4 ms·

Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C (2018)

279 points by aburan28 6y ago

dang 6y ago
Related, slightly earlier and still ongoing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25814995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25814995
illustriousbear 6y ago
So 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.
- not_kurt_godel 6y ago
  The difference is banks don't inherently rely on directly converting electricity into currency at scale.
  - compton 6y ago
    How do you think coins are made? And distributed? Of course at the moment, both systems exist so it appears that blockchain is additional and therefore unnecessary. Isn't that often how new technology first appears though? As another example, there have been similar articles about the amount of energy used by internet datacentres. While a lot of energy is certainly used to keep the internet running, such figures are only really meaningful when compared against the existing systems they can replace. What is the environmental impact of building libraries, stocking them with books, heating and lighting them, and the physical journeys that their users have to make to get there?
    - not_kurt_godel 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure electricity use of the existing currency system does not alone potentially account for 2 degrees C of global warming. Since you know, making a physical coin doesn't require deliberately burning untold numbers of CPU cycles for each transaction once it's made (nor does any corresponding digital record-keeping of it either).
- zaarn 6y ago
  Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a mid-sized country, including it's banking infrastructure. I doubt that if all banks where in one country, they'd consume more energy, including the energy consumed by all banking employees and other infrastructure necessary.
ro-_-b 6y ago
I find it remarkable how people always criticize bitcoin for environmental damage but when people are sending rockets to the orbit that's ok! One technology is apparently bad & the other good. Both damage the environment. What's the framework to judge this? "The rocket held 440 tons of jet fuel, which has a high carbon content, meaning it releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the air when burned. If SpaceX meets its target of launching a rocket every two weeks, then the company will be releasing roughly 4,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, Whittaker calculated." Source: https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/space-x-bad-for-the-environment/#:~:text=The%20astrophysicist%20Ian%20Whittaker%20wrote,into%20the%20air%20when%20burned https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/space-x-bad-for-the....
- DemocracyFTW 6y ago
  I think it does make a difference whether you spend fuel on the necessary or the expendable, the luxury, the frivolous, even if there's no hard and fast framework to judge this. As for the assumption that SpaceX is getting a free ride on this just because "space!"—you're wrong. SpaceX is getting heavily criticized for littering the skies with tens or hundreds of thousands of satellites, just so people can have internet. I mean it's a laudable goal (probably), but beyond the enormous expenditure in terms of materials, as you write (even keeping in mind that in the rocket business SpaceX is Nr1 when it comes to re-using rockets), there's still the additional material they send into the orbit, material that sooner or later will have to be replaced, material that is not unlikely to cause problems at some point (like a possible Kessler event which could shut down space exporation altogether, not to mention the light pollution they cause).
  - greyhair 6y ago
    The biggest issue to me concerns the will of people to distribute other existing methods. For example, establishing fiber, transoceanic as well as transcontinental around the globe. Proper fiber rollout would take longer, but should have started ten years ago. It would consume less energy per Tb of transmission, particularly over its lifetime. The problem is the overcoming the will to do the work, plus the geopolitics. Vast sections of the rural US still lack usable broadband to this day. Right here in the USA, where large swaths of RF licenses are held by the large cellular carriers, but have never been rolled out. SpaceX is going to address those communities, as well as communities in other nations, in ways that traditional telecom has completely ignored. I grew up and lived rural until I was nearly thirty. I still have family living rural with completely unmet internet wants. It is shameful that in this day and age, in the USA, we have such huge regions in need of basic internet access. In addition, satellite service opens up internet in ways that bypasses local governmental control. I am not saying it is the best solution, by any stretch, but the reality is, we as a nation, and we as a planet, could have short circuited satellite based internet service by properly funding and building out internet infrastructure over the last ten to fifteen years. The technology certainly already existed, but we lacked the commitment, we lacked the will. And that left a technology void that had to be filled. We have ourselves to blame.
ric2b 6y ago
Same error as always, already addressed in the sibling thread, Bitcoin energy usage does not scale linearly with transaction count: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25815303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25815303

279 points by aburan28 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Related, slightly earlier and still ongoing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25814995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25814995

illustriousbear 6y ago

So 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.

not_kurt_godel 6y ago
The difference is banks don't inherently rely on directly converting electricity into currency at scale.
- compton 6y ago
  How do you think coins are made? And distributed? Of course at the moment, both systems exist so it appears that blockchain is additional and therefore unnecessary. Isn't that often how new technology first appears though? As another example, there have been similar articles about the amount of energy used by internet datacentres. While a lot of energy is certainly used to keep the internet running, such figures are only really meaningful when compared against the existing systems they can replace. What is the environmental impact of building libraries, stocking them with books, heating and lighting them, and the physical journeys that their users have to make to get there?
  - not_kurt_godel 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure electricity use of the existing currency system does not alone potentially account for 2 degrees C of global warming. Since you know, making a physical coin doesn't require deliberately burning untold numbers of CPU cycles for each transaction once it's made (nor does any corresponding digital record-keeping of it either).
zaarn 6y ago
Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a mid-sized country, including it's banking infrastructure. I doubt that if all banks where in one country, they'd consume more energy, including the energy consumed by all banking employees and other infrastructure necessary.

ro-_-b 6y ago

I find it remarkable how people always criticize bitcoin for environmental damage but when people are sending rockets to the orbit that's ok! One technology is apparently bad & the other good. Both damage the environment. What's the framework to judge this? "The rocket held 440 tons of jet fuel, which has a high carbon content, meaning it releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the air when burned. If SpaceX meets its target of launching a rocket every two weeks, then the company will be releasing roughly 4,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, Whittaker calculated." Source: https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/space-x-bad-for-the-environment/#:~:text=The%20astrophysicist%20Ian%20Whittaker%20wrote,into%20the%20air%20when%20burned https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/space-x-bad-for-the....

DemocracyFTW 6y ago
I think it does make a difference whether you spend fuel on the necessary or the expendable, the luxury, the frivolous, even if there's no hard and fast framework to judge this. As for the assumption that SpaceX is getting a free ride on this just because "space!"—you're wrong. SpaceX is getting heavily criticized for littering the skies with tens or hundreds of thousands of satellites, just so people can have internet. I mean it's a laudable goal (probably), but beyond the enormous expenditure in terms of materials, as you write (even keeping in mind that in the rocket business SpaceX is Nr1 when it comes to re-using rockets), there's still the additional material they send into the orbit, material that sooner or later will have to be replaced, material that is not unlikely to cause problems at some point (like a possible Kessler event which could shut down space exporation altogether, not to mention the light pollution they cause).
- greyhair 6y ago
  The biggest issue to me concerns the will of people to distribute other existing methods. For example, establishing fiber, transoceanic as well as transcontinental around the globe. Proper fiber rollout would take longer, but should have started ten years ago. It would consume less energy per Tb of transmission, particularly over its lifetime. The problem is the overcoming the will to do the work, plus the geopolitics. Vast sections of the rural US still lack usable broadband to this day. Right here in the USA, where large swaths of RF licenses are held by the large cellular carriers, but have never been rolled out. SpaceX is going to address those communities, as well as communities in other nations, in ways that traditional telecom has completely ignored. I grew up and lived rural until I was nearly thirty. I still have family living rural with completely unmet internet wants. It is shameful that in this day and age, in the USA, we have such huge regions in need of basic internet access. In addition, satellite service opens up internet in ways that bypasses local governmental control. I am not saying it is the best solution, by any stretch, but the reality is, we as a nation, and we as a planet, could have short circuited satellite based internet service by properly funding and building out internet infrastructure over the last ten to fifteen years. The technology certainly already existed, but we lacked the commitment, we lacked the will. And that left a technology void that had to be filled. We have ourselves to blame.

ric2b 6y ago

Same error as always, already addressed in the sibling thread, Bitcoin energy usage does not scale linearly with transaction count: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25815303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25815303