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Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

192 points by fanf2 5y ago

maxwell 5y ago
Looks like this is mostly about PoW. Here's a recent report on the environmental impact of PoS: http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/blockchain-energy-consumption/ http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/blockchain-energy-consumption...
- danlugo92 5y ago
  PoS does not work https://endthefud.org/PoW https://endthefud.org/PoW
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    Nano uses dPoS and has worked for years. Your link is just another Bitcoin maxi with awful logic. No, pumping money into pointless mining doesn't make a coin actually more valuable. It's just a waste. Out of all the real value crypto can bring - speed, trustlessness, decentralisation - mining isn't actually needed for any of it. It just forces things into a pyramid shape.
  - tylersmith 5y ago
    Saying it doesn't change the fact that PoS systems are protecting nearly $200B right now, and growing faster than PoW systems.
coolspot 5y ago
The great filter that destroys civilizations is not a nuclear weapon technology as we thought, but crypto-mania consuming all available resources.
xrd 5y ago
I still think war and oil are dirtier and don't see a way to wean ourselves off that consumption and impact. I do see that cryptocurrencies are moving toward energy reduction through things like proof of stake and L2s. https://susanfsu.medium.com/think-btc-is-a-dirty-business-consider-the-carbon-cost-of-a-dollar-c38122fb55c5 https://susanfsu.medium.com/think-btc-is-a-dirty-business-co...
- 542458 5y ago
  I’m not really sure what your point is. Basically everything pales in comparison to war and oil - by that logic, burning trash in a barrel in my yard is fine. It’s not like if we all switched to Bitcoin tomorrow that war and oil would cease to exist.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    Well, a war typically costs trillions. Which is usually just printed out of thin air. On a truly global Bitcoin standard, you could not afford that war. Because even a government would have a limited supply of Bitcoin, and they can't just create new ones. So the only way to pay for such a war, is to do extremely heavy taxation on your citizen's Bitcoins. Good luck with that.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  HERE IS THE ARTICLE YOU CAN SEND TO PEOPLE WHEN THEY SAY “BUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?” https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3 https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issue... The promise of "proof of stake eventually" is just greenwashing.
  - seibelj 5y ago
    This is a terrible article written by someone who doesn't know anything. Plenty of proof of stake coins are currently active, such as Binance Chain, Ripple, Avalanche, Cosmos, Polkadot, and on and on. Ethereum will get there but they are being very careful.
    - tornato7 5y ago
      To be fair it was written in March, a lot of progress has been made since then
      - tylersmith 5y ago
endisneigh 5y ago
There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One way or another, there's accountability. The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. Even if what I'm saying doesn't come to be, at a minimum you've introduced yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit - our current system isn't here by accident. It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. Because cryptocurrency doesn't exist in a vacuum, no matter what you're either enriching early adopters, leading to what I described earlier; or you are subject to the same flaws as fiat that it's trying to replace.
- mathgenius 5y ago
  > whose power cannot be really removed Yes. It may not be too worrisome right now, but what if the cryptocurrency phenomena became several orders of magnitude bigger? Couple that with climate wars, failed states, and malignant corporations. I can imagine some very grim outcomes indeed.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Depends on your perspective, no? If you're the unwilling vassal of the centralized superpower that controls all the money and financial flows, then the malignant entity is the state that keeps you under boot. We might hope in theory that the democratic state that controls things has the people's best interest at heart, but an honest study of history shows that's never really been true. The state only cares about the well being on the people (and the environment) in so far as it feeds back into their own power on the global stage. And it almost necessarily has to be this way. Any democratic state that honestly cared about it's people at the expense of it's power would eventually be destroyed or overpowered by an external (or internal) organization that was more ruthless.
latchkey 5y ago
Good to see someone debunking the deeply flawed Cambridge Index. "Data is currently provided by four mining pools for the latest period." [0] There are hundreds of pools and the ones they pick have a stronger China workload. Then, they extrapolate from that limited source of data. Given that China just turned off everything and hardware moved globally (a lot to the US), it effectively invalidates everything they have been doing. [0] https://cbeci.org/mining_map/methodology https://cbeci.org/mining_map/methodology
asdff 5y ago
Another industry in need of carbon taxes. Stuff like bitcoin would be a lot more palatable if its users paid for the externalities they saddle upon everyone else from their carbon usage.
- paisawalla 5y ago
  Externalities like that should be priced into the utility bill. In CA, you will see steep overages when you reach the upper tiers of utilization.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    Ah, but with an unregulated decentralized heat-generator, I'm free to look around for the country which doesn't tax the externalities, and thus has the cheapest utility bill. California isn't where most of the crypto mining is happening...
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Bitcoin is just a convenient scapegoat for people to hate on and feel like they have the moral high ground, all while they eat a high meat diet, drive single occupant cars daily, take regular domestic flights and occasional international flights, and live in McMansions with AC 6 months out of the year. Our entire lifestyles in the developed world are horrifically carbon heavy. Beating up on things like bitcoin without addressing the actual problem of oil subsidies and the lack of carbon taxes is a waste of political capital that will set back actual effective climate action by years or decades. We can't afford to waste that time.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    FWIW, I opted out of children, eat a vegetarian diet, have never had a driver's license, and generally put on a sweater before reaching for the thermostat. And I will happily claim my two inches of my moral high-ground to say f$ck bitcoin.
  - asdff 5y ago
    So what if other industries are also polluting? That's not a great excuse. Tax it all imo. Once you have a mechanism to quantify and tax carbon usage it wouldn't be hard to expand it to other industries. In the mean time airline tickets will be costly and within a couple of years you will see freight operators laying down electrified double track along their right of ways in order to capture demand for regional passenger transit at a lower price. The market will reshape to capture the most profit it can given the regulatory environment that it resides in. This is the point of these taxes, you force paradigm shifts that ultimately benefit the species as a whole at the cost of perhaps only a few quarters of poor profits for major corporations.
gt565k 5y ago
PoS blockchains like cardano have solved the carbon and energy problem. Move over bitcoin.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  At the expense of security. Many people do take that trade.
  - Freestyler_3 5y ago
    Which aspect of security do you mean?
    - danuker 5y ago
      If a new node comes to the network, how does it know whether the nodes it sees are showing it the real history, instead of being a malicious group MITM-ing?
  - paulgb 5y ago
    Bitcoin's hashrate is currently 98+%[1] incentivized by inflation. As that decreases over the next few halvings, unless transaction fees exponentially increase accordingly, Bitcoin's security may not be such a selling point any longer. [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.h...
hparadiz 5y ago
The energy consumption used by asics per hash unit is NOT known as claimed in this link. The actual rate drops over time. The article makes so many assumptions that are basically estimates that even posting this on HN is sad.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Seethe.
  - hparadiz 5y ago
    I can say the same to you honestly. These posts are just misinformed and sad. I used to mine on a GPU.... that used way more power than any ASIC for the same computational block. What is there to seethe about? My holdings aren't dropping in value. lol.
cwkoss 5y ago
The idea of taxing cryptocurrencies specifically for carbon emissions is some mixture of naive, shallow and sour grapes. There are a lot of wasteful industries - crypto is a small slice of the overall pie and is arguably the most responsive to market forces. Make universally applied carbon taxes across all industries and let the market sort it out. I'm a crypto bull, and fully support greening our energy economy. Advocating taxing energy consumption based on use is a recipe for corrupt insider dealing and political favoritism.
- whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  Already happening. Crazy mandated ethanol blending. Hydrogen "superhighways" etc
- pjc50 5y ago
  > Make universally applied carbon taxes across all industries and let the market sort it out Globally?
  - danuker 5y ago
    I'd apply the tax globally, but make it proportional to GDP/capita. A way to enforce this is tariffs.
    - tclancy 5y ago
      Both economically inefficient and unlikely to be agreed upon across countries. Perfect.
    - geysersam 5y ago
      Problem is, some people barely afford important things, while others easily affords unimportant things. Taxing everything at the same level will either: 1. Push millions of people into extreme poverty. 2. Or, be so low impact that it is ineffective for reducing carbon emissions. What's the solution? We should not tax all things equal. In a perfect market, a global carbon tax would be excellent. Unfortunately we do not live in (anything resembling) a perfect market.
binarymax 5y ago
"they estimate 12.94GW or 0.45% of total global electricity consumption, with theoretical bounds of [4.65,31.17]GW" Devastating. Now imagine if we spent 0.45% more of global electricity on carbon capture (and growing) and how much better off our prospects would be.
- BrianOnHN 5y ago
  "Here's how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you'll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you're done." I know it doesn't translate, but can anyone look around and say anyone is even trying? (sorry to the few of you that are)
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Let's just select 0.45% of world population randomly, cut off their electricity, and use it on carbon capture. Imagine how much better the prospects of the remaining 99.55% would be!
fuddle 5y ago
I'd be in favour of banning corporations from using fossil fuels by to mine POW cryptocurrencies before it gets worse in the future.
- zaybqp 5y ago
  It is too late. There are now strong political support for cryptocurrency in the US including members of Congress. Extrapolating the current growth of crypto energy usage gives me chills. This might be the Great Filter for us.
knownjorbist 5y ago
There are some interesting crypto and crypto-adjacent projects working on leveraging carbon markets: https://twitter.com/ishaheen10/status/1437997024083808257?s=20 https://twitter.com/ishaheen10/status/1437997024083808257?s=...
tornato7 5y ago
Early next year when Ethereum becomes PoS, it will basically be JUST Bitcoin that is PoW in the top 20. From a climate perspective, we can only hope that this narrative will cause Bitcoin to slide in favor of more green currencies.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > Early next year when Ethereum becomes PoS... Haven't they been planning to move to PoS "soon" now for at least several years? I hate to say I'll believe it when I see it, but... the believeability of their PoS timelines is more than a little suspect now.
  - dorkwood 5y ago
    You're getting downvoted, but you're not wrong. Here's a comment thread from 2016 with people making the same "early next year" claim. > Ethereum hopes to do away with mining by early 2017... They're switching to proof of stake. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128406
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - stripedfish7 5y ago
    ethereum 2 is live and PoS :)
rblion 5y ago
The carbon footprint is the bottleneck for crypto. How can it scale without accelerating further ecological collapse? New coins will come along with greenwash in their rhetoric but ultimately you have to trust the science. It's funny how everyone trusts the science when it supports their worldview and ignore it when it doesn't.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Do you realize that bitcoin doesn't require constantly increasing energy use to scale, right? There exists a natural equilibrium of the value of the miner reward, the cost of energy, and the amount of energy consumed.
  - danuker 5y ago
    Indeed, and as miner reward continues to drop every four years, so will the budget to waste energy. Eventually bitcoin will need to pay its own security through transaction fees.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      Yep. That's what's expected to happen as the inflation rate drops to zero.
      - zaybqp 5y ago
        How could you expect a POW system to be energy efficient while secure when its token/coin's dollar denominated value has been inflated beyond sanity by irresponsible policies of unelected officials?
  - paulmd 5y ago
    As the amount of commerce on bitcoin increases, it becomes more desirable to reverse transactions, so there is indeed some ratio of "GDP to energy expenditure" that needs to be maintained for a sufficient level of network security. So yeah it doesn't need constantly increasing energy expenditure as long as the amount of commerce using bitcoin stops increasing.
danuker 5y ago
I am a bitcoin owner. That said, I agree that the PoW mining reward is excessive. Right now, a 51% attack on the network costs upwards of $2M/h[1]. That is an obscene amount. I argue this comes from the very high growth not being expected by the creators. Most of the miner rewards right now come from inflation (in spite of inflation being less than 2% per year). This was intended to allow the network to grow permissionlessly - so, anyone can sacrifice real-world resources for some tokens, and they don't have to buy from someone already owning it. The reason such a sacrifice is required is that you need a form of scarcity to prevent a Sybil attack[2]. Otherwise, a single person could spin up countless VMs to fake identities, which would be unfair. Since everyone must have heard of Bitcoin by now, I believe this high reward is no longer warranted, and results in a lot of waste. It should be reduced, to reduce the electricity budget of miners. A larger share of this cost should be borne by people actually using the service - i.e. transaction costs. I believe that Bitcoin should reduce its block time, in order to trigger the reward halvings more quickly. [1] - https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
- anonporridge 5y ago
  > I believe that Bitcoin should reduce its block time, in order to trigger the reward halvings more quickly. Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it's not going to happen. This would be a hard fork in the network. Bitcoin already went through a massive civil war over the block size, which is a much less contentious issue than the supply issuance rate. It took years just to get the Segwit softfork out the door and years more to be widely used. What you're suggesting would start a civil war that would rage for years, if not decades, and by the time it was finally resolved, the network would have already gone through a halving or two and naturally reduced the miner reward.
  - danuker 5y ago
    > This would be a hard fork in the network. > What you're suggesting would start a civil war that would rage for years, if not decades Yes, absolutely. I do believe even governments might react more quickly here, by taxing negative externalities, than this happening. But I wish it did, so people would stop worrying about the power used.
zaybqp 5y ago
I miss the good ol' days when we used simpler terms like air and land pollution, depletion of natural resources, and the destruction of the biosphere instead of "Carbon Footprint." I am nominating cryptocurrency as a Great Filter solution to the Fermi Paradox. It is telling to see the brightest among us advocating for this unmitigated disaster. Maybe, Mars is a perfect place to mine crypto? I am sure someone will market such a coin.
asasidh 5y ago
hard money is worth it.
max_ 5y ago
Has anyone computed the carbon footprint of the internet, smart phones & computers? I think we need to start taxing bloggers. The carbon footprint they are responsible for has been underestimated.
caeril 5y ago
Fundamentally, cryptocurrency is an end-run around the ridiculous and absurd SWIFT sanctions, KYC, and AML regulations that weigh down banks around the world. There's nothing innovative about it beyond this. We've known how to do two-phase transactions for decades, now. We've had Merkle Trees for about the same period of time. The only innovation cryptocurrency offers is that it's decentralized, to avoid the garbage regulations surrounding moving money. If anybody actually cared about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies, they'd do the obvious thing: advocate for the free, unencumbered movement of money from person X to person Y within the existing system. A repeal of KYC and AML would immediately kill all cryptocurrencies, particularly privacy coins.
- thebean11 5y ago
  None of the things you listed work as replacements for the EVM. A decentralized SWIFT still can't execute software that can move money around.
- fleddr 5y ago
  That's ridiculous. Most retail and institutional investors in crypto are already KYC. The current value in crypto isn't solely in moving money, there's scarcity (Bitcoin), utility (ether), Defi/staking, NFTs, the metaverse, whatever. Moving money is a benefit, but the least interesting use case of crypto.
  - caeril 5y ago
    > Most retail and institutional investors in crypto are already KYC Indeed, because they're there for speculation, not value or utility. > there's scarcity (Bitcoin), utility (ether), Defi/staking, NFTs, the metaverse, whatever. Ok, I'll grant scarcity, but it's also part of the previously-mentioned end-run around the worst parts of the current fiat system. Ether offers no utility beyond token scams. NFTs the same, except double. > Moving money is a benefit, but the least interesting use case of crypto. Moving money without the IRS/DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA/Mossad/PLA peeking over your shoulder is literally the killer app for cryptocurrencies. BTC is obviously failing at this particular task for anyone on a KYC exchange, but cash and tumbler markets are still thriving, and there's always Monero and ZCash, as well.
butmuh 5y ago
Another completely idiotic guesstimate. Let's pull figures out of our ass and make them look scary to sell a narrative. You can only guess the mix of miners with differing efficiencies and the percentage using renewable and captured energy.
ngold 5y ago
Finally something more destructive then stock markets. My only problem with bitcoin is, imagine if to own a share of Tesla stock, you had to burn down a hectare of forest.
sktrdie 5y ago
Does anybody have any real scientific insight into the idea that Cryptocurrencies can harness energy from far away places that is already being wasted? We need to send most of traditional energy to our households, cars, manufacturing facilities etc. This cost of transportation to me is the key difference. Crypocurrencies don't need this. Imagine putting some mining rigs in orbit near the sun and harnessing the already abundant solar energy. All you need to send back to earth is a few bytes.

192 points by fanf2 5y ago

Looks like this is mostly about PoW. Here's a recent report on the environmental impact of PoS: http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/blockchain-energy-consumption/ http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/blockchain-energy-consumption...

danlugo92 5y ago
PoS does not work https://endthefud.org/PoW https://endthefud.org/PoW
- mandmandam 5y ago
  Nano uses dPoS and has worked for years. Your link is just another Bitcoin maxi with awful logic. No, pumping money into pointless mining doesn't make a coin actually more valuable. It's just a waste. Out of all the real value crypto can bring - speed, trustlessness, decentralisation - mining isn't actually needed for any of it. It just forces things into a pyramid shape.
- tylersmith 5y ago
  Saying it doesn't change the fact that PoS systems are protecting nearly $200B right now, and growing faster than PoW systems.

coolspot 5y ago

The great filter that destroys civilizations is not a nuclear weapon technology as we thought, but crypto-mania consuming all available resources.

xrd 5y ago

I still think war and oil are dirtier and don't see a way to wean ourselves off that consumption and impact. I do see that cryptocurrencies are moving toward energy reduction through things like proof of stake and L2s. https://susanfsu.medium.com/think-btc-is-a-dirty-business-consider-the-carbon-cost-of-a-dollar-c38122fb55c5 https://susanfsu.medium.com/think-btc-is-a-dirty-business-co...

542458 5y ago
I’m not really sure what your point is. Basically everything pales in comparison to war and oil - by that logic, burning trash in a barrel in my yard is fine. It’s not like if we all switched to Bitcoin tomorrow that war and oil would cease to exist.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Well, a war typically costs trillions. Which is usually just printed out of thin air. On a truly global Bitcoin standard, you could not afford that war. Because even a government would have a limited supply of Bitcoin, and they can't just create new ones. So the only way to pay for such a war, is to do extremely heavy taxation on your citizen's Bitcoins. Good luck with that.
NoGravitas 5y ago
HERE IS THE ARTICLE YOU CAN SEND TO PEOPLE WHEN THEY SAY “BUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?” https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3 https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issue... The promise of "proof of stake eventually" is just greenwashing.
- seibelj 5y ago
  This is a terrible article written by someone who doesn't know anything. Plenty of proof of stake coins are currently active, such as Binance Chain, Ripple, Avalanche, Cosmos, Polkadot, and on and on. Ethereum will get there but they are being very careful.
  - tornato7 5y ago
    To be fair it was written in March, a lot of progress has been made since then
    - tylersmith 5y ago

endisneigh 5y ago

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One way or another, there's accountability. The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. Even if what I'm saying doesn't come to be, at a minimum you've introduced yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit - our current system isn't here by accident. It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. Because cryptocurrency doesn't exist in a vacuum, no matter what you're either enriching early adopters, leading to what I described earlier; or you are subject to the same flaws as fiat that it's trying to replace.

mathgenius 5y ago
> whose power cannot be really removed Yes. It may not be too worrisome right now, but what if the cryptocurrency phenomena became several orders of magnitude bigger? Couple that with climate wars, failed states, and malignant corporations. I can imagine some very grim outcomes indeed.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Depends on your perspective, no? If you're the unwilling vassal of the centralized superpower that controls all the money and financial flows, then the malignant entity is the state that keeps you under boot. We might hope in theory that the democratic state that controls things has the people's best interest at heart, but an honest study of history shows that's never really been true. The state only cares about the well being on the people (and the environment) in so far as it feeds back into their own power on the global stage. And it almost necessarily has to be this way. Any democratic state that honestly cared about it's people at the expense of it's power would eventually be destroyed or overpowered by an external (or internal) organization that was more ruthless.

latchkey 5y ago

Good to see someone debunking the deeply flawed Cambridge Index. "Data is currently provided by four mining pools for the latest period." [0] There are hundreds of pools and the ones they pick have a stronger China workload. Then, they extrapolate from that limited source of data. Given that China just turned off everything and hardware moved globally (a lot to the US), it effectively invalidates everything they have been doing. [0] https://cbeci.org/mining_map/methodology https://cbeci.org/mining_map/methodology

asdff 5y ago

Another industry in need of carbon taxes. Stuff like bitcoin would be a lot more palatable if its users paid for the externalities they saddle upon everyone else from their carbon usage.

paisawalla 5y ago
Externalities like that should be priced into the utility bill. In CA, you will see steep overages when you reach the upper tiers of utilization.
- sdenton4 5y ago
  Ah, but with an unregulated decentralized heat-generator, I'm free to look around for the country which doesn't tax the externalities, and thus has the cheapest utility bill. California isn't where most of the crypto mining is happening...
anonporridge 5y ago
Bitcoin is just a convenient scapegoat for people to hate on and feel like they have the moral high ground, all while they eat a high meat diet, drive single occupant cars daily, take regular domestic flights and occasional international flights, and live in McMansions with AC 6 months out of the year. Our entire lifestyles in the developed world are horrifically carbon heavy. Beating up on things like bitcoin without addressing the actual problem of oil subsidies and the lack of carbon taxes is a waste of political capital that will set back actual effective climate action by years or decades. We can't afford to waste that time.
- sdenton4 5y ago
  FWIW, I opted out of children, eat a vegetarian diet, have never had a driver's license, and generally put on a sweater before reaching for the thermostat. And I will happily claim my two inches of my moral high-ground to say f$ck bitcoin.
- asdff 5y ago
  So what if other industries are also polluting? That's not a great excuse. Tax it all imo. Once you have a mechanism to quantify and tax carbon usage it wouldn't be hard to expand it to other industries. In the mean time airline tickets will be costly and within a couple of years you will see freight operators laying down electrified double track along their right of ways in order to capture demand for regional passenger transit at a lower price. The market will reshape to capture the most profit it can given the regulatory environment that it resides in. This is the point of these taxes, you force paradigm shifts that ultimately benefit the species as a whole at the cost of perhaps only a few quarters of poor profits for major corporations.

gt565k 5y ago

PoS blockchains like cardano have solved the carbon and energy problem. Move over bitcoin.

bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
At the expense of security. Many people do take that trade.
- Freestyler_3 5y ago
  Which aspect of security do you mean?
  - danuker 5y ago
    If a new node comes to the network, how does it know whether the nodes it sees are showing it the real history, instead of being a malicious group MITM-ing?
- paulgb 5y ago
  Bitcoin's hashrate is currently 98+%[1] incentivized by inflation. As that decreases over the next few halvings, unless transaction fees exponentially increase accordingly, Bitcoin's security may not be such a selling point any longer. [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.h...

hparadiz 5y ago

The energy consumption used by asics per hash unit is NOT known as claimed in this link. The actual rate drops over time. The article makes so many assumptions that are basically estimates that even posting this on HN is sad.

NoGravitas 5y ago
Seethe.
- hparadiz 5y ago
  I can say the same to you honestly. These posts are just misinformed and sad. I used to mine on a GPU.... that used way more power than any ASIC for the same computational block. What is there to seethe about? My holdings aren't dropping in value. lol.

cwkoss 5y ago

The idea of taxing cryptocurrencies specifically for carbon emissions is some mixture of naive, shallow and sour grapes. There are a lot of wasteful industries - crypto is a small slice of the overall pie and is arguably the most responsive to market forces. Make universally applied carbon taxes across all industries and let the market sort it out. I'm a crypto bull, and fully support greening our energy economy. Advocating taxing energy consumption based on use is a recipe for corrupt insider dealing and political favoritism.

whoknowswhat11 5y ago
Already happening. Crazy mandated ethanol blending. Hydrogen "superhighways" etc
pjc50 5y ago
> Make universally applied carbon taxes across all industries and let the market sort it out Globally?
- danuker 5y ago
  I'd apply the tax globally, but make it proportional to GDP/capita. A way to enforce this is tariffs.
  - tclancy 5y ago
    Both economically inefficient and unlikely to be agreed upon across countries. Perfect.
  - geysersam 5y ago
    Problem is, some people barely afford important things, while others easily affords unimportant things. Taxing everything at the same level will either: 1. Push millions of people into extreme poverty. 2. Or, be so low impact that it is ineffective for reducing carbon emissions. What's the solution? We should not tax all things equal. In a perfect market, a global carbon tax would be excellent. Unfortunately we do not live in (anything resembling) a perfect market.

binarymax 5y ago

"they estimate 12.94GW or 0.45% of total global electricity consumption, with theoretical bounds of [4.65,31.17]GW" Devastating. Now imagine if we spent 0.45% more of global electricity on carbon capture (and growing) and how much better off our prospects would be.

BrianOnHN 5y ago
"Here's how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you'll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you're done." I know it doesn't translate, but can anyone look around and say anyone is even trying? (sorry to the few of you that are)
lostmsu 5y ago
Let's just select 0.45% of world population randomly, cut off their electricity, and use it on carbon capture. Imagine how much better the prospects of the remaining 99.55% would be!

fuddle 5y ago

I'd be in favour of banning corporations from using fossil fuels by to mine POW cryptocurrencies before it gets worse in the future.

zaybqp 5y ago
It is too late. There are now strong political support for cryptocurrency in the US including members of Congress. Extrapolating the current growth of crypto energy usage gives me chills. This might be the Great Filter for us.

knownjorbist 5y ago

There are some interesting crypto and crypto-adjacent projects working on leveraging carbon markets: https://twitter.com/ishaheen10/status/1437997024083808257?s=20 https://twitter.com/ishaheen10/status/1437997024083808257?s=...

tornato7 5y ago

Early next year when Ethereum becomes PoS, it will basically be JUST Bitcoin that is PoW in the top 20. From a climate perspective, we can only hope that this narrative will cause Bitcoin to slide in favor of more green currencies.

Syonyk 5y ago
> Early next year when Ethereum becomes PoS... Haven't they been planning to move to PoS "soon" now for at least several years? I hate to say I'll believe it when I see it, but... the believeability of their PoS timelines is more than a little suspect now.
- dorkwood 5y ago
  You're getting downvoted, but you're not wrong. Here's a comment thread from 2016 with people making the same "early next year" claim. > Ethereum hopes to do away with mining by early 2017... They're switching to proof of stake. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128406
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- stripedfish7 5y ago
  ethereum 2 is live and PoS :)

rblion 5y ago

The carbon footprint is the bottleneck for crypto. How can it scale without accelerating further ecological collapse? New coins will come along with greenwash in their rhetoric but ultimately you have to trust the science. It's funny how everyone trusts the science when it supports their worldview and ignore it when it doesn't.

anonporridge 5y ago
Do you realize that bitcoin doesn't require constantly increasing energy use to scale, right? There exists a natural equilibrium of the value of the miner reward, the cost of energy, and the amount of energy consumed.
- danuker 5y ago
  Indeed, and as miner reward continues to drop every four years, so will the budget to waste energy. Eventually bitcoin will need to pay its own security through transaction fees.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Yep. That's what's expected to happen as the inflation rate drops to zero.
    - zaybqp 5y ago
      How could you expect a POW system to be energy efficient while secure when its token/coin's dollar denominated value has been inflated beyond sanity by irresponsible policies of unelected officials?
- paulmd 5y ago
  As the amount of commerce on bitcoin increases, it becomes more desirable to reverse transactions, so there is indeed some ratio of "GDP to energy expenditure" that needs to be maintained for a sufficient level of network security. So yeah it doesn't need constantly increasing energy expenditure as long as the amount of commerce using bitcoin stops increasing.

danuker 5y ago

I am a bitcoin owner. That said, I agree that the PoW mining reward is excessive. Right now, a 51% attack on the network costs upwards of $2M/h[1]. That is an obscene amount. I argue this comes from the very high growth not being expected by the creators. Most of the miner rewards right now come from inflation (in spite of inflation being less than 2% per year). This was intended to allow the network to grow permissionlessly - so, anyone can sacrifice real-world resources for some tokens, and they don't have to buy from someone already owning it. The reason such a sacrifice is required is that you need a form of scarcity to prevent a Sybil attack[2]. Otherwise, a single person could spin up countless VMs to fake identities, which would be unfair. Since everyone must have heard of Bitcoin by now, I believe this high reward is no longer warranted, and results in a lot of waste. It should be reduced, to reduce the electricity budget of miners. A larger share of this cost should be borne by people actually using the service - i.e. transaction costs. I believe that Bitcoin should reduce its block time, in order to trigger the reward halvings more quickly. [1] - https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

anonporridge 5y ago
> I believe that Bitcoin should reduce its block time, in order to trigger the reward halvings more quickly. Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it's not going to happen. This would be a hard fork in the network. Bitcoin already went through a massive civil war over the block size, which is a much less contentious issue than the supply issuance rate. It took years just to get the Segwit softfork out the door and years more to be widely used. What you're suggesting would start a civil war that would rage for years, if not decades, and by the time it was finally resolved, the network would have already gone through a halving or two and naturally reduced the miner reward.
- danuker 5y ago
  > This would be a hard fork in the network. > What you're suggesting would start a civil war that would rage for years, if not decades Yes, absolutely. I do believe even governments might react more quickly here, by taxing negative externalities, than this happening. But I wish it did, so people would stop worrying about the power used.

zaybqp 5y ago

I miss the good ol' days when we used simpler terms like air and land pollution, depletion of natural resources, and the destruction of the biosphere instead of "Carbon Footprint." I am nominating cryptocurrency as a Great Filter solution to the Fermi Paradox. It is telling to see the brightest among us advocating for this unmitigated disaster. Maybe, Mars is a perfect place to mine crypto? I am sure someone will market such a coin.

asasidh 5y ago

hard money is worth it.

max_ 5y ago

Has anyone computed the carbon footprint of the internet, smart phones & computers? I think we need to start taxing bloggers. The carbon footprint they are responsible for has been underestimated.

caeril 5y ago

Fundamentally, cryptocurrency is an end-run around the ridiculous and absurd SWIFT sanctions, KYC, and AML regulations that weigh down banks around the world. There's nothing innovative about it beyond this. We've known how to do two-phase transactions for decades, now. We've had Merkle Trees for about the same period of time. The only innovation cryptocurrency offers is that it's decentralized, to avoid the garbage regulations surrounding moving money. If anybody actually cared about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies, they'd do the obvious thing: advocate for the free, unencumbered movement of money from person X to person Y within the existing system. A repeal of KYC and AML would immediately kill all cryptocurrencies, particularly privacy coins.

thebean11 5y ago
None of the things you listed work as replacements for the EVM. A decentralized SWIFT still can't execute software that can move money around.
fleddr 5y ago
That's ridiculous. Most retail and institutional investors in crypto are already KYC. The current value in crypto isn't solely in moving money, there's scarcity (Bitcoin), utility (ether), Defi/staking, NFTs, the metaverse, whatever. Moving money is a benefit, but the least interesting use case of crypto.
- caeril 5y ago
  > Most retail and institutional investors in crypto are already KYC Indeed, because they're there for speculation, not value or utility. > there's scarcity (Bitcoin), utility (ether), Defi/staking, NFTs, the metaverse, whatever. Ok, I'll grant scarcity, but it's also part of the previously-mentioned end-run around the worst parts of the current fiat system. Ether offers no utility beyond token scams. NFTs the same, except double. > Moving money is a benefit, but the least interesting use case of crypto. Moving money without the IRS/DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA/Mossad/PLA peeking over your shoulder is literally the killer app for cryptocurrencies. BTC is obviously failing at this particular task for anyone on a KYC exchange, but cash and tumbler markets are still thriving, and there's always Monero and ZCash, as well.

butmuh 5y ago

Another completely idiotic guesstimate. Let's pull figures out of our ass and make them look scary to sell a narrative. You can only guess the mix of miners with differing efficiencies and the percentage using renewable and captured energy.

ngold 5y ago

Finally something more destructive then stock markets. My only problem with bitcoin is, imagine if to own a share of Tesla stock, you had to burn down a hectare of forest.

sktrdie 5y ago

Does anybody have any real scientific insight into the idea that Cryptocurrencies can harness energy from far away places that is already being wasted? We need to send most of traditional energy to our households, cars, manufacturing facilities etc. This cost of transportation to me is the key difference. Crypocurrencies don't need this. Imagine putting some mining rigs in orbit near the sun and harnessing the already abundant solar energy. All you need to send back to earth is a few bytes.