6 ms·

> I think it’s hard to make the argument against allocating somewhere on the order of 1% of your portfolio to crypto. crypto, especially bitcoin, is an intenti

> I think it’s hard to make the argument against allocating somewhere on the order of 1% of your portfolio to crypto. crypto, especially bitcoin, is an intentional environmental disaster. I don't want to invest 1% of my money into an intentional environmental disaster.

thundergolfer 5y ago
Exactly the reason I don't invest. My risk appetite is more than enough to take on Bitcoin/Ethereum investment, but the environmental impact relative to its utility outside of speculative investment is insane. Did you mean to say "international environmental disaster"? I don't know in which way it's intentional that Bitcoin destroys the environment. The damage seems incidental.
- gwicks56 5y ago
  I don't understand this argument. There are lots of things people like to do that use a lot of energy that I think are stupid. Like why to people in the West drive such stupidly large cars? Surely the answer to clean the inputs, not the use case? Trying to control what people can do is just going to make the transition to a clean future impossible, because you will piss lots of people off, and make then enemies. Bitcoin uses a lot of energy because that's it's security model. Trucks use a lot of energy because they are huge. Seems a lot more productive to concentrate on moving electricity to be a clean world input ( say a carbon tax), or move to electric vehicles ( say via tax credits), than to police the actual end usage.
  - tekstar 5y ago
    I also don't drive a really big car, and I think it's stupid as well. So, now we're at two things I don't do because they're bad for the environment.
  - jcpham2 5y ago
    Internet brainwashing “ but it uses electricity” never mind the fact proof of work is on it’s fourth generation of hardware and the price absolutely coo relates with the cost to play the game. We’re opining about a system that finally, for the first time in the history of man, might accurately price the cost of the electricity consumed to power the system. It’s pretty mind boggling but that’s the internet for you.
  - TheDong 5y ago
    Bitcoin is fairly unique in its energy use. Almost every other use of resources will try to be more efficient if it can be. If, for example, it were possible to create steel alloy in a way that took 1% less energy or made less waste (and thus was presumably cheaper at scale), the trucks would use this slightly more efficient steel. On the other hand, Bitcoin relies on wasting a certain monetary value of energy for the security of the network. Its waste is adversarial. If we manage to produce 2x the electricity tomorrow and it becomes significantly cheaper, that just means a 51% attack also became much cheaper so people need to waste even more energy mining. I can't think of any other uses of energy offhand that so actively resist any improvements. I can think of other intentional forms of waste (like dumping toxic waste, "rolling coal", etc), but I can't think of any that are aligned such that making upstream production of a resource more efficient then requires producing even more waste and environmental damage.
    - polyomino 5y ago
      And you'd end up building more trucks because of Jevon's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. Bitcoin mining does respond to market pressure, if the price goes down, or you wait until the subsidy halves, there will be less incentive to mine.
    - cinntaile 5y ago
      > Bitcoin is fairly unique in its energy use. Almost every other use of resources will try to be more efficient if it can be. It's not like energy use in the world has gone down. If it's cheaper or more efficient it will go up or at best stay the same. Bitcoin has made the transition to more efficient ASICs because that increases profits, it just didn't result in less energy use because now you make more profit.
      - burroisolator 5y ago
        If a car can be more efficiently produced, the energy spent producing cars will go up because either more cars will be produced or more features will be added to the car. This is a win for the car consumer. This is very different from Bitcoin where any improvements to the efficiency of mining it (such as transitioning to ASICs) does not lead to a tangible benefit for the Bitcoin user. All major non-ASIC miners will eventually be out-competed out, but the amount of energy wasted will always be correlated to the price of Bitcoin.
  - kragen 5y ago
    > Bitcoin uses a lot of energy because that's its security model. Trucks use a lot of energy because they are huge. I agree about cleaning the inputs, but I think the parallelism implicit in your phrasing is misleading. Bitcoin uses about 12 GW. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/pdf/transportation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/pdf/transportation.pdf says freight trucks use 23% of global transportation energy use, which seems to be about 110 quads/year (figure 8-2), so that's 25 quads/year or about 850 GW. (And all of that is fossil fuel, while most Bitcoin energy consumption is from renewables.) You could say that an 850-kg rhinoceros has a lot of weight and so does a lot of damage when it runs into things, and a 12-kg poodle also has a lot of weight, but there is a noticeable difference when they accidentally crash into your garage door.
  - rualca 5y ago
    > There are lots of things people like to do that use a lot of energy that I think are stupid. (...) I don't understand what argument you tried to make. Other than a far fetched attempt at whattaboutism... Is bitcoin's astronomical power drain ok because some hypothetical person might drive a big car or goods are shipped with trucks? That does not follow. I mean, aren't there alternatives to bitcoin that have far lower energy needs? Why stick with absurd non-sequiturs to insist that bitcoin's astronomical power drain is somehow ok?
- eldfgl 5y ago
  Read about the lightning network
rawtxapp 5y ago
Look at it this way, if Bitcoin/crypto fails, then you have nothing to worry about, since they'll just go away and there will be no environmental concerns. In this scenario, you lose the 1% you invested. If they succeed on the other hand at becoming world reserve currency, then that energy usage will be justified since it's replacing something that takes even more energy (current fiat system). In this scenario, your 1% investment has probably grown to be a much larger % of your portfolio.
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  I've never seen an energy consumption breakdown of what it takes to run the branches of the Federal Reserve or the Treasury. Do you have any primary source material on that?
  - gwicks56 5y ago
    The USA dollar is the settlement currency of the world. Which means you are really looking at the energy use of the Army/Navy/Air-force. If, in this hypothetical future, BTC became the settlement record.
    - ramchip 5y ago
      I don't follow this reasoning - why would moving to BTC as a global settlement currency make armed forces obsolete?
    - wwweston 5y ago
      If you assume: (a) the energy of the Army/Navy/Air-force supports nothing other than US currency (b) no force would be necessary to back compliance with entries in a crypto ledger
    - jayd16 5y ago
      As if BTC would somehow eliminate the army, navy and air-force.
  - FpUser 5y ago
kragen 5y ago
This is goofy. The worldwide Bitcoin network uses about 12 GW, mostly renewable, because Bitcoin mining is unprofitable if it's using anything but the absolute cheapest electricity, and scalable renewable electricity is about a third the price of fossil-fuel electricity now, with the gap constantly widening. By comparison, China built 71.7 GW(p!) of new wind energy capacity last year, and the world economy uses 18000 GW. Worrying about today's Bitcoin mining is as silly as worrying about plastic straws. Maybe in the future Bitcoin mining could become an environmental disaster, but today it's insignificant. Further details in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443 and https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall....
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > The worldwide Bitcoin network uses about 12 GW, mostly renewable, because Bitcoin mining is unprofitable if it's using anything but the absolute cheapest electricity, and scalable renewable electricity is about a third the price of fossil-fuel electricity now, with the gap constantly widening. If I'm following this right, the only evidence for Bitcoin being mostly based on renewable energy is because people believe it's uneconomical to not be renewable, and not based on any actual attempt to figure out what energy types are actually being used by large mining groups? Because, especially when you compare across international countries, retail prices are only vaguely correlated with production prices. Many places subsidize the crap out of energy prices, and electricity in a subsidized place could well be much cheaper than in a non-subsidized place, even if the first plant is burning coal and other plant is using wind. For some specific data points, I believe a large clutch of miners operated out of Inner Mongolia, whose electricity capacity increases in recent years has been dominated by coal-fired power plants (because it's a coal-rich region that doesn't give two whits about environmental effects). I'll also note that there was a story a few weeks back about a coal powered plant being recommissioned solely for mining bitcoin.
  - kragen 5y ago
    > If I'm following this right, the only evidence for Bitcoin being mostly based on renewable energy is because people believe it's uneconomical to not be renewable, and not based on any actual attempt to figure out what energy types are actually being used by large mining groups? Nope, sounds like you didn't look at the references I linked at all. If you want to follow something right, try reading the references, or at least casually skimming them. https://coinshares.com/insights/beware-of-lazy-research-bitcoin-mining-update https://coinshares.com/insights/beware-of-lazy-research-bitc... is one of the sources for the percentages cited in the Harvard Business Review article explaining their methodology (in 02018). It's the polar opposite of what you're saying. It's also true that there are fundamental economic reasons that Bitcoin mining is mostly done with renewable energy; it's not just a weird coincidence. But it's not just a theoretical prediction. > retail prices are only vaguely correlated with production prices. Many places subsidize the crap out of energy prices Yeah, that does happen. Also, outright theft happens; the cheapest energy is energy that you steal. But it turns out that unprofitable subsidies and stolen energy aren't very scalable, because places where the government pays for most of the energy ① tend to have strict oversight of industrial-scale operations, ② don't generate much electricity in the first place, and ③ tend to consider entrepreneurs criminals by default because they increase wealth inequality, so they shut them down when they get found out. When Bitcoin mining (or, say, Litecoin mining) starts to scale up in such places, as it did here in Argentina some years back, the energy subsidies have a way of evaporating. > I'll also note that there was a story a few weeks back about a coal powered plant being recommissioned solely for mining bitcoin No, that was gas; my comments on it are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27450889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27450889. You're right that there are a variety of unusual circumstances that can make fossil-fueled Bitcoin mining profitable at small scales in one or another place, so it's easy to find anecdotes of it. But it's not the majority of the network.
ohhhhhh 5y ago
no, your toaster is
kerng 5y ago
I see both sides throw random facts and numbers around when it comes to energy consumption - so the truth is probably somewhere in between. It's an issue, and its gonna get better over time. So I'm less sure if it's really that big of a problem. Just because I walked by a Chase bank right now... I mean, wouldn't it safe more energy if banks would start turning off their lights from 5pm to 8am and on weekends also?
ostenning 5y ago
The hypocrisy on this topic is unbelievable. I don't know what your portfolio looks like, but most people are happy to invest in blue chip stocks and indices that contain some of the worlds largest polluters, but, of course, as soon as they hear the word BTC, they cast judgement and throw the baby out with the bath water. If you actually cared about the environment, you would be attempting to invest money into disruptive technologies like BTC that can move money away from traditional banks that have literally funded global corruption, wars, genocide and (surprise surprise), ecocide. It makes no sense whatsoever and what it tells me is that you're just regurgitating the same dribble that you heard with no critical thought of your own
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Why do people keep posting this? I have no idea where this meme came from. It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. Cryptocurrencies in general are absolutely not environmental disasters. I agree, bitcoin is a useless coin but it's not even close to having any real environmental impact. Investment in environmental disasters? I'd suggest the developed world stop trading with China but we all know people can't live without cheap consumer products, including the computers we're using to post our opinions. How about we drop the USD instead? It's literally backed by petroleum and the US military. Hard to think of anything with a bigger environmental impact. It should be easy, right? Just quote petroleum prices in cryptocurrency. Simple... The hard part is surving the inevitable US invasion and destruction of your country.

thundergolfer 5y ago

Exactly the reason I don't invest. My risk appetite is more than enough to take on Bitcoin/Ethereum investment, but the environmental impact relative to its utility outside of speculative investment is insane. Did you mean to say "international environmental disaster"? I don't know in which way it's intentional that Bitcoin destroys the environment. The damage seems incidental.

gwicks56 5y ago
I don't understand this argument. There are lots of things people like to do that use a lot of energy that I think are stupid. Like why to people in the West drive such stupidly large cars? Surely the answer to clean the inputs, not the use case? Trying to control what people can do is just going to make the transition to a clean future impossible, because you will piss lots of people off, and make then enemies. Bitcoin uses a lot of energy because that's it's security model. Trucks use a lot of energy because they are huge. Seems a lot more productive to concentrate on moving electricity to be a clean world input ( say a carbon tax), or move to electric vehicles ( say via tax credits), than to police the actual end usage.
- tekstar 5y ago
  I also don't drive a really big car, and I think it's stupid as well. So, now we're at two things I don't do because they're bad for the environment.
- jcpham2 5y ago
  Internet brainwashing “ but it uses electricity” never mind the fact proof of work is on it’s fourth generation of hardware and the price absolutely coo relates with the cost to play the game. We’re opining about a system that finally, for the first time in the history of man, might accurately price the cost of the electricity consumed to power the system. It’s pretty mind boggling but that’s the internet for you.
- TheDong 5y ago
  Bitcoin is fairly unique in its energy use. Almost every other use of resources will try to be more efficient if it can be. If, for example, it were possible to create steel alloy in a way that took 1% less energy or made less waste (and thus was presumably cheaper at scale), the trucks would use this slightly more efficient steel. On the other hand, Bitcoin relies on wasting a certain monetary value of energy for the security of the network. Its waste is adversarial. If we manage to produce 2x the electricity tomorrow and it becomes significantly cheaper, that just means a 51% attack also became much cheaper so people need to waste even more energy mining. I can't think of any other uses of energy offhand that so actively resist any improvements. I can think of other intentional forms of waste (like dumping toxic waste, "rolling coal", etc), but I can't think of any that are aligned such that making upstream production of a resource more efficient then requires producing even more waste and environmental damage.
  - polyomino 5y ago
    And you'd end up building more trucks because of Jevon's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. Bitcoin mining does respond to market pressure, if the price goes down, or you wait until the subsidy halves, there will be less incentive to mine.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    > Bitcoin is fairly unique in its energy use. Almost every other use of resources will try to be more efficient if it can be. It's not like energy use in the world has gone down. If it's cheaper or more efficient it will go up or at best stay the same. Bitcoin has made the transition to more efficient ASICs because that increases profits, it just didn't result in less energy use because now you make more profit.
    - burroisolator 5y ago
      If a car can be more efficiently produced, the energy spent producing cars will go up because either more cars will be produced or more features will be added to the car. This is a win for the car consumer. This is very different from Bitcoin where any improvements to the efficiency of mining it (such as transitioning to ASICs) does not lead to a tangible benefit for the Bitcoin user. All major non-ASIC miners will eventually be out-competed out, but the amount of energy wasted will always be correlated to the price of Bitcoin.
- kragen 5y ago
  > Bitcoin uses a lot of energy because that's its security model. Trucks use a lot of energy because they are huge. I agree about cleaning the inputs, but I think the parallelism implicit in your phrasing is misleading. Bitcoin uses about 12 GW. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/pdf/transportation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/pdf/transportation.pdf says freight trucks use 23% of global transportation energy use, which seems to be about 110 quads/year (figure 8-2), so that's 25 quads/year or about 850 GW. (And all of that is fossil fuel, while most Bitcoin energy consumption is from renewables.) You could say that an 850-kg rhinoceros has a lot of weight and so does a lot of damage when it runs into things, and a 12-kg poodle also has a lot of weight, but there is a noticeable difference when they accidentally crash into your garage door.
- rualca 5y ago
  > There are lots of things people like to do that use a lot of energy that I think are stupid. (...) I don't understand what argument you tried to make. Other than a far fetched attempt at whattaboutism... Is bitcoin's astronomical power drain ok because some hypothetical person might drive a big car or goods are shipped with trucks? That does not follow. I mean, aren't there alternatives to bitcoin that have far lower energy needs? Why stick with absurd non-sequiturs to insist that bitcoin's astronomical power drain is somehow ok?
eldfgl 5y ago
Read about the lightning network

rawtxapp 5y ago

Look at it this way, if Bitcoin/crypto fails, then you have nothing to worry about, since they'll just go away and there will be no environmental concerns. In this scenario, you lose the 1% you invested. If they succeed on the other hand at becoming world reserve currency, then that energy usage will be justified since it's replacing something that takes even more energy (current fiat system). In this scenario, your 1% investment has probably grown to be a much larger % of your portfolio.

im_down_w_otp 5y ago
I've never seen an energy consumption breakdown of what it takes to run the branches of the Federal Reserve or the Treasury. Do you have any primary source material on that?
- gwicks56 5y ago
  The USA dollar is the settlement currency of the world. Which means you are really looking at the energy use of the Army/Navy/Air-force. If, in this hypothetical future, BTC became the settlement record.
  - ramchip 5y ago
    I don't follow this reasoning - why would moving to BTC as a global settlement currency make armed forces obsolete?
  - wwweston 5y ago
    If you assume: (a) the energy of the Army/Navy/Air-force supports nothing other than US currency (b) no force would be necessary to back compliance with entries in a crypto ledger
  - jayd16 5y ago
    As if BTC would somehow eliminate the army, navy and air-force.
- FpUser 5y ago

kragen 5y ago

This is goofy. The worldwide Bitcoin network uses about 12 GW, mostly renewable, because Bitcoin mining is unprofitable if it's using anything but the absolute cheapest electricity, and scalable renewable electricity is about a third the price of fossil-fuel electricity now, with the gap constantly widening. By comparison, China built 71.7 GW(p!) of new wind energy capacity last year, and the world economy uses 18000 GW. Worrying about today's Bitcoin mining is as silly as worrying about plastic straws. Maybe in the future Bitcoin mining could become an environmental disaster, but today it's insignificant. Further details in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443 and https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall....

jcranmer 5y ago
> The worldwide Bitcoin network uses about 12 GW, mostly renewable, because Bitcoin mining is unprofitable if it's using anything but the absolute cheapest electricity, and scalable renewable electricity is about a third the price of fossil-fuel electricity now, with the gap constantly widening. If I'm following this right, the only evidence for Bitcoin being mostly based on renewable energy is because people believe it's uneconomical to not be renewable, and not based on any actual attempt to figure out what energy types are actually being used by large mining groups? Because, especially when you compare across international countries, retail prices are only vaguely correlated with production prices. Many places subsidize the crap out of energy prices, and electricity in a subsidized place could well be much cheaper than in a non-subsidized place, even if the first plant is burning coal and other plant is using wind. For some specific data points, I believe a large clutch of miners operated out of Inner Mongolia, whose electricity capacity increases in recent years has been dominated by coal-fired power plants (because it's a coal-rich region that doesn't give two whits about environmental effects). I'll also note that there was a story a few weeks back about a coal powered plant being recommissioned solely for mining bitcoin.
- kragen 5y ago
  > If I'm following this right, the only evidence for Bitcoin being mostly based on renewable energy is because people believe it's uneconomical to not be renewable, and not based on any actual attempt to figure out what energy types are actually being used by large mining groups? Nope, sounds like you didn't look at the references I linked at all. If you want to follow something right, try reading the references, or at least casually skimming them. https://coinshares.com/insights/beware-of-lazy-research-bitcoin-mining-update https://coinshares.com/insights/beware-of-lazy-research-bitc... is one of the sources for the percentages cited in the Harvard Business Review article explaining their methodology (in 02018). It's the polar opposite of what you're saying. It's also true that there are fundamental economic reasons that Bitcoin mining is mostly done with renewable energy; it's not just a weird coincidence. But it's not just a theoretical prediction. > retail prices are only vaguely correlated with production prices. Many places subsidize the crap out of energy prices Yeah, that does happen. Also, outright theft happens; the cheapest energy is energy that you steal. But it turns out that unprofitable subsidies and stolen energy aren't very scalable, because places where the government pays for most of the energy ① tend to have strict oversight of industrial-scale operations, ② don't generate much electricity in the first place, and ③ tend to consider entrepreneurs criminals by default because they increase wealth inequality, so they shut them down when they get found out. When Bitcoin mining (or, say, Litecoin mining) starts to scale up in such places, as it did here in Argentina some years back, the energy subsidies have a way of evaporating. > I'll also note that there was a story a few weeks back about a coal powered plant being recommissioned solely for mining bitcoin No, that was gas; my comments on it are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27450889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27450889. You're right that there are a variety of unusual circumstances that can make fossil-fueled Bitcoin mining profitable at small scales in one or another place, so it's easy to find anecdotes of it. But it's not the majority of the network.

ohhhhhh 5y ago

no, your toaster is

kerng 5y ago

I see both sides throw random facts and numbers around when it comes to energy consumption - so the truth is probably somewhere in between. It's an issue, and its gonna get better over time. So I'm less sure if it's really that big of a problem. Just because I walked by a Chase bank right now... I mean, wouldn't it safe more energy if banks would start turning off their lights from 5pm to 8am and on weekends also?

ostenning 5y ago

The hypocrisy on this topic is unbelievable. I don't know what your portfolio looks like, but most people are happy to invest in blue chip stocks and indices that contain some of the worlds largest polluters, but, of course, as soon as they hear the word BTC, they cast judgement and throw the baby out with the bath water. If you actually cared about the environment, you would be attempting to invest money into disruptive technologies like BTC that can move money away from traditional banks that have literally funded global corruption, wars, genocide and (surprise surprise), ecocide. It makes no sense whatsoever and what it tells me is that you're just regurgitating the same dribble that you heard with no critical thought of your own

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Why do people keep posting this? I have no idea where this meme came from. It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. Cryptocurrencies in general are absolutely not environmental disasters. I agree, bitcoin is a useless coin but it's not even close to having any real environmental impact. Investment in environmental disasters? I'd suggest the developed world stop trading with China but we all know people can't live without cheap consumer products, including the computers we're using to post our opinions. How about we drop the USD instead? It's literally backed by petroleum and the US military. Hard to think of anything with a bigger environmental impact. It should be easy, right? Just quote petroleum prices in cryptocurrency. Simple... The hard part is surving the inevitable US invasion and destruction of your country.