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Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime
- FranckLeroy 6y agoThis is how insanely bad Bitcoin is for the environment : If you buy a Tesla car (around 40 000 $) in Bitcoins, the impact of the mining of those bitcoins is around 80 tons of CO2. This is 4 times more than the savings of CO2 you can expect from this car (compared to a gasoline one) on its entire lifetime (around -20 tons).
- cwhiz 6y agoThis seems flawed. A single Bitcoin can be split into 100,000,000 pieces and spent infinitely. It may cost some X amount to mine it, but that is not an ongoing cost.
- lxgr 6y agoYes, a more precise value would arguably be the CO2 impact of mining associated with the transaction fees, together with some fraction of the "mining cost" of the coins spent.
- bttrfl 6y agoIt's not a problem of Bitcoin but the reality in which there is no cap on externalities. Every sane person will try to limit consumption/waste of critical resources if she knows the resource is limited. It's an easy choice to make. Do I take bath if I have just a bottle to drink while being lost on a desert? Do I keep car engine on in a garage? For our convenience, any side effects of our consumption are hidden from us. We don't have to kill our bacon, keep waste at home, or enslave children to drink our cocoa. Occasionally we will shed a tear while watching a documentary about lovely, furry animals with sad eyes.
- aidenn0 6y agoIt's true that if we just put a tax on CO2, then either the price of BTC would go up, or the work factor would go down. However, that seems to be less politically feasible than banning BTC.
- aero-glide2 6y agoThis is very very misleading. That bitcoin won't be used just once. After you give it to someone, they will use it too.
- ianai 6y agoWhich would be more compelling if Bitcoin weren’t hoarded and were actually usable as a currency.
- dnautics 6y agoYou mean like for purchasing a tesla?
- africanboy 6y agowhen did it happen?
- lxgr 6y ago> That bitcoin won't be used just once. Which will incur further fees, compounding the problem. (Admittedly, the fees are usually much lower than the value of the coins transmitted in a given transaction.)
- ohiovr 6y agoIf I wanted to mine a bitcoin to buy a tesla that is going to use some electricity.
- hggh 6y agoAnd what about the CO2 impact of using traditional banking (air conditioning, heating, commuting...)
- lm28469 6y agoWhat about the people commuting to the factory producing the cpus used to mine bitcoins, what about the people commuting to the car factory producing the cars of the people commuting to the cpu factory ? &c. We can play that game for a long time and nothing of value will be written
- temp8964 6y agoBecause you don't want to "play that game", so you can just assume the financial infrastructure costs zero? Is this how you "play that game"?
- lxgr 6y agoIt's definitely not zero, but I don't know any process in the financial industry that explicitly incentivizes wasting electricity. If business class tickets become cheaper, financial analysts will not start buying more plane tickets. Bitcoin miners on the other hand will start mining twice as fast the second the electricity price drops by half. It also doesn't seem like Bitcoin stakeholders are remotely interested in transitioning the system off proof-of-work and towards less wasteful alternatives, or even just making it more tractable as a retail payment system.
- dnautics 6y ago> I don't know any process in the financial industry that explicitly incentivizes wasting electricity Inflation. If you don't spend your money, it loses value. This is actually part of the economic program (inflate to grow demand). What are you going to spend it on? Stuff or sevices. Stuff takes electricity to make. Services take electricity to perform. You could also invest, but that's also just indirectly incentivising stuff and services, except in a trickle down fashion (put money into the corporation that's gonna do these things). Bitcoin may be wasteful, but, its energy cost is explicit and not hidden, which is why it's attacked.
- bluesign 6y ago- I think 80 tons of CO2 for BTC is wrong. It should be around 15-20 tons (75% of BTC is mined with renewables, I think approx 20-25% is coal) - for US, CO2 per $ GDP should be around 0.3 kg - so if BTC is 50000$ value, it is almost same CO2 then something else US produce, (it would be 50000* 0.3 = 15 tons) - if we assume those numbers correct, lets assume they are both 15 tons, it means 50% of the things US produce is less carbon friendly for environment than bitcoin. - also BTC will be reused ( it is on article though )
- ianai 6y agoThe average is not the median.
- bluesign 6y agotrue but you don't need median here: if you produce 1 hammer, 1000 nails. average thing produced is not 50% chance hammer, 50% nail, it should be weighted.
- lxgr 6y agoRenewables don't exist in a vacuum: "Green" miners buying up capacity drives up the price, driving others into non-renewables as a consequence (if only temporarily). Until we are at 100% renewables, supporting a more energy-consuming product/solution/process while alternatives readily exist should not be called "green", in my opinion.
- flyingfences 6y agoBitcoin mining operations are generally located where electricity is cheapest. Electricity is cheapest where there is a surplus of hydro power (or other power with very low marginal cost). Where there is a surplus, use of that surplus does not drive other customers to other power sources.
- lxgr 6y agoBy that logic, Bitcoin disincentivizes any investment in better grids and more efficient energy storage. Also, any such mining rig could have reasonably been a data center or scientific supercomputer instead.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoAre there any good papers on the BTC network robustness in the event of war. It is well known that major military powers have the ability to cut essentially every ocean-floor optical fiber bundle handling the backbone of the internet at a moment’s notice. If this happens, how would the bitcoin network respond without active connections to other mining nodes? E.g. would the Chinese miners automatically (algorithmically) decide that they are the only existing miners, and so on and so forth? Would an act like this essentially fork bitcoin into country segments because each communicating sub-group would think they have the ground truth until the global internet is physically reconnected? Would love to see a simulation of this.
- nooneiswatching 6y agoVery interesting thought. I believe that chains would initially split, effectively being forks of each other. However, the consensus algorithm of Bitcoin dictates that the chain with the most work is the valid one, meaning that in the event of a "reconnection", one of the chains would be abandoned (and everyone would agree which one to keep, namely the one with the most work). In the case of a total disconnect between countries, there is no other way than splitting the network. If partial connectivity exists (using satellites for example), transactions could still be broadcasted from one country to another. However, the same coins could be double-spent in your own isolated network as well... until a reorg happens upon reconnect.
- Hydraulix989 6y agoPhilosophical question: At what point do divergent chains become irreconcilably and separately valid? Is this a property we would ever want in a should-be decentralized currency? One way this can happen today is with intentional forks.
- Jimmc414 6y agoThat is actually a good and very practical question.
- rdtwo 6y agoWhat’s the lifetime of a Tesla anyway? 6 years?
- darig 6y agoThe bureaucracy of maintaining the value of a dollar goes far beyond ink and paper. All those bankers like to eat steaks. Lots of steaks.
- nradov 6y agoIronically in his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast Elon Musk spoke about about the need for a CO2 emissions tax to price in that externality. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2aB2swgyXqbFA06AxPlFmr?si=jHD9sszzRv2Lr5-mXAAx1A&utm_source=copy-link https://open.spotify.com/episode/2aB2swgyXqbFA06AxPlFmr?si=j...
- Tepix 6y agoWe need a significant worldwide CO2 emissions tax to get rid of the POW coins and replace them with something vastly more efficient. Bitcoin is unable to evolve due to lack of consensus. The only constant is change. If bitcoin is unable to change it will die.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoBut how else will we get rich without doing any work?
- Tepix 6y agoYou can still pump the new coins, you just won't need to create megatons of CO2 in the process.
- imtringued 6y agoYou can buy stocks. The company you are investing in can do the work on your behalf.
- cheeseomlit 6y agoOK then go ahead, what's your vastly more efficient solution?
- Tepix 6y agoIt seems that Avalanche consensus is a strong contender, isn't it?
- BluSyn 6y agoPoW isn't going anywhere. CO2 tax would just push more mining to renewable, which 80% of it already is. This is all FUD.
- Tepix 6y agoPOW is taking renewable energy away from other consumers of electricity.
- zMiller 6y agoArticles like this while well meaning and coming from a good place are extremely naive and myopic. Do a bit of research in terms of the costs in lives and “, yes c02, of the current status quo and petro dollar complex. Do some research on how many human productive hours where lost in debasement and irresponsible monetary policy (fun fact the GFC cost around 70,000$ per American) I can go on forever and should you be interested id be more than happy to point you in the direction of sound research that has been done on this topic rather than this click bait
- 67868018 6y agoThese comments are worthless if you don't have the receipts to back them up. Be better than the rest of the internet.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zMiller 6y agohttps://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/03/19/global-warming-and-the-iraq-war/ https://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/03/19/global-warming-a... https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-social-and-political-costs-of-the-financial-crisis-10-years-later https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-social-and-political-costs-of-th... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-02-09/what-people-get-wrong-about-bitcoin-s-climate-footprint-nic-carter-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-02-09/what-people... Happy to offer much more if requested
- 67868018 6y agoNone of these are peer reviewed journals
- esotericn 6y agoAs far as I'm concerned, this is equivalent to the statement that "refrigerating beer causes the ozone layer to fail". There was a time that it did, and then we banned CFCs, and now it doesn't. Shouting at people about CO2 is simply never ever ever going to fix the problem. It needs to be incentivised or it won't happen.
- neatwithatwist 6y agoNot to mention individuals aren't even the cause of creating most of the greenhouse gas volume behind climate change. It's massive corporations creating something like 90% of all greenhouse gasses? 100 of them create 71% (https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=corporations+creating+the+most+greenhouse+gasses&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=corpora...) So when Shell and BP are on Twitter sharing ways to change your behavior to save the environment, it's like the murderer encouraging you to wear a lucky charm to prevent being murdered, as they're standing over you with the knife.
- Tarsul 6y agowell, if only we hadn't have forgotten that corporations work for the people, imagine the world we could live in.
- EveYoung 6y agoUnless individuals change their purchasing behaviour, big cooperations will have little incentive to do anything different. It's the same as "blaming" China for high emissions while still buying products manufactured under these conditions.
- away_throw 6y agoThe question is where to source alternatives. It is significantly harder to find products from alternative sources. For some products, the only solution is DIY.
- gruez 6y ago
- jjk166 6y agoThe difficulty of mining bitcoin is variable, whereas for gold it is (comparatively) constant. The energy cost of creating $40,000 worth of bitcoin right now is very different from the energy cost of $40,000 worth of bitcoin having been created. It is estimated that 190,000 Tons of gold have been produced in history, which is 53.8 years worth at current production rates. That current production rate requires 132 TWh per year, so the total cost of producing the gold in circulation should be approximately 7100 TWh. The total power consumption of bitcoin has been approximately 370 TWh. The market cap for gold is approximately 11 times higher than bitcoin's, but that would still only be 4070 TWh when normalized. On average that's 0.37 kwh per dollar of bitcoin mined to date vs 0.64 kwh per dollar of gold mined to date.
- guenthert 6y agoA good share of the gold mined is not in circulation. Besides other uses, the bond wires of every chip are made out of gold. Bitcoin is "the gift which keeps on giving". Every transaction, not only the original "mining", incurs a substantial ecological cost. The share of gold otoh used as financial tool is often not moved at all in transactions. E.g. a good share of it is stored in some vaults and virtually never moved. Most of Germany's gold was store in Fort Knox for more than sixty years, see https://www.ft.com/content/4edf00ee-a43c-11e7-8d56-98a09be71849 https://www.ft.com/content/4edf00ee-a43c-11e7-8d56-98a09be71... .
- jjk166 6y agoAnd plenty of bitcoin is not in circulation, but that is irrelevant. The comparison is between the ecological cost of mining bitcoin versus mining gold. Like gold, bitcoin does not actually have to change hands to be used. If people deposit bitcoin into a virtual vault, they can exchange it with eachother all day long without anything being processed on the network. It's only when someone withdraws their bitcoin from that vault that they need to process a real transaction - equivalent to physically moving gold. The difference between bitcoin and gold is that the environmental costs of transferring value by gold increase with distance and quantity: it takes a lot more to ship a ton of gold around the world than handing a coin to a person next door. Bitcoin, on the other hand has a fixed cost - the transaction to buy a pizza is no different from the transaction to buy a pizzeria. Of course you're not going to wire a bitcoin to the local pizza boy, you're going to go through an intermediary that provides a lower cost transaction. You use bitcoin for the big transfers where it is competitive both financially and ecologically with transporting similar value in physical assets.
- BluSyn 6y agoThis is all FUD. Miners largely use renewable power that is excess, not expensive dirty power plants. Here's a good breakdown of the counter argument: https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587 https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587
- mgh2 6y agoThe author seems to have a conflict of interest, do you have additional analysis or proof (ex: peer reviewed papers)?
- throwawayboise 6y agoElectric power is fungible. Any renewable power used for Bitcoin is power that cannot be used to offset carbon emissions.
- thatfrenchguy 6y agoThis is not how power grids work. Renewables have priority over dirtier peaker plants. If you turn off bitcoin mining, the average CO2 per kw emitted by the grid goes down.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cwkoss 6y agoLol, that the author isn't accounting for Bitcoins being used more than once makes this comparison one of the most laughable "bitcoin is too energy inefficient" arguments I've seen yet. This is basically like saying, "If you only account for the first passenger on the bus, busses are way less efficient than everyone driving their own sportscar!".
- filleduchaos 6y agoEach subsequent transaction still uses a significant amount of energy, no?
- cwkoss 6y agoYeah, a better comparison would be energy usage per transaction, and completely disregard coin creation as a distinct kind of transaction (fundamentally, coin creation is just another transaction in the block). There are still many caveats and nuances when analyzing this number, but at least it would be a valid comparison.
- aeternum 6y agoThe miner hash power secures the blockchain and is independent of transaction rate. Increasing the transaction rate does not require any additional energy expenditure and transaction rate (block size) has already been increased twice since Bitcoin's inception. Dividing the total power consumption of bitcoin by the relatively small transaction rate makes for good headlines so I'd expect it to continue even though the two are unrelated.
- Triv888 6y agoAnd they verify many transactions each time they mine a block.
- EdSchouten 6y agoStill, how much energy would it take to print an equal amount of money in the form of banknotes?
- 6y ago