of future Bitcoin emissions is questionable, given the tenuous correlation between transactions and mining energy use... > Second, all three Bitcoin adoption scenarios designed by Mora et al. represent sudden and improbable departures from historical trends in Bitcoin transactions... > Third, Mora et al. applied outdated values for mining rig efficiencies and electric power CO2 intensities, which inflated their estimated 2017 Bitcoin energy use and CO2 emissions values considerably. > Fourth, by analytical design, Mora et al. applied 2017 per-transaction energy use and CO2 emissions values in all future years, multiplied by annual transactions... This decision effectively held both mining rig efficiency and grid CO2 intensities constant for the next 100 yr... This unprecedented choice ignores the dynamic nature of mining rig and power grid technologies and violates the widely followed practice of accounting for technological change in forward-looking energy technology scenarios... > Fifth, in constructing their scenarios, Mora et al. committed key errors when analysing adoption rates within their 40-technology comparison pool... [1] 'Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions', available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0535-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0535-4
- bb88 6y agoOne thing that is interesting though is that it seems like BTC mining would increase with the price of BTC. If each BTC is more valuable, it becomes more feasible to use more energy on mining rigs. Am I wrong?
- LatteLazy 6y agoAren't we already well past the co2 needed for a 2C rise? And still accelerating... Edit: yes, even if we cut emissions drastically, the existing 450ppm CO2 level would be enough to get us 2 degrees.
- 458aperta 6y agoI love that bitcoin maximalists have now become the ire of the global warming movement. Quite fitting as it literally is the ponzi scheme of our generation helping criminals launder their money. History will not be kind to those who pushed shitcoins, I personally would never ever hire someone who've been associated with such outfit.
- hirundo 6y agoThe scarcity of bitcoins depends on the scarcity of computational power, and at scale that causes all the problems associated with generating energy. But is that the only viable way to generate scarce tokens? What if there was some objective, necessarily incorruptible and public source of random data, and tokens were generated only when certain values appear? The number generated is adjusted by adjusting the range of those values. Is such a publicly verifiable random source possible? Some kind of cosmic slot machine, like maybe variations in a pulsar? If it is possible, could it actually be a low power way to mint scarce tokens? The same random source used to generate the tokens could also be used to randomly distribute them. Is that compatible with the incentive structure of crypto coins?
- Sargos 6y agoEthereum is starting to use Proof of Stake which provides the same security as Bitcoin's Proof of Work but without the energy waste. Over the long run proof of work will cease to be used.
- madacol 6y agoPoS security is weaker than PoW, that's a fact. See https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/70807/how-does-proof-of-stake-prevents-dishonest-behaviour-compared-to-pow https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/70807/how-does-p... But is it stronger enough to still be 99% as useful? I don't know, these are all experiments.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago> The scarcity of bitcoins depends on the scarcity of computational power No, the scarcity of Bitcoin is hardcoded into the protocol. The protocol doesn't care if 1 miner or 1 million miners are validating the blockchain. The number of BTC is the same. ...as long as everyone agrees to use the same Bitcoin, that is. People could simply fork the Bitcoin chain with a different number of maximum Bitcoin and call it "Bitcoin 2". The scarcity relies on Bitcoiners all agreeing to not recognize any other protocol with a higher limit on Bitcoin, which is currently an attractive proposition to all of the BTC early adopters who would profit greatly from forcing the rest of the world to buy their BTC at inflated prices in the future to get anything done.
- danaliv 6y agoGuy sitting at folding table with large sign in front of it that says, “convince me that Bitcoin is not a massive mis-allocation of resources.”
- dane-pgp 6y agoIf you own some resources, under what circumstances should someone else be able to tell you how to allocate/use them? It's perfectly valid to say that governments should make laws or economic policies to prevent negative externalities like pollution, but that is begging the question of what activity is causing the pollution. If your bitcoin mining rig is in an area that is powered by a coal power station, then you are indirectly increasing CO2 pollution, but coal that is burnt to supply other customers with power is no less polluting. Therefore it doesn't seem equitable to single out just one user of the electricity. It is even more inequitable to punish bitcoin miners that use otherwise-curtailed renewable energy for the externalities of non-renewably powered miners.
- biolurker1 6y agoWhat should be measured also is: less banks, bank tellers and massively less gold mining around the world IF Bitcoin is going to succeed.
- viraptor 6y agoThe first two are already covered by online banks. People would still need banking even if cryptocurrency somehow got common. Gold would likely not change - there's still trade based around it and currencies are not bound to hold price anymore really.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoThe idea that banks will dwindle if Bitcoin gets adopted is a serious misunderstanding of how banks actually work and the value they provide to people. We're just not going to arrive in a situation where common people would voluntarily choose to manage their own private keys and crypto wallets, full stop. Can you imagine your parents forgetting the password to their retirement account and going bankrupt? Or your grandma getting tricked into a phishing scam that immediately and irreversibly sends her entire net worth to a scammer? Even the average Bitcoin user prefers to keep their money in something like Coinbase rather than try to manage their own crypto wallet. Likewise, gold doesn't simply disappear as an asset and get replaced by Bitcoin. The strange thing about crypto is that the crypto market cap keeps going up as new coins are added to the market. Cryptocurrency is a chance to create new asset classes, which altcoin developers are more than happy to oblige as long as the demand exists. Does this mean more money (value) is being willed into existence? No, in fact there's a lot of evidence that cryptocurrency is heavily fueled by an explosion in credit and leverage. There are literally exchanges that will let you purchase altcoins with up to 100x leverage right now.
- biolurker1 6y agoI think thinking that something that does something another sector does will not eat on its profits and personnel is not well thought out.
- slickrick216 6y agoHahaha you know things are bad when nature is pushing lame bitcoin FUD.
- biolurker1 6y agoFirst think you read is that OP doesn't understand economics and thinks Bitcoin is air. End of reading.would be so much better f he made an argument about ecology and his his biased beliefs about what society should use for money.
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- spir 6y agoStephen seems unaware of the fact that his objections to bitcoin are solved by ethereum. - bitcoin uses huge amounts of energy - bitcoin has no cash flow - bitcoin has no use cases vs. - ethereum consumes ~100% less energy via proof of stake - ethereum has cash flow from fees ($68M last week) - ethereum has ~infinite use cases since it's an app platform
- fyll-0000 6y agoIf someone can make a very low power / overhead consensus model that can defend it self, and preferably free to use then this tech might actually be worthy. Right now, it’s more harm than good?
- Zamicol 6y agoThis is one of many reasons why Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake (PoS) and ditching Proof of Work (PoW). The already functional Ethereum 2.0 chain has Bitcoin's security guarantees for a tiny fraction of the electricity costs. Bitcoin's yearly electricity consumption is now estimated at $3.8 billion. This must be sustained indefinitely, and is a huge target for regulation and nation state interference. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ Bitcoin's "store of value" has a forever price tag in the billions yearly. This doesn't make economic sense. If Ethereum can fulfill Bitcoin's role as a "store of value" at a much lower yearly cost, I don't see how it would not eventually become more attractive as a store of value. For a great detailed explanation on why PoS is better see Vitalk's blog. Vitalik views attacks on chains in terms of costs, which IMHO is the proper paradigm to quantify attack costs. https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html (BTW, the TLS cert looks like it has an issue at the moment). In 2011 I assumed Bitcoin would transition because PoW's weaknesses were obvious. Unfortunately, the majority of the leftovers in Bitcoin no longer share my sentiment. Electricity consumption is a reason that PoW is the most likely downfall of Bitcoin if they don't transition to another technology. To keep PoW Bitcoin will need to morph into something else, like a semi-centralized "reserve" asset which is not a technology that excites me. A scalable ecosystem where large volumes of economic value can be transferred excites me. Everyday use excites me. You can "hide" an Ethereum PoS server in your basement. You can't hide the massive electricity usage, transportation, and manufacturing of specialized hardware used in a Bitcoin ASIC farm. The specialization also means there's a huge centralization pressure in the Bitcoin network. I personally welcome (reasonable) regulation, but if I was concerned about regulation as many Bitcoiners tout, PoW would not be an effective way of implementing regulation resistance.
- iamgopal 6y agoall the Banks and insurance companies should required by law to be Carbon neutral or positive.
- Tepix 6y agoIn my point of view, one thing is certain: Technology has advanced since bitcoin was launched. We can do everything that bitcoin can better and more efficiently with newer algorithms like Avalanche consensus¹. Given that our climate is spiraling out of control, i think it is prudent to switch to these more efficient technologies. The bitcoin community is locked in a stalemate. Hard forks seem impossible. If bitcoin cannot be improved, i hope we will move on to something less wasteful. -- ¹ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUy4jh5mGNZvLkjies1RWM4YuvJh5o2FYopNPVYwrRVGV https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUy4jh5mGNZvLkjies1RWM4YuvJh5o2FYopNPV...
- nicklaf 6y agoI'd be curious to know whether a breakthrough in quantum computing that broke cryptographic algorithms that cryptocurrencies depend on could prevent this by making non-quantum cryptography obsolete. Or am I wrong to assume that there won't simply be new algorithms that are safe from such quantum-based cryptographic attacks?
- donjigweed 6y agoThe energy "waste" argument against Bitcoin is really one of the silliest there is. One man's waste is another's treasure. "Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste." Does playing video games "produce absolutely nothing?" Some would say so, others would say not, that it produces positive emotions in players. But the entire ecosystem of gaming no doubt "wastes" more energy than bitcoin mining. Who gets to decide, to decree, what constitutes "waste?" That it's ok to engage in certain activities, like gaming, which some people would classify as "waste," but not ok to engage in others. And the climate change argument as the cherry on top. Time to power down everything then. No more bitcoin mining, no more cars, no more travel, watching movies, it's all "wasteful." Shut it all down.
- mr_woozy 6y agoDoes no one else see the bitter irony in this coming from a developer with a startup who presumable contributes to the same electricity usage via datacenters and user load?
- illustriousbear 6y agoSo what? Is there some assumption that traditional banking don't consume a significant amount of energy? I think we're all familiar with towering bank buildings full of employees using computers, air conditioners and a range of appliances (alongside their daily commute). This is without even thinking about banking tech and system infrastructure.
- gasull 6y ago70% of Bitcoin mining is from renewal resources: https://twitter.com/Melt_Dem/status/1351175859613429764 https://twitter.com/Melt_Dem/status/1351175859613429764 Netflix uses more than twice the energy that is spent in Bitcoin mining: https://twitter.com/onybose/status/1351207551648616449 https://twitter.com/onybose/status/1351207551648616449 A lot of the energy used for Bitcoin mining would be wasted otherwise: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1351216547566669829 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1351216547566669829