6 ms·

Elon Musk wants clean power. But Tesla's carrying Bitcoin's dirty baggage

37 points by laurex 6y ago

randompwd 6y ago
All these articles and yet none of them have articulated the carbon cost of the current financial system.
- kerng 6y ago
  I argued the same earlier today and got downvoted by HN. I agree with you.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  What exactly do you mean about "articulated" ? They certainly mentioned it...
  - randompwd 6y ago
    the article says: > Some bitcoin proponents note, meanwhile, that the existing financial system with its millions of employees and computers in air-conditioned offices uses large amounts of energy too. There's 0 details or comparisons in there.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    I don't see any mention of the hundreds of dollars of fees and car and airplane trips to banks and governmental offices to sign dozens of papers that are necessary to transfer between un-allied/distant countries - the exact thing where Bitcoin absolutely shines and is used for that a lot. People say how there's always an alternative without thinking about what that alternative is exactly.
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Yes, that's a very good point ! On first order of approximation you can take how much a miner gains on average per transaction (mining+fees), which is probably much easier to calculate than the real cost of the other side (I guess one could check how much Western Union takes ?) Sometimes people compare it with Visa/Mastercard costs, but it's unfair when you're talking about unallied countries, as those benefit from the discount coming from operating at scale in allied countries, and the bitcoin network cannot be consistently shut down without shutting down the Internet itself !
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
BlueTemplar 6y ago
Why would bitcoin miners care about intermittent power ? Wouldn't those windy German days when electric energy prices turn negative be very attractive to them ? Or is bitcoin mining hardware still quickly getting obsolete ?
- emteycz 6y ago
  Of course yes, similarly in China with hydro power and in Iceland with geothermals, but that's impossible to explain to these 'critics', they don't even accept the concept of waste electricity - in their world electricity can easily beam anywhere across the Earth without any costs and infrastructure and/or be stored for however long in whatever amount, for free. Even the fact that ordinary electricity costs 3 times the earnings from mining doesn't stop them. Anecdotes about a brother of their friend's cousin mining using GPUs will be invoked to argue people are mining in their basements using grid electricity and thus the Bitcoin network uses fossil fuels, even though mining with GPUs is impossible for many years now. The benefits of Bitcoin will be handwaved away even though they criticize the "high cost" of transactions - who the hell uses these costly transactions if Bitcoin is so useless and can be replaced by cheaper and better methods?
jjk166 6y ago
The electricity cost of processing a bitcoin transaction on a dedicated ASIC mining rig is, at the moment, 308 kwh. This is roughly equivalent to the energy content of 100 gallons of gasoline. Assuming electricity is produced at the local power plant from fossil fuels at 40% overall efficiency, that electric vehicles have a powerplant to road efficiency of 30% while internal combustion car averages 20 mpg, if you drive for 100,000 miles over the course of a car's lifetime, you will save the equivalent of 8,750 gallons of gasoline. Paying for your tesla with bitcoin will decrease those lifetime carbon savings by 2.8%. If for every 35 people who pay for their tesla in bitcoin, 1 is someone who wouldn't have bought an electric vehicle otherwise, there is still a net overall decrease in CO2 emissions.
- frongpik 6y ago
  I'd assume those 308 kWh come from a hydro station nearby and drop the loosy calculations about teslas and gallons.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    My analysis is a worst case scenario, if you use green energy sources it only gets better.
- craftinator 6y ago
  > The electricity cost of processing a bitcoin transaction on a dedicated ASIC mining rig is, at the moment, 308 kwh. Source?
  - jjk166 6y ago
    A current ASIC bitcoin miner will do 90 Terahashes per second (1 Terahash = 1 trillion hashes) while consuming 3420 Watts which is equivalent to 38 Watts per Terahash (38 W/TH). Average power consumption will be higher, though those with big dedicated rigs probably make up the bulk of the network's processing power. The entire bitcoin mining network which processes all transactions does 120 Exahashes (120,000,000 terahashes) per second. Were all mining done on comparable asics this would be 4.56 GW to run the whole network, which in turn means electricity consumption would be 4.56 million kwh per hour. At the time of this writing bitcoin is averaging 14,814 transactions per hour, meaning the average electricity consumption per transaction is 308 kwh. You can see the hash rates and power consumption for bitcoin miners at [0]. Hash rates for the network at [1]. Transaction rate at [2]. [0] https://www.asicminervalue.com/efficiency/sha-256 https://www.asicminervalue.com/efficiency/sha-256 [1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate [2] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second
jude- 6y ago
There's lots of misdirected anger these last few days towards Bitcoin. First, the only thing that's energy-intensive about Bitcoin is block production. Making transactions, relaying them, validating them and storing them have negligible energy cost. Second, nothing about the Bitcoin protocol requires block production to use fossil fuels. Just like with every other energy-intensive industry, the problem isn't the industry. The problem is the fossil fuel use. Therefore, if you want to get mad about the high energy use of block production leading to environmental pollution, you should direct that anger at the appropriate target: miners who use fossil fuels to mine. How do we fix this? The same way we fixed it in every other energy-intensive industry: through taxes and regulation. Let's get some laws passed to require miners in your area to use only renewable energy, and to require exchanges to impose a carbon tax on coins whose miners rely on fossil fuels to mine. Properly applied, these laws would make fossil-fuel mining unprofitable, which is exactly what we want. Bitcoin and PoW aren't going anywhere at this point. So let's make sure it's continued existence doesn't make the world worse. Sound good?
- uxcolumbo 6y ago
  Can you share some sources where I can read up on this? I checked the bitcoin docs - but couldn't find much about energy use (or I'm just not very good at searching ;) )
  - db48x 6y ago
    Mining a block requires a lot of calculations, calculations are done on computers, computers use electricity, and producing electricity necessarily produces pollution. Ergo, bitcoin is bad. Of course, the estimates of how much energy is used are always a bit suspect. I've seen articles like this that just don't quote any sources at all, and I've seen a number of them that all ultimately refer the same reddit comment from a decade ago where someone made an estimate of the per-hash electricity cost. They then scale that up to the current hash rate and use that as an authoritative figure. Of course, nobody adds up all the electricity used heating and cooling all the bank branches in the world, or the cost of the looping animations on the screens of all the ATMs in the world, or the food eaten by all of the bank tellers in the world. Single-book accounting can make anything look bad. But aside from that, the real story here is that the proof of work implementation allows the bitcoin system to spend money on something that makes certain kinds of attacks difficult or impossible. Other banking systems have to protect against those same attacks, but they do it by using trust between humans, exhaustive reporting and accounting requirements, and so on. As a result, those attacks are easier than in the bitcoin system, especially when international banks are involved. That big scandal in Germany where Wirecard told it's auditors that it had €1.9B in a bank in the Philippines comes to mind. It turns out that they forged the documents in an attempt to cover up their failing business. Forging a bitcoin transaction like that is impossible.
nexthash 6y ago
At current energy consumption rates for average mining equipment, it took 2.4 million terrawatts to mine Elon Musk's $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. Pretty sure that such horrendous energy consumption would be better used elsewhere, such as keeping the lights on in people's homes.
- craftinator 6y ago
  Source for electricity cost of $1.5 billion in bitcoin? I've seen a whole lot of anecdote, but no credible calculations, references, or studies.

37 points by laurex 6y ago

randompwd 6y ago

All these articles and yet none of them have articulated the carbon cost of the current financial system.

kerng 6y ago
I argued the same earlier today and got downvoted by HN. I agree with you.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
What exactly do you mean about "articulated" ? They certainly mentioned it...
- randompwd 6y ago
  the article says: > Some bitcoin proponents note, meanwhile, that the existing financial system with its millions of employees and computers in air-conditioned offices uses large amounts of energy too. There's 0 details or comparisons in there.
- emteycz 6y ago
  I don't see any mention of the hundreds of dollars of fees and car and airplane trips to banks and governmental offices to sign dozens of papers that are necessary to transfer between un-allied/distant countries - the exact thing where Bitcoin absolutely shines and is used for that a lot. People say how there's always an alternative without thinking about what that alternative is exactly.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Yes, that's a very good point ! On first order of approximation you can take how much a miner gains on average per transaction (mining+fees), which is probably much easier to calculate than the real cost of the other side (I guess one could check how much Western Union takes ?) Sometimes people compare it with Visa/Mastercard costs, but it's unfair when you're talking about unallied countries, as those benefit from the discount coming from operating at scale in allied countries, and the bitcoin network cannot be consistently shut down without shutting down the Internet itself !
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

BlueTemplar 6y ago

Why would bitcoin miners care about intermittent power ? Wouldn't those windy German days when electric energy prices turn negative be very attractive to them ? Or is bitcoin mining hardware still quickly getting obsolete ?

emteycz 6y ago
Of course yes, similarly in China with hydro power and in Iceland with geothermals, but that's impossible to explain to these 'critics', they don't even accept the concept of waste electricity - in their world electricity can easily beam anywhere across the Earth without any costs and infrastructure and/or be stored for however long in whatever amount, for free. Even the fact that ordinary electricity costs 3 times the earnings from mining doesn't stop them. Anecdotes about a brother of their friend's cousin mining using GPUs will be invoked to argue people are mining in their basements using grid electricity and thus the Bitcoin network uses fossil fuels, even though mining with GPUs is impossible for many years now. The benefits of Bitcoin will be handwaved away even though they criticize the "high cost" of transactions - who the hell uses these costly transactions if Bitcoin is so useless and can be replaced by cheaper and better methods?

jjk166 6y ago

The electricity cost of processing a bitcoin transaction on a dedicated ASIC mining rig is, at the moment, 308 kwh. This is roughly equivalent to the energy content of 100 gallons of gasoline. Assuming electricity is produced at the local power plant from fossil fuels at 40% overall efficiency, that electric vehicles have a powerplant to road efficiency of 30% while internal combustion car averages 20 mpg, if you drive for 100,000 miles over the course of a car's lifetime, you will save the equivalent of 8,750 gallons of gasoline. Paying for your tesla with bitcoin will decrease those lifetime carbon savings by 2.8%. If for every 35 people who pay for their tesla in bitcoin, 1 is someone who wouldn't have bought an electric vehicle otherwise, there is still a net overall decrease in CO2 emissions.

frongpik 6y ago
I'd assume those 308 kWh come from a hydro station nearby and drop the loosy calculations about teslas and gallons.
- jjk166 6y ago
  My analysis is a worst case scenario, if you use green energy sources it only gets better.
craftinator 6y ago
> The electricity cost of processing a bitcoin transaction on a dedicated ASIC mining rig is, at the moment, 308 kwh. Source?
- jjk166 6y ago
  A current ASIC bitcoin miner will do 90 Terahashes per second (1 Terahash = 1 trillion hashes) while consuming 3420 Watts which is equivalent to 38 Watts per Terahash (38 W/TH). Average power consumption will be higher, though those with big dedicated rigs probably make up the bulk of the network's processing power. The entire bitcoin mining network which processes all transactions does 120 Exahashes (120,000,000 terahashes) per second. Were all mining done on comparable asics this would be 4.56 GW to run the whole network, which in turn means electricity consumption would be 4.56 million kwh per hour. At the time of this writing bitcoin is averaging 14,814 transactions per hour, meaning the average electricity consumption per transaction is 308 kwh. You can see the hash rates and power consumption for bitcoin miners at [0]. Hash rates for the network at [1]. Transaction rate at [2]. [0] https://www.asicminervalue.com/efficiency/sha-256 https://www.asicminervalue.com/efficiency/sha-256 [1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate [2] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second

jude- 6y ago

There's lots of misdirected anger these last few days towards Bitcoin. First, the only thing that's energy-intensive about Bitcoin is block production. Making transactions, relaying them, validating them and storing them have negligible energy cost. Second, nothing about the Bitcoin protocol requires block production to use fossil fuels. Just like with every other energy-intensive industry, the problem isn't the industry. The problem is the fossil fuel use. Therefore, if you want to get mad about the high energy use of block production leading to environmental pollution, you should direct that anger at the appropriate target: miners who use fossil fuels to mine. How do we fix this? The same way we fixed it in every other energy-intensive industry: through taxes and regulation. Let's get some laws passed to require miners in your area to use only renewable energy, and to require exchanges to impose a carbon tax on coins whose miners rely on fossil fuels to mine. Properly applied, these laws would make fossil-fuel mining unprofitable, which is exactly what we want. Bitcoin and PoW aren't going anywhere at this point. So let's make sure it's continued existence doesn't make the world worse. Sound good?

uxcolumbo 6y ago
Can you share some sources where I can read up on this? I checked the bitcoin docs - but couldn't find much about energy use (or I'm just not very good at searching ;) )
- db48x 6y ago
  Mining a block requires a lot of calculations, calculations are done on computers, computers use electricity, and producing electricity necessarily produces pollution. Ergo, bitcoin is bad. Of course, the estimates of how much energy is used are always a bit suspect. I've seen articles like this that just don't quote any sources at all, and I've seen a number of them that all ultimately refer the same reddit comment from a decade ago where someone made an estimate of the per-hash electricity cost. They then scale that up to the current hash rate and use that as an authoritative figure. Of course, nobody adds up all the electricity used heating and cooling all the bank branches in the world, or the cost of the looping animations on the screens of all the ATMs in the world, or the food eaten by all of the bank tellers in the world. Single-book accounting can make anything look bad. But aside from that, the real story here is that the proof of work implementation allows the bitcoin system to spend money on something that makes certain kinds of attacks difficult or impossible. Other banking systems have to protect against those same attacks, but they do it by using trust between humans, exhaustive reporting and accounting requirements, and so on. As a result, those attacks are easier than in the bitcoin system, especially when international banks are involved. That big scandal in Germany where Wirecard told it's auditors that it had €1.9B in a bank in the Philippines comes to mind. It turns out that they forged the documents in an attempt to cover up their failing business. Forging a bitcoin transaction like that is impossible.

nexthash 6y ago

At current energy consumption rates for average mining equipment, it took 2.4 million terrawatts to mine Elon Musk's $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. Pretty sure that such horrendous energy consumption would be better used elsewhere, such as keeping the lights on in people's homes.

craftinator 6y ago
Source for electricity cost of $1.5 billion in bitcoin? I've seen a whole lot of anecdote, but no credible calculations, references, or studies.