9 ms·
> responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages red flag this article is steeped in pseudoscience. you could spend a lifetime trying to model and predic
by kryogen1c 6y ago
> responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages
red flag this article is steeped in pseudoscience.
you could spend a lifetime trying to model and predict global weather patterns _with no outside intervention_. the idea that you could even make an attempt at attaching a number to this phenomena is laughable. what are the error bars here, 10,000%?
lets pretend, for example, you tried to estimate the impact of tsunamis assuming that we think this weather event is standard deviations more likely due to BTC (this is non-obvious and probably not true, but for the sake of argument). dozens of tsunamis around the globe will kill people and decimate cities, but your estimate will be multiple orders of magnitude off in some places like fukushima - a cursory glance at wikipedia indicates a lower bound of 300 billion dollars.
this is not to say that we shouldnt be concerned about rapid global climate system changes; on the contrary! junk science like this actively harms the cause. we dont have to sensationalize, reality and truth are scary enough.
- trident5000 6y agoYou could make up some fear mongering "study" about almost every energy using topic. AI and video rendering for instance which is often for some marginal purpose. Or heating pools, idle electronics, big homes with AC, leisure travel, all the useless crap bought and manufactured in China with dirty coal, etc.
- jf22 6y agoRight, and all those things are harmful to the planet.
- trident5000 6y agoMany I just listed use more energy than btc...so yes, they are.
- jf22 6y agoSo what are you saying, that because other things are also bad we can't have a discussion how bad one thing is?
- trident5000 6y agoIm saying you were being sarcastic thereby making the claim that those things are not harmful, and they are. Im not sure whats confusing here.
- jf22 6y agoI was not being sarcastic. Those things are harmful.
- pwinnski 6y agoYou mentioned five things, all of which are frequently focused on as contributors to global climate change. Well, I'm not sure I've seen "AI and video rendering" mentioned in that context, but I'm also not sure that they use more power than crypto mining. But definitely I've seen articles addressing idle electronics[0], big homes with AC[1], leisure travel[2], and "all the useless crap bought and manufactured in China with dirty coal"[3]. So it shouldn't be surprising that crypto mining is added to the list. Any and all heavy users of energy are contributing to climate change in some way, and the cost/benefit analysis for some are more justifiable than others. Food production is energy-hungry, but without it, people die. Nobody would die if crypto mining ended tomorrow. Thanks to government standards, idle electronics are better now than they were, and will continue to improve in the future. Big homes with A/C is a largely American problem without anything to really address it yet, but there has been a lot of attention focused on the issue already. In general a bad thing is bad whether there are worse things or not. Crypto mining is a big drain on energy resources with very little benefit, or with benefit to very few people, and it doesn't have to the biggest drain, or benefit the fewest number of people the least for that to be true. 0. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/keep-your-devices-wasting-energy-and-money https://www.nrdc.org/stories/keep-your-devices-wasting-energ... 1. https://www.ajc.com/news/local/are-air-conditioners-slowly-killing/CPdQohTaTmPPITuhSgjtWK/ https://www.ajc.com/news/local/are-air-conditioners-slowly-k... 2. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/25/8881364/greta-thunberg-climate-change-flying-airline https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/25/8881364/greta-th... 3. https://phys.org/news/2017-11-impact-climate-china-substantial-losses.html https://phys.org/news/2017-11-impact-climate-china-substanti...
- effie 6y agoBy endlessly arguing about regulating minor consumer/production classes the attention span and opportunities for effective change diminish. The regulation should happen for the big polluters first, i.e. coal plants, transport ships. When that is done and the problem is largely fixed, you can spend your time arguing about cryptocurrency taxation, why not. It makes no sense, in the current situation, to discuss 10000 small energy consumers and appropriate pollution tax for all of them. We need to fix the damn energy production first.
- jtkgkgnyn 6y agoHuman life in general is harmful to the planet. So what are you saying?
- jf22 6y agoI don't understand why you would feel as though this reply says anything. There is always something worse or has alternative consequences.
- unfamiliar 6y agoThat it's important to measure the impact of each accurately so that we can make sensible decisions about where to curtail said damages.
- pseudo0 6y agoMaking the study about bitcoin in particular seems like a clickbaity way of getting attention, when the core issue seems to be dirty power generation. Bitcoin makes up a tiny fraction of non-essential American power usage, so focusing on it in particular just seems like jumping on the "Bitcoin is terrible for the environment" bandwagon. Articles on this topic seem to pop up every couple weeks on HN lately, and they generally aren't novel or interesting.
- cecja 6y agoSTOP using whataboutism as an argument for crypto it's just pathetic at this moment.
- GavinMcG 6y agoAre you saying we shouldn't understand the consequences of what we do? It's useful to know that BTC has major externalities because it allows us to make a rational choice. We could make different choices about all the things you listed, too. Or not! But you seem to be actually arguing for willful blindness, here.
- trident5000 6y agoaRE yOu SayInG tHat No Im actually not. You said that. Pointing out that you can cherry pick and micro-analyze anything.
- GavinMcG 6y agoIt was a question. You seemed to be implying that any such study would be "fear-mongering" (your words). That suggests that you think the studies wouldn't be useful and that we shouldn't do them. Your playground rhetoric isn't helpful.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- effie 6y agoYou are misunderstanding the point. Of course, cryptocurrencies have externalities and it is good to quantify them. In that respect, the paper could be useful. The objection is, this paper makes no attempt to analyze and show cryptocurrencies are worth attention any more than other 1000 consumer classes. It just states "crypto has externalities", does not weight them properly in perspective and advocates for "more research" and "lets regulate". That is irresponsible. Regulation should happen at the biggest most important polluters such as transport and coal plants.
- GavinMcG 6y agoIt's a single paper. It responsibly limits itself to a manageable conclusion and responsibly points out where there are still open questions. Can you point out where in the paper the authors leap to "let's regulate" as you put it? There seems to be one small section about regulation, but it doesn't exactly advocate for it: it describes how their pricing research could be used in regulation. It describes challenges in regulating. But it responsibly avoids making moral/policy claims.
- rmorey 6y agoThis is not just some article, it's a peer-reviewed study from the University of Arizona. Surely it has fault, but honestly I don't think a "cursory glance at wikipedia" provides a compelling counterargument
- kspacewalk2 6y ago>This is not just some article, it's a peer-reviewed study from the University of Arizona. When junk science is peer-reviewed, it's even more of a problem.
- _Microft 6y agoSure, but how do you tell that this is "junk science" as you call it?
- falcolas 6y agoPerhaps it disagrees with their personal worldview, because it would make their Bitcoin investment a questionable move for the world. There's a lot of justification going on around people's bitcoin investments; you can't say a negative thing about it right now without being dogpiled.
- effie 6y agoBad arguments. Estimating social benefit of cryptocurrencies by the dollar cost of mining operations is obviously incorrect. No perspective on the big picture. Pollution they talk about is happening at power plants, not mining rigs. Net electric energy consumption of cryptocurrencies is less than 1% of world total. Proposing targeted regulation policies on minor consumer classes, no mention of big problems(transport, coal plants) and big solutions (nuclear energy). Looks very biased. This looks like a nice lobby/news propaganda scribble from a think tank working against cryptocurrencies. Not as a scientific paper.
- ROARosen 6y ago> This is not just some article, it's a peer-reviewed study from the University of Arizona Without going into the paper itself, why do you believe being peer-reviewed means that we cannot - and should not - look at it critically with our own brains and minds, analyze the evidence, and reach our own conclusions?
- throwaway20875 6y agoHyper competitive market forces in the west have created the wrong incentives for everyone, especially institutions. When there is a demand to weaponize or politicize science then we naturally get stuff like this.
- cecja 6y agoYou are as retarded as a Qanon motherfucker.
- Certhas 6y agoYou clearly haven't actually looked at how the damages are modelled have you? You just in your head inveneted a naive way in which to estimate damages and then argued that that doesn't work. There is a large and robust literature to assess these type of damages (search for Social Cost of Carbon). The methodological challenges are discussed really well in the paper actually. Much of the damages calculated here aren't even climate but direct air pollution, for which we have robust data and damage models. Insurance companies use these type of damage models at large scale for risk assessment all the time. The article looks fairly solid to me.
- throwaway20875 6y agoThe article is undermined by its arbitrary focus on crypto. The premise is that crypto mining drives consumption for power, and power production results in "health and climate damage". Are we going to police consumers of power now? Will we invest our time and energy in determining the "good" and "bad" consumers of power. Or are we going to invest our time and resources in building out a sustainable, clean, and efficient power production infrastructure to replace the ancient one we have? Ctrl+f 'nuclear': 1/1 found.
- ufo 6y agoYes, reducing energy waste is an important way to tackle the environmental externalities of energy production. For example, in cold countries one of the major efforts for helping with climate change is to encourage buildings to use better insulation, to waste less heat during winter.
- sadfinger 6y agoThis is right. It is useful to know how much electricity production costs in health and environmental output. It is useful to know how much of bitcoins value is the electricity cost. We can put a value on environmental harm caused by total electricity usage. But, using these and suggesting that we can accurately measure the cost of cryptocurrency now and in the future compared to how the money/value would otherwise be spent is a distortion. The same reasoning can be used to make anything that stores value or does not have an obvious output look disproportionately harmful. It could be useful to compare cryptocurrencies with themselves. I am a little interested to see how they factored cryptocurrency's optimization to use the cheapest electricity possible. It disproportionately favors storing value from electricity that would otherwise be wasted.
- Deukhoofd 6y agoThey take the average emission per kWh generated in the country, combine that with existing research of the social cost of carbon done by the EPA (which includes damages done through climate change), as well as the change in mortality rate caused by these emissions. Then they combine this by the electricity requirements of bitcoin mining, and they have their results. (in very global terms, there's a lot more work done in the results). I definitely wouldn't call it pseudo-science, as their arguments seem valid, and their methods seem to follow through at a cursory glance. They do note some weaknesses in their research, such as not having access to the exact sources of electricity miners use, however, which might change the results.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- k2enemy 6y agoDid you actually read the article? I'll make it easy for you: https://scihubtw.tw/10.1016/j.erss.2019.101281 https://scihubtw.tw/10.1016/j.erss.2019.101281 They make no attempt at trying to predict global weather patterns. Rather the article seems to be mostly "glue" -- connecting energy usage of cryptocurrencies with previously done work trying to measure the externalities of pollution and energy usage. The research that the article builds on gets used all the time in government policy etc. Which doesn't make it correct, but deserves a little more than a knee-jerk reaction and outright dismissal because the method you came up with in thirty seconds doesn't hold up.
- comboy 6y agoPeople are playing with big enough money trading crypto that they throw in social media campaigns just for kicks.
- groby_b 6y agoThis doesn't engage with the report at all. You call it pseudoscience without any supporting evidence. You speculate about error bars without grounding in fact, and the only counterargument you bring is a weak hand waving that it must be a hard problem, with a gratuitous citation from Wikipedia. And given that you basically claim that actuarial science is impossible, I'd hope you bring a stronger claim than that. As it is, this is, as the quote goes, "just your opinion, man".