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My problem with these takes is that they're missing the forest through the trees. I don't believe you'll ever be able to solve climate change by shaming people

by Me1000 6y ago

My problem with these takes is that they're missing the forest through the trees. I don't believe you'll ever be able to solve climate change by shaming people based on their usage of electricity. The problem is not HOW people use electricity, it's how the electricity itself is generated. The electricity might be used to draw triangles on my screen, hash some value, keep me warm in my apartment, or make my car move; each of those things might be objectionable to someone. Ever since humans learned to harness electricity our usage has increased, and with it our quality of life has also increased. That's not going to change. The only way to prevent electricity usage from causing climate change is to regulate emissions themselves (either through carbon taxes or outright bans: that's for regulators to decide) and invest in alternative forms for electricity generation (that includes nuclear).

paulgb 6y ago
This would be a reasonable stance if Bitcoin were just another activity, but it’s unique in its energy profile. What other technology is designed so that energy efficiency improvements are absorbed and nullified (through the difficulty adjustment mechanism)?
- stouset 6y ago
  Precisely. Without Bitcoin, we could be retiring coal plants with the additional solar and wind that have been coming online. Instead, every additional Watt-hour we generate is used to mine Bitcoin on top of existing demand.
  - lai-yin 6y ago
    That's an absurd argument. And as long as we're using solar and wind, we'll need backup from coal, gas and nuclear for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. If you think increasing battery capacity will solve that, read up on the supply chain of lithium.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      Coal is a baseload generator. It cannot ramp up or down very easily. Nuclear is mostly baseload... not so much because its impossible to ramp-down nuclear, but because nuclear's initial-investment (site planning / engineering / regulations) are the bulk of its costs. Ongoing costs (ie: fuel) are miniscule. There's "no point" ramping down Nuclear, given its miniscule fuel costs. Might as well keep pumping electricity as long as the price of electricity is non-negative. So only gas ramps up-and-down. ------ As such, Solar / Wind + Gas Peaker combinations are very good for ramping down Coal production. Because the bulk of electricity is needed in the daytime (due to the hot sun making AC work harder), Solar/Wind + Gas Peakers will use less fossil fuels than a Coal baseload generator over the same period.
      - legutierr 6y ago
        What about hydroelectric? Is it not possible to ramp up and down there?
        dragontamer 6y ago
        Hydroelectric is great, but only when the geography + local water usage agrees with the construction project. For places like California which is facing a shortage of Water, Hydroelectric is a weaker option. Ex: if you run a dam in reverse for Pumped Storage, that implies sucking up the precious water from the lower-reservoir back up to the upper side. Realistically speaking, the near term future is Solar + Gas peakers. We should build out as much Hydro-electric as possible, but most good river sites are already built out. (IE: Rivers which have a large change in elevation to make a Dam project actually worthwhile).
        legutierr 6y ago
        I read somewhere recently that if existing dams in West Virginia were retrofitted with hydroelectric capabilities, they could yield something close to the power requirements of New York City. Maybe hydroelectric isn't an option for California, but in the east, there might be much more of an opportunity.
- ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
  No design needed. If the price of gold doubles, twice as much resources can be invested to dig up a ton of gold.
  - praxulus 6y ago
    That applies to bitcoin too, but gold doesn't also become twice as hard to dig up just because mining equipment became twice as efficient.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >gold doesn't also become twice as hard to dig up just because mining equipment became twice as efficient. it does, kind of. as we use up the easy to find deposits, the remaining deposits are harder to mine/refine, so essentially it does get harder.
  - Guvante 6y ago
    Gold has an intrinsic additional cost to acquiring that is unrelated to humans. There exist deposits that are harder to get to in the world and it isn't currently economically viable to extract them. This isn't mankind's doing it is just a truth of the world. Bitcoin adds artificial scarcity that isn't intrinsic. And unfortunately society as a whole pays for that additional scarcity by increasing the resources spent mining blocks. I am not saying this is an unacceptable trade-off all things considered. I just think the gold analogy is flawed.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >Gold has an intrinsic additional cost to acquiring that is unrelated to humans. There exist deposits that are harder to get to in the world and it isn't currently economically viable to extract them. This isn't mankind's doing it is just a truth of the world. I disagree. Gold was specifically chosen to be rare and hard to counterfeit. That's why we don't use sea shells as a store of value. In that respect I don't see how awarding value to holders of a shinny yellow metal is any different than awarding value to holders of a hard to find hash.
- ballenf 6y ago
  Bitcoin is far from unique in this. When gas prices fall people have been shown to drive more. And buy less efficient cars and drive them less efficiently (faster, more aggressively). When water prices are lower people water their lawns more and take more baths. When shipping ePackets from China is cheap, people buy more stuff from there. I just don’t see how Bitcoin responding to supply and demand is different from any other consumable. It feels like the argument makes the unstated presumption that Bitcoin has no utility, which is a separate debate. Bitcoin advocates would say that more and more miners arguably provide greater security assurances making the currency itself more valuable.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    > Bitcoin is far from unique in this. When gas prices fall people have been shown to drive more. This is human behavior responding to incentives. Yes, more energy is burned, but more people get places. What I’m talking about is like if a car responded to the price of gas decreasing by 50% by revving in neutral until the total cost per mile was the same.
  - ufo 6y ago
    I think this is not what the parent poster was saying. The problem of bitcoin is not one of induced demand, where cheaper goods means that people become willing to use it less efficiently. Difficulty adjustment is as if every car monitored its MPG and then dynamically adjusted the engine until it became as efficient as a 2003 hummer. When the mining efficiency is increased, that isn't translated into more bitcoins being mined or more people benefiting from bitcoin. The matching mining difficulty increase ensures that all that extra efficiency will be turned into waste heat.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    >> This would be a reasonable stance if Bitcoin were just another activity, but it’s unique in its energy profile. What other technology is designed so that energy efficiency improvements are absorbed and nullified (through the difficulty adjustment mechanism)? > Bitcoin is far from unique in this. When gas prices fall people have been shown to drive more. And buy less efficient cars and drive them less efficiently (faster, more aggressively). I don't think that's true, or it's only true if you look at it from a consumption perspective that ignores important parts of the picture. When gas prices fall, more energy is used, but travel miles increase. More work gets done per dollar. When bitcoin mining gets more efficient or energy cheaper, the amount of bicoin "work" done stays constant, because the difficulty changes to compensate. It's like if roads got longer the cheaper gas gets.
- Me1000 6y ago
  This is both a good and a fair critique of bitcoin. But I don't understand the endgame. Should the use of bitcoin be banned or just shamed? Let's assume for a moment that I live "off the grid" and run my full BTC node using my own solar power. Is that something that should be banned? Should it be shamed? I don't know where to draw the line.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    This is a great question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’d at least like to see CEOs who put it on their balance sheet put to task for it. E.g. putting it on your books should be penalized by ESG funds. Elon Musk shouldn’t get away with greenwashing it through Tesla’s (possibly overrated anyway) environmental halo. Nor should California taxpayers be subsidizing electric vehicles if the carbon benefits are negated by the manufacturer’s Bitcoin holdings.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >This is a great question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’d at least like to see CEOs who put it on their balance sheet put to task for it Should CEOs who put gold on their balance sheets be put to task for the environmental damage that causes? Should companies that buy conflict minerals be put to task for that as well? If so, you're just describing a pollution tax.
      - paulgb 6y ago
        Yes, I think they should. The difference between this and a tax is that it’s not done by the government, but for what it’s worth I don’t oppose that either.
      - jcranmer 6y ago
        > Should companies that buy conflict minerals be put to task for that as well? They very frequently are.
    - wskinner 6y ago
      What is the marginal environmental impact of a company adding 1BTC to its balance sheet?
- jliptzin 6y ago
  Compared to other methods of money transfer I think Bitcoin does pretty well in terms of its energy usage. How much energy is used printing money and shipping it to various banks in Brinks trucks? How much is used building and operating millions of bank branches/ATMs worldwide?
  - svachalek 6y ago
    Cash is terrible. But that's not all "other methods of money transfer". Compared to an ATM debit, credit card payment, or even most modern crypto coins, the energy cost of Bitcoin is ridiculous.
    - jliptzin 6y ago
      The marginal cost to use an ATM is low but what about the fixed costs of installing them and the ongoing maintenance? How much methane is released into the atmosphere feeding bankers porterhouse steaks?
robomartin 6y ago
The problem is more fundamental than that. We cannot solve climate change by subtraction (eliminating things, usage, consumption, fuels, factories, etc.). We know this with absolute certainty through at least 800,000 years of highly accurate ice core atmospheric data.

by Me1000 6y ago

paulgb 6y ago

This would be a reasonable stance if Bitcoin were just another activity, but it’s unique in its energy profile. What other technology is designed so that energy efficiency improvements are absorbed and nullified (through the difficulty adjustment mechanism)?

stouset 6y ago
Precisely. Without Bitcoin, we could be retiring coal plants with the additional solar and wind that have been coming online. Instead, every additional Watt-hour we generate is used to mine Bitcoin on top of existing demand.
- lai-yin 6y ago
  That's an absurd argument. And as long as we're using solar and wind, we'll need backup from coal, gas and nuclear for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. If you think increasing battery capacity will solve that, read up on the supply chain of lithium.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    Coal is a baseload generator. It cannot ramp up or down very easily. Nuclear is mostly baseload... not so much because its impossible to ramp-down nuclear, but because nuclear's initial-investment (site planning / engineering / regulations) are the bulk of its costs. Ongoing costs (ie: fuel) are miniscule. There's "no point" ramping down Nuclear, given its miniscule fuel costs. Might as well keep pumping electricity as long as the price of electricity is non-negative. So only gas ramps up-and-down. ------ As such, Solar / Wind + Gas Peaker combinations are very good for ramping down Coal production. Because the bulk of electricity is needed in the daytime (due to the hot sun making AC work harder), Solar/Wind + Gas Peakers will use less fossil fuels than a Coal baseload generator over the same period.
    - legutierr 6y ago
      What about hydroelectric? Is it not possible to ramp up and down there?
      - dragontamer 6y ago
        Hydroelectric is great, but only when the geography + local water usage agrees with the construction project. For places like California which is facing a shortage of Water, Hydroelectric is a weaker option. Ex: if you run a dam in reverse for Pumped Storage, that implies sucking up the precious water from the lower-reservoir back up to the upper side. Realistically speaking, the near term future is Solar + Gas peakers. We should build out as much Hydro-electric as possible, but most good river sites are already built out. (IE: Rivers which have a large change in elevation to make a Dam project actually worthwhile).
        legutierr 6y ago
        I read somewhere recently that if existing dams in West Virginia were retrofitted with hydroelectric capabilities, they could yield something close to the power requirements of New York City. Maybe hydroelectric isn't an option for California, but in the east, there might be much more of an opportunity.
ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
No design needed. If the price of gold doubles, twice as much resources can be invested to dig up a ton of gold.
- praxulus 6y ago
  That applies to bitcoin too, but gold doesn't also become twice as hard to dig up just because mining equipment became twice as efficient.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >gold doesn't also become twice as hard to dig up just because mining equipment became twice as efficient. it does, kind of. as we use up the easy to find deposits, the remaining deposits are harder to mine/refine, so essentially it does get harder.
- Guvante 6y ago
  Gold has an intrinsic additional cost to acquiring that is unrelated to humans. There exist deposits that are harder to get to in the world and it isn't currently economically viable to extract them. This isn't mankind's doing it is just a truth of the world. Bitcoin adds artificial scarcity that isn't intrinsic. And unfortunately society as a whole pays for that additional scarcity by increasing the resources spent mining blocks. I am not saying this is an unacceptable trade-off all things considered. I just think the gold analogy is flawed.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >Gold has an intrinsic additional cost to acquiring that is unrelated to humans. There exist deposits that are harder to get to in the world and it isn't currently economically viable to extract them. This isn't mankind's doing it is just a truth of the world. I disagree. Gold was specifically chosen to be rare and hard to counterfeit. That's why we don't use sea shells as a store of value. In that respect I don't see how awarding value to holders of a shinny yellow metal is any different than awarding value to holders of a hard to find hash.
ballenf 6y ago
Bitcoin is far from unique in this. When gas prices fall people have been shown to drive more. And buy less efficient cars and drive them less efficiently (faster, more aggressively). When water prices are lower people water their lawns more and take more baths. When shipping ePackets from China is cheap, people buy more stuff from there. I just don’t see how Bitcoin responding to supply and demand is different from any other consumable. It feels like the argument makes the unstated presumption that Bitcoin has no utility, which is a separate debate. Bitcoin advocates would say that more and more miners arguably provide greater security assurances making the currency itself more valuable.
- paulgb 6y ago
  > Bitcoin is far from unique in this. When gas prices fall people have been shown to drive more. This is human behavior responding to incentives. Yes, more energy is burned, but more people get places. What I’m talking about is like if a car responded to the price of gas decreasing by 50% by revving in neutral until the total cost per mile was the same.
- ufo 6y ago
  I think this is not what the parent poster was saying. The problem of bitcoin is not one of induced demand, where cheaper goods means that people become willing to use it less efficiently. Difficulty adjustment is as if every car monitored its MPG and then dynamically adjusted the engine until it became as efficient as a 2003 hummer. When the mining efficiency is increased, that isn't translated into more bitcoins being mined or more people benefiting from bitcoin. The matching mining difficulty increase ensures that all that extra efficiency will be turned into waste heat.
- ardy42 6y ago
  >> This would be a reasonable stance if Bitcoin were just another activity, but it’s unique in its energy profile. What other technology is designed so that energy efficiency improvements are absorbed and nullified (through the difficulty adjustment mechanism)? > Bitcoin is far from unique in this. When gas prices fall people have been shown to drive more. And buy less efficient cars and drive them less efficiently (faster, more aggressively). I don't think that's true, or it's only true if you look at it from a consumption perspective that ignores important parts of the picture. When gas prices fall, more energy is used, but travel miles increase. More work gets done per dollar. When bitcoin mining gets more efficient or energy cheaper, the amount of bicoin "work" done stays constant, because the difficulty changes to compensate. It's like if roads got longer the cheaper gas gets.
Me1000 6y ago
This is both a good and a fair critique of bitcoin. But I don't understand the endgame. Should the use of bitcoin be banned or just shamed? Let's assume for a moment that I live "off the grid" and run my full BTC node using my own solar power. Is that something that should be banned? Should it be shamed? I don't know where to draw the line.
- paulgb 6y ago
  This is a great question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’d at least like to see CEOs who put it on their balance sheet put to task for it. E.g. putting it on your books should be penalized by ESG funds. Elon Musk shouldn’t get away with greenwashing it through Tesla’s (possibly overrated anyway) environmental halo. Nor should California taxpayers be subsidizing electric vehicles if the carbon benefits are negated by the manufacturer’s Bitcoin holdings.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >This is a great question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’d at least like to see CEOs who put it on their balance sheet put to task for it Should CEOs who put gold on their balance sheets be put to task for the environmental damage that causes? Should companies that buy conflict minerals be put to task for that as well? If so, you're just describing a pollution tax.
    - paulgb 6y ago
      Yes, I think they should. The difference between this and a tax is that it’s not done by the government, but for what it’s worth I don’t oppose that either.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      > Should companies that buy conflict minerals be put to task for that as well? They very frequently are.
  - wskinner 6y ago
    What is the marginal environmental impact of a company adding 1BTC to its balance sheet?
jliptzin 6y ago
Compared to other methods of money transfer I think Bitcoin does pretty well in terms of its energy usage. How much energy is used printing money and shipping it to various banks in Brinks trucks? How much is used building and operating millions of bank branches/ATMs worldwide?
- svachalek 6y ago
  Cash is terrible. But that's not all "other methods of money transfer". Compared to an ATM debit, credit card payment, or even most modern crypto coins, the energy cost of Bitcoin is ridiculous.
  - jliptzin 6y ago
    The marginal cost to use an ATM is low but what about the fixed costs of installing them and the ongoing maintenance? How much methane is released into the atmosphere feeding bankers porterhouse steaks?

robomartin 6y ago

The problem is more fundamental than that. We cannot solve climate change by subtraction (eliminating things, usage, consumption, fuels, factories, etc.). We know this with absolute certainty through at least 800,000 years of highly accurate ice core atmospheric data.