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A good reminder that Bitcoin runs on cheap renewables is BS. See also miners buying gas power plants in New York.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2
by oefrha 6y ago
A good reminder that Bitcoin runs on cheap renewables is BS. See also miners buying gas power plants in New York.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479
- mr_woozy 6y agosure if you're suddenly not counting China's hydropower as renewables suddenly.
- soperj 6y agoDepending on what's flooded Hydro can actually be the dirtest power out there. There's a hydro plant in brazil that contributes 3 times the number of ghg emissions as it's equivalent coal plant.
- edoceo 6y agoBelo Monte? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belo_Monte_Dam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belo_Monte_Dam
- turbinerneiter 6y agoThat is due to the construction? Just wondering nif there are any hidden runtime emissions you are refering to.
- samus 6y agoThe vegetation now covered by water will start to rot and release lots of methane and other goodies. Unless it is cleared away first. This is only practical with trees though.
- jhgb 6y agoEven of you clear it away, you can still get plant matter from upstream.
- EL_Loco 6y agoIt is due to the decomposing vegetation under the water. However, it depends on what is under the water. Some hydro reservoirs actually are carbon sinks while others are worse than coal plants. You also have to take time of operation into account. Hydro becomes cleaner as time passes. A 50 year old hydro plant will have had a lot of the vegetation decomposed already vs a 5 year old one.
- soperj 6y agoNot really. It's from rotting trees, and when they decompose in an anaerobic environment they take 3-5 times long to decompose. Most trees will take well over a hundred years to fully decompose.
- oefrha 6y ago- Unless I seriously misinterpreted the news, the significant chunk of hash rate cut due to this blackout is all coal. - Until hydro and other renewables cover all electricity needs, crypto mining hogging hydro just pushes other non-crypto power demands to fossil fuel.
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoTechnically speaking, western China has a lot of renewable power and not as much demand for it as eastern China. If they were mining in western China to take advantage of lower rates, and that energy can’t be transmitted East anyways, then it might make sense (or they could just move some industry from eastern China to western China to take advantage of renewables, or get that UHV grid working so they can move renewable electricity East to where it’s needed).
- powerapple 6y agoThe government has put out policies to encourage industry to move to western China. It is not so much about energy, it is mainly to deal with the imbalance of development between western China and eastern China (more so Northern China and Southern China). As far as I can recall, there was power shortage a few months ago, and I have suspected bitcoin mining would contributed to some of it.
- kaba0 6y agoIt doesn’t matter where it is used up, the point is that it is unnecessary work taking a huge amount of energy, that could be used for better things. Even using up purely renewable energy makes every other industry rely more on non-renewables, so it is a lose-lose either way.
- disruptalot 6y agoMaybe with the simplistic perspective that Bitcoin has a value that you can calculate. Energy usecases are worth what energy they use. Energy exists in a mostly free market and that's the best way to determine value. Everything else is conjecture.
- bonestamp2 6y agoAlso a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk space, or memory, or even just the tokens themselves to replace bitcoin's proof of work model).
- pmlnr 6y agoSo point them out, please. One that is efficient on all levels.
- ssijak 6y agoNano. It is also very fast, few seconds to transfer funds.
- tarsinge 6y agoEthereum POS chain is live and the migration of the main chain is planned for the end of the year.
- mrfusion 6y agoWhere can I learn more about this assuming I have an 85-90 IQ?
- rauljordan2020 6y agohttps://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-ethereum-2-0 https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-ethereum-2-0
- Paradigma11 6y agoI like Tezos. Its has a very interesting and developed smart contract technology stack: https://tezos.com/developer-portal https://tezos.com/developer-portal and is Proof of Stake. You can run a node on a cheap laptop.
- keorn 6y agoPolkadot: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-consensus https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-consensus
- sleavey 6y agoHas anyone tried to calculate the energy expenditure of the fiat currency system as a comparison, ideally per "unit worth" (whatever that might be) since fiat still vastly outcapitalises cryptocurrency?
- runeks 6y agoYes, and it’s vastly less than Bitcoin. Simply because it’s centralized, and a centralized system is always more efficient than a decentralized one. It’s a well known trade off. A better comparison would be gold versus Bitcoin, as they’re both similarly decentralized. Just comparing energy consumption between the two probably wouldn’t make sense, though, as gold mining e.g. ruins vast areas of land.
- intricatedetail 6y agoBut fiat has different properties so a bit apples to oranges in terms of efficiency. You could compare how efficient is USD vs GBP, but not USD vs BTC.
- nextaccountic 6y ago> Yes, and it’s vastly less than Bitcoin. Where is it?
- arthurcolle 6y agoCare to share your sources? Naturally, a summation of the energy expenditure of all of the related components of the existing fiat system must be included, from the totality of all people operating the various functions that facilitate the existing fiat system; i.e. their commutes, aggregate expenditures due to needing to operate physical banks, power usage at these physical banks, etc. are all factored into this calculation... right? All the way to the minting of new currency (probably almost negligible in the aggregate), to all of the security apparatus that ensure that bills are legitimate, to major parts of the US Secret Service that verify that bills are legitimate (including all of their expenses scaled to the proportion of agents dedicated to this task force)... I honestly don't believe that the electricity usage of BTC is higher than fiat currency operation, in the aggregate. Please share any sources if you have any information that contradicts this. It's an interesting area of open research + I'm curious if I've missed any publications recently.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoA good reminder that bitcoin is mined by 51% chinese miners and that it's not that decentralized, obviously.
- herbst 6y agoA reminder that blockchain is public and 51% attacks would be visible.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoI don't see where's that even relevant? You just see the transaction, until they mesh it. You don't know who and there is no accountability if there's abuse. It's the preferred method of payment for scammers, so visibility means absolutely nothing. Reminder that 51% were even possible in the past. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GHash.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GHash.io Seeing the transactions weren't a solution then and aren't a solution now.
- foepys 6y agoAssuming there is a detected 51% attack, what would be done against this? Spinning up more nodes to counter attack is not an incentive for other "good" (whatever this means) miners because keeping unused mining capacity at hand is equal to losing money. Detection is worthless without applying counter measures.
- inshadows 6y agoHopefully, rest of our economy has rested on green power for last hundred of years. Oh wait...
- cortic 6y agoThe ability to turn electricity into money is not the problem, or if it is, then lump all of modern endeavors in capitalism alongside of Bitcoin. The problem is we (the world) are not effectively taxing carbon emissions. Right now it should be unprofitable to use coal or oil energy. If this was done right, Bitcoin would be a massive stimulus to renewables.
- betterunix2 6y agoHow is Bitcoin a boon to renewables? Bitcoin consumes energy, and that energy is not being used for other things. Taxing one form of energy will just mean everything that uses energy becomes more expensive; Bitcoin fees would rise or mining operations would simply move to places without the tax. The actual problem is that Bitcoin's incentive structure works against energy efficiency. Usually we would expect to see improvements in technology result in reductions in energy consumption. Instead, when a new hashing machine is built that computes the same number of hashes for less energy, the response from Bitcoin miners is to compute more hashes using the same amount of energy. That is what Bitcoin incentivizes, and that is why Bitcoin will always be an environmental catastrophe even if we only had renewable power sources (take a look at the environmental cost of producing a solar panel -- there is more to the environment than carbon emissions).
- Majromax 6y ago> How is Bitcoin a boon to renewables? Bitcoin consumes energy, and that energy is not being used for other things. The utopian view is that not all energy is currently being used for other things. On grids with heavy penetration of renewables, peak production can overwhelm demand, causing bulk power to become effectively free. In a suitably regulated environment, bitcoin or an equivalent could act as a last-resort user of such power. Doing so would provide a baseline demand for excess generation, effectively subsidizing renewable buildout. This effect becomes stronger with carbon taxes, which would make non-renewable power comparatively much more expensive and effectively reduce bitcoining-demand from such sources relative to renewables. However, the non-utopian view is that this possible arbitrage is global, not local. Through bad regulation, corrupt governments, or outright theft, miners somewhere on the planet can access power even more cheaply than from the excess renewables contemplated above.
- ravenstine 6y agoThat may be true, but the toothpaste is out of the tube. If we can't abruptly stop the use of fossil fuels to stop climate change, I don't think any amount of pointing out how much energy BTC uses is going to change the fact that it's been well established.
- paulgb 6y agoAlthough I believe it is well-established, there's still a lot of people spreading industry talking points about how it's mostly renewables, in spite of stories like this to the contrary. Motivated reasoning is a helluva drug.
- mavhc 6y agoBitcoin is an experiment to see if humans will set fire to their own house while they're living in it for a quick buck. The answer is: yes
- DennisP 6y agoI'd say it's one of a great many successful replications of that experiment.
- cdiddy2 6y agoWell mining in China moves with the seasons. During rainy season excess hydro power in Sichuan and Yunnan is used for mining, during dry season its coal in Xinjiang
- tim333 6y agoBut you can talk people into selling BTC and buying ADA or some other proof of stake coin. I think if pension funds etc go into bitcoin it'd be an environmental disaster so it's probably worth campaigning against that. The energy consumption comes out kind of proportional to the bitcoin price.
- maerF0x0 6y agoA very large amount (something about 25-47% [1]) of homes use electricity without getting any computation for their electricity to heat conversion. Those homes could use computing devices (albeit at a high capital cost) with 0 marginal energy or environmental cost. Especially if their device is a sunk cost. Yes heat pumps are better than 100% efficient, but they're inappropriate in many circumstances, and can be as expensive as ASIC miners, but it seems that miners also have a much better ROI (~1-2yrs payback) than the energy savings a heat pump would give (~5-10yrs payback). This ROI could be then funneled into carbon offset projects, renewables, and research. [1]: A quick google brought up a few results spanning those ranges
- CogitoCogito 6y ago> This ROI _could_ be funneled into carbon offset projects, renewables, and research. They could also just take the costs that would go to ASICs and instead put that into the investments in the first place. What actual utility is there in some mathematical computations for society as a whole?
- imtringued 6y agoIf the computation had utility then it would be predictable. Think of calculating digits of Pi. You can calculate the digits ahead of time and stockpile them, you can use your stockpile to do a 51% attack.
- maerF0x0 6y agoIf the btc has greater value than the outputs from the renewables, then the market is "voting" on what is actually the most valuable thing to that society. I know it's tempting to argue along the lines of "What could be more important than the environment?" and that is a good question, but that is a shift in societal values question, not an economic one. Economics simply helps one optimize the outcomes towards a values set.
- imtringued 6y agoLet's assume that this is true and there is a way to leverage waste heat from mining perfectly. This would reduce the cost of mining and the savings can be invested into more mining.
- jude- 6y agoA friendly reminder that PoW runs just fine on 100% renewables. It's the job of regulators to make sure all PoW runs this way. Just like it's the job of regulators to mandate renewable energy for literally all other industries.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoWhy 100% renewables? Biofuel is renewable but also emits lots of carbon and air pollution. Nuclear is not considered renewable but is low carbon and clean air. Seems like the the term allows undue wiggle room. Might want to require that it be generated with energy that emits less than 50 gCO2-eq/kWh on a lifecycle basis or something more specific.
- jude- 6y agoPlease don't be daft. You know what I meant.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoDidn't mean to be daft. It's a word with lots wrapped up in it. 100% clean is a better term IMHO.
- semicolon_storm 6y agoI thought one of the touted benefits of bitcoin (and other DeFi) is the resistance to regulations? Sort of seems counterproductive to say that regulation will fix the issues with the currency that's supposed to resist regulation.
- jude- 6y agoNonsense. PoW exists in the real world and had negative externalities. Of course it's subject to regulation.
- ffggvv 6y agohow would they do that practically? would require a huge surveillance state with constant monitoring to make sure you’re not mining on non allowed power