7 ms·

Look at Bitcoin and despair. The frogs have decided that those nifty bubbles in the water are actually money and are excitedly turning up the heat.

by pavlov 5y ago

bamboozled 5y ago
Why do people fixate on bitcoin? It's burning fossil fuel, transport and deforestation that causes climate change. For all you know, the worlds biggest miners are using renewable energy? I mean that could be theoretically possible.
- pavlov 5y ago
  > "For all you know, the worlds biggest miners are using renewable energy? I mean that could be theoretically possible." We know they're not. Bitcoin miners seek out the cheapest energy, which is mostly fossil. We know that even decommissioned fossil fuel power plants are being reopened for this purpose. That's not some kind of SJW propaganda, you can read about it in the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-life-to-old-fossil-fuel-power-plants-11621594803 https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-l...
  - bamboozled 5y ago
    Solar is the cheapest form of energy generation in 2021 [1], it's for political reasons fossil fuels are a cheaper. You should be more concerned that your government hasn't banned coal power generation. [1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-01-03/solar-now-cheapest-electricity-in-history-how-much-will-it-matter/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-01-03/solar-now-chea...
    - pavlov 5y ago
      If solar was the cheapest, then Bitcoin would be replacing other actually productive energy consumers and forcing them to fossil sources. So getting rid of Bitcoin would still be positive.
      - bamboozled 5y ago
        You can't just get rid of people doing calculations on computers, it's not going to happen without some pretty authoritarian, dystopian hell. The problem needs to be solved at the source, burning fossil fuels needs to be stopped, today!
  - lowkey 5y ago
    > “We know they're not. Bitcoin miners seek out the cheapest energy, which is mostly fossil.” - Citation needed My understanding is that the cheapest electricity sources are a result of massive excess energy available far from population sources. These are often renewables including hydro, wind, solar, nuclear and geothermal. In some cases older coal plants with excess capacity will be cheap in the short term, but these are always going to suffer from material operating cost per Gigawatt to pay for fuel, unlike renewable alternatives which mostly require upfront investment but not ongoing fuel expense. Once the capital is spent on renewable capacity it is a sunk cost and the marginal cost of electricity production is close to zero. That can never be the case for coal or othe fossil fuels that will always have some marginal fuel cost per unit of electricity produced. If dirty coal and other hydrocarbons are the problem, lets tax or ban those.
- ohazi 5y ago
  Because turning off cars and trucks would be a quality of life disaster for most people on the planet. Turning off bitcoin would immediately remove a sizable developed nation sized chunk of annual co2 production, and would negatively impact practically nobody in comparison. People fixate on it because it would be a trivially easy win.
  - knuthsat 5y ago
    But at this point, human emissions are irrelevant. The n-th order effects that will happen from an already predicted temperature increase will obliterate any savings. The tundra in Siberia holds methane equivalent to 100 years of 2020 emissions. When that stuff starts melting (and it's already exploding) the bitcoin experiment will be a drop in the ocean.
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      Over my life I've seen the Overton window on this debate move from: > Global warming isn't real. To: > Global warming is real, but it's not our fault. To: > Global warming is our fault, but it's too expensive to fix. To, finally, sentiments like this. Summarized as: > Global warming is out fault and we could fix it. But why bother, it's too far gone already. At this point pessimism has set in. I'm just tired. COVID showed us that the capacity for personal sacrifice in western nations is very low indeed. I don't expect anyone will want to do anything about global warming if it threatens their job, hobbies, or investments. Long term consequences be damned.
      - knuthsat 5y ago
        It's interesting that mainstream religions of this world never deal with collective guilt on an individual level. It's always a catalyst that cleanses everyone from individual sin. We just don't have societal mechanisms that would do this. Look at veganism or similar movements (like the collective movement around quarantine, masks and vaccines). People just do not want to change, they do not want to think rationally or can't and they will mock everything that challenges their status quo.
    - 5y ago
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  I think the fixation is because Bitcoin is a novel technology that is adding to all the problems you've listed. We've made great technological strides in energy efficiency over the last few decades. From more efficient lighting and appliances to electric cars to cheaper clean energy sources like photovoltaics. By contrast, Bitcoin in a new technology that is not an efficiency improvement. In fact, it threatens to wipe out all that incremental progress. It's a heel-turn from a sector of the economy that, for a time, held the promise that it could find a way for us to address global warming through technological innovation.
  - bamboozled 5y ago
    What about fracking for gas? Seems pretty novel to me? Why not focus on that. Fracking sites leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere, destroy water tables why focus on a crypto currency that some people actually use? What about mass international air travel? There are lots of novel things happening, why focus on bitcoin?
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      Did I say I supported fracking? Besides, I don't work in the fracking industry, I work in the software industry. And it's painful to see my industry contributing to the problem in such a thoughtless way. Maybe if this was Fracking News and people were bashing on bitcoin you'd have a point.
      - bamboozled 5y ago
        Even if what you're saying is true, how do you supposed we "ban" cryptos or stop them? As a person who works on software, you'd have to realize how non-trivial it would be to stop. What about banning people from going for a drive just for fun, or on a holiday via aircraft ? It's a lot easier for governments to ban coal fire power stations and fracking replacing them with renewables and hydrogen storage. This is actually something we can control and do without taking over people's freedoms.
- 19g 5y ago
  Probably recency bias, media coverage, and because for the resources it uses (with any source of energy), it’s hard to see it as a better alternative to what exists currently Agriculture, fossil fuels, transportation and manufacturing for single use products are some of the highest order problems to me.
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  Even if they were all using renewables, and they're not, that's renewable low carbon energy that could be put to productive uses by industry. Bitcoin uses as much energy as Argentina FFS! All for a 'currency' which will never be used as such. We need revenue neutral carbon taxes now. When miners pay for the damage they do, we'll see how quickly they move away from algorithmic busy work towards proof of stake.
  - bamboozled 5y ago
    What you see as "useful" is subjective. Bitcoin is mined because for some people it's useful.
    - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
      Please tell me how bitcoin is useful as a currency. Pretty much anyone with any understanding of economics would tell you that it's a terrible currency (and frankly, a questionable investment)
      - lowkey 5y ago
        > Pretty much anyone with any understanding of economics would tell you that it's a terrible currency (and frankly, a questionable investment) - citation needed A store of value is a valid use case of a currency and Bitcoin has proven to be an amazing store of value compared with all fiat currencies that have been debased by their respective governments. Bitcoin may also someday prove to be a viable unit of account in the future as it stabilizes and matures in price discovery, but fiat currencies by design will never be good stores of value. Any Austrian school economist who understands the benefits of the Gold standard would tell you that the hard fixed supply of Bitcoin makes it a better currency for the people than any fiat currency.
- lowkey 5y ago
  I’m still waiting for my fair trade, organic, ethically made, non-strip mined gold. Gold has a market cap 10x Bitcoin held by central banks around the world and is mined at a rate of about 2% per year making it a bigger issue than Bitcoin mining. My understanding is that close to 100% of gold is mined using non-renewable energy. 100% of gold is strip mined in a rape of the planet that leaves the land completely unusable. Gold production is at least 10x as environmentally destructive as bitcoin, half of which is mined using renewable energy. I vote we ban coal plants and strip mining and boycott any country that violates the pledge. If we are being objective we should focus our efforts on the largest sources of pollution. Energy production isn’t the problem. Dirty energy production is the problem. Since Bitcoin miners are mobile and constantly seeking the lowest cost electricity, if we ban dirty electricity production, Bitcoin actually incentivizes the production and development of new clean energy sources by opening up remote options that were not previously viable.
wait_a_minute 5y ago
Isn’t it like half a percent of total electricity spending though? So even if you had a magic wand to get rid of people’s mining hardware, you wouldn’t solve the problem. So why focus on Bitcoin so singularly? What’s the agenda here?
- Analemma_ 5y ago
  Half a percent is a staggering, colossal amount of energy, especially considering that the percentage of humans who use Bitcoin is less by orders of magnitude, and that it is-- let's be honest here-- pretty much useless. I am utterly baffled by the suggestion that "half a percent of all electricity use" is not something worth being alarmed about.
- RobRivera 5y ago
  you say that as if .5 % is trivial. you say that as if solutions can't be composed by aggregate
- pavlov 5y ago
  It consumes more power than Argentina and has increased 6500% since 2015 without providing any meaningful utility to mankind. Bitcoin deserves to be a first-tier target for reducing carbon emissions. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t target other energy consumption too.
  - lowkey 5y ago
    > It consumes more power than Argentina and has increased 6500% since 2015 without providing any meaningful utility to mankind. - Every member of mankind who chose to invest in Bitcoin for any meaningful length of time would argue it provided immense utility to them. At 150-200 million Hodlers, that is bigger than Japan. - Every member of mankind who appreciates having an alternative to forced negative interest rates, or random haircuts to bank savings accounts (e.g. Gibraltor) appreciates having Bitcoin as an option - A store of value that is impervious to the ravages of inflation and operates outside the domain of politicians or central banks is incredibly useful for mankind, but not maybe so useful to those who wish to rule over mankind Bitcoin is: - the people’s money - peer-to-peer digital gold - rules without rulers - the hardest reserve currency ever invented (better than gold) All that and it consumes less energy per year than YouTube or even hairdryers. > Bitcoin deserves to be a first-tier target for reducing carbon emissions. No, no it doesn’t > That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t target other energy consumption too. Yes, I agree completely - and we should prioritize the biggest and dirtiest energy consumption first if our goal is to address the real problem instead of virtue signaling. There are a long list of polluting environmentally destructive activities much worse than Bitcoin such as Gold for example. 100% of Gold is strip-mined with non-renewable energy. Maybe we should convince the world’s central banks to dump their gold reserves for Bitcoin. Or maybe shut down the world’s hair dryer production because it uses more energy than Bitcoin. There’s an idea.

Look at Bitcoin and despair. The frogs have decided that those nifty bubbles in the water are actually money and are excitedly turning up the heat.

by pavlov 5y ago

Look at Bitcoin and despair. The frogs have decided that those nifty bubbles in the water are actually money and are excitedly turning up the heat.

bamboozled 5y ago

Why do people fixate on bitcoin? It's burning fossil fuel, transport and deforestation that causes climate change. For all you know, the worlds biggest miners are using renewable energy? I mean that could be theoretically possible.

pavlov 5y ago
> "For all you know, the worlds biggest miners are using renewable energy? I mean that could be theoretically possible." We know they're not. Bitcoin miners seek out the cheapest energy, which is mostly fossil. We know that even decommissioned fossil fuel power plants are being reopened for this purpose. That's not some kind of SJW propaganda, you can read about it in the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-life-to-old-fossil-fuel-power-plants-11621594803 https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-l...
- bamboozled 5y ago
  Solar is the cheapest form of energy generation in 2021 [1], it's for political reasons fossil fuels are a cheaper. You should be more concerned that your government hasn't banned coal power generation. [1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-01-03/solar-now-cheapest-electricity-in-history-how-much-will-it-matter/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-01-03/solar-now-chea...
  - pavlov 5y ago
    If solar was the cheapest, then Bitcoin would be replacing other actually productive energy consumers and forcing them to fossil sources. So getting rid of Bitcoin would still be positive.
    - bamboozled 5y ago
      You can't just get rid of people doing calculations on computers, it's not going to happen without some pretty authoritarian, dystopian hell. The problem needs to be solved at the source, burning fossil fuels needs to be stopped, today!
- lowkey 5y ago
  > “We know they're not. Bitcoin miners seek out the cheapest energy, which is mostly fossil.” - Citation needed My understanding is that the cheapest electricity sources are a result of massive excess energy available far from population sources. These are often renewables including hydro, wind, solar, nuclear and geothermal. In some cases older coal plants with excess capacity will be cheap in the short term, but these are always going to suffer from material operating cost per Gigawatt to pay for fuel, unlike renewable alternatives which mostly require upfront investment but not ongoing fuel expense. Once the capital is spent on renewable capacity it is a sunk cost and the marginal cost of electricity production is close to zero. That can never be the case for coal or othe fossil fuels that will always have some marginal fuel cost per unit of electricity produced. If dirty coal and other hydrocarbons are the problem, lets tax or ban those.
ohazi 5y ago
Because turning off cars and trucks would be a quality of life disaster for most people on the planet. Turning off bitcoin would immediately remove a sizable developed nation sized chunk of annual co2 production, and would negatively impact practically nobody in comparison. People fixate on it because it would be a trivially easy win.
- knuthsat 5y ago
  But at this point, human emissions are irrelevant. The n-th order effects that will happen from an already predicted temperature increase will obliterate any savings. The tundra in Siberia holds methane equivalent to 100 years of 2020 emissions. When that stuff starts melting (and it's already exploding) the bitcoin experiment will be a drop in the ocean.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    Over my life I've seen the Overton window on this debate move from: > Global warming isn't real. To: > Global warming is real, but it's not our fault. To: > Global warming is our fault, but it's too expensive to fix. To, finally, sentiments like this. Summarized as: > Global warming is out fault and we could fix it. But why bother, it's too far gone already. At this point pessimism has set in. I'm just tired. COVID showed us that the capacity for personal sacrifice in western nations is very low indeed. I don't expect anyone will want to do anything about global warming if it threatens their job, hobbies, or investments. Long term consequences be damned.
    - knuthsat 5y ago
      It's interesting that mainstream religions of this world never deal with collective guilt on an individual level. It's always a catalyst that cleanses everyone from individual sin. We just don't have societal mechanisms that would do this. Look at veganism or similar movements (like the collective movement around quarantine, masks and vaccines). People just do not want to change, they do not want to think rationally or can't and they will mock everything that challenges their status quo.
  - 5y ago
AlexandrB 5y ago
I think the fixation is because Bitcoin is a novel technology that is adding to all the problems you've listed. We've made great technological strides in energy efficiency over the last few decades. From more efficient lighting and appliances to electric cars to cheaper clean energy sources like photovoltaics. By contrast, Bitcoin in a new technology that is not an efficiency improvement. In fact, it threatens to wipe out all that incremental progress. It's a heel-turn from a sector of the economy that, for a time, held the promise that it could find a way for us to address global warming through technological innovation.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  What about fracking for gas? Seems pretty novel to me? Why not focus on that. Fracking sites leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere, destroy water tables why focus on a crypto currency that some people actually use? What about mass international air travel? There are lots of novel things happening, why focus on bitcoin?
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    Did I say I supported fracking? Besides, I don't work in the fracking industry, I work in the software industry. And it's painful to see my industry contributing to the problem in such a thoughtless way. Maybe if this was Fracking News and people were bashing on bitcoin you'd have a point.
    - bamboozled 5y ago
      Even if what you're saying is true, how do you supposed we "ban" cryptos or stop them? As a person who works on software, you'd have to realize how non-trivial it would be to stop. What about banning people from going for a drive just for fun, or on a holiday via aircraft ? It's a lot easier for governments to ban coal fire power stations and fracking replacing them with renewables and hydrogen storage. This is actually something we can control and do without taking over people's freedoms.
19g 5y ago
Probably recency bias, media coverage, and because for the resources it uses (with any source of energy), it’s hard to see it as a better alternative to what exists currently Agriculture, fossil fuels, transportation and manufacturing for single use products are some of the highest order problems to me.
wing-_-nuts 5y ago
Even if they were all using renewables, and they're not, that's renewable low carbon energy that could be put to productive uses by industry. Bitcoin uses as much energy as Argentina FFS! All for a 'currency' which will never be used as such. We need revenue neutral carbon taxes now. When miners pay for the damage they do, we'll see how quickly they move away from algorithmic busy work towards proof of stake.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  What you see as "useful" is subjective. Bitcoin is mined because for some people it's useful.
  - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    Please tell me how bitcoin is useful as a currency. Pretty much anyone with any understanding of economics would tell you that it's a terrible currency (and frankly, a questionable investment)
    - lowkey 5y ago
      > Pretty much anyone with any understanding of economics would tell you that it's a terrible currency (and frankly, a questionable investment) - citation needed A store of value is a valid use case of a currency and Bitcoin has proven to be an amazing store of value compared with all fiat currencies that have been debased by their respective governments. Bitcoin may also someday prove to be a viable unit of account in the future as it stabilizes and matures in price discovery, but fiat currencies by design will never be good stores of value. Any Austrian school economist who understands the benefits of the Gold standard would tell you that the hard fixed supply of Bitcoin makes it a better currency for the people than any fiat currency.
lowkey 5y ago
I’m still waiting for my fair trade, organic, ethically made, non-strip mined gold. Gold has a market cap 10x Bitcoin held by central banks around the world and is mined at a rate of about 2% per year making it a bigger issue than Bitcoin mining. My understanding is that close to 100% of gold is mined using non-renewable energy. 100% of gold is strip mined in a rape of the planet that leaves the land completely unusable. Gold production is at least 10x as environmentally destructive as bitcoin, half of which is mined using renewable energy. I vote we ban coal plants and strip mining and boycott any country that violates the pledge. If we are being objective we should focus our efforts on the largest sources of pollution. Energy production isn’t the problem. Dirty energy production is the problem. Since Bitcoin miners are mobile and constantly seeking the lowest cost electricity, if we ban dirty electricity production, Bitcoin actually incentivizes the production and development of new clean energy sources by opening up remote options that were not previously viable.

wait_a_minute 5y ago

Isn’t it like half a percent of total electricity spending though? So even if you had a magic wand to get rid of people’s mining hardware, you wouldn’t solve the problem. So why focus on Bitcoin so singularly? What’s the agenda here?

Analemma_ 5y ago
Half a percent is a staggering, colossal amount of energy, especially considering that the percentage of humans who use Bitcoin is less by orders of magnitude, and that it is-- let's be honest here-- pretty much useless. I am utterly baffled by the suggestion that "half a percent of all electricity use" is not something worth being alarmed about.
RobRivera 5y ago
you say that as if .5 % is trivial. you say that as if solutions can't be composed by aggregate
pavlov 5y ago
It consumes more power than Argentina and has increased 6500% since 2015 without providing any meaningful utility to mankind. Bitcoin deserves to be a first-tier target for reducing carbon emissions. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t target other energy consumption too.
- lowkey 5y ago
  > It consumes more power than Argentina and has increased 6500% since 2015 without providing any meaningful utility to mankind. - Every member of mankind who chose to invest in Bitcoin for any meaningful length of time would argue it provided immense utility to them. At 150-200 million Hodlers, that is bigger than Japan. - Every member of mankind who appreciates having an alternative to forced negative interest rates, or random haircuts to bank savings accounts (e.g. Gibraltor) appreciates having Bitcoin as an option - A store of value that is impervious to the ravages of inflation and operates outside the domain of politicians or central banks is incredibly useful for mankind, but not maybe so useful to those who wish to rule over mankind Bitcoin is: - the people’s money - peer-to-peer digital gold - rules without rulers - the hardest reserve currency ever invented (better than gold) All that and it consumes less energy per year than YouTube or even hairdryers. > Bitcoin deserves to be a first-tier target for reducing carbon emissions. No, no it doesn’t > That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t target other energy consumption too. Yes, I agree completely - and we should prioritize the biggest and dirtiest energy consumption first if our goal is to address the real problem instead of virtue signaling. There are a long list of polluting environmentally destructive activities much worse than Bitcoin such as Gold for example. 100% of Gold is strip-mined with non-renewable energy. Maybe we should convince the world’s central banks to dump their gold reserves for Bitcoin. Or maybe shut down the world’s hair dryer production because it uses more energy than Bitcoin. There’s an idea.