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> Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic,

> Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn't really matter whether you A) use non-renewable energy for BS or B) use renewable energy for BS, displacing other energy users to non-renewables. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.

raisedbyninjas 5y ago
Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they are some of the most location neutral energy consumers. This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy equipment. It allows them to achieve economies of scale faster and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy that we need.
- zsmi 5y ago
  > 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. It's estimated all of the U.S. is ~17% of global energy. [1] "According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden." [2] [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 [2] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
- p_j_w 5y ago
  >This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. Sure, but there doesn't seem to be to be any indication that this is what actually happens. Is there any evidence for that?
  - kragen 5y ago
    Yes, there is a great deal of evidence of Bitcoin farms being located adjacent to hydro dams. I'm not sure about wind farms.
- emn13 5y ago
  The incentives to use renewables are there... where the costs of fossil sources are high, and where the energy consuming process will be reliably profitable long enough to pay for all those renewable energy sources. That last bit makes me doubt this would push renewables - who trusts that mining will remain profitable for years or even a decade? In other words, it may well incentivize energy sources with low down-payment costs. Also: all those GPUs are expensive; is a miner really going to slow down mining significantly just because it's dark or no longer windy? Or will they prefer constant power, given the fact that GPU's will become obsolete much more quickly than the power source, and thus there's pressure to recoup that investment as quickly as possible, I'd guess... thus incentivizing baseload power, not unreliable but cheap power - conceivably, anyhow?
  - kragen 5y ago
    The high bit here is that coin mining is not 1 TW; it's 0.012 TW, so the overall effect is almost insignificant. But it's still interesting to know which direction the incentives run. The cost of fossil-fuel electricity generation is about half capex and half opex (including fuel), and in much of the world, solar is now cheaper than either fossil-fuel capex or fossil-fuel opex. A large part of capex is machinery, much of which is so costly that shipping costs are insignificant, so the costs are the same anywhere in the world. Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs, but your comments about intermittency and capital costs apply a fortiori to ASIC mining.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  If only we could send a self-replicating machine that builds raspberry pis and solar panels to the moon with an uplink. Then the difficulty would jump and we'd need to send one to Jupiter. Then to mercury to set up the dyson swarm. Suddenly we are a Kardashev civ... but it's all for bitcoin mining for rich billionaire paranoia of centralized currency control by the US government, and the actual bitcoin production rate is constant since the difficulty rate on the coins exploded from galaxy-spanning miner fleets.
- Hjfrf 5y ago
  Location-neutral also means sitting directly on top of coal mines. If somebody's mining bitcoin they're clearly not interested in ethics in the first place.
  - btoiled 5y ago
    Supporting MMT that directly causes massive inequality in the society is super ethical I guess.
- kragen 5y ago
  As explained above, the real number is closer to 0.012 TW, so while the impact on the renewable transition is probably positive, it's very small, more like 0.1% of global energy production. It's disturbing that nobody in this whole thread thought to fact-check those implausibly large numbers; it indicates that the whole thread is dominated by herd instinct, not rational thought.
vmception 5y ago
The energy use is of captured energy that would be lost in transport to other energy users, because it uses just as much energy or more to transport it. This means that “renewable energy more than the output of Argentina was always being wasted for over a century every day because it was uneconomical to transport it” Crypto mining has been unique in that it only needs power and housing to stay dry, low infrastructure, and doesn't need very good internet, compared to other large computational projects, or any other sector. Okay, so we got the “ah it uses a lot of energy!” argument over to “ah okay its a relatively green sector compared to literally everything else but I don't respect the use in favor of literally everything else and this must be taking away from that” which is also not true so I’m curious how the goal post moves after this - assuming you are able to corroborate what I’ve told you at face value. It would be more productive to advocate for specific sites to not raise prices for others if they did, or specific sites to use cleaner energy sources. I can understand how that could cause some consternation if your whole cause is not liking crypto mining at all. But it is important to remain vigilante on how these mining operations run, as it is possible for nation states to operate these uneconomically and actually do things that you imagine is happening now. (Renewable and captured are not synonymous but usually its the same)
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  If your first paragraph is about rejected energy, then there's not a lot to say here except that rejected energy doesn't mean what you think it does. If not, then I don't know what it is supposed to be about. No one builds power plants in places where there is no demand for power. Electric power can be carried over pretty large distances though with very low losses, so having say a few hundred km between a hydro-dam and a large consumer is not a major problem. According to your post the best result would be that Bitcoin farms are powered by renewable energy plants build in places where nobody would have any use for that power anyway, because they're too remote to connect to any consumer. Even if this happens (and from what we're able to tell, it is not, instead we see coal and natural gas plants being ramped up to power bitcoin farms), it's still a net negative because building renewable energy power plants (as well as bitcoin farms) causes a significant amount of emissions. In normal use of e.g. a solar panel, this makes sense because it displaces non-renewable energy sources with higher emissions, so net emissions are reduced. In your scenario, there's a bunch of solar farms in the middle of the Saharan desert mining bitcoins, which - at this point - yes would not be able to displace non-renewable energy, but still represents a net-negative regardless because of the effort required to put all that shit there in the first place. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.
_jal 5y ago
The renewable energy nonsense is just that - bullshit to distract. Knocking a single coal mine offline in China famously cut bitcoin mining activity by a third earlier this year. https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-environment-pollution/ https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env... Now, the claim could still theoretically be true, but I really want to see some hard numbers with sources from the next person trying to defend that claim.
- kragen 5y ago
  Subsidized energy can be cheap or even free, and it's hard to compete with free. For-profit Bitcoin miners are in an intense competition to find the cheapest energy. Anyone who can steal their energy or get someone else to pay for it via subsidies will win there, but only until the free lunch ends. Energy free lunches are ending all over the world now; nobody wants to build a coal plant in order to give away the energy to bitcoin miners so they can retire in Switzerland. And that's why the Chinese authorities kicked out all the bitcoin miners a couple months after that, dropping the bitcoin hashrate by more than half. It's on its way back up, but it hasn't fully recovered. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate By contrast, especially in tropical regions, you can build a solar or wind power plant to mine bitcoin profitably without finding someone else to fob the bill off on. In much of the world, solar energy is now less than half the cost of fossil-fuel energy, though not in cloudy polar regions like Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK. There's a new record-low PPA price every few months, and it's always solar; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-pv-tender-draws-world-record-low-bid-of-0104-kwh/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-... this April seems to be the latest, at US$0.0104/kWh, which is about a quarter of what coal energy usually costs. That's why the Navajo Generating Station has been demolished, Peabody Coal has gone bankrupt and may do so again, and for the first time in human history, outside of PRC, more coal generating capacity was shut down than was built last year. This year that'll probably be true worldwide. Coal (and nuclear, and oil) just can't compete economically with solar anymore, even in temperate regions. And, consequently, neither can Bitcoin miners who are paying the cost of using coal. Fortunately for them, shipping their server racks to a more profitable region is a lot cheaper than doing the same with a steel mill. Hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of the whole political-economic environment in which Bitcoin mining is happening than just a few hard numbers, which are of course fundamental.
elif 5y ago
I'm curious why we don't find a similar backlash to people who put their energy into a hot tub or to cool a 5x sized home.. as these cases don't even purportedly support a valuable economic mechanism. For instance. I don't cool my home with AC. does it bother you that I mine bitcoin overnight when the grid has surplus energy?
- jupp0r 5y ago
  I'd be more onboard if you heated your home by mining in the winter.
- Clubber 5y ago
  A lot of people are in the habit of complaining about what other people do that might possibly but not likely indirectly affect them somehow. Of course the powers that be are fine with this (and probably promote it) because as long as the populace is pointing fingers at each other's lifestyle, they are ignoring the massive use of fossil energy (among other things) used to make a few rich people richer. "Penny wise and pound foolsh." Another example of this is plastic bottles. See it's your responsibility to recycle, not the company's responsibility to not use plastic. People nanny each other's recycling habits but don't say shit about Coca-Cola bottlers. Bottler's are too busy laughing their ass off on the way to the bank. Recycle, reduce, reuse.
- gnramires 5y ago
  In the case of cryptocurrency, there is a clear better alternative that is Proof of Stake. It's caused by techological, economical and educational inertia. Cryptocurrency is driven by community consensus, and that's what we're doing here... discussing an outdated consensus (PoW supremacy) in the hope of changing it.
  - nanidin 5y ago
    Proof of stake changes the game and raises the bar for entry. It essentially creates a "rich get richer" scenario where the only way to increase the amount of coin you have is to either already have enough to participate in proof of stake, or to buy the coin from someone else. In that light, I wouldn't necessarily say that proof of stake is clearly better than proof of work. As an example, the proposed proof of stake mechanism for Ethereum requires 32 ETH, which is around $100k USD today. So established parties with capital will be able to stake, but your average person will not. I'm not sure I like that aspect of it.
Consultant32452 5y ago
Ridding the world of centrally planned currency isn’t shits and giggles. We’re in the midst of the largest wealth transfer in history. Trillions are being given to the wealthy while the poor see their purchasing power wither away. I’m not certain we’ll successfully escape their depraved clutches, but wasting a little electricity is worth the chance.
- boudin 5y ago
  How are crypto currencies changing that?
  - btoiled 5y ago
    Fixed issuance.
    - boudin 5y ago
      I still fail to see how it addresses wealth distribution issues. Crypto currencies are just an asset as any other financial asset. Yes it's decentralised but the only thing it seems to have proved so far is that centralisation might not be an issue in the first place. Since crypto currencies are more of a financial asset than a currency, it's also highly dependent on actual currencies in the end.
      - Consultant32452 5y ago
        Because the powerful people with more crypto than you can't magically issue infinite more crypto and give it to themselves, devaluing the crypto in your wallet. Classification as an asset is part of the state fighting against crypto currency. It's a non sequitor. If the dollar was deflationary more people would be holding onto it as an asset. But the dollar is intentionally manipulated/inflated so that it's a liability to hold it, therefore people trade it for other asset classes.
- stouset 5y ago
  > Trillions are being given to the wealthy while the poor see their purchasing power wither away. And you don’t think crypto is contributing to this?
xnx 5y ago
I think Bitcoin is ridiculous and wasteful, but I'm also conflicted because I think similarly about many physical products: jewelry, mansions, oversized personal vehicles. There's a lot of embedded energy in all of those goods. Who am I to judge which ones are worthwhile. It all makes me dearly wish there was a global tax on taking the resources out of the ground.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  At least all of those have reasonable lifespans and have high rates of recycling, can't say the same for mining rigs.

raisedbyninjas 5y ago

Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they are some of the most location neutral energy consumers. This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy equipment. It allows them to achieve economies of scale faster and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy that we need.

zsmi 5y ago
> 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. It's estimated all of the U.S. is ~17% of global energy. [1] "According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden." [2] [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 [2] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
p_j_w 5y ago
>This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. Sure, but there doesn't seem to be to be any indication that this is what actually happens. Is there any evidence for that?
- kragen 5y ago
  Yes, there is a great deal of evidence of Bitcoin farms being located adjacent to hydro dams. I'm not sure about wind farms.
emn13 5y ago
The incentives to use renewables are there... where the costs of fossil sources are high, and where the energy consuming process will be reliably profitable long enough to pay for all those renewable energy sources. That last bit makes me doubt this would push renewables - who trusts that mining will remain profitable for years or even a decade? In other words, it may well incentivize energy sources with low down-payment costs. Also: all those GPUs are expensive; is a miner really going to slow down mining significantly just because it's dark or no longer windy? Or will they prefer constant power, given the fact that GPU's will become obsolete much more quickly than the power source, and thus there's pressure to recoup that investment as quickly as possible, I'd guess... thus incentivizing baseload power, not unreliable but cheap power - conceivably, anyhow?
- kragen 5y ago
  The high bit here is that coin mining is not 1 TW; it's 0.012 TW, so the overall effect is almost insignificant. But it's still interesting to know which direction the incentives run. The cost of fossil-fuel electricity generation is about half capex and half opex (including fuel), and in much of the world, solar is now cheaper than either fossil-fuel capex or fossil-fuel opex. A large part of capex is machinery, much of which is so costly that shipping costs are insignificant, so the costs are the same anywhere in the world. Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs, but your comments about intermittency and capital costs apply a fortiori to ASIC mining.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
If only we could send a self-replicating machine that builds raspberry pis and solar panels to the moon with an uplink. Then the difficulty would jump and we'd need to send one to Jupiter. Then to mercury to set up the dyson swarm. Suddenly we are a Kardashev civ... but it's all for bitcoin mining for rich billionaire paranoia of centralized currency control by the US government, and the actual bitcoin production rate is constant since the difficulty rate on the coins exploded from galaxy-spanning miner fleets.
Hjfrf 5y ago
Location-neutral also means sitting directly on top of coal mines. If somebody's mining bitcoin they're clearly not interested in ethics in the first place.
- btoiled 5y ago
  Supporting MMT that directly causes massive inequality in the society is super ethical I guess.
kragen 5y ago
As explained above, the real number is closer to 0.012 TW, so while the impact on the renewable transition is probably positive, it's very small, more like 0.1% of global energy production. It's disturbing that nobody in this whole thread thought to fact-check those implausibly large numbers; it indicates that the whole thread is dominated by herd instinct, not rational thought.

vmception 5y ago

The energy use is of captured energy that would be lost in transport to other energy users, because it uses just as much energy or more to transport it. This means that “renewable energy more than the output of Argentina was always being wasted for over a century every day because it was uneconomical to transport it” Crypto mining has been unique in that it only needs power and housing to stay dry, low infrastructure, and doesn't need very good internet, compared to other large computational projects, or any other sector. Okay, so we got the “ah it uses a lot of energy!” argument over to “ah okay its a relatively green sector compared to literally everything else but I don't respect the use in favor of literally everything else and this must be taking away from that” which is also not true so I’m curious how the goal post moves after this - assuming you are able to corroborate what I’ve told you at face value. It would be more productive to advocate for specific sites to not raise prices for others if they did, or specific sites to use cleaner energy sources. I can understand how that could cause some consternation if your whole cause is not liking crypto mining at all. But it is important to remain vigilante on how these mining operations run, as it is possible for nation states to operate these uneconomically and actually do things that you imagine is happening now. (Renewable and captured are not synonymous but usually its the same)

formerly_proven 5y ago
If your first paragraph is about rejected energy, then there's not a lot to say here except that rejected energy doesn't mean what you think it does. If not, then I don't know what it is supposed to be about. No one builds power plants in places where there is no demand for power. Electric power can be carried over pretty large distances though with very low losses, so having say a few hundred km between a hydro-dam and a large consumer is not a major problem. According to your post the best result would be that Bitcoin farms are powered by renewable energy plants build in places where nobody would have any use for that power anyway, because they're too remote to connect to any consumer. Even if this happens (and from what we're able to tell, it is not, instead we see coal and natural gas plants being ramped up to power bitcoin farms), it's still a net negative because building renewable energy power plants (as well as bitcoin farms) causes a significant amount of emissions. In normal use of e.g. a solar panel, this makes sense because it displaces non-renewable energy sources with higher emissions, so net emissions are reduced. In your scenario, there's a bunch of solar farms in the middle of the Saharan desert mining bitcoins, which - at this point - yes would not be able to displace non-renewable energy, but still represents a net-negative regardless because of the effort required to put all that shit there in the first place. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.

_jal 5y ago

The renewable energy nonsense is just that - bullshit to distract. Knocking a single coal mine offline in China famously cut bitcoin mining activity by a third earlier this year. https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-environment-pollution/ https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env... Now, the claim could still theoretically be true, but I really want to see some hard numbers with sources from the next person trying to defend that claim.

kragen 5y ago
Subsidized energy can be cheap or even free, and it's hard to compete with free. For-profit Bitcoin miners are in an intense competition to find the cheapest energy. Anyone who can steal their energy or get someone else to pay for it via subsidies will win there, but only until the free lunch ends. Energy free lunches are ending all over the world now; nobody wants to build a coal plant in order to give away the energy to bitcoin miners so they can retire in Switzerland. And that's why the Chinese authorities kicked out all the bitcoin miners a couple months after that, dropping the bitcoin hashrate by more than half. It's on its way back up, but it hasn't fully recovered. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate By contrast, especially in tropical regions, you can build a solar or wind power plant to mine bitcoin profitably without finding someone else to fob the bill off on. In much of the world, solar energy is now less than half the cost of fossil-fuel energy, though not in cloudy polar regions like Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK. There's a new record-low PPA price every few months, and it's always solar; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-pv-tender-draws-world-record-low-bid-of-0104-kwh/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-... this April seems to be the latest, at US$0.0104/kWh, which is about a quarter of what coal energy usually costs. That's why the Navajo Generating Station has been demolished, Peabody Coal has gone bankrupt and may do so again, and for the first time in human history, outside of PRC, more coal generating capacity was shut down than was built last year. This year that'll probably be true worldwide. Coal (and nuclear, and oil) just can't compete economically with solar anymore, even in temperate regions. And, consequently, neither can Bitcoin miners who are paying the cost of using coal. Fortunately for them, shipping their server racks to a more profitable region is a lot cheaper than doing the same with a steel mill. Hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of the whole political-economic environment in which Bitcoin mining is happening than just a few hard numbers, which are of course fundamental.

elif 5y ago

I'm curious why we don't find a similar backlash to people who put their energy into a hot tub or to cool a 5x sized home.. as these cases don't even purportedly support a valuable economic mechanism. For instance. I don't cool my home with AC. does it bother you that I mine bitcoin overnight when the grid has surplus energy?

jupp0r 5y ago
I'd be more onboard if you heated your home by mining in the winter.
Clubber 5y ago
A lot of people are in the habit of complaining about what other people do that might possibly but not likely indirectly affect them somehow. Of course the powers that be are fine with this (and probably promote it) because as long as the populace is pointing fingers at each other's lifestyle, they are ignoring the massive use of fossil energy (among other things) used to make a few rich people richer. "Penny wise and pound foolsh." Another example of this is plastic bottles. See it's your responsibility to recycle, not the company's responsibility to not use plastic. People nanny each other's recycling habits but don't say shit about Coca-Cola bottlers. Bottler's are too busy laughing their ass off on the way to the bank. Recycle, reduce, reuse.
gnramires 5y ago
In the case of cryptocurrency, there is a clear better alternative that is Proof of Stake. It's caused by techological, economical and educational inertia. Cryptocurrency is driven by community consensus, and that's what we're doing here... discussing an outdated consensus (PoW supremacy) in the hope of changing it.
- nanidin 5y ago
  Proof of stake changes the game and raises the bar for entry. It essentially creates a "rich get richer" scenario where the only way to increase the amount of coin you have is to either already have enough to participate in proof of stake, or to buy the coin from someone else. In that light, I wouldn't necessarily say that proof of stake is clearly better than proof of work. As an example, the proposed proof of stake mechanism for Ethereum requires 32 ETH, which is around $100k USD today. So established parties with capital will be able to stake, but your average person will not. I'm not sure I like that aspect of it.

Consultant32452 5y ago

Ridding the world of centrally planned currency isn’t shits and giggles. We’re in the midst of the largest wealth transfer in history. Trillions are being given to the wealthy while the poor see their purchasing power wither away. I’m not certain we’ll successfully escape their depraved clutches, but wasting a little electricity is worth the chance.

boudin 5y ago
How are crypto currencies changing that?
- btoiled 5y ago
  Fixed issuance.
  - boudin 5y ago
    I still fail to see how it addresses wealth distribution issues. Crypto currencies are just an asset as any other financial asset. Yes it's decentralised but the only thing it seems to have proved so far is that centralisation might not be an issue in the first place. Since crypto currencies are more of a financial asset than a currency, it's also highly dependent on actual currencies in the end.
    - Consultant32452 5y ago
      Because the powerful people with more crypto than you can't magically issue infinite more crypto and give it to themselves, devaluing the crypto in your wallet. Classification as an asset is part of the state fighting against crypto currency. It's a non sequitor. If the dollar was deflationary more people would be holding onto it as an asset. But the dollar is intentionally manipulated/inflated so that it's a liability to hold it, therefore people trade it for other asset classes.
stouset 5y ago
> Trillions are being given to the wealthy while the poor see their purchasing power wither away. And you don’t think crypto is contributing to this?

xnx 5y ago

I think Bitcoin is ridiculous and wasteful, but I'm also conflicted because I think similarly about many physical products: jewelry, mansions, oversized personal vehicles. There's a lot of embedded energy in all of those goods. Who am I to judge which ones are worthwhile. It all makes me dearly wish there was a global tax on taking the resources out of the ground.

toomanybeersies 5y ago
At least all of those have reasonable lifespans and have high rates of recycling, can't say the same for mining rigs.