6 ms·

The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

40 points by Flatcircle 6y ago

randomhodler84 6y ago
Hahaha not this again. More ignorance and misinterpretation of how and why energy is used. It doesn’t matter how much energy is used! What matters is how it is made, and there is no better financial incentive than renewably mined bitcoin. Eventually humanity should build acoustic Dyson spheres around nocoiners to convert their void screams into network hashrate.
- domano 6y ago
  I do not understand the argument, i have read it a lot in the last weeks. Does bitcoin not just incentivise the currently cheapest energy source? Which is still not renewable for most markets afaik.
  - randomhodler84 6y ago
    Eventually all markets will converge on renewable energy being the cheapest. It can be no other way — no consumable fuel will always beat consumable fuel in the long run. Bitcoin accelerates this transition process by providing something of value.
    - planb 6y ago
      Yes, in the long run you are right. In the timeframe that matters, Bitcoin IS an ecological disaster. I don't understand why people ignore that just because they like the idea of crypto - which I do, too. edit: well, actually of course I understand. But wouldn't it be honest to say "I care less about the environment than I care about my wealth" instead of claiming that Bitcoin will incentivise green energy?
  - tlb 6y ago
    Every use of power is incentivized to use the cheapest energy source. So the only way to solve CO2 climate effects is to make renewables be the cheapest. Solar is getting cheaper following a learning curve, where every billion dollars spent makes it a few percent cheaper. It’s possible that an increase in power demand will get us to fully renewable energy faster. Solar competes well with coal for new capacity, but not for existing capacity. So growth in demand may cause a faster transition.
  - edwnjos 6y ago
    Renewable energy created during low usage times are the cheapest since otherwise its going to waste. Lots of dams china, hence lots of miners in china.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- snypher 6y ago
  >doesn’t matter how much energy is used For machines that turn coal into waste heat for no benefit, I think it does.
  - randomhodler84 6y ago
    It’s cool that you think there is no benefit. Bitcoin is an optional system that nobody is forced to use. I find a very large benefit and so do millions of others. Enjoy watching the depreciating fiat!
    - creepto 6y ago
      Luckily Bitcoin cannot depreciate. If times get rough Bitfinex can just print a few billion USDT.
superkuh 6y ago
Everyone competing to find hashes that start with a large number of zeros to secure a currency is significantly less of an ecological disaster than maintaining a standing army (or military alliances with someone who does) like fiat currencies use.
- throwaway6734 6y ago
  Bitcoin can't function without the same standing armies
  - vntok 6y ago
    What a curious opinion. Care to elaborate?
    - ohgodplsno 6y ago
      Guess where Coinbase settled, and why it's not in an absolutely lawless place. Guess where Kraken settled, and why it's not in Somalia. The very same exchanges that make cryptocurrencies have their "value" (because, had these not been here, BTC would most likely still be under the $100 bar) rely on said army to be in a safe spot.
    - throwaway6734 6y ago
      Crypto relies on functioning nation-state infrastructure (internet/electrical) just like anything else
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Crypto millionaires are really not smart
  - vntok 6y ago
    This is not the place to attack people. Please don't.
    - 6y ago
goatcode 6y ago
I wonder how much energy is used by just the cafeterias combined in all of the federal reserve's many offices.
- vntok 6y ago
  That. Then, add all the energy consumed by the 24/7 monitoring and safeguarding of every single one of those facilities, and for good measure add to each cost line the energy cost of the whole chain of processes that selects, sets up and maintains enough of both humans and machines to accomplish that task at scale.
  - goatcode 6y ago
    Our comments and questions along these lines don't seem to be too popular. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up in the industry I'm in with my own locally unique thoughts and conclusions. It's very tiring.
    - wmf 6y ago
      Crypto only provides a small fraction of the functionality of the federal reserve or banks or credit card companies, so it isn't fair to compare energy consumption. (I know coiners basically don't want monetary policy so the fed has negative value to them but many people disagree.)
      - goatcode 6y ago
        That's a fair point, but a similar point could be made about the efficiency and energy density of solar vs. coal. Definitely about wind vs. coal. So I'd say based on that the entire original point is mastabatory at best.
nanna 6y ago
How are non-proof of work algorithms doing?
- wmf 6y ago
  Avalanche is running and the Ethereum 2.0 merge is coming.
  - vntok 6y ago
    Any century now.
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  Just as useless as Bitcoin, but at least not eating a country worth of TWh.
- Glench 6y ago
  Chia (by bittorrent inventor Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time and is specifically billed as a scalable, energy-efficient alternative with the same Nakamoto guarantees as Bitcoin. Their mainnet has been out for a month and the network is growing like 35% week over week. https://chia.net/ https://chia.net/
  - nanna 6y ago
    Interesting, and its contract language is LISP-like! https://chialisp.com/ https://chialisp.com/
    - Glench 6y ago
      yeah! And possibly more importantly, after looking at Solidity contracts and seeing how much they were hacked, they severely limited the stateful side effects of ChiaLISP transactions. Apparently their thinking was so that these programs could be better audited by enterprise users that way, making Chia a more attractive blockchain to target.
      - 6y ago
solarpunk 6y ago
To counter the whataboutisms abounding in the comments thread here, I will start a comment tree differently. How does the bitcoin community solve this problem? Is migrating to a proof-of-stake system viable in the long term? Would doing so affect the value of bitcoin as an asset? Would it improve it's value as anything else?
- rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
  No, PoS is an insecure trick that reinvents TradFi power structures. PoS bitcoin has been tried, and it is worth very little (like other PoS coins). Bitcoiners dont consider energy usage a actually a problem, infact, it is one of its greatest strengths! PoS is not the path forward. Reducing energy is not the path forward. Clean energy generation is the only way forward.
  - hootbootscoot 6y ago
    1 megawatt can give you X satoshis of imaginary bla bla. 1 megawatt can smelt a lot of metal that can build bridges and electric vehicle parts, for example. Whereas energy production is finite. Whereas BTC and it's ilk steal from the mouths of babes. Whereas BTC and it's ilk currently cause real externalities, in the real physical communal world we share.
- Glench 6y ago
  I don't know anything about proof-of-stake but Chia by the inventor of bittorrent (Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time by using extra commodity hard drive space instead of special-purpose CPU cycles: https://www.chia.net/ https://www.chia.net/ Their mainnet has been out for a month and people are able to mine ("farm") using low-energy hardware. There are people that are farming petabytes of storage with a single Raspberry Pi. I myself am using an old crappy laptop with some unused hard drives I had around the house.
- wmf 6y ago
  They don't see it as a problem and have no intention of solving it.
option 6y ago
limiting energy use, for bitcoin or not, is a dead end. We should be incentivizing clean energy and penalizing dirty one. Carbon taxes/quotas would be a great start.
NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
This strikes me as hysterical. Bitcoin miners tend to co-locate with the cheapest sources of electricity, which tend to be places where electricity is abundant and hard to export. Like hydro power, geothermal, and flare gas at refineries. To assume they're using the same mix of power generating processes as average, or as everyone else, doesn't make any sense. They aren't. They're effectively finding a financial means of exporting cheap electricity that is more efficient than literally exporting it via high-tension wires or turning it into products (like aluminum, as Iceland does) on-site. Could it be better? Hell yes. And I wish proof-of-stake and all the other ideas well.
- vntok 6y ago
  Yes. Bitcoin is actually the most efficient driver of greener energy production and transmission. It aligns the interest state actors have in developing such a costly infrastructure (aiming at recouping costs strategically, politically, socially and even financially over the long term) with the interest private entities have in getting access to cheap energy now (aiming at profiting from it over a much shorter timespan).
raptortech 6y ago
Don't get me wrong, Bitcoin is an ecological nightmare and I think it should be shunned accordingly. But the "fun-fact" that it consumes more energy than solar produces is false. "Power generation from solar PV is estimated to have increased by 22% in 2019, to 720 TWh" [1] "Bitcoin miners are expected to consume roughly 130 Terawatt-hours of energy (TWh)" [2] [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv [2] https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocurrency-and-energy-consumption/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocur...
- goatcode 6y ago
  > Bitcoin is an ecological nightmare Compared with other forms of currency, how does it stack up?
xiphias2 6y ago
This looks like a duplicate to me
politician 6y ago
Food for thought: 65% of bitcoin mining occurs in China [1], China is still building nuclear reactors [2], there are millions of tonnes of uranium reserves on the planet [3]. Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about our inability to generate clean energy while ignoring our ability to generate clean energy. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  On the other hand, if we were not doing Bitcoin, we could use that nuclear power for something else, like replacing coal plants...
  - politician 6y ago
    We have so much uranium that we can do Bitcoin AND everything else.
    - wmf 6y ago
      Is that actually happening? Is it on track to happen?
      - politician 6y ago
        The same people who lament the energy usage of PoW have also been stirring up FUD against nuclear. I said that the outrage about Bitcoin is a proxy for lamenting the lack of clean energy while also ignoring or resisting our current, proven ability to generate clean energy. Are you sealioning?

40 points by Flatcircle 6y ago

Hahaha not this again. More ignorance and misinterpretation of how and why energy is used. It doesn’t matter how much energy is used! What matters is how it is made, and there is no better financial incentive than renewably mined bitcoin. Eventually humanity should build acoustic Dyson spheres around nocoiners to convert their void screams into network hashrate.

domano 6y ago
I do not understand the argument, i have read it a lot in the last weeks. Does bitcoin not just incentivise the currently cheapest energy source? Which is still not renewable for most markets afaik.
- randomhodler84 6y ago
  Eventually all markets will converge on renewable energy being the cheapest. It can be no other way — no consumable fuel will always beat consumable fuel in the long run. Bitcoin accelerates this transition process by providing something of value.
  - planb 6y ago
    Yes, in the long run you are right. In the timeframe that matters, Bitcoin IS an ecological disaster. I don't understand why people ignore that just because they like the idea of crypto - which I do, too. edit: well, actually of course I understand. But wouldn't it be honest to say "I care less about the environment than I care about my wealth" instead of claiming that Bitcoin will incentivise green energy?
- tlb 6y ago
  Every use of power is incentivized to use the cheapest energy source. So the only way to solve CO2 climate effects is to make renewables be the cheapest. Solar is getting cheaper following a learning curve, where every billion dollars spent makes it a few percent cheaper. It’s possible that an increase in power demand will get us to fully renewable energy faster. Solar competes well with coal for new capacity, but not for existing capacity. So growth in demand may cause a faster transition.
- edwnjos 6y ago
  Renewable energy created during low usage times are the cheapest since otherwise its going to waste. Lots of dams china, hence lots of miners in china.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
snypher 6y ago
>doesn’t matter how much energy is used For machines that turn coal into waste heat for no benefit, I think it does.
- randomhodler84 6y ago
  It’s cool that you think there is no benefit. Bitcoin is an optional system that nobody is forced to use. I find a very large benefit and so do millions of others. Enjoy watching the depreciating fiat!
  - creepto 6y ago
    Luckily Bitcoin cannot depreciate. If times get rough Bitfinex can just print a few billion USDT.

superkuh 6y ago

Everyone competing to find hashes that start with a large number of zeros to secure a currency is significantly less of an ecological disaster than maintaining a standing army (or military alliances with someone who does) like fiat currencies use.

throwaway6734 6y ago
Bitcoin can't function without the same standing armies
- vntok 6y ago
  What a curious opinion. Care to elaborate?
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    Guess where Coinbase settled, and why it's not in an absolutely lawless place. Guess where Kraken settled, and why it's not in Somalia. The very same exchanges that make cryptocurrencies have their "value" (because, had these not been here, BTC would most likely still be under the $100 bar) rely on said army to be in a safe spot.
  - throwaway6734 6y ago
    Crypto relies on functioning nation-state infrastructure (internet/electrical) just like anything else
agumonkey 6y ago
Crypto millionaires are really not smart
- vntok 6y ago
  This is not the place to attack people. Please don't.
  - 6y ago

goatcode 6y ago

I wonder how much energy is used by just the cafeterias combined in all of the federal reserve's many offices.

vntok 6y ago
That. Then, add all the energy consumed by the 24/7 monitoring and safeguarding of every single one of those facilities, and for good measure add to each cost line the energy cost of the whole chain of processes that selects, sets up and maintains enough of both humans and machines to accomplish that task at scale.
- goatcode 6y ago
  Our comments and questions along these lines don't seem to be too popular. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up in the industry I'm in with my own locally unique thoughts and conclusions. It's very tiring.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Crypto only provides a small fraction of the functionality of the federal reserve or banks or credit card companies, so it isn't fair to compare energy consumption. (I know coiners basically don't want monetary policy so the fed has negative value to them but many people disagree.)
    - goatcode 6y ago
      That's a fair point, but a similar point could be made about the efficiency and energy density of solar vs. coal. Definitely about wind vs. coal. So I'd say based on that the entire original point is mastabatory at best.

nanna 6y ago

How are non-proof of work algorithms doing?

wmf 6y ago
Avalanche is running and the Ethereum 2.0 merge is coming.
- vntok 6y ago
  Any century now.
ohgodplsno 6y ago
Just as useless as Bitcoin, but at least not eating a country worth of TWh.
Glench 6y ago
Chia (by bittorrent inventor Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time and is specifically billed as a scalable, energy-efficient alternative with the same Nakamoto guarantees as Bitcoin. Their mainnet has been out for a month and the network is growing like 35% week over week. https://chia.net/ https://chia.net/
- nanna 6y ago
  Interesting, and its contract language is LISP-like! https://chialisp.com/ https://chialisp.com/
  - Glench 6y ago
    yeah! And possibly more importantly, after looking at Solidity contracts and seeing how much they were hacked, they severely limited the stateful side effects of ChiaLISP transactions. Apparently their thinking was so that these programs could be better audited by enterprise users that way, making Chia a more attractive blockchain to target.
    - 6y ago

solarpunk 6y ago

To counter the whataboutisms abounding in the comments thread here, I will start a comment tree differently. How does the bitcoin community solve this problem? Is migrating to a proof-of-stake system viable in the long term? Would doing so affect the value of bitcoin as an asset? Would it improve it's value as anything else?

rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
No, PoS is an insecure trick that reinvents TradFi power structures. PoS bitcoin has been tried, and it is worth very little (like other PoS coins). Bitcoiners dont consider energy usage a actually a problem, infact, it is one of its greatest strengths! PoS is not the path forward. Reducing energy is not the path forward. Clean energy generation is the only way forward.
- hootbootscoot 6y ago
  1 megawatt can give you X satoshis of imaginary bla bla. 1 megawatt can smelt a lot of metal that can build bridges and electric vehicle parts, for example. Whereas energy production is finite. Whereas BTC and it's ilk steal from the mouths of babes. Whereas BTC and it's ilk currently cause real externalities, in the real physical communal world we share.
Glench 6y ago
I don't know anything about proof-of-stake but Chia by the inventor of bittorrent (Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time by using extra commodity hard drive space instead of special-purpose CPU cycles: https://www.chia.net/ https://www.chia.net/ Their mainnet has been out for a month and people are able to mine ("farm") using low-energy hardware. There are people that are farming petabytes of storage with a single Raspberry Pi. I myself am using an old crappy laptop with some unused hard drives I had around the house.
wmf 6y ago
They don't see it as a problem and have no intention of solving it.

option 6y ago

limiting energy use, for bitcoin or not, is a dead end. We should be incentivizing clean energy and penalizing dirty one. Carbon taxes/quotas would be a great start.

NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago

This strikes me as hysterical. Bitcoin miners tend to co-locate with the cheapest sources of electricity, which tend to be places where electricity is abundant and hard to export. Like hydro power, geothermal, and flare gas at refineries. To assume they're using the same mix of power generating processes as average, or as everyone else, doesn't make any sense. They aren't. They're effectively finding a financial means of exporting cheap electricity that is more efficient than literally exporting it via high-tension wires or turning it into products (like aluminum, as Iceland does) on-site. Could it be better? Hell yes. And I wish proof-of-stake and all the other ideas well.

vntok 6y ago
Yes. Bitcoin is actually the most efficient driver of greener energy production and transmission. It aligns the interest state actors have in developing such a costly infrastructure (aiming at recouping costs strategically, politically, socially and even financially over the long term) with the interest private entities have in getting access to cheap energy now (aiming at profiting from it over a much shorter timespan).

raptortech 6y ago

Don't get me wrong, Bitcoin is an ecological nightmare and I think it should be shunned accordingly. But the "fun-fact" that it consumes more energy than solar produces is false. "Power generation from solar PV is estimated to have increased by 22% in 2019, to 720 TWh" [1] "Bitcoin miners are expected to consume roughly 130 Terawatt-hours of energy (TWh)" [2] [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv [2] https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocurrency-and-energy-consumption/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocur...

goatcode 6y ago
> Bitcoin is an ecological nightmare Compared with other forms of currency, how does it stack up?

xiphias2 6y ago

This looks like a duplicate to me

politician 6y ago

Food for thought: 65% of bitcoin mining occurs in China [1], China is still building nuclear reactors [2], there are millions of tonnes of uranium reserves on the planet [3]. Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about our inability to generate clean energy while ignoring our ability to generate clean energy. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
On the other hand, if we were not doing Bitcoin, we could use that nuclear power for something else, like replacing coal plants...
- politician 6y ago
  We have so much uranium that we can do Bitcoin AND everything else.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Is that actually happening? Is it on track to happen?
    - politician 6y ago
      The same people who lament the energy usage of PoW have also been stirring up FUD against nuclear. I said that the outrage about Bitcoin is a proxy for lamenting the lack of clean energy while also ignoring or resisting our current, proven ability to generate clean energy. Are you sealioning?