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Legitimizing Bitcoin more than offsets the environmental benefits of electric vehicles.
by exabrial 6y ago
Legitimizing Bitcoin more than offsets the environmental benefits of electric vehicles.
- ludditetech 6y agoFiat system costs a lot to run too, pretty sure this assertion debunked.
- JustFinishedBSG 6y agoGood thing you are only pretty sure then because it's entirely false. Bitcoin needs several orders of magnitude more energy per transactions.
- lifty 6y agoIt's better to think of Bitcoin efficiency in terms of transaction throughput (value moved) instead of transactions per second. This tweet makes a comparison with Fedwire: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1358155385081888778?s=21 https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1358155385081888778?s... 2nd layer solutions will scale Bitcoin transaction capacity in terms of transactions/s
- xur17 6y ago100% this. I work at a merchant that accepts Bitcoin for payment, and 90+% of our volume comes in over lightning (a layer 2 solution built on top of Bitcoin).
- mrpopo 6y agoSo, only 1 order of magnitude down. EDIT: according to a chart here [0], 1 "raw" Bitcoin transaction is equivalent to 400k Visa transactions. That's 5 orders of magnitude. Unless Lightning handles 99.999% of all Bitcoin transactions, the Bitcoin network will be unbelievably wasteful. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
- simias 6y agoThese layer 2 solutions lead to centralization and make some nodes more important than others. The fact that most cryptocurrency enthusiasts tend to brush this under the carpet shows that it's more about getting rich than some ideological fight against the banks. Cryptocurrency developers are slowly but surely reinventing the banking system, just less efficient and less regulated. Then there's the question of whether a deflationary currency can even work in the first place.
- lifty 6y agoI don't think that Bitcoin or any other crypto asset needs to become the main currency of any country. They can live as tertiary assets with valuable properties, that can facilitate trade or act as collateral for certain contracts, without being declared a currency in any geographical jurisdiction.
- maxerickson 6y agoI mean, he spells it out, but it is doing 1/1000 the value. And if you make that comparison, how much energy is being used to run Fedwire? A few kilowatts maybe?
- fvdessen 6y agoThe security of the US financial systems is maintained in part by the US military which is not exactly free either
- maxerickson 6y agoWithout the sun we'd all be really cold.
- ben_w 6y agoWhat’s the real difference between a layer on top of BTC (effectively a new currency backed by BTC) and an existing currency backed by traditional things like gold and international treaties?
- 3np 6y agoBoth sides of this arguments are oversimplifications to the point of being meaningless. Specifically: L2 like lightning, settlements on sidechains, and other things I won't go into here. The long and short of it is that it's incredibly hard to quantify and compare and I am yet to see an attempt that gives any meaningful insight. If Bitcoins proof-of-work and the consequences it has becomes a net loss or net win in terms of climate is a very open question. I would love to see more analysis of it but it's really not obvious either way.
- user-the-name 6y agoLighting is dead on arrival, and can not possibly scale. It will never amount to anything. It is relying on people finding solutions to routing problems that nobody even knows how to begin tackling.
- DennisP 6y agoOn top of that, you have to be online to receive Lightning funds, if they were routed through an intermediary. It's an interactive protocol. https://github.com/moneybutton/yours-channels/blob/master/docs/gentle-lightning.md https://github.com/moneybutton/yours-channels/blob/master/do...
- 3np 6y agoAs someone who has been following the development closely and run nodes for years; you are very, very wrong. Adoption has been extremely slow and the two main implementations (lnd and lightningd) are far from complete and feature-compatible, even if development velocity is actually very high in both. There are serious efforts in development to improve on all the current problems, and relatively seamless interoperability and liquidity bridges with L2 networks on other chains like Ethereum is IMO the coming key to make it happen for real. In practice it should not be necessary for a retail user to run or maintain their own always-on node(s) in order to get the benefits in a secure way - but much of the required plumbing is still in heavy development. It's OK that it takes time. Maybe it's another 5-10 years until you will be able to appreciate it - I think it's shorter than that but time will tell. --- TLDR lightning hasn't fully arrived yet and it will continue to happen gradually
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aww_dang 6y agoThere are other alternatives to BTC, which are more efficient in terms of energy usage, more effective in terms of transaction speed and transaction fees. BTC is a cryptocurrency, but not equal to cryptocurrency for the sake of this discussion. BTC is arguably not effective as an actual medium of exchange. Many BTC maximalists have retreated from the actual currency use case in favor of "store of value" arguments.
- Hamuko 6y agoThe annualised energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is currently between the United Arab Emirates and Argentina. https://www.cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons https://www.cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dcolkitt 6y agoWhat percent of the electricity used by Bitcoin miners is generated by fossil fuels? My impression is that most miners are located to take advantage of locales with very cheap hydroelectric/geothermal or take advantage of subsidized/overbuilt renewables. But I could be wrong. Any data on this?
- lemoncurd 6y agowhatever has the lowest costs
- DennisP 6y agoIf they're on an electric grid that also has fossil fuels, then it doesn't really matter. More clean energy to them is less to other customers, who have to make up for it with more fossil.
- dcolkitt 6y agoThat assumes that the demand for electricity is not price elastic.
- bildung 6y agoIt only assumes that demand is not 100% price elastic, which is almost guaranteed to be true.
- matthewdgreen 6y agoThe weird thing here is that Bitcoin doesn't care about whether it's mined with clean electricity or other, and the realities of the market are pretty opaque. When people correctly point out that Bitcoin mining consumes a lot of energy, a bunch of people immediately make the claim that most of this energy must come from excess renewable sources. But there's actually no reason at all to believe this, very little evidence in favor of it, and nothing in the Bitcoin system design that ensures it. It's basically an article of faith -- because the alternative would be objectively horrifying. We could design cryptocurrency systems that deliberately focus on using excess renewables, or just plain use less energy for mining. But the problem is that "Bitcoin" has come to stand in for "a cryptocurrency using the specific design choices that its inventor made more than a decade ago" and so privileging Bitcoin itself makes these choices impossible. The very best possible outcome is that (small-b) bitcoin tokens will eventually migrate to more efficient consensus networks, and the big-B Bitcoin network itself will be spun down to consume less power.
- DennisP 6y agoHe should have gone for a proof-of-stake chain instead.
- asenna 6y agoFor investments from large institutions and companies, I don't think there's any other option out there with the security and regulatory support similar to Bitcoin and with a fixed total-supply.
- DennisP 6y agoInstitutions invest in all sorts of things without a fixed total supply. Equities, gold, and national currencies, for example.
- asenna 6y agoBy fixed total supply, I meant as a hedge against inflation similar to Gold.
- DennisP 6y agoBut all those things are hedges against inflation. None of them have a precisely fixed supply like Bitcoin. Also, institutions buy things for lots of reasons besides hedging inflation. Arguably they're buying Bitcoin for the same reason they buy growth stocks.
- tome 6y agoGenuine question: Is it the case that Bitcoin has a precisely determined supply because the difficulty schedule is informally agreed on by all participants? What would happen if some large number of participants, say 75%, decided to change that? They simply could, couldn't they?
- LightMachine 6y ago
- londons_explore 6y agoThe energy cost of running the bitcoin network is ~constant in relation to the number of transactions processed. Cost of running the network also goes down with time as fewer bitcoins are issued as block rewards. It goes up with the price of bitcoin, as more miners spend electricity on mining. Those things have historically led to increased energy costs for the network, but in the future they could well lead to decreased energy use too.
- estaseuropano 6y agoI always understood that there is only a limited number of transactions in each block. So higher transaction number = higher block number needed and therefore likely higher competition and higher transaction cost. This means that more blocks needed = more miners motivated to mine. Does the higher number of 'failed' mining not also increase with the number of miners? And proof of work increases with each block does that not imply higher energy cost per mined block?
- londons_explore 6y ago> I always understood that there is only a limited number of transactions in each block. Correct. > So higher transaction number = higher block number needed No. The rate blocks are made is fixed (on average), and that limits the total transaction capacity of the whole network. That's why people are working on things like the Lightning Network as a way to add more transactions. Other efforts to either have more blocks per hour or more transactions per block have (mostly) failed.
- Miner49er 6y agoI think at a certain point, the only profitable way to mine BTC will be with energy that was going to be wasted anyway.
- ForHackernews 6y agoThat depends how high the BTC bubble price goes. At a certain point, mining BTC could be the only economically viable activity to do with electricity.
- cesarb 6y agoThat's only the case if the Bitcoin price is low. Each block gives the miner a certain amount of Bitcoin, so it's only profitable to mine Bitcoin if the cost of the energy used to mine that block is lower than the price of the Bitcoin the miner received. The higher the price of Bitcoin, the higher can the cost of the energy be before it's no longer profitable.
- Miner49er 6y agoYeah it's of course a balance. It depends on the difficulty, reward, and cost. The reward is constantly going down. I guess I just think there will eventually be a balance where it's only possible to mine with free/wasted electricity, but maybe not.
- dylkil 6y agoHes legitimizing crypto in general. PoS will be proven to be more efficient in almost every way, people will gravitate towards that. Bitcoin has the network effects of being the first mover right now. Ethereum is surpassing it on many metrics, txs/day, $ volume processed per day, etc [1]. [1]https://www.blockchaincenter.net/flippening/ https://www.blockchaincenter.net/flippening/
- kevingadd 6y ago"PoS will be proven to be more efficient in almost every way" We've already known PoS is more efficient for like a decade haven't we? When will it become real and actually start to supplant Bitcoin, 2030? It's a very interesting theoretical point but I don't see how it's relevant when we're talking about the environmental impact Bitcoin has been having for years while Tesla is dumping money into it.
- michaelsbradley 6y agoThe Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain mainnet launched on 01 Dec 2020; you can track its operation with e.g. BeaconScan[1] and beaconha.in[2]. Ethereum 2.0 (proof of stake) is currently a hybrid, with the beacon chain operating in conjunction with Ethereum 1.0 (proof of work). The plan[3] is to merge Eth1 and Eth2 by 2022, though it's an admittedly ambitious plan. My bet is that it will happen before 2024. [1] https://beaconscan.com/ https://beaconscan.com/ [2] https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/ [3] https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/docking/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/docking/
- ad31mar 6y agoStop pumping shitcoins.
- yyy888sss 6y agoBitcoin uses as much electricity as Chile and a single transaction has the same carbon footprint as ~700k Visa transactions. This may also be underestimated and account for around half of global data centre energy consumption as per a recent study. [1] [1] - https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
- Hamuko 6y agoThe Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index gives a much higher estimate (78 TWh vs. 117 TWh), which makes it about the same as the annual electricity usage of United Arab Emirates (pop. 9.9 million). https://www.cbeci.org/ https://www.cbeci.org/
- codenotmath 6y agoTesla should have waited 3 more years until the next halvening.
- BLanen 6y agoThat doesn't change anything in energy usage, and shows how you fundamentally don't understand how it works.
- imwillofficial 6y agoI don’t care about the energy issue. See actual sources of most of bitcoins energy. (Nat gas, thermal, etc that would be otherwise wasted.)
- Hamuko 6y agoCan you show those actual sources?
- imwillofficial 6y ago
- antonios 6y agoMaybe, if you completely disregard everything else that Bitcoin puts on the table, and how much energy is required to sustain the infrastructure it will make obsolete.
- vgaldikas 6y agoThere are now proof of stake alternatives, that offer what bitcoin does and a whole lot more
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y agoAll EV's are worse for the environment than buying a used Petrol car.
- ben_w 6y agoHighly likely a used petrol car will be bought by someone even if not by you personally, so not a fair assessment. A fair assessment would be a new BEV versus a new petrol versus a new diesel versus a new hybrid.
- tome 6y agoAlso possible that if you buy the used petrol car then the someone else who would have bought it will buy a new one instead, ultimately stimulating the production of more new petrol cars.
- lucideer 6y agoThis isn't how markets work. Your argument is basically equivalent to the old "my vote doesn't count" line, but yet still different people get elected over time. It's not about whether you or I buy a used petrol car over a new EV; it's about whether you & I buy a used petrol car over a new EV. Emphasis on the environmental efficiency of new products in general over the environmental impact of buying new in the first place is a topic that's well worth highlighting.
- ben_w 6y agoI do not understand your thought process. Cars enter the world by being made, not by being sold. They leave the world by being damaged beyond economical repair, not by being bought. This is not the same as party politics, even though literally every election and referendum I have voted in would’ve resulted in the same winner had I not voted. The political comparison would be voting ex-politicans off X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing or $COUNTRYs-got-talent etc. (second hand) versus current politicians in elections (new).
- 6y ago
- knuthsat 6y agoOur biggest environmental footprints as individuals are heating and cooling. Having an electric car is nothing compared to it. Take one intercontinental flight and again, having a fossil fuel car for a year does not exceed the emissions of that flight. http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ Legitimizing Bitcoin has nothing to do with the environment in the large scale of things. It's like saying that you need to optimize fast functions instead of slow ones.
- ric2z 6y ago> It's like saying that you need to optimize fast functions instead of slow ones. I really like this analogy
- kissiel 6y ago> having a fossil fuel car for a year does not exceed the emissions of that flight. That's true (-ish). Here are the numbers: Modern pure-ICE cars don't got below 100g/km of CO2. Round trip NYC-LHR yields 1 ton of CO2. So the above comment is true-ish for cars that do less than 10k km annually.
- kevinventullo 6y agoIs that flight footprint averaged over the number of passengers?
- kissiel 6y agoYessir. I remembered the number from the past, and before writing this post I found this https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/jul/19/carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...
- baxtr 6y agoAre you basically saying that going from fossil to electric vehicles won’t make a big difference?
- ransom1538 6y ago"Legitimizing Bitcoin more than offsets the environmental benefits of electric vehicles." Not in Iceland.
- patniemeyer 6y agoNot going to defend Bitcoin POW, but that's some world class Tesla FUD right there :) First, I think JPMorgan, GS, MicroStrategy, Grayscale, pumping billions into BTC this year and the OCC announcing that banks can use blockchain for settlement probably has more to do with BTC being viewed as legit than TSLA jumping on board as a tech company. Second, about 25% of energy is consumed in passenger transportation and Tesla is pretty much single-handedly moving the world to electrifying that making it a) 5x more efficient, b) possible to run from renewables. Third Tesla is the only organization in the world ramping up to do planet-scale battery production that will make it possible to transition all energy production to renewables. (If people want to pay to produce and consume clean energy for arbitrary purposes that's fine by me... as long as they don't kill me in the process). The idea that Tesla's influence on BTC mining will waste more energy than their electrification efforts have saved and/or redirected to renewables is nutty.
- rfoo 6y agoAre there any alternative to the Bitcoin?
- linux-user 6y agoDepends on the use case. If you want to pay anonymously online then there is Paysafecard for example (available in some countries and for some services). There are other blockchain currencies of course, but I think they all have the same environmental issues.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoEthereum, but it still relies primarily on Proof of Work, with Ethereum's Proof of Stake Beacon Chain currently in the first phase of its launch, and not being used to secure transactions.
- aww_dang 6y agoYeah, there's Nanocurrency. No fees, instant transactions and delegated proof of stake consensus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(cryptocurrency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(cryptocurrency) https://content.nano.org/whitepaper/Nano_Whitepaper_en.pdf https://content.nano.org/whitepaper/Nano_Whitepaper_en.pdf The whitepaper specifically addresses BTC's energy consumption on page one.
- StavrosK 6y agoI really like Nano, the whitepaper is pretty easy to read, they seem reasonably good and sending money is instant (sub-second). Pretty great for a currency that's meant to be used, rather than hoarded.
- xerxespoy 6y agoTake your pick: https://coingecko.com https://coingecko.com While many of these are forks of Bitcoin and use similarly wasteful proof mechanisms, many are also completely new and different. Several different consensus mechanisms are broadly used across these, most of which improve drastically on Bitcoins wasteful Proof of Work (PoW). Some even solve the problem with only very negligible energy footprint, such as the variations on Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). It's been long-debated whether those alternatives trade safety for energy-savings, but after many years it would appear the reverse is true. The majority of projects that have succumbed to some kind of system-inherent weakness have been PoW protocols being "51% attacked", which is generally not a concern for the alternatives.
- ArkanExplorer 6y agoYou should blame Governments of the world, for holding interest rates at lower levels than the inflation rate. eg. the USA inflation rate is 2%, whereas the interest rate is 0%. Its inevitable that savings will flow out of fiat and into all kinds of other assets. This is the entire purpose of low interest rates - to inflate the value of assets held by retirees, pensioners, and the ultra-wealthy. Bitcoin is unique because the supply cannot be expanded (beyond what is scheduled as rewards for miners) - unlike gold, shares, living spaces. Its also significantly more liquid and easier to transact than any of those assets because it is digital and global.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoYou don’t have to choose just one, single party to accept the blame. Bitcoin can be wrong even as other alternatives are also wrong. Also, the Bitcoin supply may be limited, but the supply of new alt pins or even BitCoin forks continues to inflate every year.
- brightball 6y agoLong term, he’ll be legitimizing Ethereum.
- ath92 6y agoTesla's mission is to accelerate the adoption of renewable energy sources. This doesn't directly counter that. In fact you could argue that pushing the world to rely on massively energy-inefficient proof-of-work rather than a centralized authority for trust in the financial system is going to make the need for renewables even greater. If (and it's a big if) we can get to 10% renewable energy in the next decades, Bitcoin's energy consumption will be much less of an issue.
- user-the-name 6y agoThere is no lack of demand for energy. The world is absolutely ravenous for energy. The reason we don't have more renewable energy is absolutely not, in any way, because of there not being a big enough demand for energy. No, what Tesla has done here will instead wipe out all the gains in reducing carbon emissions it has managed so far, out of pure greed. This is a disaster.
- febeling 6y agoBitcoin miners use surplus energy in remote places with lots of thermal or hydroelectric power. Remote China and Iceland. This electricity often can't be put to any other use anyway. The price of energy is probably enough to ensure this. Besides, the cost of maintaining Bitcoin has to be compared with holding up a fiat currency empire like the US. This requires lots of military, suppression of democracy and generally violence. Seen through that lense it might be quite cheap.
- andrewon 6y agoCurious what percentage of bitcoin's energy use is from surplus energy that otherwise no use?
- baud147258 6y agorecently Iran was blaming bitcoin for blackouts, so perhaps not all bitcoin is mined from hydro/thermal power. Of course it could that Iran was just looking for an easy scapegoat.
- altcognito 6y ago> This electricity often can't be put to any other use anyway. This is false. If there is surplus electricity, prices would drop, and you could expand availability. Government, especially the Chinese government is more than capable of shaping market demand. Furthermore, you could displace existing coal based electrical demand in the country. The value of currency comes from trust that you manage it well, not from the number of bombers.
- Miner49er 6y agoThere exists energy where it's not economically viable to put on a grid, or really do anything with. Many mine Bitcoin with this energy. Even in the United States. The cost of transporting it is more then the energy is worth.
- nickflood 6y agoIn Europe where I live, electricity costs 0.06 euro for generation and then 0.25 on top for transportation to me. So eve if the grid is vast, transport costs are vast as well.
- ArchD 6y agoMissing the point. Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency to grab attention and normalize the idea of public permissionless public blockchains in the public's and government's mind. Upon this foundation laid by bitcoin, other coins that use proof-of-stake can gradually take over some or most of its market share. The alternative to your narrative is that this is promoting permissionless cryptocurrency that is hard for the government to print and manipulate, not necessarily Bitcoin per se. Additionally, if proof-of-stake coins and DeFi can take over some of the manual paperwork done by banks, it would amount to energy savings. Right now bitcoin is the leader and everybody knows what it is. Compared to other coins, it has a more mature ecosystem to support the needs of a corporate treasury. Companies choosing bitcoin now doesn't mean a proof-of-stake coin cannot take over the mantle later. You can consider bitcoin to be the first coin that lands on a beachhead in the disruption of traditional finance.
- swiley 6y agoIt's not like there aren't more efficient crypto currencies now. We have Etherium.
- hfsp 6y agoEric Voskuil writes about the "energy" argument. All moneys can be compared on energy level, and it is important to note not to look at energy solely, but also labor, land, services, energy, hardware, and other resources needed to keep a system running. If you are comparing the coin to fiat, take into account the military industrial complex, the cost of physical bank branches, physical issue, the cost of seignorage on the money holder (i.e. gain of energy for those close to the printing press vs. loss of energy for existing holders). If you rationally examine, the money holder will select the money with the least energy waste. All moneys not held imply a higher amount of energy inefficiency. This is why one may hold the USD, as opposed to the Turkish Lira. This is why one may hold btc, as opposed to the USD. If you want to investigate a bit more in depth, cryptoeconomics Proof of Work fallacy is a great resource by Eric Voskuil. Link: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-of-Work-Fallacy https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o....
- donsupreme 6y agoSomebody should tell Elon about NANO if he is serious about the environment and wants a real digital money system