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Bill aims to halt Bitcoin mining until its environmental impact can be assessed
- Freewheelin 5y agoLike the Australien Government, they blame the consumers of electricity(EVs are bad because they charge from our dirty 19th century generation tech we've ensured most people have to use, like it or not), not the market and ridiculous policies keeping the dirty energy generators at the forefront of the energy market. Same applies to indoor cannabis growing power consumption. So utterly and hopelessly dishonest
- api 5y agoI've had a contrarian thought about Bitcoin and energy lately. I am not convinced it's right so it's just a speculation. A lot of people have scratched their heads about Elon's backing of cryptocurrency while at the same time apparently being concerned about climate change. What if it actually does make sense? What if increasing energy demand actually will help transition toward lower carbon emissions? When demand is stable or falling, industries become very conservative. Why invest in anything new if demand is static? Just run that old clunky coal burner plant as long as possible. But if demand is rising you have to expand. That means deploying new stuff. What new stuff do you build now? Well there's gas, which is mostly lower carbon than coal, but most new capacity being built is solar and wind. So you build that, then you build storage to back it. Once that's done, then why invest more money in stringing along those ancient coal burners?
- wmf 5y agoThis has been discussed a bunch on HN and elsewhere in recent months. I haven't seen any comprehensive analysis of it, but I have a few concerns: If you create net new demand then fill it with renewables you haven't reduced emissions at all because the coal plants are still running. In theory, higher demand can make new tech cheaper due to economy of scale but the effect isn't linear; it's probably like an S-curve. Where are renewables on that scale? Are they already large enough that diminishing returns are kicking in? How much crypto energy demand would move renewable costs? Would it need to be 10% of existing usage? Higher? Lower?
- airza 5y agoThe very cynical (and imo correct view) is that he is very interested in the aggregate demand side and not particularly interested in the saving the planet side.
- sadness3 5y agoWhat is too often left out of the discussion is the highly inefficient traditional establishment which are the alternative for currency trading and distributed financial activity. Most studies show that the traditional approach uses more energy.
- asd4232 5y agoMore energy in absolute terms, or per financial transaction? I mean, what matters is whether replacing the entire financial system with Bitcoin would produce more emissions through mining than the system currently does.
- bingbong70 5y agoThe current system is backed by the largest polluter on the planet, the US military. Bitcoin in comparison uses less energy but its too early for some to recognize this fact. Bitcoin is the settlement layer, tools built on top of it (like 2nd/3rd layer tech that can achieve 100K-1M+ transactions per second) require very little additional energy.
- bingbong70 5y agoRather than downvote how about telling us where you disagree? Seems silly to rob readers of a potentially useful rebuttal.
- aaron-santos 5y ago> If you create net new demand then fill it with renewables you haven't reduced emissions at all because the coal plants are still running. There is a non-zero possibility that the public's perception of coal power plants being associated with Bitcoin mining increases to a point where the support to ban coal power plants reaches an actionable threshold. Consider who benefits from delivering a setback to Bitcoin and see if they enter the arena of public opinion on this issue.
- kaba0 5y agoElon is an egoistic billionaire scammer, hardly caring about anything other than his wallet.
- api 5y agoIf he only cared about his wallet he would have gone into finance, not tried to build an aerospace company and do other absurdly hard things. Finance is where all the cushy easy money is. He is definitely egotistical but he obviously has more complex motives.
- kaba0 5y agoLike enjoying playing with stocks? And frankly, he would not be the richest person on Earth if finance was where the sweet old money is.
- Quixotica1 5y agoNew York be like “what?! People running businesses in our state? Can’t have that...”
- burnished 5y agoRunning what kind of businesses?
- reducesuffering 5y agoYes, no businesses running in NYC folks...
- maxharris 5y agoAre they going to halt activity at the legacy financial institutions such as banks, credit unions, brokerages, hedge funds, credit card companies and the like? Those things have an environmental impact many times greater than Bitcoin does.
- dnautics 5y agoI would find it hilarious if someone proposed a bill to halt transactions in dollars until its geopolitical impacts are assessed.
- ffggvv 5y agoactually they don’t
- jobigoud 5y agoThey do, unless you are talking about efficiency and 'per transaction' cost, but environmental impact is measured with absolute numbers.
- salawat 5y agoNo it doesn't actually. The a banks electronic clearinghouse and transaction processing system can handle potentially billions of transaction per second. No cryptoshenanigans required aside from that required to secure data at rest. You're making a claim that something predicated on everyone wasting tons of power to do hashing that just gets thrown away when the first person nails it and starts propagating, and all of that per 100 or so transactions, with at max maybe two to three dozen servers per bank, with full capability to reverse, adjust, reconcile, chargeback, so on, and so forth. So no. No, they won't shut down traditional financial processing. They don't need to.
- asd4232 5y agoYour argument is like claiming that a private jet is more economical than a 747 jumbo jet, because it burns less fuel. Energy consumption per transaction is what really matters, and Bitcoin really sucks there.
- runeks 5y agoI don’t get it. What’s there to assess? Producing power for Bitcoin mining impacts the environment in exactly the same way as producing power for anything else. If the price of electricity produced by e.g. coal plants doesn’t include externalities then we need to fix that. But it shouldn’t matter whether this power is used by a Bitcoin miner or an aluminum smelter.
- kaba0 5y agoOne creates a useful material and can potentially be optimized to be more efficient in the future, while the other uses by definition more and more energy for very questionable benefits.
- bingbong70 5y agoInternet porn uses a tremendous amount of energy....is it useful material? What's the new criteria to cut off energy to paying customers? Seems like censorship-happy people are creating a new weapon. Be careful when supporting measures like this.
- w0de0 5y agoHow is banning Bitcoin censorship? Seems like a great law to me; laws are usually the best way to prevent a tragedy of the commons. I’m also pretty burned out on all the crypto fans warning of a slippery slope to tyranny if crypto is not allowed to operate in a libertarian free market. Come on. Not everything is a road to tyranny. We live in a state of laws and sometimes those laws impact you. It doesn’t mean that’s you’re the victim of the early stages of a fascist regime. It’s childish to think so, in my opinion.
- bingbong70 5y ago>How is banning Bitcoin censorship? Financial transactions/trade is the most honest form of communication. Bitcoin enables unrestricted financial transactions aka free speech.
- Dma54rhs 5y agoAs much as I dislike BitCoin and it's evangelists, PC gaming alone consumes the same amount kW of energy. All for non productive entertainment purposes, Bill should rally the Microsoft board to release an update to put gaming on PCs to a halt until we can assess this enormous impact on environment and mental health.
- reducesuffering 5y agoSomeone didn’t read the article...
- colejohnson66 5y ago"Bill" as in the US Congress, not Bill Gates.
- erik_seaberg 5y agoWhy a peaker plant? I thought those were the most expensive energy sources, only used during demand spikes because they can ramp up and down quickly.
- TimJRobinson 5y agoA carbon tax would make more sense. Attack the root cause instead of the symptoms.