23 ms·

Bitcoin as a Battery

147 points by tomsyouruncle 6y ago

henearkr 6y ago
Well, call any anthropogenic CO2 amount in the atmosphere "battery" then...
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  The fact that said thing produces a lot of CO2 is not going to stop anyone from doing said thing if they enjoy it. Source: population growth.
  - quotha 6y ago
    That cannot continue, pop will drop significantly if we don’t stop producing so much CO2.
    - paulcole 6y ago
      > will drop significantly if we don’t stop producing so much CO2 Next Tuesday? Sometime this summer? Next year? A decade from now? 2070? Everybody knows there are problems with producing too much CO2. However, nearly everyone’s hoping (but not saying) that the bill doesn’t come fully due until they’re dead. And by “fully due” I mean “directly effects their day-to-day life in a truly drastic way.”
      - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
        > Next Tuesday? Sometime this summer? Next year? A decade from now? 2070? There's a reasonable case that this gained force _last_ summer, i.e. in 2020 source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56288038 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56288038 But yeah, it takes a few decades for the bill to come fully due from a "decline in birth rate".
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    People don't ruin the environment with bitcoin mining because they "enjoy" it. They do it because they can get money out of it. Stop the supply of money, it goes away.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Cantinflas 6y ago
It is not a battery if you cannot get electricity out when needed. It's a weird analogy for something that does not store energy in any form
- smashem 6y ago
  Since a bitcoin is a monetary form of energy, and since the bitcoin network is so readily available, we could build layers on top of the network to enable quicker conversion of monetary energy to electrical energy.
  - Applejinx 6y ago
    Literal energy isn't the same thing as capital.
  - Vhano 6y ago
    You're right. This is why I love dry underwear. You can readily stack them and put up a sewing machine on top of it after which you can make more dry underwear. It's basically free
notum 6y ago
A bit nonsensical imho. A battery by definition has to be able to produce the same type of energy that was put into it. While correlating crypto with something random every week (Easter bunnies next Sunday?) can be marginally interesting, this instance makes no sense. We can't extract electricity from aluminum or Satoshis, we can buy it though, but that's outside of the battery scope.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  Not "a bit". It is just absolute and complete nonsense coming from the sociopathic cryptocurrency fraudsters.
- eloff 6y ago
  Refined aluminum is in quite a high-energy state. Chemically you could extract energy or make electricity from aluminum. It's used in some types of military explosives. Because the refining takes so much electricity, some well-meaning people suggest running it at times of low demand to balance the grid. But refining is capital intensive so you don't want to turn it off or you miss out on the returns from the investment, and the process runs at high temperatures and can't just be turned on and off (in fact if that happens unintentionally it makes a big mess!) I agree with what you're saying though.
  - notum 6y ago
    You're right. If we further expand the idea we can extract energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant. I'll refrain from calling my dog a battery though. Now excuse me while I go feed little Duracell. Good girl!
    - latexr 6y ago
      > we can extract energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant. You don’t need that either. Stacking concrete blocks can work as a battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmrwdTGZxGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmrwdTGZxGk
    - 6y ago
quotha 6y ago
Interesting idea, not sure battery is the word for this, and there are already strong forces at work driving away fossil fuel.
andrewshadura 6y ago
At first I thought the author makes fun of Bitcoin fanatics, but it appears he's actually serious? This is just insane.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kneel 6y ago
  Author is 100% correct with his assessment. I don't see a single coherent argument against in this comment section, just incredulity trying to defend itself. Real dynamics at play here. We're still a ways off from realizing what's going on but I'm happy to see others articulating what the code can only describe.
fancyfredbot 6y ago
An infuriating article. A better title would have been bitcoin as a way to use all the cheap electricity. I hope I'm being trolled.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  This is actually what bitcoiners believe. Well, I say "believe", but it's more that bitcoiners do not care about truth or making sense, all that matters is bitcoin and the price going up.
mustafa_pasi 6y ago
It is not a battery in the physical sense because it does not store energy. What it does is, it allows you to transfer the economic utility of cheap local energy to regions where energy is more in demand. Although, as the article itself highlights, this could also be done more efficiently with aluminum smelting, and other processes that are energy intensive but don't require much infrastructure. From a purely financial point of view I suspect maintaining a bitcoin mining operation in remote areas is harder and requires more frequent upgrades than if you were doing a more traditional manufacturing process.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Moving bauxite in and doing something with the slag and spent reactants takes quite a bit of infrastructure, no? Perhaps aluminum recycling is a better option for this scenario?
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  The main infrastructure needed for a bitcoin running operation in a remote place would be: * the mining rig itself. If there's a way to ship manufacturing product from the location, there must be a way to bring this in too. Pound for pound and liter by liter, this can't take more space or infrastructure to bring than aluminum or any other physical product I can think of. * cooling. same as above. * electricity. If you can manufacture aluminum, you have enough. * small amount of on-site workers to perform critical repairs Things you don't need: * large custom-built machines. * many trained/untrained workers to take care of the machines * infrastructure that can consistently ship tons of material to and from a remote location all year round (mining rig upgrades consume much less mass/volume and can be batched to avoid shipping during rough climate seasons)
- smashem 6y ago
  > ...it does not store energy. Yes it does. It stores what is called "monetary energy", and monetary energy belongs in the same class as kinetic, elastic, and chemical energies. One of the key differences between bitcoin and other monetary assets is that bitcoin is absolutely scarce (the first absolutely scare monetary asset in human history), so its energy cannot leak via inflation.
sdfzug 6y ago
being far fetched seems like an understatement
PeterBarrett 6y ago
This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart. Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.
- nickez 6y ago
  If bitcoin would be fully powered by renewables, do you still think its energy consumption would be a problem?
  - merlinscholz 6y ago
    Not the energy consumption in itself, but the amount of heat and physical electronic waste generated certainly is.
    - skohan 6y ago
      Yes it's not like solar panels are condensed out of the air with zero waste. They have to be manufactured, in a process which almost certainly isn't carbon neutral yet. The materials used to make them have to be extracted from somewhere. They're transported to the installation site on the back of diesel-burning trucks. Cleaner energy sources are a necessity, but simply reducing consumption will always have the best impact on sustainability.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    Depends. Could those renewables go to other applications? If so, then using them for BTC means that somebody else must use carbon. If instead the renewables were located in places where it was not possible to move the energy to more useful locations or if the entire world ran on zero-emission power, then it'd be much less of a concern. I'm happy to let BTC win if it means that global warming is halted. But if worldwide net zero emissions is a prerequisite for BTC being considered non-wasteful then that's a tall order.
fsh 6y ago
I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery. The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the article boil down to a variant of the broken window fallacy, where economic value is falsely attributed to a useless waste of resources.
- osrec 6y ago
  How much of the energy used by a processor is dissipated as heat? If it's a significant amount, perhaps it could be recovered in some way?
  - scotty79 6y ago
    It can be utilized for heating human occupied spaces. Humans need a lot of heating.
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      If you are going to use electricity to heat human occupied spaces, you should use a heatpump which has much better efficiency, above 100%.
      - scotty79 6y ago
        Sure, that's not optimal way of heating with electricity. That's just a way of utilizing heat from computing.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        Cooling technologies just move the heat around. A datacenter produces a lot of heat that is then subsequently moved out of the building. Capturing that heat shouldn't be too difficult because it passes through central AC or central chillers.
tonetheman 6y ago
GD... why did anyone bother reading this crap. Excessive energy usage from my made up currency is driving innovation. Gah. Crypto and the people hyping it need to be quiet or at least be honest about what is going on. We are draining energy really quickly so we can make sure someone isn't double spending the imaginary money... What a horrible article.
- mrits 6y ago
  I thought the article is bad. But what you said is also not true. It sounds like you are complaining about the high energy use of Bitcoin. Crypto does not have to use a lot of energy to work, it just happens that bitcoin uses a proof of work algorithm.
- noxer 6y ago
  crypto and crypto people != BTC and BTC maxis
- smashem 6y ago
  > ...made up currency... Welcome to reality. https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-255ecc93404f https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-2...
gus_massa 6y ago
I like the analogy with Aluminum, but I don't like the title. As far as I know nobody oxidize Aluminum to get electricity back. And nobody undo Bitcoins mining (whatever that means). So Aluminum and Bitcoins are really similar, but not a battery.
- mrmanner 6y ago
  Aluminium and BTC are not at all similar. Aluminium is a useful commodity. It's used to build things people need and want, and to wrap falafel rolls. BTC is a currency with no value in and of itself.
gerbler 6y ago
It's more like "embodied energy" than battery
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  If you have embodied energy in something of no intrinsic value except as proof that you wasted some electricity, what you have is mere entropy. Burned toast.
  - gus_massa 6y ago
    Sometime, I think that "Proof of Work" is very similar to "Proof of Burn". Usually in "Proof of Burn" you "burn" some cryptocoin sending it to an invalid address, and the blockchain has a proof that they are unrecoverable. (It was popular before someone notice that with an ICO you can have your cake and eat it too.) In "Proof of Work" you "burn" a few barrels or petrol to produce electricity and then make some hash with the electricity, so if you find the correct hash it is a probabilistic proof that you burned the petrol. (You can cheat with other source of energy, like solar or wind, but they also have a cost.)
- Nursie 6y ago
  If anything it’s a record of energy transformed from electricity to heat, little else. The energy isn’t still present in the Bitcoin.
- noxer 6y ago
  It definitely not. The energy used turned to heat and eventually radiated away into the universe. Just like the energy used to find the largest prime number. Unless you think that energy is embodies in the number somehow but then where was the energy before the number was found? Because the number clearly already existed before it was found.
pmuk 6y ago
Bitcoin is more like a black hole than a battery
adav 6y ago
Cheap energy into aluminium results in useful material to build things with. Cheap energy into bitcoin results in some more bitcoins of questionable use?
- Nursie 6y ago
  It doesn’t even result in more bitcoins. The emission rate is fixed.
  - hackernudes 6y ago
    But miners are competing for bigger slices of the pie. So more energy does mean more bitcoin (for a specific miner).
Roark66 6y ago
The only way PoW crypto is superceded is if someone finally implements PoS. There is a lot of hope in ethereum "moving to" proof of stake, but I think a move will never happen. Miners will not allow it. It'll be a fork. Then, if it has to be forked why not start from scratch with something better? I imagine/hope many people are working on better crypto protocols at the moment.
- wrnr 6y ago
  Etherium has a grim trigger in to form of a future parabolic increase in difficulty that is perpetually delayed by a signed patch to prevent miners from being too conservative.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  It will happen, because the developers will get the same fees what the miners get right now without spending energy (which is a risky and low margin industry). Good luck getting real institutional money getting into PoS based systems though, PoW took 10 years to get accepted as a secure store of value for the tresuries.
- cfcosta 6y ago
  Both Cardano and BNB use proof of stake, with Cardano being much more decentralized (but smart contracts are coming next few months), and BSC/BNB being the most popular currently. You can also use BTC as a wrapped asset (backed by a smart contract) on both the BSC/Eth networks. PoW is going away quickly, but Bitcoin is not going to move, the "difficulty" is by design at least in the current concept of it as a storage of value. Edit: By the way, it is possible (or will be in the future) to run staking pools on Cardano on Raspberry Pis, and get the same benefits as bigger hardware. Currently it needs 4~8gb of ram afaik, but pis are getting faster every release, next one might be good.
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  Even if it forked, that would be working as intended. Anyone can fork Ethereum, but there's currently billions locked in staking on the Beacon Chain, so there's at least a large segment of the community that will support PoS, so there will be a PoS chain, even if there's also a forked PoW chain. I just doubt the PoW chain will remain useful, as the PoS chain will have obvious benefits and would likely remain the dominant Ethereum.
scotty79 6y ago
I'm so happy that other people start to notice this dynamic. Why are we not yet fully running on renewables? Why don't we have trillions of dollars pouring into solar panels and wind turbines and pumped storage hydroelectricity and battery storage? The answer is there's not enough demand for excess electricity to create and keep excess electricity. I read about new pumped storage hydroelectricity installation closed due to lack of demand. There are too few ways to turn excess electricity into money. If we are going to have fully renewable energy in the future, we need to produce way more energy than we need so when conditions are bad for power generation we still have enough. And for that we need incentives. We are struggling to create artificial, law based incentives on global scale. Cryptos are currently the best way we have to organically create those incentives. There were already instances of crypto miners selling energy they contracted, back to the grid, when price of energy briefly exceeded the gain they could have by burning that energy to mine. When prices of crypto rise again in few years and hardware hashrate plateaus we may reach a point when miners will be building/buying new windmill and solar panel installations on mass scale, because their costs will be dominated by the energy costs and the cheapest energy will be excess energy renewables produce. We don't lack resources to reach the green future, we lack incentives, and if we are lucky meteoric rise of price of crypto can provide those. EDIT: And the post is flagged into oblivion. I'm no longer happy because interesting observation got silenced. Well I guess see you all in few years. EDIT2: .... and now it's unflagged. :-) A hot topic.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  What about training ML models as another example? It requires a lot of energy as well (and I expect it to be more significant in the future), and the optimal power draw should depend on the price of energy. Of course it requires GPU/TPU pricing to change depending on clock speed, which is hard to sell to customers. So yeah, for now Bitcoin mining is a more scalable solution.
  - scotty79 6y ago
    Sure. That's also great if you can monetize trained ML models so easily that everyone can participate. It's already being done to some very small degree by few companies that locate their ML server farms in places where energy is cheap and renewable. I hope this application will some day compete with crypto for computing power and energy and win but I don't think it will be popularized and commoditized soon enough to bring money into green energy. I hopefully await headlines "ML training now uses as much energy as Australia". If you could create crypto based on ML training it would be so cool.
aetch 6y ago
This is a joke, right? You can’t convert Bitcoin back into energy no matter how you look at it.
- kneel 6y ago
  You can convert it to other forms of organized energy, like a Tesla.
- memorysafety 6y ago
  You can. It's not even hard to work out: if we take "charging" to mean "buying energy for ₿", then "discharging" ought to mean "buying ₿ for energy". If you think about it, both of those describe the same economic transaction — just from opposing vantage points (what is "charging" to one party in a transaction, is "discharging" to the other). Relatedly, consider Switzerland's pumped hydro at Linthal. It'd be hard to dispute calling that plant a "battery" (works on gravity+water); but also consider the economic role it plays: it's an energy price arbitrage facility. During the night, when grid prices get low, the plant "buys" the energy "for" water volume in the high lake. During the local day, the plant "sells" the water volume back, "for" literal electricity fed back into the grid at a higher price. ... Why have the water?
christiansakai 6y ago
Argument for PoW breaks down once PoS is proven battle tested for years. Ethereum will lead the way proving this.
johbjo 6y ago
In that case, everything is a battery. Just radiate heat into space and call the night sky "a battery".
mojomark 6y ago
>>And in a way, aluminum is a battery. Of course, while traditional batteries start and end with energy directly, aluminum’s battery is economic, converting energy to value. And that value can be re-used elsewhere (even converted back into energy!) To the authors latter point, Aluminum isn't just 'like' an energy battery - it IS in fact a very energy dense battery. Aluminum alloys are used to liberate large amounts of Hydrogen at the point of use, which can be used in fuel cells. This is currently used as an air independant energy source for some underwater vehicles. The oxidized byproduct (which is about 8X less dense than the Al3 alloy itself) can be re-smelted to "recharge" the Al3+ battery. Apple actually developed a very low-Carbon aluminum smelting process, so the total cycle is very clean as long as renewable energy is used in the smelting process.
throwaway4good 6y ago
It is crypto. It does not have to make sense.
raverbashing 6y ago
People claiming bitcoin is a battery understand nothing about batteries. It's just fake rethoric designed to greenwash it. Batteries are batteries, fair enough. Load shifting "are batteries" because you're not using the electricity now, but later. So it's equivalent to storing it now and using later. Fine Aluminium smelting "are batteries" because you're shifting the location. It's like putting a battery in a ship, charging it then shipping it somewhere else (as long as it doesn't get stuck ;) ) Bitcoin mining is... ? You mined your coin now, using electricity, cool. Then to use it you need to spend more electricity. 812.74 kWh per transaction to be exact https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ This is ridiculous. This is not a battery.
sanbor 6y ago
Reducing damage to the environment should be a core goal of cryptocurrencies. As things stand now in most countries, miners can get away with burning fossil fuels to mine and profit, without paying the cost of the contamination produced. But others will pay the cost for sure. The pollution byproduct of crypto should be fixed ASAP, not rationalized.
microtherion 6y ago
Even if one accepts the underlying assumption that bitcoin "store" the energy wasted on "mining" them, the theory espoused in the article simply does not hold water. If a new energy source becomes available, so 10x as much energy as before gets put into aluminum smelting, you end up with 10x as much aluminum. Bitcoin "mining" does not work that way. The computations are an artificial hurdle erected to hit a predetermined level of scarcity/difficulty. If 10x as much energy as before gets put into bitcoin "mining", difficulty levels will adjust, and you end up with exactly the same amount of bitcoin as before.
- randomhodler84 6y ago
  What happens when you print 10x the money... let’s see shall we, they are doing it now!
  - microtherion 6y ago
    Depends on whom you mean with "you". US money supply has not grown at anywhere near 10x recently: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MZM https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MZM Tether supply has grown roughly 10x since January 2020, though, but that's on a blockchain, so surely everything is on the up and up: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/
- poundofshrimp 6y ago
  If more energy is spent on bitcoin, it is usually because the value of the miner reward grows and attracts more mining. Miner reward value grows due to either 1) the market value of the coin itself grows or 2) the miner fees grow. Both are market forces and ultimately depend on demand for bitcoin transactions. So I don’t see a contradiction here.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    But you will notice that my hypothetical stipulated a new energy source becoming available (or cheaper). The difference between bitcoin and aluminum is that bitcoin values the energy not qua energy, but purely for its wasted cost, so if energy becomes cheaper overall (or hash computation becomes more efficient), you have to use more of it to create the same value for bitcoin, if it becomes more expensive, you can create the same value using less energy. That's why I find it silly to say that bitcoin stores "energy". It stores sunk cost.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
It's rational for people invested in bitcoin to try to justify its wasteful architecture. I sympathise with the need to break off governments and giant like Visa and MasterCard. But we need to be better than them before transitioning. Btc is pure speculation and fomo
- noxer 6y ago
  see XRPL.org its basically BTC but better and actually usable
h4kor 6y ago
It's astounding how much mind mending crypto bros have to do to justify the energy waste of their pyramid scheme
danuker 6y ago
I am a cryptocurrency enthusiast (disclaimer: I even own some). But I find this article fallacious. > if we think of Bitcoin as a battery, what can we do with it? The key properties of Bitcoin’s battery are: 1) always on and permissionless (no need to find customers, just plug and go) I think it is a very wasteful transformation of the power put in. You can get it to be always on and "permissionless" without burning this much energy: check out [Bitcoin Cash, Dash, ZCash](https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/) and other, cheaper-to-mine (still proof-of-work) currencies. The actual benefit you get is security via out-costing: "you have to burn up this many resources to double-spend". Because of the simplicity of this out-costing, lots of people trust it, because they can understand it (even though it's wasteful). > and 2) naturally seeking low-cost electricity: it will always buy when the price is right. Just because electricity is cheap in some places doesn't mean we should bid it up pointlessly. ---- I would love to see a PoS scheme that I could understand enough to trust. But they are much harder to create, and until then, I keep my money in PoW ones, in spite of the cost of transacting.
- incrudible 6y ago
  The energy usage of a PoW scheme is in direct proportion to its usage (transaction fees), block reward and price of the underlying. As such, I don't see that Bitcoin Cash, Dash or ZCash would be fundamentally more efficient if these factors were to rival Bitcoin, even if parameters such as block size were to change. For the longest time, Ethereum transactions were far cheaper than Bitcoin transactions, but today they rival Bitcoin.
  - danuker 6y ago
    Transaction fees are not just proportional to usage. They are a price set by demand (usage) and supply (block space). Currently Bitcoin limiting the block size to 1MB is artificially lowering supply. Recently, Bitcoin Cash has surpassed Bitcoin in transactions per day: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-bch.html#log&1y https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-bch.ht... Their blocks are larger, so there is more room for transactions, so miners are not so well rewarded, so they can afford to waste less electricity in total. Of course, this reduced waste implies reduced security (instead of securing >$700k/h, it's "only" $8.5k/h - https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/).
thesausageking 6y ago
This is the new "blockchain not bitcoin". Why do VCs feel the need to post reductive grand statements like these?
betterunix2 6y ago
Batteries can release energy. Bitcoin cannot. Neither can aluminum. Bitcoin consumes vast amounts of energy, far more than "traditional" payment systems (per transaction), and denying that reality helps nothing. Bitcoin is an energy-wasting system. Fix that problem if you want to see wider adoption; don't just pretend there is no problem.
- noxer 6y ago
  Aluminum actually can. Its made form aluminuum oxide + energy and you can oxidize (for example burn) aluminum back into aluminum oxide which releases energy. Certainly not what the author meant and certainly not possible with bitcoin where the energy is turned into heat and no chemical reaction happens at all.
knl 6y ago
Ah, I love how people love to paddle flawed ideas in order to protect their mindset. This article goes into great depths to explain all the fallacies when it comes to energy and bitcoin: https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-coins-are-an-esg-nightmare/ https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-c.... tl;dr is that bitcoin is just wasting energy and no amount of text will help improve that situation. It should be outright forbidden.
gammalost 6y ago
> crypto mining is driving the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Why is waste a good thing if it's renewable? It's the argument I see brought up almost every time. It feels like people are conflating renewable with a infinite energy source.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Because nobody is talking about heat pollution yet and Out of Sight, Out of Mind.
nathias 6y ago
In a sense, the aluminum coming from Iceland is like a battery. What is a battery? A way of shifting both the location and the time-of-use of energy. This is a bad analogy, batteries are energy storage, spending energy is not the same as storing energy.
specialist 6y ago
From OC: > One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes. Yup. Money is weird. Measurement of value, accounting of debts, commodity to be collected. David Graeber's book Debt has a pretty good survey of our evolving, manyform, paradoxical thinking towards money and related metaphors. As for crypto currency, I mostly agree with Mark Cuban's conclusion they're collectibles. Ergo, they're useful for escrow use cases, like exfiltrating money and swapping assets. I'll believe crypto currencies are proper money once a government accepts them as payment for taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism
- ashray 6y ago
  Not trying to convince you of anything but just wanted to share this with you. It has started happening... Zug in Switzerland accepts crypto for taxes. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/switzerlands-crypto-valley-has-started-accepting-bitcoin-ether-for-tax-payments-2021-02-18 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/switzerlands-crypto-valley-h...
xbar 6y ago
These are just hand-wavy rosy ideas.
a9h74j 6y ago
A "store of energy" implies some ability to extract energy back out. "A putative store of value" != "a store of energy".
fnord77 6y ago
imagine the thermodynamic losses.
- hinkley 6y ago
  We are going to be able to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere more by afforestation (terrestrial and marine) than by covering the planet in solar panels and turbines.
SkipperCat 6y ago
A ham sandwich is a battery.... Bitcoin is not a battery. Its fiat currency that uses a lot of energy to perform a fraction of the transactions that would be needed for it to be used for normal day to day transactions (filling up your gas tank, buying a coffee, etc). If anything, I'd say Bitcoin is the exact opposite of a battery, it's an energy sink. I say that because its fiat money. With the example used of aluminum, you've taken energy and made a durable good/commodity. You don't need to have faith in aluminum that it exists, it just there. Drop it on your foot and you'll have proof. With Bitcoin, it will just take a lack of faith and the whole thing becomes worthless. Bitcoin is interesting, it might become a reserve/hedge investment like diamonds or gold. But let's not put it in the halls of the Duracell bunny.
noxer 6y ago
Had to flag this not because it break any rules its just 100% too dumb to be on HN. I had to double check if this wasn't satire.
deepinsand 6y ago
Bitcoin is an amazing wedge to install distributed solar and storage throughout the nation. Right now, utilities and governments make it hard to monetize these assets, and bitcoin provide an easy alternative. This builds the supply chain and labor force that are needed to perform a full clean energy transition. I don't have a strong opinion on cryptocurrency, but I have a strong opinion on energy supply chains. Plug: I'm building https://cryptoclean.energy/ https://cryptoclean.energy/ with this exact thesis. Check it out to get a renewable energy system for your mining rig.
whateveracct 6y ago
Dollar bills are closer to batteries than BTC.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
audunw 6y ago
What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically pure waste? There is no way to make aluminum other than putting huge amounts of energy. Aluminum has value to everyone in some way, not just those invested in it. There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions, or even to do proof-of-work cryptocurrency (if you feel that's necessary), besides using Bitcoin. With aluminum you can even reverse the process and use it as an actual battery. With Bitcoin you can't. The energy is burned forever. I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  You need to have a triadic understanding of bitcoin, this is what allows it to be a flat currency, a store of value, and a battery at both one and the same time, through the act of transubstantiation of the coin a quantum state is triggered that allows the individual coin to choose which form it will manifest itself as.
  - funkychicken 6y ago
    I wish I could give this comment HackerNews Gold.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      I'm actually surprised at the reception, I was expecting a -3, but I wanted to say it anyway.
      - bob1029 6y ago
        Parody & sarcasm are very effective tools for illustrating how hyperbolic a situation has become.
andagainagain 6y ago
So... to break down the idea, it starts with redefining energy, then leans on that definition to justify making more bitcoin. What this means has nothing to do with energy, and everything to do with cost savings on bitcoin mining by intentionally increasing electricity load on a system based on electricity variation of renewables. You can do that IF your goal is to get more bitcoin. But you're not storing energy by doing so. Electrically speaking, you are only a cost on the system.
bootlooped 6y ago
It seems like increasing electricity demand would also increase the incentives to keep old fossil fuel plants online.
ldbooth 6y ago
Bitcoin as a flexible load has utility, the misappropriation of the word 'battery' does not.
gidam 6y ago
this guy really understand thermodynamics and physics of batteries... We are safe! I propose to entrust him with the solution of all the energy problems of the planet.
scottmsul 6y ago
Bitcoin enthusiast here. Pretty surprising how antagonistic the HN crowd is to bitcoin.
- bootlooped 6y ago
  Why? The downsides are obvious and the realized upsides are extremely limited. The best thing I can say about it is that it's enabled cheaper international money transfers for some people. The worst thing is that it consumes an entire nation's worth of electricity. Compare those two things; is it worth it?
- Applejinx 6y ago
  Hackers are capable of thinking through an argument and, at their best, coming up with disruptive and/or unexpected solutions to a situation. This is of course how Bitcoin came to be in the first place. That's also why hackers may be the first to figure out the catastrophic failure of cryptocurrency, or perhaps ALL cryptocurrency as a class, or the exploit to disrupt the disruptor and render cryptocurrency a useless dead end. It's founded on assumptions both explicit and implicit. One of the implicit ones is that capitalism will continue to be the force that checkmates any argument against crypto: get enough capital into it and the capital will seek to protect itself, honestly or dishonestly, peacefully or violently, with no consideration for any other concern. Hackers are capable of thinking through that scenario and asking whether, by contrast, something like bitcoin might be the exploit that destroys capitalism by increasing its efficiencies until they're untenable.
peterbonney 6y ago
I used Bitcoin to buy milk, therefore it is a cow.
kummappp 6y ago
Crypto currencies offer non-repudiation and that is it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation
jasonlaramburu 6y ago
The analogy makes no sense. The mining reward for BTC is fixed (6.25 BTC every 10 minutes) regardless of how much electricity is burned in the process.
coding123 6y ago
I can't figure out how to charge a battery with bitcoin. Just working for a few hours drains my 12.6 to 12.2 at night. Lead acid is a battery. Lithium is a battery. Btc is not
macawfish 6y ago
This is anti-scientific gaslighting and it does a disservice to all the people working hard to bring the actual benefits of applied cryptography and distributed tech to the public in ways to that actually provide public good. There are alternatives to wasteful proof of work schemes. Proof of space and time & proof of stake. Neither are perfect but clearly Bitcoin's hyperdeflationary raccoon trap proof of work scheme isn't either. Bitcoin advocates had better get it together.
toss1 6y ago
What the author is describing is not a battery. It is a sink. I saw no method of storing and re-releasing the energy Only a method of immediately consuming the energy into something potentially useful and transportable. IT is not like transporting your BTC will allow you to extract new energy at its destination, the way that transporting charged batteries or gasoline would. So it has utility, but not nearly as much as he's advertising in the headline.
Fede_V 6y ago
Whenever I read something this far off the mark, I genuinely wonder if it's total lack of intellectual honesty, or, having drank so much kool aid that this argument genuinely makes sense. Bitcoin transactions require the solution of a completely useless and expensive to compute mathematical computation. THIS IS BY DESIGN, TO MAKE IT SCARCE. In the short term, we are facing a critical shortage of computer chips because bitcoin miners are buying critical infrastructure and using them to do absolutely useless math to speculate on an obvious bubble. In the long term, we absolutely need to solve global warming, and the only way we will do so is if we figure out a way to decouple carbon emissions from productivity on a global scale. Bitcoin makes this task much harder - by its very definition, bitcoin literally scales with energy consumption. Energy prices and bitcoin prices (plus fixed costs due to mining equipment) will always be in some sort of equilibrium. Second - we need those chips that are currently calculating completely useless hashes to actually be put to use in productive sectors. IF your attitude is some variant of - fuck you, I don't care about the world, I just want to get rich profiting from this bubble - fine, I can't convince you to care about the rest of humanity. But please - be clear eyed about this: there is not a single credible global warming scholar that believes Bitcoin will help. Not one. The only people who try to push forward incredibly shoddy thinkpieces about how Bitcoin/NFTs will help global warming are obviously Bitcoin speculators or paid shills.
- leventov 6y ago
  Correction: we need to solve climate change in a short term, not long term.
  - Fede_V 6y ago
    You are right, I should have used short term and very short term.
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  Very disingenuous to include NFTs in the same category as Bitcoin. NFTs live on Ethereum which is in the process of changing its consensus from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.
randomopining 6y ago
Bitcoin cannot be stopped by a government. The crypto math makes it so valuable to lock in your wealth.
- Applejinx 6y ago
  I'm gonna say 'proof needed here'. What you're really saying is, if a government or all governments do stop it, you're boned.
arithma 6y ago
Bitcoin is more of ash rather than a battery in this analogy. I like bitcoin (the idea, not the burning of the planet, even though it's only a temporary hack to bootstrap the whole thing). And hey, maybe it will encourage building nuclear mining farms, that will give their owners free bitcoin, and then we can use the nuclear plants. The only defense I can stomach for Bitcoin's unfathomable energy consumption is that it might be only temporary. Is it worth it? So far, not that much, but I think developed-countries under-estimate the value of bitcoin, since they have more stable economies, and thus currencies, and enjoy freedom of moving their money, and data privacy...
kilovoltaire 6y ago
There's a discussion of a rebuttal to this here- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612952 (Also it's newer and more upvoted but for some reason no longer on the front page?)
kneel 6y ago
This essay checks out. Thermodynamics and its higher order effects have profound effects on our modern world. We've been fooled into thinking otherwise, but new forms of money are clearing the fog. This is very exciting.
poundofshrimp 6y ago
The “battery” in the article is misleading. I wouldn’t call bitcoin a battery any more so than I would call aluminum a battery. The point the article appears to make is that bitcoin mining is much more elastic in its energy use and is therefore uniquely fit to fill some niche energy markets. That’s completely different from and quite a far cry from being a “battery”.
eladv 6y ago
Here is my rebuttal to this blogpost, where I claim that Bitcoin is not a battery, but rather a bottomless sink for marginal-cost electricity: https://medium.com/lunar-ventures/bitcoin-is-not-a-battery-it-is-a-sink-852db9669f20 https://medium.com/lunar-ventures/bitcoin-is-not-a-battery-i... And the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26611342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26611342
yellowapple 6y ago
This would be more compelling if there was a way to turn a cryptocurrency back into energy. And indeed, energy-backed currency seems to be a staple of science fiction - things like "energy credits". Cryptocurrency gets us halfway there, in the sense that you can transform energy into it, but the reverse ain't really feasible. Perhaps as (actual) batteries and supercapacitors and such continue to miniaturize we'll see something closer to a true energy credit, with financial transactions taking place through the transfer of stored energy - be it directly (people maintaining batteries as wallets) or indirectly (people exchanging currency entitling the holder to some amount of energy).
DemocracyFTW 6y ago
I am from the future, and this claim has been refuted: Bitcoin is not a battery, it's a waste of everybody's resources. Some people who have been exposed to curves like the one at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Carbon_Emissions.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Carbon_Emissions.s... (which shows that almost all extra CO2 comes from after 1950, and *around 50% of all anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere dates from the past 20 years!) seemingly fall into a kind of cognitive dissonance and react with "surely this isn't true" (climate deniers); others rationalize that the most frivolous wasters of fossil energy are actually beneficial for mankind and the planet.
machawinka 6y ago
I am amazed by the level's of stupidity crypto has gotten to. Time for the regulators to crash the party.

147 points by tomsyouruncle 6y ago

henearkr 6y ago

Well, call any anthropogenic CO2 amount in the atmosphere "battery" then...

ketamine__ 6y ago
The fact that said thing produces a lot of CO2 is not going to stop anyone from doing said thing if they enjoy it. Source: population growth.
- quotha 6y ago
  That cannot continue, pop will drop significantly if we don’t stop producing so much CO2.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    > will drop significantly if we don’t stop producing so much CO2 Next Tuesday? Sometime this summer? Next year? A decade from now? 2070? Everybody knows there are problems with producing too much CO2. However, nearly everyone’s hoping (but not saying) that the bill doesn’t come fully due until they’re dead. And by “fully due” I mean “directly effects their day-to-day life in a truly drastic way.”
    - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
      > Next Tuesday? Sometime this summer? Next year? A decade from now? 2070? There's a reasonable case that this gained force _last_ summer, i.e. in 2020 source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56288038 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56288038 But yeah, it takes a few decades for the bill to come fully due from a "decline in birth rate".
- user-the-name 6y ago
  People don't ruin the environment with bitcoin mining because they "enjoy" it. They do it because they can get money out of it. Stop the supply of money, it goes away.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Cantinflas 6y ago

It is not a battery if you cannot get electricity out when needed. It's a weird analogy for something that does not store energy in any form

smashem 6y ago
Since a bitcoin is a monetary form of energy, and since the bitcoin network is so readily available, we could build layers on top of the network to enable quicker conversion of monetary energy to electrical energy.
- Applejinx 6y ago
  Literal energy isn't the same thing as capital.
- Vhano 6y ago
  You're right. This is why I love dry underwear. You can readily stack them and put up a sewing machine on top of it after which you can make more dry underwear. It's basically free

notum 6y ago

A bit nonsensical imho. A battery by definition has to be able to produce the same type of energy that was put into it. While correlating crypto with something random every week (Easter bunnies next Sunday?) can be marginally interesting, this instance makes no sense. We can't extract electricity from aluminum or Satoshis, we can buy it though, but that's outside of the battery scope.

user-the-name 6y ago
Not "a bit". It is just absolute and complete nonsense coming from the sociopathic cryptocurrency fraudsters.
eloff 6y ago
Refined aluminum is in quite a high-energy state. Chemically you could extract energy or make electricity from aluminum. It's used in some types of military explosives. Because the refining takes so much electricity, some well-meaning people suggest running it at times of low demand to balance the grid. But refining is capital intensive so you don't want to turn it off or you miss out on the returns from the investment, and the process runs at high temperatures and can't just be turned on and off (in fact if that happens unintentionally it makes a big mess!) I agree with what you're saying though.
- notum 6y ago
  You're right. If we further expand the idea we can extract energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant. I'll refrain from calling my dog a battery though. Now excuse me while I go feed little Duracell. Good girl!
  - latexr 6y ago
    > we can extract energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant. You don’t need that either. Stacking concrete blocks can work as a battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmrwdTGZxGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmrwdTGZxGk
  - 6y ago

quotha 6y ago

Interesting idea, not sure battery is the word for this, and there are already strong forces at work driving away fossil fuel.

andrewshadura 6y ago

At first I thought the author makes fun of Bitcoin fanatics, but it appears he's actually serious? This is just insane.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kneel 6y ago
Author is 100% correct with his assessment. I don't see a single coherent argument against in this comment section, just incredulity trying to defend itself. Real dynamics at play here. We're still a ways off from realizing what's going on but I'm happy to see others articulating what the code can only describe.

fancyfredbot 6y ago

An infuriating article. A better title would have been bitcoin as a way to use all the cheap electricity. I hope I'm being trolled.

user-the-name 6y ago
This is actually what bitcoiners believe. Well, I say "believe", but it's more that bitcoiners do not care about truth or making sense, all that matters is bitcoin and the price going up.

mustafa_pasi 6y ago

It is not a battery in the physical sense because it does not store energy. What it does is, it allows you to transfer the economic utility of cheap local energy to regions where energy is more in demand. Although, as the article itself highlights, this could also be done more efficiently with aluminum smelting, and other processes that are energy intensive but don't require much infrastructure. From a purely financial point of view I suspect maintaining a bitcoin mining operation in remote areas is harder and requires more frequent upgrades than if you were doing a more traditional manufacturing process.

hinkley 6y ago
Moving bauxite in and doing something with the slag and spent reactants takes quite a bit of infrastructure, no? Perhaps aluminum recycling is a better option for this scenario?
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
The main infrastructure needed for a bitcoin running operation in a remote place would be: * the mining rig itself. If there's a way to ship manufacturing product from the location, there must be a way to bring this in too. Pound for pound and liter by liter, this can't take more space or infrastructure to bring than aluminum or any other physical product I can think of. * cooling. same as above. * electricity. If you can manufacture aluminum, you have enough. * small amount of on-site workers to perform critical repairs Things you don't need: * large custom-built machines. * many trained/untrained workers to take care of the machines * infrastructure that can consistently ship tons of material to and from a remote location all year round (mining rig upgrades consume much less mass/volume and can be batched to avoid shipping during rough climate seasons)
smashem 6y ago
> ...it does not store energy. Yes it does. It stores what is called "monetary energy", and monetary energy belongs in the same class as kinetic, elastic, and chemical energies. One of the key differences between bitcoin and other monetary assets is that bitcoin is absolutely scarce (the first absolutely scare monetary asset in human history), so its energy cannot leak via inflation.

sdfzug 6y ago

being far fetched seems like an understatement

PeterBarrett 6y ago

This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart. Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.

nickez 6y ago
If bitcoin would be fully powered by renewables, do you still think its energy consumption would be a problem?
- merlinscholz 6y ago
  Not the energy consumption in itself, but the amount of heat and physical electronic waste generated certainly is.
  - skohan 6y ago
    Yes it's not like solar panels are condensed out of the air with zero waste. They have to be manufactured, in a process which almost certainly isn't carbon neutral yet. The materials used to make them have to be extracted from somewhere. They're transported to the installation site on the back of diesel-burning trucks. Cleaner energy sources are a necessity, but simply reducing consumption will always have the best impact on sustainability.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Depends. Could those renewables go to other applications? If so, then using them for BTC means that somebody else must use carbon. If instead the renewables were located in places where it was not possible to move the energy to more useful locations or if the entire world ran on zero-emission power, then it'd be much less of a concern. I'm happy to let BTC win if it means that global warming is halted. But if worldwide net zero emissions is a prerequisite for BTC being considered non-wasteful then that's a tall order.

fsh 6y ago

I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery. The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the article boil down to a variant of the broken window fallacy, where economic value is falsely attributed to a useless waste of resources.

osrec 6y ago
How much of the energy used by a processor is dissipated as heat? If it's a significant amount, perhaps it could be recovered in some way?
- scotty79 6y ago
  It can be utilized for heating human occupied spaces. Humans need a lot of heating.
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    If you are going to use electricity to heat human occupied spaces, you should use a heatpump which has much better efficiency, above 100%.
    - scotty79 6y ago
      Sure, that's not optimal way of heating with electricity. That's just a way of utilizing heat from computing.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Cooling technologies just move the heat around. A datacenter produces a lot of heat that is then subsequently moved out of the building. Capturing that heat shouldn't be too difficult because it passes through central AC or central chillers.

tonetheman 6y ago

GD... why did anyone bother reading this crap. Excessive energy usage from my made up currency is driving innovation. Gah. Crypto and the people hyping it need to be quiet or at least be honest about what is going on. We are draining energy really quickly so we can make sure someone isn't double spending the imaginary money... What a horrible article.

mrits 6y ago
I thought the article is bad. But what you said is also not true. It sounds like you are complaining about the high energy use of Bitcoin. Crypto does not have to use a lot of energy to work, it just happens that bitcoin uses a proof of work algorithm.
noxer 6y ago
crypto and crypto people != BTC and BTC maxis
smashem 6y ago
> ...made up currency... Welcome to reality. https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-255ecc93404f https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-2...

gus_massa 6y ago

I like the analogy with Aluminum, but I don't like the title. As far as I know nobody oxidize Aluminum to get electricity back. And nobody undo Bitcoins mining (whatever that means). So Aluminum and Bitcoins are really similar, but not a battery.

mrmanner 6y ago
Aluminium and BTC are not at all similar. Aluminium is a useful commodity. It's used to build things people need and want, and to wrap falafel rolls. BTC is a currency with no value in and of itself.

gerbler 6y ago

It's more like "embodied energy" than battery

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
If you have embodied energy in something of no intrinsic value except as proof that you wasted some electricity, what you have is mere entropy. Burned toast.
- gus_massa 6y ago
  Sometime, I think that "Proof of Work" is very similar to "Proof of Burn". Usually in "Proof of Burn" you "burn" some cryptocoin sending it to an invalid address, and the blockchain has a proof that they are unrecoverable. (It was popular before someone notice that with an ICO you can have your cake and eat it too.) In "Proof of Work" you "burn" a few barrels or petrol to produce electricity and then make some hash with the electricity, so if you find the correct hash it is a probabilistic proof that you burned the petrol. (You can cheat with other source of energy, like solar or wind, but they also have a cost.)
Nursie 6y ago
If anything it’s a record of energy transformed from electricity to heat, little else. The energy isn’t still present in the Bitcoin.
noxer 6y ago
It definitely not. The energy used turned to heat and eventually radiated away into the universe. Just like the energy used to find the largest prime number. Unless you think that energy is embodies in the number somehow but then where was the energy before the number was found? Because the number clearly already existed before it was found.

pmuk 6y ago

Bitcoin is more like a black hole than a battery

adav 6y ago

Cheap energy into aluminium results in useful material to build things with. Cheap energy into bitcoin results in some more bitcoins of questionable use?

Nursie 6y ago
It doesn’t even result in more bitcoins. The emission rate is fixed.
- hackernudes 6y ago
  But miners are competing for bigger slices of the pie. So more energy does mean more bitcoin (for a specific miner).

Roark66 6y ago

The only way PoW crypto is superceded is if someone finally implements PoS. There is a lot of hope in ethereum "moving to" proof of stake, but I think a move will never happen. Miners will not allow it. It'll be a fork. Then, if it has to be forked why not start from scratch with something better? I imagine/hope many people are working on better crypto protocols at the moment.

wrnr 6y ago
Etherium has a grim trigger in to form of a future parabolic increase in difficulty that is perpetually delayed by a signed patch to prevent miners from being too conservative.
xiphias2 6y ago
It will happen, because the developers will get the same fees what the miners get right now without spending energy (which is a risky and low margin industry). Good luck getting real institutional money getting into PoS based systems though, PoW took 10 years to get accepted as a secure store of value for the tresuries.
cfcosta 6y ago
Both Cardano and BNB use proof of stake, with Cardano being much more decentralized (but smart contracts are coming next few months), and BSC/BNB being the most popular currently. You can also use BTC as a wrapped asset (backed by a smart contract) on both the BSC/Eth networks. PoW is going away quickly, but Bitcoin is not going to move, the "difficulty" is by design at least in the current concept of it as a storage of value. Edit: By the way, it is possible (or will be in the future) to run staking pools on Cardano on Raspberry Pis, and get the same benefits as bigger hardware. Currently it needs 4~8gb of ram afaik, but pis are getting faster every release, next one might be good.
intotheabyss 6y ago
Even if it forked, that would be working as intended. Anyone can fork Ethereum, but there's currently billions locked in staking on the Beacon Chain, so there's at least a large segment of the community that will support PoS, so there will be a PoS chain, even if there's also a forked PoW chain. I just doubt the PoW chain will remain useful, as the PoS chain will have obvious benefits and would likely remain the dominant Ethereum.

scotty79 6y ago

I'm so happy that other people start to notice this dynamic. Why are we not yet fully running on renewables? Why don't we have trillions of dollars pouring into solar panels and wind turbines and pumped storage hydroelectricity and battery storage? The answer is there's not enough demand for excess electricity to create and keep excess electricity. I read about new pumped storage hydroelectricity installation closed due to lack of demand. There are too few ways to turn excess electricity into money. If we are going to have fully renewable energy in the future, we need to produce way more energy than we need so when conditions are bad for power generation we still have enough. And for that we need incentives. We are struggling to create artificial, law based incentives on global scale. Cryptos are currently the best way we have to organically create those incentives. There were already instances of crypto miners selling energy they contracted, back to the grid, when price of energy briefly exceeded the gain they could have by burning that energy to mine. When prices of crypto rise again in few years and hardware hashrate plateaus we may reach a point when miners will be building/buying new windmill and solar panel installations on mass scale, because their costs will be dominated by the energy costs and the cheapest energy will be excess energy renewables produce. We don't lack resources to reach the green future, we lack incentives, and if we are lucky meteoric rise of price of crypto can provide those. EDIT: And the post is flagged into oblivion. I'm no longer happy because interesting observation got silenced. Well I guess see you all in few years. EDIT2: .... and now it's unflagged. :-) A hot topic.

xiphias2 6y ago
What about training ML models as another example? It requires a lot of energy as well (and I expect it to be more significant in the future), and the optimal power draw should depend on the price of energy. Of course it requires GPU/TPU pricing to change depending on clock speed, which is hard to sell to customers. So yeah, for now Bitcoin mining is a more scalable solution.
- scotty79 6y ago
  Sure. That's also great if you can monetize trained ML models so easily that everyone can participate. It's already being done to some very small degree by few companies that locate their ML server farms in places where energy is cheap and renewable. I hope this application will some day compete with crypto for computing power and energy and win but I don't think it will be popularized and commoditized soon enough to bring money into green energy. I hopefully await headlines "ML training now uses as much energy as Australia". If you could create crypto based on ML training it would be so cool.

aetch 6y ago

This is a joke, right? You can’t convert Bitcoin back into energy no matter how you look at it.

kneel 6y ago
You can convert it to other forms of organized energy, like a Tesla.
memorysafety 6y ago
You can. It's not even hard to work out: if we take "charging" to mean "buying energy for ₿", then "discharging" ought to mean "buying ₿ for energy". If you think about it, both of those describe the same economic transaction — just from opposing vantage points (what is "charging" to one party in a transaction, is "discharging" to the other). Relatedly, consider Switzerland's pumped hydro at Linthal. It'd be hard to dispute calling that plant a "battery" (works on gravity+water); but also consider the economic role it plays: it's an energy price arbitrage facility. During the night, when grid prices get low, the plant "buys" the energy "for" water volume in the high lake. During the local day, the plant "sells" the water volume back, "for" literal electricity fed back into the grid at a higher price. ... Why have the water?

christiansakai 6y ago

Argument for PoW breaks down once PoS is proven battle tested for years. Ethereum will lead the way proving this.

johbjo 6y ago

In that case, everything is a battery. Just radiate heat into space and call the night sky "a battery".

mojomark 6y ago

>>And in a way, aluminum is a battery. Of course, while traditional batteries start and end with energy directly, aluminum’s battery is economic, converting energy to value. And that value can be re-used elsewhere (even converted back into energy!) To the authors latter point, Aluminum isn't just 'like' an energy battery - it IS in fact a very energy dense battery. Aluminum alloys are used to liberate large amounts of Hydrogen at the point of use, which can be used in fuel cells. This is currently used as an air independant energy source for some underwater vehicles. The oxidized byproduct (which is about 8X less dense than the Al3 alloy itself) can be re-smelted to "recharge" the Al3+ battery. Apple actually developed a very low-Carbon aluminum smelting process, so the total cycle is very clean as long as renewable energy is used in the smelting process.

throwaway4good 6y ago

It is crypto. It does not have to make sense.

raverbashing 6y ago

People claiming bitcoin is a battery understand nothing about batteries. It's just fake rethoric designed to greenwash it. Batteries are batteries, fair enough. Load shifting "are batteries" because you're not using the electricity now, but later. So it's equivalent to storing it now and using later. Fine Aluminium smelting "are batteries" because you're shifting the location. It's like putting a battery in a ship, charging it then shipping it somewhere else (as long as it doesn't get stuck ;) ) Bitcoin mining is... ? You mined your coin now, using electricity, cool. Then to use it you need to spend more electricity. 812.74 kWh per transaction to be exact https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ This is ridiculous. This is not a battery.

sanbor 6y ago

Reducing damage to the environment should be a core goal of cryptocurrencies. As things stand now in most countries, miners can get away with burning fossil fuels to mine and profit, without paying the cost of the contamination produced. But others will pay the cost for sure. The pollution byproduct of crypto should be fixed ASAP, not rationalized.

microtherion 6y ago

Even if one accepts the underlying assumption that bitcoin "store" the energy wasted on "mining" them, the theory espoused in the article simply does not hold water. If a new energy source becomes available, so 10x as much energy as before gets put into aluminum smelting, you end up with 10x as much aluminum. Bitcoin "mining" does not work that way. The computations are an artificial hurdle erected to hit a predetermined level of scarcity/difficulty. If 10x as much energy as before gets put into bitcoin "mining", difficulty levels will adjust, and you end up with exactly the same amount of bitcoin as before.

randomhodler84 6y ago
What happens when you print 10x the money... let’s see shall we, they are doing it now!
- microtherion 6y ago
  Depends on whom you mean with "you". US money supply has not grown at anywhere near 10x recently: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MZM https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MZM Tether supply has grown roughly 10x since January 2020, though, but that's on a blockchain, so surely everything is on the up and up: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/
poundofshrimp 6y ago
If more energy is spent on bitcoin, it is usually because the value of the miner reward grows and attracts more mining. Miner reward value grows due to either 1) the market value of the coin itself grows or 2) the miner fees grow. Both are market forces and ultimately depend on demand for bitcoin transactions. So I don’t see a contradiction here.
- microtherion 6y ago
  But you will notice that my hypothetical stipulated a new energy source becoming available (or cheaper). The difference between bitcoin and aluminum is that bitcoin values the energy not qua energy, but purely for its wasted cost, so if energy becomes cheaper overall (or hash computation becomes more efficient), you have to use more of it to create the same value for bitcoin, if it becomes more expensive, you can create the same value using less energy. That's why I find it silly to say that bitcoin stores "energy". It stores sunk cost.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

It's rational for people invested in bitcoin to try to justify its wasteful architecture. I sympathise with the need to break off governments and giant like Visa and MasterCard. But we need to be better than them before transitioning. Btc is pure speculation and fomo

noxer 6y ago
see XRPL.org its basically BTC but better and actually usable

h4kor 6y ago

It's astounding how much mind mending crypto bros have to do to justify the energy waste of their pyramid scheme

danuker 6y ago

I am a cryptocurrency enthusiast (disclaimer: I even own some). But I find this article fallacious. > if we think of Bitcoin as a battery, what can we do with it? The key properties of Bitcoin’s battery are: 1) always on and permissionless (no need to find customers, just plug and go) I think it is a very wasteful transformation of the power put in. You can get it to be always on and "permissionless" without burning this much energy: check out [Bitcoin Cash, Dash, ZCash](https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/) and other, cheaper-to-mine (still proof-of-work) currencies. The actual benefit you get is security via out-costing: "you have to burn up this many resources to double-spend". Because of the simplicity of this out-costing, lots of people trust it, because they can understand it (even though it's wasteful). > and 2) naturally seeking low-cost electricity: it will always buy when the price is right. Just because electricity is cheap in some places doesn't mean we should bid it up pointlessly. ---- I would love to see a PoS scheme that I could understand enough to trust. But they are much harder to create, and until then, I keep my money in PoW ones, in spite of the cost of transacting.

incrudible 6y ago
The energy usage of a PoW scheme is in direct proportion to its usage (transaction fees), block reward and price of the underlying. As such, I don't see that Bitcoin Cash, Dash or ZCash would be fundamentally more efficient if these factors were to rival Bitcoin, even if parameters such as block size were to change. For the longest time, Ethereum transactions were far cheaper than Bitcoin transactions, but today they rival Bitcoin.
- danuker 6y ago
  Transaction fees are not just proportional to usage. They are a price set by demand (usage) and supply (block space). Currently Bitcoin limiting the block size to 1MB is artificially lowering supply. Recently, Bitcoin Cash has surpassed Bitcoin in transactions per day: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-bch.html#log&1y https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-bch.ht... Their blocks are larger, so there is more room for transactions, so miners are not so well rewarded, so they can afford to waste less electricity in total. Of course, this reduced waste implies reduced security (instead of securing >$700k/h, it's "only" $8.5k/h - https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/).

thesausageking 6y ago

This is the new "blockchain not bitcoin". Why do VCs feel the need to post reductive grand statements like these?

betterunix2 6y ago

Batteries can release energy. Bitcoin cannot. Neither can aluminum. Bitcoin consumes vast amounts of energy, far more than "traditional" payment systems (per transaction), and denying that reality helps nothing. Bitcoin is an energy-wasting system. Fix that problem if you want to see wider adoption; don't just pretend there is no problem.

noxer 6y ago
Aluminum actually can. Its made form aluminuum oxide + energy and you can oxidize (for example burn) aluminum back into aluminum oxide which releases energy. Certainly not what the author meant and certainly not possible with bitcoin where the energy is turned into heat and no chemical reaction happens at all.

knl 6y ago

Ah, I love how people love to paddle flawed ideas in order to protect their mindset. This article goes into great depths to explain all the fallacies when it comes to energy and bitcoin: https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-coins-are-an-esg-nightmare/ https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-c.... tl;dr is that bitcoin is just wasting energy and no amount of text will help improve that situation. It should be outright forbidden.

gammalost 6y ago

> crypto mining is driving the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Why is waste a good thing if it's renewable? It's the argument I see brought up almost every time. It feels like people are conflating renewable with a infinite energy source.

hinkley 6y ago
Because nobody is talking about heat pollution yet and Out of Sight, Out of Mind.

nathias 6y ago

In a sense, the aluminum coming from Iceland is like a battery. What is a battery? A way of shifting both the location and the time-of-use of energy. This is a bad analogy, batteries are energy storage, spending energy is not the same as storing energy.

specialist 6y ago

From OC: > One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes. Yup. Money is weird. Measurement of value, accounting of debts, commodity to be collected. David Graeber's book Debt has a pretty good survey of our evolving, manyform, paradoxical thinking towards money and related metaphors. As for crypto currency, I mostly agree with Mark Cuban's conclusion they're collectibles. Ergo, they're useful for escrow use cases, like exfiltrating money and swapping assets. I'll believe crypto currencies are proper money once a government accepts them as payment for taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism

ashray 6y ago
Not trying to convince you of anything but just wanted to share this with you. It has started happening... Zug in Switzerland accepts crypto for taxes. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/switzerlands-crypto-valley-has-started-accepting-bitcoin-ether-for-tax-payments-2021-02-18 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/switzerlands-crypto-valley-h...

xbar 6y ago

These are just hand-wavy rosy ideas.

a9h74j 6y ago

A "store of energy" implies some ability to extract energy back out. "A putative store of value" != "a store of energy".

fnord77 6y ago

imagine the thermodynamic losses.

hinkley 6y ago
We are going to be able to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere more by afforestation (terrestrial and marine) than by covering the planet in solar panels and turbines.

SkipperCat 6y ago

A ham sandwich is a battery.... Bitcoin is not a battery. Its fiat currency that uses a lot of energy to perform a fraction of the transactions that would be needed for it to be used for normal day to day transactions (filling up your gas tank, buying a coffee, etc). If anything, I'd say Bitcoin is the exact opposite of a battery, it's an energy sink. I say that because its fiat money. With the example used of aluminum, you've taken energy and made a durable good/commodity. You don't need to have faith in aluminum that it exists, it just there. Drop it on your foot and you'll have proof. With Bitcoin, it will just take a lack of faith and the whole thing becomes worthless. Bitcoin is interesting, it might become a reserve/hedge investment like diamonds or gold. But let's not put it in the halls of the Duracell bunny.

noxer 6y ago

Had to flag this not because it break any rules its just 100% too dumb to be on HN. I had to double check if this wasn't satire.

deepinsand 6y ago

Bitcoin is an amazing wedge to install distributed solar and storage throughout the nation. Right now, utilities and governments make it hard to monetize these assets, and bitcoin provide an easy alternative. This builds the supply chain and labor force that are needed to perform a full clean energy transition. I don't have a strong opinion on cryptocurrency, but I have a strong opinion on energy supply chains. Plug: I'm building https://cryptoclean.energy/ https://cryptoclean.energy/ with this exact thesis. Check it out to get a renewable energy system for your mining rig.

whateveracct 6y ago

Dollar bills are closer to batteries than BTC.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

audunw 6y ago

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically pure waste? There is no way to make aluminum other than putting huge amounts of energy. Aluminum has value to everyone in some way, not just those invested in it. There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions, or even to do proof-of-work cryptocurrency (if you feel that's necessary), besides using Bitcoin. With aluminum you can even reverse the process and use it as an actual battery. With Bitcoin you can't. The energy is burned forever. I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
You need to have a triadic understanding of bitcoin, this is what allows it to be a flat currency, a store of value, and a battery at both one and the same time, through the act of transubstantiation of the coin a quantum state is triggered that allows the individual coin to choose which form it will manifest itself as.
- funkychicken 6y ago
  I wish I could give this comment HackerNews Gold.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I'm actually surprised at the reception, I was expecting a -3, but I wanted to say it anyway.
    - bob1029 6y ago
      Parody & sarcasm are very effective tools for illustrating how hyperbolic a situation has become.

andagainagain 6y ago

So... to break down the idea, it starts with redefining energy, then leans on that definition to justify making more bitcoin. What this means has nothing to do with energy, and everything to do with cost savings on bitcoin mining by intentionally increasing electricity load on a system based on electricity variation of renewables. You can do that IF your goal is to get more bitcoin. But you're not storing energy by doing so. Electrically speaking, you are only a cost on the system.

bootlooped 6y ago

It seems like increasing electricity demand would also increase the incentives to keep old fossil fuel plants online.

ldbooth 6y ago

Bitcoin as a flexible load has utility, the misappropriation of the word 'battery' does not.

gidam 6y ago

this guy really understand thermodynamics and physics of batteries... We are safe! I propose to entrust him with the solution of all the energy problems of the planet.

scottmsul 6y ago

Bitcoin enthusiast here. Pretty surprising how antagonistic the HN crowd is to bitcoin.

bootlooped 6y ago
Why? The downsides are obvious and the realized upsides are extremely limited. The best thing I can say about it is that it's enabled cheaper international money transfers for some people. The worst thing is that it consumes an entire nation's worth of electricity. Compare those two things; is it worth it?
Applejinx 6y ago
Hackers are capable of thinking through an argument and, at their best, coming up with disruptive and/or unexpected solutions to a situation. This is of course how Bitcoin came to be in the first place. That's also why hackers may be the first to figure out the catastrophic failure of cryptocurrency, or perhaps ALL cryptocurrency as a class, or the exploit to disrupt the disruptor and render cryptocurrency a useless dead end. It's founded on assumptions both explicit and implicit. One of the implicit ones is that capitalism will continue to be the force that checkmates any argument against crypto: get enough capital into it and the capital will seek to protect itself, honestly or dishonestly, peacefully or violently, with no consideration for any other concern. Hackers are capable of thinking through that scenario and asking whether, by contrast, something like bitcoin might be the exploit that destroys capitalism by increasing its efficiencies until they're untenable.

peterbonney 6y ago

I used Bitcoin to buy milk, therefore it is a cow.

kummappp 6y ago

Crypto currencies offer non-repudiation and that is it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation

jasonlaramburu 6y ago

The analogy makes no sense. The mining reward for BTC is fixed (6.25 BTC every 10 minutes) regardless of how much electricity is burned in the process.

coding123 6y ago

I can't figure out how to charge a battery with bitcoin. Just working for a few hours drains my 12.6 to 12.2 at night. Lead acid is a battery. Lithium is a battery. Btc is not

macawfish 6y ago

This is anti-scientific gaslighting and it does a disservice to all the people working hard to bring the actual benefits of applied cryptography and distributed tech to the public in ways to that actually provide public good. There are alternatives to wasteful proof of work schemes. Proof of space and time & proof of stake. Neither are perfect but clearly Bitcoin's hyperdeflationary raccoon trap proof of work scheme isn't either. Bitcoin advocates had better get it together.

toss1 6y ago

What the author is describing is not a battery. It is a sink. I saw no method of storing and re-releasing the energy Only a method of immediately consuming the energy into something potentially useful and transportable. IT is not like transporting your BTC will allow you to extract new energy at its destination, the way that transporting charged batteries or gasoline would. So it has utility, but not nearly as much as he's advertising in the headline.

Fede_V 6y ago

Whenever I read something this far off the mark, I genuinely wonder if it's total lack of intellectual honesty, or, having drank so much kool aid that this argument genuinely makes sense. Bitcoin transactions require the solution of a completely useless and expensive to compute mathematical computation. THIS IS BY DESIGN, TO MAKE IT SCARCE. In the short term, we are facing a critical shortage of computer chips because bitcoin miners are buying critical infrastructure and using them to do absolutely useless math to speculate on an obvious bubble. In the long term, we absolutely need to solve global warming, and the only way we will do so is if we figure out a way to decouple carbon emissions from productivity on a global scale. Bitcoin makes this task much harder - by its very definition, bitcoin literally scales with energy consumption. Energy prices and bitcoin prices (plus fixed costs due to mining equipment) will always be in some sort of equilibrium. Second - we need those chips that are currently calculating completely useless hashes to actually be put to use in productive sectors. IF your attitude is some variant of - fuck you, I don't care about the world, I just want to get rich profiting from this bubble - fine, I can't convince you to care about the rest of humanity. But please - be clear eyed about this: there is not a single credible global warming scholar that believes Bitcoin will help. Not one. The only people who try to push forward incredibly shoddy thinkpieces about how Bitcoin/NFTs will help global warming are obviously Bitcoin speculators or paid shills.

leventov 6y ago
Correction: we need to solve climate change in a short term, not long term.
- Fede_V 6y ago
  You are right, I should have used short term and very short term.
intotheabyss 6y ago
Very disingenuous to include NFTs in the same category as Bitcoin. NFTs live on Ethereum which is in the process of changing its consensus from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.

randomopining 6y ago

Bitcoin cannot be stopped by a government. The crypto math makes it so valuable to lock in your wealth.

Applejinx 6y ago
I'm gonna say 'proof needed here'. What you're really saying is, if a government or all governments do stop it, you're boned.

arithma 6y ago

Bitcoin is more of ash rather than a battery in this analogy. I like bitcoin (the idea, not the burning of the planet, even though it's only a temporary hack to bootstrap the whole thing). And hey, maybe it will encourage building nuclear mining farms, that will give their owners free bitcoin, and then we can use the nuclear plants. The only defense I can stomach for Bitcoin's unfathomable energy consumption is that it might be only temporary. Is it worth it? So far, not that much, but I think developed-countries under-estimate the value of bitcoin, since they have more stable economies, and thus currencies, and enjoy freedom of moving their money, and data privacy...

kilovoltaire 6y ago

There's a discussion of a rebuttal to this here- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612952 (Also it's newer and more upvoted but for some reason no longer on the front page?)

kneel 6y ago

This essay checks out. Thermodynamics and its higher order effects have profound effects on our modern world. We've been fooled into thinking otherwise, but new forms of money are clearing the fog. This is very exciting.

poundofshrimp 6y ago

The “battery” in the article is misleading. I wouldn’t call bitcoin a battery any more so than I would call aluminum a battery. The point the article appears to make is that bitcoin mining is much more elastic in its energy use and is therefore uniquely fit to fill some niche energy markets. That’s completely different from and quite a far cry from being a “battery”.

eladv 6y ago

Here is my rebuttal to this blogpost, where I claim that Bitcoin is not a battery, but rather a bottomless sink for marginal-cost electricity: https://medium.com/lunar-ventures/bitcoin-is-not-a-battery-it-is-a-sink-852db9669f20 https://medium.com/lunar-ventures/bitcoin-is-not-a-battery-i... And the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26611342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26611342

yellowapple 6y ago

This would be more compelling if there was a way to turn a cryptocurrency back into energy. And indeed, energy-backed currency seems to be a staple of science fiction - things like "energy credits". Cryptocurrency gets us halfway there, in the sense that you can transform energy into it, but the reverse ain't really feasible. Perhaps as (actual) batteries and supercapacitors and such continue to miniaturize we'll see something closer to a true energy credit, with financial transactions taking place through the transfer of stored energy - be it directly (people maintaining batteries as wallets) or indirectly (people exchanging currency entitling the holder to some amount of energy).

DemocracyFTW 6y ago

I am from the future, and this claim has been refuted: Bitcoin is not a battery, it's a waste of everybody's resources. Some people who have been exposed to curves like the one at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Carbon_Emissions.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Carbon_Emissions.s... (which shows that almost all extra CO2 comes from after 1950, and *around 50% of all anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere dates from the past 20 years!) seemingly fall into a kind of cognitive dissonance and react with "surely this isn't true" (climate deniers); others rationalize that the most frivolous wasters of fossil energy are actually beneficial for mankind and the planet.

machawinka 6y ago

I am amazed by the level's of stupidity crypto has gotten to. Time for the regulators to crash the party.