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Right now very few people are actually using Bitcoin for everyday transactions, and yet still the carbon footprint rivals many large countries. If this became t

Right now very few people are actually using Bitcoin for everyday transactions, and yet still the carbon footprint rivals many large countries. If this became the world’s primary currency (as many crypto fans seem to want) it would increase our total carbon footprint by multiple orders of magnitude. I do not see many people in the crypto community approaching this with the deadly seriousness it deserves. Most conversations seem to devolve into: - wishcasting about how energy is produced: “There are a whole bunch of miners in South America running on hydro!” This ignores that we are decades away at least from a solarpunk world where energy isn’t a zero-sum game, the hydro energy being used by miners just means the people in nearby cities have to resort to fossil fuels. - wishcasting about Proof-of-Stake: “We could just switch to this and the carbon problems go away!” I admit it would be great if this happened, but No large coins use it, and I’ll believe Ethereum when I see it. Proof-of-Stake also has downsides that some crypto people won’t accept, so by their own admission it’s not credibly considered an option (certainly not for Bitcoin). - wishcasting about carbon offsets: “We can buy our way out!” The recent California wildfires have burned through a lot of the trees planted as “carbon offsets”, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere. Offsets were a neat idea, but they don’t seem to have panned out well, and I have yet to hear a credible case that carbon capture can ramp up fast enough to match crypto’s growing carbon footprint. - whataboutism: “You ride planes don’t you? Those have huge carbon footprints!” I have yet to hear a compelling argument that a Planes+Bitcoin world would have a smaller carbon footprint than the current Planes+Mastercard world. And no one is talking about Bitcoin making planes go away. I’d love to hear a clear and credulous case for how we get out of this problem, but I have yet to hear one from the crypto community. If the crypto community won’t take this seriously and propose real solutions, people from outside the crypto community will come up with solutions that will involve banning crypto.

lhorie 5y ago
Forgive me if this is a dumb comment, but my understanding is that bitcoin's footprint is largely due to mining, correct? But bitcoin itself is considered an asset (in the US, at least). So in theory, it's possible to just trade bitcoins off-chain (either on another blockchain or just using boring centralized tech) without necessarily incurring a corresponding increase in mining-related costs, right? IIRC Polkadot staking has a 28 day minimum unstaking cool-off period, yet one can stake/unstake instantaneously in Kraken, so I'm led to believe that off-chain transactions must already happen to at least some extent. Am I missing something?
- Uehreka 5y ago
  But if you’re trading bitcoins “off-chain”, doesn’t that mean you’re negating the point of a blockchain-based currency?
  - lhorie 5y ago
    Yes, but for my purposes as a layperson using a currency, I'm choosing to trust a system that is opaque to me anyways (be it a bank/exchange/other financial institution vs a validator pool). One could argue, for example, that anti-fraud mechanisms in off-chain systems don't have a on-chain counterpart, despite being a desirable feature, so IMHO, if the argument goes that crypto can't do things on-chain that regular currencies can, it seems most feasible to just treat them as digital assets to be tradeable over existing centralized systems, no?
- cesarb 5y ago
  > So in theory, it's possible to just trade bitcoins off-chain (either on another blockchain or just using boring centralized tech) without necessarily incurring a corresponding increase in mining-related costs, right? The mining-related costs are mostly unrelated to whether the bitcoins are traded on-chain or off-chain. The mining-related costs are more directly related to the price of bitcoin, or rather, how much a miner can earn with the block rewards and transaction fees. By trading bitcoin, even off-chain, you increase the demand for bitcoin, and therefore indirectly increase its price; the only difference is that by trading off-chain, the miners don't receive the transaction fees (which are currently less than 2% of the block rewards).
arebop 5y ago
If the cost of electricity rose 100% now, the kwh used to mine bitcoin would drop correspondingly. IOW, Bitcoin isn't a scheme to destroy the world by exhausting energy or destroying the planet, it's just a bunch of people who want distributed consensus and they're willing to pay for it and you can't fathom why. You don't complain about aluminum fiends or anybody else spending money and potentially exploiting carbon externalities, ask yourself why not. If you care about the environment so much then impose pollution controls rather than singling out one particular use you don't understand.
- ericb 5y ago
  Except exponential scarcity is built in, we're not near the end yet, and the scarcity is causing exponential growth in energy expenditure, carbon release, and heat. Bitcoin would be the perfect scheme to destroy the world.
  - ephbit 5y ago
    Scarcity is built in, yes .. but block reward halving is built in as well. Now if there were a time to come, when lightning network allowed wide adoption of bitcoin as an actual payment system ... and the speculation on ever rising price were obsolete, because the price was more or less stable ... then the limited mining rewards would put a stop to exponential growth in energy expenditure. Where do I get it wrong? (Serious question)
    - ericb 5y ago
      The supply dictates the price. Thought experiment: Imagine any item with a certain amount of demand. Now cut the supply of that good in half. What happens to the price? If the supply gets cut in half, then cut in half again, and again, what happens? If we accept that the mining reward is the "supply" then we can see that it should cause continual increases. As for the already-emitted supply, you can essentially ignore it because of self-interest. Seeing the effect of diminishing supply and unlike miners, not needing immediate funds to buy new mining hardware to stay competitive, for currency hodlers, HODLing is the rational strategy. So holders aren't really part of the supply equation, hence the "store of value" narrative. So you've got a dwindling supply flow, that causes higher prices, which, because of built in competition, guarantees that the blocks will go to whoever is willing to expend the most energy to get them, which is a ceiling only provided by the current price, which is ever driven higher by the increasing exponential scarcity of the halving block rewards. Essentially, this scheme ends with the heat death of our planet, and unlike climate change, green energy might not be able to make a dent in time. The halvening stops in 2140, if I remember right. Humans intuitively don't understand exponential growth well, but if the same path continues, the energy growth (halvening = price doubling) 1 = Today = ARGENTINA's energy usage 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048 In 40 years, 2048 times that. And it just goes up from there. Now, if you're thinking, that's more than the world produces, you're right. But what happens if it is even half, or 1/10th as bad? Still nothing that leaves us a habitable planet, because the heat and carbon from mining will drive climate change past the brink.

lhorie 5y ago

Forgive me if this is a dumb comment, but my understanding is that bitcoin's footprint is largely due to mining, correct? But bitcoin itself is considered an asset (in the US, at least). So in theory, it's possible to just trade bitcoins off-chain (either on another blockchain or just using boring centralized tech) without necessarily incurring a corresponding increase in mining-related costs, right? IIRC Polkadot staking has a 28 day minimum unstaking cool-off period, yet one can stake/unstake instantaneously in Kraken, so I'm led to believe that off-chain transactions must already happen to at least some extent. Am I missing something?

Uehreka 5y ago
But if you’re trading bitcoins “off-chain”, doesn’t that mean you’re negating the point of a blockchain-based currency?
- lhorie 5y ago
  Yes, but for my purposes as a layperson using a currency, I'm choosing to trust a system that is opaque to me anyways (be it a bank/exchange/other financial institution vs a validator pool). One could argue, for example, that anti-fraud mechanisms in off-chain systems don't have a on-chain counterpart, despite being a desirable feature, so IMHO, if the argument goes that crypto can't do things on-chain that regular currencies can, it seems most feasible to just treat them as digital assets to be tradeable over existing centralized systems, no?
cesarb 5y ago
> So in theory, it's possible to just trade bitcoins off-chain (either on another blockchain or just using boring centralized tech) without necessarily incurring a corresponding increase in mining-related costs, right? The mining-related costs are mostly unrelated to whether the bitcoins are traded on-chain or off-chain. The mining-related costs are more directly related to the price of bitcoin, or rather, how much a miner can earn with the block rewards and transaction fees. By trading bitcoin, even off-chain, you increase the demand for bitcoin, and therefore indirectly increase its price; the only difference is that by trading off-chain, the miners don't receive the transaction fees (which are currently less than 2% of the block rewards).

arebop 5y ago

If the cost of electricity rose 100% now, the kwh used to mine bitcoin would drop correspondingly. IOW, Bitcoin isn't a scheme to destroy the world by exhausting energy or destroying the planet, it's just a bunch of people who want distributed consensus and they're willing to pay for it and you can't fathom why. You don't complain about aluminum fiends or anybody else spending money and potentially exploiting carbon externalities, ask yourself why not. If you care about the environment so much then impose pollution controls rather than singling out one particular use you don't understand.

ericb 5y ago
Except exponential scarcity is built in, we're not near the end yet, and the scarcity is causing exponential growth in energy expenditure, carbon release, and heat. Bitcoin would be the perfect scheme to destroy the world.
- ephbit 5y ago
  Scarcity is built in, yes .. but block reward halving is built in as well. Now if there were a time to come, when lightning network allowed wide adoption of bitcoin as an actual payment system ... and the speculation on ever rising price were obsolete, because the price was more or less stable ... then the limited mining rewards would put a stop to exponential growth in energy expenditure. Where do I get it wrong? (Serious question)
  - ericb 5y ago
    The supply dictates the price. Thought experiment: Imagine any item with a certain amount of demand. Now cut the supply of that good in half. What happens to the price? If the supply gets cut in half, then cut in half again, and again, what happens? If we accept that the mining reward is the "supply" then we can see that it should cause continual increases. As for the already-emitted supply, you can essentially ignore it because of self-interest. Seeing the effect of diminishing supply and unlike miners, not needing immediate funds to buy new mining hardware to stay competitive, for currency hodlers, HODLing is the rational strategy. So holders aren't really part of the supply equation, hence the "store of value" narrative. So you've got a dwindling supply flow, that causes higher prices, which, because of built in competition, guarantees that the blocks will go to whoever is willing to expend the most energy to get them, which is a ceiling only provided by the current price, which is ever driven higher by the increasing exponential scarcity of the halving block rewards. Essentially, this scheme ends with the heat death of our planet, and unlike climate change, green energy might not be able to make a dent in time. The halvening stops in 2140, if I remember right. Humans intuitively don't understand exponential growth well, but if the same path continues, the energy growth (halvening = price doubling) 1 = Today = ARGENTINA's energy usage 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048 In 40 years, 2048 times that. And it just goes up from there. Now, if you're thinking, that's more than the world produces, you're right. But what happens if it is even half, or 1/10th as bad? Still nothing that leaves us a habitable planet, because the heat and carbon from mining will drive climate change past the brink.