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This article is just bad. Bitcoin's dirty baggage is magnitudes less than anything else companies and countries do to this world through not just air pollution

This article is just bad. Bitcoin's dirty baggage is magnitudes less than anything else companies and countries do to this world through not just air pollution but environment destruction, water pollution etc. I'll keep arguing about this continuously. Bitcoin will never reach the severity that some other industries did. Bitcoin is a non-issue.

titzer 6y ago
You can keep arguing until you are blue in the face, but Bitcoin will continue to be a boondoggle that should never have happened. For the life of me I cannot understand the attitude that because someone somewhere did something worse we should stop caring and stop working on solutions. We're on a sinking ship with leaks everywhere. Plug some leaks instead of arguing about it! But you'll come back with "oh we need to allocate resources in the most impactful way possible", which we argue about for decades and never do anything. Meanwhile, new leaks are springing up every second.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  You have to expend resources to make progress. The alternative to Bitcoin is a bloody worldwide revolution. Most people aren't actually happy living in a world of extreme inequality where only the 0.01% have any say in how our society is run. Getting off state backed currency is a prerequisite to social progress. Bitcoin is doing this in a bloodless, warless manner.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    Actually the alternative is proof-of-stake, which accomplishes the same objectives as Bitcoin with very little energy consumption.
  - robjan 6y ago
    Look at the distribution of Bitcoin. Do you think it's any different? A small number of people (I'm excluding the exchanges here) controll the majority of the bitcoins.
    - solosoyokaze 6y ago
      Correct, but the properties of Bitcoin are baked into the protocol and not up for policy debate. The Bitcoin Core people can't get together and cause massive inflation, wiping out everyone's savings and lowering the value of their salaries. Most importantly, no military is needed to secure the value of BTC. The US is in a constant state of warfare to keep its position on the top of the world hierarchy, which is what gives USD the value it has. I'll take a GPU mining in Iceland over a bomb dropped in the Middle East as the backing to my finances any day of the week.
      - titzer 6y ago
        > I'll take a GPU mining in Iceland over a bomb dropped in the Middle East as the backing to my finances any day of the week. This is a false choice, clearly. But regardless, I don't think you're properly accounting for how bad of an externality climate change is, and the (completely unnecessary) CO2 emissions from mining bitcoins is directly linked to a whole future of bad things happening, not just a single bomb.
  - titzer 6y ago
    > Bitcoin is doing this in a bloodless, warless manner. Man, what koolaid. Bitcoin is a speculation market that has done nothing but benefit rich speculators and its computational demand has led to vast negative externalities for the planet. Stop doing that! Maybe you should support a bloodless revolution by volunteering at a soup kitchen.
jellicle 6y ago
Really? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 "Bitcoin uses more electricity annually than the whole of Argentina, analysis by Cambridge University suggests. " Using more electricity than most nations worldwide to run a database seems wasteful to me. Extravagantly wasteful. "Doors and windows open with the A/C cranked" wasteful.
throwaway9936 6y ago
It is an issue, you have to compare it to other forms of payment, and it's several magnitudes worse than any alternative. > A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment. Read for instance this: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064 https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064
- knuthsat 6y ago
  But other forms of payment are also non-issue. It's like trying to optimize my internet usage. Instead of having 200Mbit downlink active all the time (because I'm streaming random bits), I'll reduce it to 2Mbit because of energy consumption. Compared to everything else I'm doing, internet usage is a non-issue. We need to think about optimizing environmental destruction, water pollution, air pollution. Bitcoin consuming as much electricity as Argentina still does magnitudes less damage with that electricity than Argentina. I really do not see the issue. This Bitcoin environmental/energy footprint subject is getting so much attention and I really can't grok why. I can't believe someone would try to optimize the fastest functions first, instead of slow ones.
  - dralley 6y ago
    We are "optimizing the slow ones" so to speak. Per-capita electricity consumption peaked in 1979 and has been going down ever since due to improvements in efficiency. The same is true of per-capita oil consumption. And if you see a "fast function" that's just obviously unnecessary, which is trivial to get rid of, then of course you do that. I do that all the time.
DennisP 6y ago
I guess half a percent of the world's electricity consumption isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, but if Bitcoin's price goes up 10X then so will its energy usage. Mining effort is proportional to the value of the block reward. https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons

titzer 6y ago

You can keep arguing until you are blue in the face, but Bitcoin will continue to be a boondoggle that should never have happened. For the life of me I cannot understand the attitude that because someone somewhere did something worse we should stop caring and stop working on solutions. We're on a sinking ship with leaks everywhere. Plug some leaks instead of arguing about it! But you'll come back with "oh we need to allocate resources in the most impactful way possible", which we argue about for decades and never do anything. Meanwhile, new leaks are springing up every second.

solosoyokaze 6y ago
You have to expend resources to make progress. The alternative to Bitcoin is a bloody worldwide revolution. Most people aren't actually happy living in a world of extreme inequality where only the 0.01% have any say in how our society is run. Getting off state backed currency is a prerequisite to social progress. Bitcoin is doing this in a bloodless, warless manner.
- DennisP 6y ago
  Actually the alternative is proof-of-stake, which accomplishes the same objectives as Bitcoin with very little energy consumption.
- robjan 6y ago
  Look at the distribution of Bitcoin. Do you think it's any different? A small number of people (I'm excluding the exchanges here) controll the majority of the bitcoins.
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    Correct, but the properties of Bitcoin are baked into the protocol and not up for policy debate. The Bitcoin Core people can't get together and cause massive inflation, wiping out everyone's savings and lowering the value of their salaries. Most importantly, no military is needed to secure the value of BTC. The US is in a constant state of warfare to keep its position on the top of the world hierarchy, which is what gives USD the value it has. I'll take a GPU mining in Iceland over a bomb dropped in the Middle East as the backing to my finances any day of the week.
    - titzer 6y ago
      > I'll take a GPU mining in Iceland over a bomb dropped in the Middle East as the backing to my finances any day of the week. This is a false choice, clearly. But regardless, I don't think you're properly accounting for how bad of an externality climate change is, and the (completely unnecessary) CO2 emissions from mining bitcoins is directly linked to a whole future of bad things happening, not just a single bomb.
- titzer 6y ago
  > Bitcoin is doing this in a bloodless, warless manner. Man, what koolaid. Bitcoin is a speculation market that has done nothing but benefit rich speculators and its computational demand has led to vast negative externalities for the planet. Stop doing that! Maybe you should support a bloodless revolution by volunteering at a soup kitchen.

jellicle 6y ago

Really? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 "Bitcoin uses more electricity annually than the whole of Argentina, analysis by Cambridge University suggests. " Using more electricity than most nations worldwide to run a database seems wasteful to me. Extravagantly wasteful. "Doors and windows open with the A/C cranked" wasteful.

throwaway9936 6y ago

It is an issue, you have to compare it to other forms of payment, and it's several magnitudes worse than any alternative. > A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment. Read for instance this: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064 https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064

knuthsat 6y ago
But other forms of payment are also non-issue. It's like trying to optimize my internet usage. Instead of having 200Mbit downlink active all the time (because I'm streaming random bits), I'll reduce it to 2Mbit because of energy consumption. Compared to everything else I'm doing, internet usage is a non-issue. We need to think about optimizing environmental destruction, water pollution, air pollution. Bitcoin consuming as much electricity as Argentina still does magnitudes less damage with that electricity than Argentina. I really do not see the issue. This Bitcoin environmental/energy footprint subject is getting so much attention and I really can't grok why. I can't believe someone would try to optimize the fastest functions first, instead of slow ones.
- dralley 6y ago
  We are "optimizing the slow ones" so to speak. Per-capita electricity consumption peaked in 1979 and has been going down ever since due to improvements in efficiency. The same is true of per-capita oil consumption. And if you see a "fast function" that's just obviously unnecessary, which is trivial to get rid of, then of course you do that. I do that all the time.

DennisP 6y ago

I guess half a percent of the world's electricity consumption isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, but if Bitcoin's price goes up 10X then so will its energy usage. Mining effort is proportional to the value of the block reward. https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons