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But the core problem is that dirty electricity is not (yet!) taxed for its CO2 emission. If the same plant would be used to power a data center for Netflix stre

But the core problem is that dirty electricity is not (yet!) taxed for its CO2 emission. If the same plant would be used to power a data center for Netflix streaming it would be equally bad.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago
No, really, the core problem is that bitcoin has negative value for society.
- gtt 5y ago
  It is really useful for some applications, and I think it is especially useful for keeping fiat money in check. Now, I can deflect from fiat (at some costs, obviously).
  - asdff 5y ago
    why not invest in a commodity to hedge against fiat? You know, something real and economically useful...
    - cool_dude85 5y ago
      Oh, and depend on the GOVERNMENT to protect my commodities contracts with fiat courts of law, or my physical commodities with their jackbooted thugs?
    - gtt 5y ago
      Harder to store, transfer, many commodities are perishable, bulky, heavy, etc.
      - asdff 5y ago
        When you buy commodities for investment they aren't exactly shipping trucks of corn to your house
        gtt 5y ago
        Of course, but you are not actually owning those commodities, then. You are not buying them and this is the point -- with bitcoin you are really in control.
        disruptalot 5y ago
        That's strange, how do you know it's real and you own it? With my bitcoin, I can verify that I received it and that no one except myself has access to that specific portion of the supply. And then I can even transact it whenever I like without the involvement of any custodian!
        arcticbull 5y ago
        You can verify that you have a key that corresponds to a specific quantity of Bitcoin. What you cannot verify is how much you can exchange it for. This is no different than owning a share of a commodity ETF. Transacting via custodian has literally never once gotten in my way. Has it for you?
        disruptalot 5y ago
        > What you cannot verify is how much you can exchange it for. Yes the price of assets are decided in a free market. So what point are you making exactly? Clearly in every other aspect, bitcoin is superior. In fact, bitcoin is one of the only assets that can be traded in the most free market environments possible, next to cash. > Transacting via custodian has literally never once gotten in my way. Has it for you? Yes it has. And it has for hundreds of millions people around the world. I come from a country that's under heavy sanctions, banks will refuse to bank you or will shutdown your account for no apparent reason. You're marked as a risky client anywhere you go that touches money and have to put up with extra checks. Whoever you bank with has never had outages? They've never kept funds on hold pending checks? You haven't had to chase up a every department because your wire transfer didn't arrive? The list goes on. If not then good for you, but you're in the absolute tiny minority.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        When you learn about commodity-backed ETFs and mutual funds you're going to be really excited :)
        gtt 5y ago
        Not if I want to really own real thing.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        I can't imagine why you would want to haha. I don't really want to own Apple, I just want price action to the upside. Owning shares in a commodity ETF is no less real than owning a bitcoin.
    - ExisterMr 5y ago
      Most people on earth don't have the ability to just invest in traditional commodity markets as a hedge. Most people on earth DO have a mobile device, which grants them permissionless and censorship resistant access to the bitcoin network. This access allows for an escape hatch against abusive regimes who debase their country's fiat currency.
    - disruptalot 5y ago
      So I take it you are not willing to accept bitcoin for free since it's not "real and economically useful"? Commodities don't have a fixed supply, they are not transportable, you can't actually own them. You can't verify them. You can't transact them easily. Real and economically useful, bitcoin or commodities. which is which?
      - cool_dude85 5y ago
        >Real and economically useful, bitcoin or commodities. which is which? Commodities are the ones that can be both real and economically useful, to answer your question. It's raining right now where I am. The roof of my house is keeping me dry. Can a bitcoin do the same?
        disruptalot 5y ago
        The property you're asserting is physicality not reality or usefulness.
    - waterhouse 5y ago
      You realize what that would entail? Imagine a horde of wallstreetbets people buying huge amounts of dry wheat, causing the price to go through the roof and/or wheat becoming unavailable in some areas. Or, when they sell, a bunch of farmers' revenues dropping and making them go bankrupt. You really want that? Isn't it better if the chaos is contained to goods that aren't really important?
  - slg 5y ago
    The "cryptocurrencies are really useful" argument is now equivalent to the "gold has intrinsic value" argument. Technically they are both right, but the current price is so out of line with the actual value generated by those use cases as to be basically irrelevant. Both derive the majority of their value from people purchasing it as an speculative investment.
    - gtt 5y ago
      Gold is (relatively) easy to store, transfer, hard to obtain, really limited supply -- the qualities that make commodity good money. Uselessness of gold is actually useful here -- transactions with it does not distort markets. Imagine if we used coffee beans as "gold" -- then changes in monetary velocity would impact consumers, who would be forced to stash it.
      - slg 5y ago
        So real estate?
        gtt 5y ago
        Hard to transport.
        slg 5y ago
        Sorry, the brevity of that comment apparently didn't convey my point well enough. Real estate is an example of what you theorized would happen with coffee beans. It is a useful resource that is also used for speculative investment. It is something everyone needs, but as a society we have decided its price should also always be increasing. This has a net negative impact on society. Bitcoin existing doesn't stop people from speculatively investing in real estate, so I don't think people will just start speculating on coffee beans or something similar if Bitcoin goes away.
    - waterhouse 5y ago
      Would it be better if people poured loads of money into something useful as a speculative investment? Imagine if the price of, say, steel went up by a huge amount due to people hedging against currency. Or housing—I hear this has actually happened.
- ChemSpider 5y ago
  No, it is my/your personal decision how to waste electricity. You find Bitcoin a waste, I find Netflix streaming a waste (just as example). If/once the environmental cost is priced in, all will be fine. Once that is done, nobody would use this coal plant for mining bitcoins anyway, because it will be too expensive.
  - zepto 5y ago
    That’s like saying it’s your personal decision to smoke cigarettes in a crowded airplane.
    - ChemSpider 5y ago
      The key part of my reply is: If/once the environmental cost is priced in, all will be fine. There are many ways to waste electricity. Bitcoin is a big one, but so is electric heating of uninsulated houses (still very common in the US): https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39293 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39293 => All this will be solved by pricing in the environmental cost.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - zepto 5y ago
        > There are many ways to waste electricity. Bitcoin is a big one, but so is electric heating of uninsulated houses This is like seeing someone else light a cigarette on a plane, and deciding it’s harmless for you to smoke because someone else is already smoking. (Edit: changed metaphor to match original)
        disruptalot 5y ago
        And the exact same proposition for any use of energy. That you don't find it useful does not mean it is not. Mind your own uses of energy and leave the market to decide what is really valuable.
- starkd 5y ago
  But who are you to say what has negative value for society? Who gives anybody that right? If bitcoin truly is useless, like you say, it will peter out and be abandoned, because they won't be able to sustain it. That's how new ideas are tried out. It's what brings vitality and dynamism to an economy.
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    I would happily get rid of my Netflix account, but if people would take away my Bitcoin (good luck trying), it would be devastating to my life. Many don't understand it that at this point Bitcoin is a means of survival for tens or hundreds of millions of people, just like the stock market is a means of survival for billions of people in their pension funds.
fsflover 5y ago
Exactly. The CO2 tax would force miners to switch to renewables, boosting the green energy industry. Here comes the positive side of bitcoin.
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  The positive side of bitcoin? Our limited renewable production capacity spent dumping cycles into the trash can still wouldn't be a positive thing.
  - exabrial 5y ago
    yep. Every MWH of renewable energy wasted on mining could have shut a coal plant down.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Encouraging Bitcoin mining to boost renewable deployments is like encouraging smoking to boost lung cancer research. Proof of work is a grey goo in the nanotechnology way, it gets more and more energy intensive the more efficient technology gets. It also increases the budget for power and electronics the more expensive the token gets. This leads to the runaway power consumption you see now. Renewables are green relative to coal, but they’re not zero footprint. To build a windmill with limited lifespan you need to mine rare earth metals in open air hellscapes in Mongolia [1]. You need to produce mountains of fiberglass. There’s no way to recycle fiberglass so once these fall apart you get your ores back, but have to bury the windmills [2]. Similarly for photovoltaics. The PV cells currently in use are made with cadmium and tellurium, heavy metals which again can’t really be recycled and end up buried in pits where they leech out into the environment. [3] Bitcoin also generates 100g of ewaste per transaction which cannot be recycled meaningfully. The old ASIC miners can’t event be reused because they’re special purpose. So they’re shipped to poor countries where poor people dump toxic chemicals over it with inadequate safety gear to obtain what little metallics they can, and once again bury the rest. [4] The only way forward is to reduce consumption by investing in efficient technology, not promote it with actively anti-efficient technology. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... [3] https://grist.org/energy/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-what-will-we-do-with-the-megatons-of-toxic-trash/ https://grist.org/energy/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-wh... [4] https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/toxic-e-waste-dumped-in-poor-nations-says-united-nations https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/toxic-e-waste-dumped-in-poor-nat...
exabrial 5y ago
huh? No. The root of the problem is people wasting electricity on a pretend money ponzi scheme.
endisneigh 5y ago
No it wouldn't. Netflix provides entertainment. Bitcoin provides the ability for speculators to make money, however there are ways to do so that do not incur the same costs. You could argue that energy spent on entertainment is a waste, but it's been done since the dawn of civilization (the wasting of energy for entertainment - dance, art, fireworks, etc. etc.). As far as I know there's no way to entertain yourself without spending any more marginal energy compared to alternatives. Presumably you, the reader, are reading this, on a computer that uses energy. Such energy could be said to have been "wasted", since reading the text I'm typing now isn't inherently productive.
- bingbong70 5y ago
  Entertainment vs a censorship resistant financial network >there are ways to do so that do not incur the same costs. What are the other ways to make censorship resistant financial transactions globally? One of these products/services is orders of magnitude more valuable than the other.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bingbong70 5y ago
  I notice a common trend of nocoiners is minimizing the utility of the bitcoin network to make their job of criticizing it easier. It is intellectually dishonest and lazy and makes it impossible for people that have actually studied the tech to take you seriously.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  > Netflix provides entertainment. Bitcoin provides the ability for speculators to make money A.k.a gambling, a.k.a entertainment. It's essentially the same. Especially people that play a lot with altcoins and constantly buy and sell, it's basically a hobby for them, a game where the score is an amount of money.
ARandumGuy 5y ago
Setting aside what's more intrinsically beneficial, one of the big problems with bitcoin mining is that there's no real cap to the amount of electricity it can consume. With Netflix, their electricity consumption roughly scales with their customer base. Netflix isn't going to double their electricity consumption, unless they double the amount of customers they have. Netflix is incentivized to consume the amount of electricity they need to serve their customers, and no more. Bitcoin, however, has a completely different set of incentives. Since Bitcoin effectively converts electricity to money, Bitcoin miners will attempt to consume as much electricity as possible, to maximize their mining output. In addition, any efficiencies made doesn't really reduce the environmental impact, as any electricity saved can just be pumped into mining more Bitcoin.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Netflix also converts electricity to money. It just also requires labor.

But the core problem is that dirty electricity is not (yet!) taxed for its CO2 emission. If the same plant would be used to power a data center for Netflix streaming it would be equally bad.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

No, really, the core problem is that bitcoin has negative value for society.

gtt 5y ago
It is really useful for some applications, and I think it is especially useful for keeping fiat money in check. Now, I can deflect from fiat (at some costs, obviously).
- asdff 5y ago
  why not invest in a commodity to hedge against fiat? You know, something real and economically useful...
  - cool_dude85 5y ago
    Oh, and depend on the GOVERNMENT to protect my commodities contracts with fiat courts of law, or my physical commodities with their jackbooted thugs?
  - gtt 5y ago
    Harder to store, transfer, many commodities are perishable, bulky, heavy, etc.
    - asdff 5y ago
      When you buy commodities for investment they aren't exactly shipping trucks of corn to your house
      - gtt 5y ago
        Of course, but you are not actually owning those commodities, then. You are not buying them and this is the point -- with bitcoin you are really in control.
      - disruptalot 5y ago
        That's strange, how do you know it's real and you own it? With my bitcoin, I can verify that I received it and that no one except myself has access to that specific portion of the supply. And then I can even transact it whenever I like without the involvement of any custodian!
        arcticbull 5y ago
        You can verify that you have a key that corresponds to a specific quantity of Bitcoin. What you cannot verify is how much you can exchange it for. This is no different than owning a share of a commodity ETF. Transacting via custodian has literally never once gotten in my way. Has it for you?
        disruptalot 5y ago
        > What you cannot verify is how much you can exchange it for. Yes the price of assets are decided in a free market. So what point are you making exactly? Clearly in every other aspect, bitcoin is superior. In fact, bitcoin is one of the only assets that can be traded in the most free market environments possible, next to cash. > Transacting via custodian has literally never once gotten in my way. Has it for you? Yes it has. And it has for hundreds of millions people around the world. I come from a country that's under heavy sanctions, banks will refuse to bank you or will shutdown your account for no apparent reason. You're marked as a risky client anywhere you go that touches money and have to put up with extra checks. Whoever you bank with has never had outages? They've never kept funds on hold pending checks? You haven't had to chase up a every department because your wire transfer didn't arrive? The list goes on. If not then good for you, but you're in the absolute tiny minority.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      When you learn about commodity-backed ETFs and mutual funds you're going to be really excited :)
      - gtt 5y ago
        Not if I want to really own real thing.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        I can't imagine why you would want to haha. I don't really want to own Apple, I just want price action to the upside. Owning shares in a commodity ETF is no less real than owning a bitcoin.
  - ExisterMr 5y ago
    Most people on earth don't have the ability to just invest in traditional commodity markets as a hedge. Most people on earth DO have a mobile device, which grants them permissionless and censorship resistant access to the bitcoin network. This access allows for an escape hatch against abusive regimes who debase their country's fiat currency.
  - disruptalot 5y ago
    So I take it you are not willing to accept bitcoin for free since it's not "real and economically useful"? Commodities don't have a fixed supply, they are not transportable, you can't actually own them. You can't verify them. You can't transact them easily. Real and economically useful, bitcoin or commodities. which is which?
    - cool_dude85 5y ago
      >Real and economically useful, bitcoin or commodities. which is which? Commodities are the ones that can be both real and economically useful, to answer your question. It's raining right now where I am. The roof of my house is keeping me dry. Can a bitcoin do the same?
      - disruptalot 5y ago
        The property you're asserting is physicality not reality or usefulness.
  - waterhouse 5y ago
    You realize what that would entail? Imagine a horde of wallstreetbets people buying huge amounts of dry wheat, causing the price to go through the roof and/or wheat becoming unavailable in some areas. Or, when they sell, a bunch of farmers' revenues dropping and making them go bankrupt. You really want that? Isn't it better if the chaos is contained to goods that aren't really important?
- slg 5y ago
  The "cryptocurrencies are really useful" argument is now equivalent to the "gold has intrinsic value" argument. Technically they are both right, but the current price is so out of line with the actual value generated by those use cases as to be basically irrelevant. Both derive the majority of their value from people purchasing it as an speculative investment.
  - gtt 5y ago
    Gold is (relatively) easy to store, transfer, hard to obtain, really limited supply -- the qualities that make commodity good money. Uselessness of gold is actually useful here -- transactions with it does not distort markets. Imagine if we used coffee beans as "gold" -- then changes in monetary velocity would impact consumers, who would be forced to stash it.
    - slg 5y ago
      So real estate?
      - gtt 5y ago
        Hard to transport.
        slg 5y ago
        Sorry, the brevity of that comment apparently didn't convey my point well enough. Real estate is an example of what you theorized would happen with coffee beans. It is a useful resource that is also used for speculative investment. It is something everyone needs, but as a society we have decided its price should also always be increasing. This has a net negative impact on society. Bitcoin existing doesn't stop people from speculatively investing in real estate, so I don't think people will just start speculating on coffee beans or something similar if Bitcoin goes away.
  - waterhouse 5y ago
    Would it be better if people poured loads of money into something useful as a speculative investment? Imagine if the price of, say, steel went up by a huge amount due to people hedging against currency. Or housing—I hear this has actually happened.
ChemSpider 5y ago
No, it is my/your personal decision how to waste electricity. You find Bitcoin a waste, I find Netflix streaming a waste (just as example). If/once the environmental cost is priced in, all will be fine. Once that is done, nobody would use this coal plant for mining bitcoins anyway, because it will be too expensive.
- zepto 5y ago
  That’s like saying it’s your personal decision to smoke cigarettes in a crowded airplane.
  - ChemSpider 5y ago
    The key part of my reply is: If/once the environmental cost is priced in, all will be fine. There are many ways to waste electricity. Bitcoin is a big one, but so is electric heating of uninsulated houses (still very common in the US): https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39293 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39293 => All this will be solved by pricing in the environmental cost.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - zepto 5y ago
      > There are many ways to waste electricity. Bitcoin is a big one, but so is electric heating of uninsulated houses This is like seeing someone else light a cigarette on a plane, and deciding it’s harmless for you to smoke because someone else is already smoking. (Edit: changed metaphor to match original)
      - disruptalot 5y ago
        And the exact same proposition for any use of energy. That you don't find it useful does not mean it is not. Mind your own uses of energy and leave the market to decide what is really valuable.
starkd 5y ago
But who are you to say what has negative value for society? Who gives anybody that right? If bitcoin truly is useless, like you say, it will peter out and be abandoned, because they won't be able to sustain it. That's how new ideas are tried out. It's what brings vitality and dynamism to an economy.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  I would happily get rid of my Netflix account, but if people would take away my Bitcoin (good luck trying), it would be devastating to my life. Many don't understand it that at this point Bitcoin is a means of survival for tens or hundreds of millions of people, just like the stock market is a means of survival for billions of people in their pension funds.

fsflover 5y ago

Exactly. The CO2 tax would force miners to switch to renewables, boosting the green energy industry. Here comes the positive side of bitcoin.

cool_dude85 5y ago
The positive side of bitcoin? Our limited renewable production capacity spent dumping cycles into the trash can still wouldn't be a positive thing.
- exabrial 5y ago
  yep. Every MWH of renewable energy wasted on mining could have shut a coal plant down.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
arcticbull 5y ago
Encouraging Bitcoin mining to boost renewable deployments is like encouraging smoking to boost lung cancer research. Proof of work is a grey goo in the nanotechnology way, it gets more and more energy intensive the more efficient technology gets. It also increases the budget for power and electronics the more expensive the token gets. This leads to the runaway power consumption you see now. Renewables are green relative to coal, but they’re not zero footprint. To build a windmill with limited lifespan you need to mine rare earth metals in open air hellscapes in Mongolia [1]. You need to produce mountains of fiberglass. There’s no way to recycle fiberglass so once these fall apart you get your ores back, but have to bury the windmills [2]. Similarly for photovoltaics. The PV cells currently in use are made with cadmium and tellurium, heavy metals which again can’t really be recycled and end up buried in pits where they leech out into the environment. [3] Bitcoin also generates 100g of ewaste per transaction which cannot be recycled meaningfully. The old ASIC miners can’t event be reused because they’re special purpose. So they’re shipped to poor countries where poor people dump toxic chemicals over it with inadequate safety gear to obtain what little metallics they can, and once again bury the rest. [4] The only way forward is to reduce consumption by investing in efficient technology, not promote it with actively anti-efficient technology. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... [3] https://grist.org/energy/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-what-will-we-do-with-the-megatons-of-toxic-trash/ https://grist.org/energy/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-wh... [4] https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/toxic-e-waste-dumped-in-poor-nations-says-united-nations https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/toxic-e-waste-dumped-in-poor-nat...

exabrial 5y ago

huh? No. The root of the problem is people wasting electricity on a pretend money ponzi scheme.

endisneigh 5y ago

No it wouldn't. Netflix provides entertainment. Bitcoin provides the ability for speculators to make money, however there are ways to do so that do not incur the same costs. You could argue that energy spent on entertainment is a waste, but it's been done since the dawn of civilization (the wasting of energy for entertainment - dance, art, fireworks, etc. etc.). As far as I know there's no way to entertain yourself without spending any more marginal energy compared to alternatives. Presumably you, the reader, are reading this, on a computer that uses energy. Such energy could be said to have been "wasted", since reading the text I'm typing now isn't inherently productive.

bingbong70 5y ago
Entertainment vs a censorship resistant financial network >there are ways to do so that do not incur the same costs. What are the other ways to make censorship resistant financial transactions globally? One of these products/services is orders of magnitude more valuable than the other.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bingbong70 5y ago
I notice a common trend of nocoiners is minimizing the utility of the bitcoin network to make their job of criticizing it easier. It is intellectually dishonest and lazy and makes it impossible for people that have actually studied the tech to take you seriously.
jobigoud 5y ago
> Netflix provides entertainment. Bitcoin provides the ability for speculators to make money A.k.a gambling, a.k.a entertainment. It's essentially the same. Especially people that play a lot with altcoins and constantly buy and sell, it's basically a hobby for them, a game where the score is an amount of money.

ARandumGuy 5y ago

Setting aside what's more intrinsically beneficial, one of the big problems with bitcoin mining is that there's no real cap to the amount of electricity it can consume. With Netflix, their electricity consumption roughly scales with their customer base. Netflix isn't going to double their electricity consumption, unless they double the amount of customers they have. Netflix is incentivized to consume the amount of electricity they need to serve their customers, and no more. Bitcoin, however, has a completely different set of incentives. Since Bitcoin effectively converts electricity to money, Bitcoin miners will attempt to consume as much electricity as possible, to maximize their mining output. In addition, any efficiencies made doesn't really reduce the environmental impact, as any electricity saved can just be pumped into mining more Bitcoin.

lostmsu 5y ago
Netflix also converts electricity to money. It just also requires labor.