5 ms·

And what about the CO2 impact of using traditional banking (air conditioning, heating, commuting...)

by hggh 6y ago

lm28469 6y ago
What 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 ago
  Because 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 ago
    It'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.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        >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. How does spending money on clean energy infrastructure produce CO2 emissions? Obviously there is a trace amount because we are dependent on a CO2 based economy but in reality if the incentives were correct we would be able to increase spending without additional CO2 emissions. The problem begins with the fact that the central bank is distributing the fresh money in a way that drives Bitcoin up. So yes, we could argue that the central bank is directly responsible for the CO2 emissions of Bitcoin and the system itself is what's broken. Bitcoin is just the symptom.
lukev 6y ago
Is there any evidence that Bitcoin is actually displacing traditional banking? Using BTC for your savings or checking account would be an absolutely terrible idea given its volatility. No rational person would ditch traditional banking in favor of Bitcoin. So really, this is just whataboutism to deflect from the fact that, environmentally speaking, Bitcoin is one of the worst inventions of the century.
- high_priest 6y ago
  The "Volatility" is purely temporary because of the market still being built. Eventually, the limited supply will make the currency super-stable and make calculations of actual worth of something super-easy. https://youtube.com/shorts/5jsY7YSJBs4 https://youtube.com/shorts/5jsY7YSJBs4
  - lukev 6y ago
    The value of Bitcoin is driven almost entirely by speculation. Speculative assets are not known for their stability.
- tanseydavid 6y ago
  >> No rational person would ditch traditional banking in favor of Bitcoin. There are people who have made arrangements to receive their payroll disbursements in BTC. While there are not many of these people and they probably all still maintain some form of traditional bank account, I am curious if you would define these folks as irrational (by your definition)?
  - lukev 6y ago
    I'll ask you... Bitcoin is a high-risk, aggressive investment by any definition. Which is fine if you believe it and like that sort of thing (other than killing the planet but that's a different question.) Would you define someone who put 100% of their net worth into an aggressive, high-risk investment as irrational?
anonymouswacker 6y ago
What about the CO2 impact of fiat currency in practice by governments & central banks? War has costs, so does welfare, and the electricity used to spin propaganda, etc. These are externalities that nobody is looking into, unless they have tinfoil hats on.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Bitcoin is a paperclip optimizer. Every time you think the amount of energy it currently consumes is justified it will continue to consume more energy in the future.
67868018 6y ago
Mastercard just uses a Postgres database cluster which is significantly less computationally expensive than bitcoin. And it scales better.
Macha 6y ago
Bitcoin is 0.5% of global energy usage. https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons Is it 1/200 of global financial activity? Coindesk indicates that bitcoin had 25 million transactions versus Visa having 50 billion transactions. So that is 1/2000 [https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bitcoins-climate-footprint https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...] If Visa had a similar energy efficiency to bitcoin, the energy use of Visa alone would be larger than the current global energy use. This rules out unaccounted dependencies hiding a larger energy use than reported for the financial sector that would put bitcoin on a more even footing, even when you count things like "the US military" or "extracting oil to fuel cars" as an energy cost solely existing for the financial sector.
TrackerFF 6y ago
Tbf, traditional banking is more than just moving cash from one account to another. If anything, the vast majority of activity inside / within banks is dedicated to the numerous services they offer.

And what about the CO2 impact of using traditional banking (air conditioning, heating, commuting...)

by hggh 6y ago

And what about the CO2 impact of using traditional banking (air conditioning, heating, commuting...)

What 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 ago
Because 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 ago
  It'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.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      >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. How does spending money on clean energy infrastructure produce CO2 emissions? Obviously there is a trace amount because we are dependent on a CO2 based economy but in reality if the incentives were correct we would be able to increase spending without additional CO2 emissions. The problem begins with the fact that the central bank is distributing the fresh money in a way that drives Bitcoin up. So yes, we could argue that the central bank is directly responsible for the CO2 emissions of Bitcoin and the system itself is what's broken. Bitcoin is just the symptom.

lukev 6y ago

Is there any evidence that Bitcoin is actually displacing traditional banking? Using BTC for your savings or checking account would be an absolutely terrible idea given its volatility. No rational person would ditch traditional banking in favor of Bitcoin. So really, this is just whataboutism to deflect from the fact that, environmentally speaking, Bitcoin is one of the worst inventions of the century.

high_priest 6y ago
The "Volatility" is purely temporary because of the market still being built. Eventually, the limited supply will make the currency super-stable and make calculations of actual worth of something super-easy. https://youtube.com/shorts/5jsY7YSJBs4 https://youtube.com/shorts/5jsY7YSJBs4
- lukev 6y ago
  The value of Bitcoin is driven almost entirely by speculation. Speculative assets are not known for their stability.
tanseydavid 6y ago
>> No rational person would ditch traditional banking in favor of Bitcoin. There are people who have made arrangements to receive their payroll disbursements in BTC. While there are not many of these people and they probably all still maintain some form of traditional bank account, I am curious if you would define these folks as irrational (by your definition)?
- lukev 6y ago
  I'll ask you... Bitcoin is a high-risk, aggressive investment by any definition. Which is fine if you believe it and like that sort of thing (other than killing the planet but that's a different question.) Would you define someone who put 100% of their net worth into an aggressive, high-risk investment as irrational?

anonymouswacker 6y ago

What about the CO2 impact of fiat currency in practice by governments & central banks? War has costs, so does welfare, and the electricity used to spin propaganda, etc. These are externalities that nobody is looking into, unless they have tinfoil hats on.

imtringued 6y ago
Bitcoin is a paperclip optimizer. Every time you think the amount of energy it currently consumes is justified it will continue to consume more energy in the future.

67868018 6y ago

Mastercard just uses a Postgres database cluster which is significantly less computationally expensive than bitcoin. And it scales better.

Macha 6y ago

Bitcoin is 0.5% of global energy usage. https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons Is it 1/200 of global financial activity? Coindesk indicates that bitcoin had 25 million transactions versus Visa having 50 billion transactions. So that is 1/2000 [https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bitcoins-climate-footprint https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...] If Visa had a similar energy efficiency to bitcoin, the energy use of Visa alone would be larger than the current global energy use. This rules out unaccounted dependencies hiding a larger energy use than reported for the financial sector that would put bitcoin on a more even footing, even when you count things like "the US military" or "extracting oil to fuel cars" as an energy cost solely existing for the financial sector.

TrackerFF 6y ago

Tbf, traditional banking is more than just moving cash from one account to another. If anything, the vast majority of activity inside / within banks is dedicated to the numerous services they offer.