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Square: Bitcoin Is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future
- FredPret 6y agoWe’re going to mine so many bitcoins that it’ll keep the windmills spinning all night! /s
- Scoundreller 6y agoI’ll take “dumb enough headlines where I won’t read the article” for $100 Alex.
- JadeNB 6y agoI don't blame you. Here's the abstract that goes with that clickbait headline, which is as far as I could get: > In this memo, we aim to explain how the Bitcoin network functions as a unique energy buyer that could enable society to deploy substantially more solar and wind generation capacity. This deployment, along with energy storage, aims to facilitate the transition to a cleaner and more resilient electricity grid. We believe that the energy asset owners of today can become the essential bitcoin miners of tomorrow.
- neatze 6y agoIt is even worse, then I thought.
- SamBam 6y agoUgh. It's such a facile argument. "You know the problem with electricity? People don't buy enough of it! If we double the amount of electricity used on the planet, people will need to spend more on solar panels. And more solar panels are good, right?"
- wyager 6y ago> You know the problem with electricity? People don't buy enough of it! Personally, I want humanity to climb the kardashev scale. Bitcoin reduces petrodollar seigniorage profits and turns them into subsidies on power infrastructure.
- billytetrud 6y agoYou clearly don't understand the economics of the situation. Renewable power generation from wind and solar has a much higher ratio of wasted power because they have such high variability in output. Because of this, in cases where the power generally can't be cost effectively stored or supplemented (by dynamic increase of dirtier energy), wind and solar simply won't be built in favor of coal plants. Bitcoin mining can use this wasted energy, which increases the revenue that can be generated by renewable sources, thus making it more likely that areas will choose renewable over coal. So please don't get all disgusted when you didn't actually read through what's going on. Your biases are blinding you.
- neatze 6y agoHow I am reading your comment: Higher demand will decrease prices for renewable sources, because of bitcoin mining, and such feedback eventually will lead to decrease prices in supply of renewable sources material. I see a few false assumption, to say the least: 1. Material for renewable sources are not scares and there's production is cheap. 2. It is cheaper to mine from renewables sources then from non-renewable sources. (infrastructure cost) 3. There is no trend in replacing existing energy sources with renewables sources, without bitcoin.
- billytetrud 6y ago
- cyberlab 6y agoIn layman's terms: Bitcoin's borderline-fraudulent use of energy will be able to /fix/ the energy that was spent in mining new coins, and the dirty deed can be forgotten. Except you can't so easily forget damage to the environment!!
- celticninja 6y agoAll this vitriol for Bitcoin and how terrible it is for the environment. Honestly it is just the latest stick people want to beat it with. Its hardly the first and it wont be the last thing that damages our environment. And it is also far from the biggest causes of pollution. Cargo ships cause more pollution than all the cars on earth, yet we are told to drive less but the cargo ships keep coming, keep getting bigger and keep polluting. Stopping/Reducing them would mean we can't consume cheap goods so a blind eye is turned, to an easier target, Bitcoin. If everyone who I heard complain about the inefficency of bitcoin were also protesting Mcdonalds, Shell, Texaco, Amazon etc it might actually have some merit but until then I feel free to ignore the green virtue signalling.
- nasmorn 6y agoAre people that cannot tell CO2 and local air pollution apart the same who cannot see the difference between gambling and investment?
- spaced-out 6y agoSo you want to talk about how much energy casinos around the world waste?
- nightski 6y agoAll investment is gambling. Investments have different risk profiles, sure. But unless you can perfectly predict the future then the uncertainty is non-zero and it is a gamble. But when investing how much an investment makes absolutely isn't very interesting. All that matters is opportunity cost, or how one investment compares to all of the others. You want to make the best investment for the right amount of risk - and this is going to always be a gamble because it is highly uncertain.
- stopBurncoins 6y agoNext in the news: Why proof-of-space cryptocurrencies do not waste disk space, even though you can't use it anymore. Why can't we stop pretending it is not just an unregulated investment? It's good at that. Market it as such and stop portraying it as anything else.
- billytetrud 6y agoYou're letting you biases blind you. The headline is correct, there are a lot of merits that you aren't thinking of because your head is so far in the sand you can't even be bothered to read and educate yourself.
- dang 6y ago"Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Perhaps you don't owe this article or its headline better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here.
- gkfasdfasdf 6y agoCrazy idea: mine bitcoin in satellites that are aimed at the Sun 24/7. Just need to figure out a way to dissipate the heat I guess.
- phpnode 6y agothis is just another disingenuous propaganda piece for cryptocurrency proponents to link to whenever people bring up the environmental impacts of bitcoin. Shameful.
- madspindel 6y agoIs this a joke or just a bad attempt at greenwashing?
- phpnode 6y agoIt's an offensively transparent attempt at greenwashing from a company run by a morally vacuous bitcoin proponent and an investment company with a large position in bitcoin.
- ISL 6y agoThere is a chance that this idea is actually correct. However, in the near-term, I'm going long on popcorn as the advocates attempt to make the "making energy more expensive will actually help people of limited means who want to heat their homes" case.
- wyager 6y agoBitcoin production occurs at the margins where power is cheapest, because it uniquely does not matter where the mining takes place geographically. Many Bitcoin mines are using power that was completely unviable to use previously due to distance from grid infrastructure. I would expect it to have relatively little impact on electricity prices in general, and essentially zero impact where electricity is already expensive.
- ISL 6y agoIf you live at the margins, in say, Wenatchee, WA, it matters. Bitcoin mining has disrupted city infrastructure and priced out existing stakeholders. "Wheel never stops turning, Badger." "That only matters to the people on the rim."
- Taek 6y agoThis is true of any industry though. And Wenatchee, WA could easily prevent this by adding a tax or changing the local regulations around electricity consumption.
- pyrale 6y agohttps://observers.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210203-in-iran-power-outages-reveal-the-secret-business-of-chinese-bitcoin-farms https://observers.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210203-in-ir...
- isoprophlex 6y ago> Our model demonstrates that integrated bitcoin mining could transfigure intermittent power resources into baseload-capable generation stations. What a beautifully idiotic piece of Bitcoin propaganda, brought to you by the truth distorting, greedy ass crypto investor crowd.
- seibelj 6y agoIs there a reason why this statement is false?
- phpnode 6y agoyou cannot generate electricity from bitcoin
- isoprophlex 6y agoIntermittent producers becoming baseload is a contradictio in terminis. No amount of handwaving or cherry picking can change this. Furthermore my own stand is that presence of miners remove pressure on grid operators to install storage capacity. This means miner presence does the exact opposite of that statement.
- cool_dude85 6y agoBy what conceivable mechanism could bitcoin "transfigure" an "intermittent power resource" such as a solar PV panel into being baseload-capable? If I put a bitcoin on my solar panel does it start producing at night? Will a bitcoin keep the clouds from casting shadows on my solar farm?
- kinghajj 6y agoI think the idea is that mining Bitcoin can offset installation costs, thereby making it cheaper to install more energy storage, which would help make intermittent energy sources like solar/wind act more like a baseload provider?
- FredPret 6y agoI put my bitcoin on a hamster wheel. Turned into a perpetual-motion turbine. Hamster calmly got off and now sits next to it, wearing sunglasses and a little suit, monitoring his hodlings.
- skybrian 6y agoI’ve made similar arguments myself, but currently Bitcoin’s price is so high that it’s profitable to mine using energy from coal or natural gas. A carbon tax would help to discourage this, but so would crashing the price of Bitcoin.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- idreyn 6y agoI just saw another interesting whitepaper the other day from the World Sudoku Society suggesting that we tile the Mojave with solar panels to generate more Sudoku puzzles!
- artifact_44 6y agoWhy do you hate sudokoin?
- stopBurncoins 6y agoCurrently the only way for bitcoin to be clean is to switch the underlying tech to proof of stake https://www.change.org/StopBurncoins https://www.change.org/StopBurncoins
- wyager 6y agoProof of stake lacks the security properties of proof of work, because casting conflicting votes is free.
- Arainach 6y agoIf a product can't be secure without using more energy than most countries (and if that security is considered to be important), that product is garbage and shouldn't be allowed to continue.
- celticninja 6y agoThe US dollar is only secure because of the US Military. If a product (US Dollar) can't be secure without spending more money on defence than most countries combined, that product is garbage and shouldn't be allowed to continue. Thats with discounting the other costs, such as the loss of human life, when the military decides it needs to invade somewhere to make sure its 'enemies' can see how big its stick is.
- wyager 6y agoUnfortunately it’s not up to your personal opinion if things are “allowed to continue”. A fair comparison with Bitcoin alternatives reveals it is net more efficient than the things it’s replacing (petrodollar warfare, giant payment processors, etc).
- est31 6y agoIsn't issuing conflicting votes, if proven, costing people their stake?
- willeh 6y agoAny benefit that a "buyer of last resort" entails can easily be provided by either government or derivatives markets. Bitcoin takes away resources (energy and semiconductor manufacturing) from socially good things. It is much better when people admit that they are greedy than when they try to paint their greed as some great effort towards saving the planet. This goes for both traditional money managers and HODLers. I'm hoping for a correction soon, as much as we might all end up unemployed, it would be a great pleasure to see these SV thought leaders cut down to size.
- wyager 6y ago> Bitcoin takes away resources (energy and semiconductor manufacturing) from socially good things The provision of high-quality money/savings/etc is a social good.
- AlexandrB 6y agoIt is. But what does that have to do with bitcoin? Bitcoin is both volatile and has increasingly expensive transaction costs making it a bad vehicle for steady savings as well as a poor currency.
- wyager 6y agoObviously millions of people disagree. Volatility is to be expected during the monetization process. Bitcoin transaction fees are lower than CC fees (2.5-3%) on any sizable transaction and lightning brings the fees close to zero.
- peter_d_sherman 6y agoTakeaways: >"o Bitcoin mining presents an opportunity to accelerate the global energy transition to renewables by serving as a complementary technology for clean energy production and storage. o Solar and wind are now the least expensive energy sources in the world, but are hitting deployment bottlenecks primarily because of their intermittent power supply and grid congestion. o Bitcoin miners as a flexible load option could potentially help solve much of these intermittency and congestion problems, allowing grids to deploy substantially more renewable energy. o By deploying more solar and wind, these generation technologies will likely fall even further down their respective cost curves, bringing them closer to zero marginal cost energy production." PDS: What a strange, yet interesting, set of ideas! Before reading this, I had not seen these sets of ideas juxtaposed as they were here. Interesting!
- Luker88 6y agowell, there's a lie in the middle though: "Bitcoin miners as a flexible load" I'm just going to guess that miners will not take seriously the idea of "you just have to mine only during the day" The return of mining is much higher than the cost of coal, so this theory can only happen when throughout the whole world the average pool return is between the cost of coal energy and the cost of solar energy At that point, nobody will be mining anymore probably
- Taek 6y agoIt's a tradeoff between capex and opex. Right now, the capex costs are so high that you are more or less forced to run miners 24/7, or you never make back the capex costs. If bitcoin miners were more opex heavy in terms of Total Lifetime Cost, it could make sense to turn them off at night. As Moore's law continues to slow down, miners slowly are becoming more opex heavy.
- sauwan 6y agoOverinstallation of renewable production is likely one of the lowest cost ways to hit carbon reduction goals. But costs routinely go negative already, even in the midwest, largely because of the renewable tax production credits where producers still make money even selling at a loss. This problem will only get worse, so finding productive use cases for this capacity is great. While I think bitcoin makes some sense, I personally think the new coin Chia could make even more sense. "Farming" (aka mining) chia is very energy lite - but it does require "plotting" which is more energy intensive. If plotters run during the inexpensive energy periods and low cost farming is the only thing that runs during the peak energy cost periods, then the network wouldn't see huge fluctuations in mining and leave more vulnerable during periods of low mining and high energy costs.
- 1helloworld1 6y agoThis seems like an extreme case of cognitive dissonance. People who hold bitcoin (or are somehow vested in it) are trying really hard to rationalize the energy costs associated with bitcoin. But there is no way to avoid physics. Energy - no matter how it's produced- is lost as heat while mining bitcoins.
- billytetrud 6y agoTell me that again AFTER having actually read the paper.
- AlexandrB 6y agoI don't understand how a paper could contradict basic physics. Energy spent mining bitcoin is energy not spent doing something else. There are other ways to encourage more renewable energy production (e.g. government subsidies) that don't involve taking the resulting energy and turning it to waste heat. Even low-efficiency energy storage methods (like pumping water up a hill) are more efficient than simply turning the excess energy to heat.
- billytetrud 6y agoJesus Christ, well stay ignorant then. No laws of physics are being violated for chrisake.
- easymovet 6y agoBitcoin uses less energy to immutably log transactions than the manipulated rube goldberg system we currently use for keeping track of money balances, that should be all that matters.
- wufufufu 6y agoI think believing this (the title in particular) is even more partisan and more wrong than not participating in Bitcoin because it's "bad for the environment" which I read as "I feel I missed the boat, so I'm going to criticize". I would rather suffer the environmental damage that Bitcoin incentivizes over having central banking control our currency (not saying it's that simple, but that is how I think about it in broad strokes). No government can print Bitcoin at will to fund military spending or generally increase social inequity, which I think printing new money usually ends up doing. I think there are far worse things for the environment than Bitcoin. Have you seen our land and water usage?
- idreyn 6y ago> I would rather suffer the environmental damage that Bitcoin incentivizes over having central banking control our currency What multiplier do you have to add to the environmental damage to get to the point where Bitcoin meaningfully supersedes central banking instead of providing a funky niche alternative to it, and how do you feel about it then? > No government can print Bitcoin at will to fund military spending I can think of a few state actors that could take control of 51% of the network, and one with rather capricious views on private property rights that could do so just by seizing the mining hardware already operating on its soil.
- danaris 6y agoWould you rather knowingly see the biosphere of our planet pushed to a point where it cannot easily support human civilization in the form we have known it, just to temporarily uphold an ideological point like "no central control of our currency"?
- FredPret 6y agoOP takes a silly stance, but it would take a hell of a lot of bitcoin mining to destroy the biosphere!
- danaris 6y agoOn its own, sure. But we're already seeing the effects that herald that destruction: rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, etc. The modern capitalist civilization we've built is actually extremely fragile precisely because it has optimized so carefully for the current circumstances, throwing away safety measures, buffers, and redundancies as inefficient wastes of money. So if, for instance, the droughts in California continue to worsen, we may see a huge chunk of the almond industry literally dry up and blow away. And you might not care about almonds specifically, but it's just one more warning sign that the whole system is running close to its limits, and more and more parts of it are going to start to fail if we don't show some damn responsibility and stop wasting, just as a for instance, hundreds of terawatt-hours every year on something whose sole practical purpose is to enrich a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros.
- prichino 6y agoWhy do people who have no money think they have a say in how energy is spent? Historically, in the whole of time, there has never been a period where that happened. What is making people think it is different with Bitcoin?
- k2enemy 6y agoWe should pass a law that all ICE vehicles must get less than 5 miles per gallon. That will make people need more gas, and it might accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles!! What a horseshit argument. So bad that I have a very different sentiment towards Square as a company now.
- celticninja 6y agoWell cheap gas in the US has contributed to vehicles not improving their efficency. And I would hazard that US automobiles have caused more environmental damage in their lifetime than bitcoin has. Are you pushing for better public transport infrastructure in the USA? Or are you thinking about a new/second car to get around?
- k2enemy 6y agoI'm pointing out that increasing demand for something "bad" is a stupid way to make it expensive. Use pigovian taxes or something else that doesn't destroy the environment. If we want to quicken the adoption of clean electricity, then tax dirty electricity.
- celticninja 6y agoNo issues with that, but surely tax gas by that same reasoning. My point is that fuel for vehicles is bad for the environment, we know that, yet gas in the US is very cheap and as a result there is no push for public transport which is cleaner and more efficient. So for every post about how bad bitcoin is, it misses the point that there are older technologies, which are replaceable with cheaper, cleaner and more efficient alternatives now. But these are glossed over because bitcoin is the current target. If bitcoin dissappeared tomorrow i am sure that 90% of people who published an article about how bad it was would not switch to the next polluter. They would happily return to their status quo. Its disingenuous basically.
- rogerth1s 6y agoyou don't understand how electric markets work. electricity is bid on daily, based on marginal cost of production. solar has a very low marginal cost which pushes down the cost curve. the more solar energy there is --> cheaper price to consumers. however, utilities struggle with having a lot of solar/wind generation as there is a timing mismatch between peak generation and peak demand. bitcoin can be used like a sponge to sop up excess production and allow currently stalled projects to proceed without the need for additional new load.
- thysultan 6y agoYes we like the bitcoins. We'd like you to know that we're not in the business of staying poor, to that effect would you like to buy a carbon green bitcoin?
- swensel 6y agoI would add that mining Bitcoin using by products of natural gas production, which would otherwise be burned (flared) or vented directly into the atmosphere, is being put into practice already [1]. 1: https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-flaring-is-being-used-to-mine-bitcoin/ https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-flaring-i...
- javadocmd 6y agoIf we go around breaking windows we could really bolster the world's window-making capacity.
- billytetrud 6y agoSo many people here who clearly didn't bother to read much (if any) of the paper talking about how the headline is "obviously" wrong. If it feels "obviously" wrong to you, it's because of your preconceived notions and biases. How about reading the paper before making fools of yourselves? A couple points for the extra lazy: * Renewable power generation from wind and solar has a much higher ratio of wasted power because they have such high variability in output. Because of this, in cases where the power generally can't be cost effectively stored or supplemented (by dynamic increase of dirtier energy), wind and solar simply won't be built in favor of coal plants. Bitcoin mining can use this wasted energy, which increases the revenue that can be generated by renewable sources, thus making it more likely that areas will choose renewable over coal. * Bitcoin mining is a fixed quantity: so the more mining done using renewable energy, the less will be done with coal power (so when SamBam mocked this paper by saying "If we double the amount of electricity used on the planet, people will need to spend more on solar panels!" He completely didn't understand the zero sum aspect of bitcoin mining). * In fact, this has a more pronounced effect because players in the market who aren't as efficient can see their margins decrease below the point of profitablity. Since otherwise wasted electricity is cheapest, more and more bitcoin mining will be done using it, which means less and less will be done using usable electricity.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stopBurncoins 6y ago> Renewable power generation from wind and solar has a much higher ratio of wasted power because they have such high variability in output. Because of this, in cases where the power generally can't be cost effectively stored or supplemented (by dynamic increase of dirtier energy), wind and solar simply won't be built in favor of coal plants. Bitcoin mining can use this wasted energy, which increases the revenue that can be generated by renewable sources, thus making it more likely that areas will choose renewable over coal. So you think that cities will just put up with the increasing power outages, until the miners will give up in that region? That the normal public won't form a mob asking for more power in the night, which will attract more miners, thus making the whole point moot? That looks like a weird gamble to make > Bitcoin mining is a fixed quantity: so the more mining done using renewable energy, the less will be done with coal power (so when SamBam mocked this paper by saying "If we double the amount of electricity used on the planet, people will need to spend more on solar panels!" He completely didn't understand the zero sum aspect of bitcoin mining). no, bitcoin has a fixed max of coin, but we already are at the point where the only limit is how to get the hardware to mine. There is no limit on mining. Sure, it will shift more towards cheap power. But that needs to be also continuous. So bitcoin will drive the adoption of more continuous power, because if you do not do it, cities power will be a collateral damage more and more often. > In fact, this has a more pronounced effect because players in the market who aren't as efficient can see their margins decrease below the point of profitablity. Since otherwise wasted electricity is cheapest, more and more bitcoin mining will be done using it, which means less and less will be done using usable electricity. All this talk about using "waste" electricity is only relevant if your system never goes above max usage, thus causing power outages. That is already not true, and it's not like the power companies allocate only the "waste" electricity to bitcoin. Nobody stops mining when the power plant is near capacity. You just generate more pressure to add more power plants that give continuous power (so: not solar). We have "waste" electricity because the system is designed to handle peaks and other plants going down. Mining is eating away all the safety margin on the system. the more there is, the more it will eat
- paul_milovanov 6y agoSunshine is free, but materials, labour, manufacturing, manufacturing and end-of-life waste, land and opportunity cost of building solar/wind energy installations are all not free.
- smolder 6y agoThis is trying really hard to invent benefits to mining, where there really are none apart from the obvious: more bitcoins for you, and robustness for the network.
- 433o 6y agoabove we set forth that information was provided as opensource recently and made available as set forth above 2 us ....ARK (the morons). somehow.