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"If we were to allow extensive mining of crypto-assets in Sweden, there is a risk that the renewable energy available to us will be insufficient to cover the re

by seu 5y ago

"If we were to allow extensive mining of crypto-assets in Sweden, there is a risk that the renewable energy available to us will be insufficient to cover the required climate transition that we need to make. This energy is urgently required for the development of fossil-free steel, large-scale battery manufacturing and the electrification of our transport sector. Based on estimates from Cambridge University, it is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single bitcoin. This is the equivalent of forty-four laps around the globe. 900 bitcoins are mined every day. This is not a reasonable use of our renewable energy." Could not be clearer: either you allow Bitcoin, benefitting only a few miners and users, or you let society as a whole transition to a more sustainable future.

vadfa 5y ago
Nuclear is clean and sustainable and can allow people to mine bitcoin and even heat their homes, which seems to be a problem currently in some regions of Europe.
- thg 5y ago
  Nuclear is also a dead technology you can't have a rational discussion about, sadly. Much the same as GMOs.
  - vadfa 5y ago
    The elites are working hard on impoverishing the average citizen as much as possible, and a very reliable way is to increase the price of power and food in the name of "ecology".
- JustinVx 5y ago
  Nuclear doesn’t produce any greenhouse gasses, but with the radioactive waste it generates it of course isn’t really clean. It’s also expensive and takes decades to build.
  - DeusExMachina 5y ago
    That waste is much easier to dispose that the waste created by "renewables" like solar panels, especially with newer generation plants that burn old nuclear waste.
    - shadowfox 5y ago
      I am not sure how much you have looked at these newer plants? While must can use since amount of nuclear waste (which is great), their biproducts are only somewhat less toxic than the original. These are nowhere as clean as people seem to imagine.
- newaccount74 5y ago
  Nuclear energy may not release CO2 into the atmosphere, but that doesn't make it clean and sustainable: - you need to store radioactive waste for hundreds of years - "safe" permanent storage sites often end up not not being actually safe 50 years later - warming rivers by using the water for cooling may wreck local ecosystems The only thing that is actually sustainable is not using all the energy in the first place. Bitcoin is the opposite of that.
  - DeusExMachina 5y ago
    Nuclear waste is much safer than all other waste from energy production: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19/stop-letting-your-ridiculous-fears-of-nuclear-waste-kill-the-planet/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19...
  - skohan 5y ago
    That all might be true, but there are ways to improve on those points. For instance thorium reactors are much more efficient in terms of waste, and they are much safer. A lot of problems we have with Nuclear is because the tech most widely used was created with a side goal of advancing nuclear weapon production. I'm by no means a nuclear maximalist, but I could see better nuclear being a component of a larger sustainable energy strategy.
    - gefhfff 5y ago
      Thorium reactors are a castle in the air
      - skohan 5y ago
        Everything is until it isn't right? Do you think there's a fundamental problem there, or is it just taking too long?
        kitkat_new 5y ago
        taking too long is a fundamental problem here
- gefhfff 5y ago
  Stop the crap. Nuclear is neither clean (long term waste problem) nor a solution (building nuclear plants will take too long) And even less does it make sense to waste resources on mining hardware as well as mining farms that produce heat just as a by product. "Heating their homes" is as likely as Santa being real
- forgotmyoldname 5y ago
  I’m fine with nuclear, but producing excess nuclear waste simply to produce random bits to do absolutely nothing isn’t something I’d support.
  - vadfa 5y ago
    I agree with you, but how exactly do you check for that? Put a telescreen in every home?
    - forgotmyoldname 5y ago
      Treat crypto no different from stocks. You can’t just buy, trade, and cash out stocks from some random guy online. Crypto is basically no different from stocks at this point—things change in value just because people think others expect the price to change and follow the herd.
- progre 5y ago
  As someone living near one of europes largest uranium deposits, i can tell you that nuclear itself might be clean, but getting the fuel is anything but. Uranium dont come in nice nuggets like gold, its mixed up with other things so that its only fractions of grams per ton of rock you have to mine. When this rock is processed we are left with big holes in the ground that shifts the level of the waterbed, and big piles of toxic rock dust that leaks all kinds of nasty shit into said ground water.
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    Same for the minerals needed for batteries or most other things. This is mining.
peakaboo 5y ago
I feel like you guys are completely inside the matrix here so allow me to explain... Bitcoin is being fought by banks and governments because it threatens the dollar and the banking system. The future they want is a global coin, not a decentralized currency.
- agilob 5y ago
  >Bitcoin is being fought Proof of Work coins are being fought for governments because they committed to goals decided in Paris Agreement and PoW CCs are making it harder to achieve the goals. Swedes discuss banning Bitcoin, but not PoS coins or premined coins that do not have PoS or PoW
- karamanolev 5y ago
  How about the people win against the evil banks and governments ... and then proceeds to drown in the rising oceans, burn in increased wildfires, freeze in extremely cold weather (including all the gas and coal power plants used to mine BTC, see recent Texas events).
  - amjnsx 5y ago
    We could ban bitcoin and still drown in rising oceans. 100 companies contribute to 70% of Earth’s pollution. Why aren’t we banning them? https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
    - karamanolev 5y ago
      Classic whataboutism. Don't. The fact that we aren't banning some things that we should (if we have an alternative) doesn't mean we shouldn't ban anything. To be clear, I'm all for banning climate change activities that we have an alternative for. Also for accelerating research into things for which we don't. Bitcoin can be regulated in order to limit the climate change effects, right now it's a huge tulip mania.
- 5y ago
VMG 5y ago
This merely pushes Bitcoin mining to countries that do not have this kind of regulation (and probably have less renewable energy).
- rebuilder 5y ago
  It would still raise the cost of mining. And those countries that do not ban mining will face increasing pressure to do so, due to miners pushing energy prices up. But yes, an international treaty banning PoW crypto mining would be more effective. Then confiscate the equipment and use it to attack the networks.
  - agilob 5y ago
    Unless they buy their own coal plant?
  - louloulou 5y ago
    How about an international treaty instituting a carbon tax, if C02 is what you actually want to minimize. Sounds like that's not the goal based on your comment though.
  - VMG 5y ago
    High mining cost is what provides network security. I doubt there will be popular support for military interventions against Bitcoin. But if a "War against Bitcoin" were to happen, it would probably be as successful as the "War on Drugs" and "War on Terror"
    - Jensson 5y ago
      It would actually make the network more secure, since mining would shift from big industry players to local private users who mine from home electricity. You can't hide a power dependent business and poor countries lack the power production for significant mining operations.
    - skohan 5y ago
      Security is the argument of last-resort for so many bad technologies.
swman 5y ago
Honestly do we really need cryptocurrency? I don’t want my transactions public. I like exchanging cash for weed (legal in California) and nobody needs to know regardless. I also don’t understand what’s wrong with USD. I grew up in a third world country so maybe it could help people there but in USA? I’m happy with the dollar fluctuations vs four digit fluctuations daily. Can someone give me a good explain?
- ur-whale 5y ago
  > I don’t want my transactions public. First, not all cryptos share Bitcoin's open ledger characteristics. Look up Monero, ZCash, Grin, Beam : they all implement untraceable transactions, not just pseudo-anonymous ones like Bitcoin. Second, pseudonymous transactions is far from being the only interesting property of Bitcoin. Among others, no centralized control is a key aspect.
  - ninepoints 5y ago
    Complete transaction anonymity is not a feature. There are no protections against wash trading, and you have no way to gauge true market demand or pricing from transaction volume data alone.
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    > they all implement untraceable transactions As a non-criminal, what use would I have for untraceable transactions?
    - ur-whale 5y ago
      > As a non-criminal, what use would I have for untraceable transactions? As a non-criminal, what you would you have a need for privacy?
    - lawn 5y ago
      Imagine if you have a business and someone uses their tainted coins (from a hack or extortion or whatever) and buys something from you. You then deposit this on an exchange... And get your account locked. Or worse, imagine using your Bitcoin wallet in a store, and the business owner sees that you have $100k in the wallet you just paid with (because it's public knowledge). He then calls his friends who will follow you and try to kidnap and torture you to hand them over.
avereveard 5y ago
Option c: price energy usage accordingly and profit off cryptominers. You'll have the funds to expand energy production capacity to both solve today problem and future proof infrastructure
polaris_mars 5y ago
This is a feature not a bug. What I'm hearing is, it takes the energy necessary to drive 1.8m kilometres to forge one bitcoin. Perfect. And humanity is not on the verge of climate extinction, although it is the dogma of our times.
opaov 5y ago
Meanwhile the bitcoin marketing mega machine is going into over drive. Full/Front page ads in newspapers, targeted campaigns on the most misguided, propping up talking heads and influencers, 24*7 sms bombardment in countries all over the world offering free coins, games and wallets to rope in more and more people who have clue about anything. Show growth. Get funds to buy more marketing, target the most ignorant, produce more growth, rinse and repeat. The whole process is like a death sprial that gets more effecient every year. The marketing industry has turned into such a global exploitative scam with the tools that have today.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  Everything is a scam nowadays, from tap water to US presidency. It’s almost if the rich people stopped caring about morals and just started setting up traps to entertain themselves with the suffering of others.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >It’s almost if the rich people stopped caring about morals and just started setting up traps to entertain themselves with the suffering of others. There is even a successful Korean TV show depicting this current situation.
lordnacho 5y ago
The thing is it doesn't matter whether there are a few miners or a lot. Bitcoin will continue to mine a block every 10 minutes. It's like an energy sink, you can drip in tiny amounts and get the same, or you can pour in all future fusion power plants, you get the same. So actually it won't affect bitcoin, but it will release the energy to other uses.
- throw298340 5y ago
  This is just wrong. The hashrate is proportional to the network security, eg 51% attack. The sentiment on HN against crypto strikes me as odd… it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s … Give it some time to evolve and embrace the future!
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    The very first time I saw email, I immediately knew I wanted to have it. Ditto with the web. Ditto with video conferencing. I've known about crypto for almost ten years. I worked in the field writing bits of the rippled code for a couple of years. And I still have no idea why anyone would want to use cryptocurrencies, except of course for crime. > it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s … Hmm, is this comment intended to be a parody? Well, it certainly turned out that the car was the Devil's tool, because we are running as fast as we can to devastate our climate by turning fossil fuels into carbon dioxide.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >car was the Devil's tool, because we are running as fast as we can to devastate our climate by turning fossil fuels into carbon dioxide. To be fair, mankind evolved a lot due to the use of cars. Off-rail transportation has changed the way we live, not just for the worse. The coffee and bananas I bought today was transported by a motor vehicle for the last mile. The ambulance that drove my friend to the hospital was also a motor vehicle. Most of our agriculture that is responsible for us having cheap food, is also powered by motor vehicles. Motor vehicles have benefited nearly everyone, whereas crypto currencies haven't benefited almost anyone so far except the speculators who advocate for more people to buy in, to push the price up, so they can cash out (in fiat of course) at a higher price.
mytailorisrich 5y ago
It is a very slippery slope, though, when a small group of people starts deciding what use of electricity is allowed. Also, I think it is absolutely BS to claim that allowing bitcoin mining equals not "letting society transition to a more sustainable future". If electricity production is constrained then this should be addressed generally on both demand and supply sides instead of essentially finding scapegoats. (I don't like bitcoin, by the way, but it's not a reason to go over the top)
oytis 5y ago
Or maybe just invest in atomic energy that is capable of producing enough power for current and future needs?
bothandeach 5y ago
Seu, you are absolutely right. "The required climate transition" is 100% on the button. We cannot allow the moneyed class to close the future for humanity IMNSHO. Thanks for such clarity.

by seu 5y ago

vadfa 5y ago

Nuclear is clean and sustainable and can allow people to mine bitcoin and even heat their homes, which seems to be a problem currently in some regions of Europe.

thg 5y ago
Nuclear is also a dead technology you can't have a rational discussion about, sadly. Much the same as GMOs.
- vadfa 5y ago
  The elites are working hard on impoverishing the average citizen as much as possible, and a very reliable way is to increase the price of power and food in the name of "ecology".
JustinVx 5y ago
Nuclear doesn’t produce any greenhouse gasses, but with the radioactive waste it generates it of course isn’t really clean. It’s also expensive and takes decades to build.
- DeusExMachina 5y ago
  That waste is much easier to dispose that the waste created by "renewables" like solar panels, especially with newer generation plants that burn old nuclear waste.
  - shadowfox 5y ago
    I am not sure how much you have looked at these newer plants? While must can use since amount of nuclear waste (which is great), their biproducts are only somewhat less toxic than the original. These are nowhere as clean as people seem to imagine.
newaccount74 5y ago
Nuclear energy may not release CO2 into the atmosphere, but that doesn't make it clean and sustainable: - you need to store radioactive waste for hundreds of years - "safe" permanent storage sites often end up not not being actually safe 50 years later - warming rivers by using the water for cooling may wreck local ecosystems The only thing that is actually sustainable is not using all the energy in the first place. Bitcoin is the opposite of that.
- DeusExMachina 5y ago
  Nuclear waste is much safer than all other waste from energy production: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19/stop-letting-your-ridiculous-fears-of-nuclear-waste-kill-the-planet/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19...
- skohan 5y ago
  That all might be true, but there are ways to improve on those points. For instance thorium reactors are much more efficient in terms of waste, and they are much safer. A lot of problems we have with Nuclear is because the tech most widely used was created with a side goal of advancing nuclear weapon production. I'm by no means a nuclear maximalist, but I could see better nuclear being a component of a larger sustainable energy strategy.
  - gefhfff 5y ago
    Thorium reactors are a castle in the air
    - skohan 5y ago
      Everything is until it isn't right? Do you think there's a fundamental problem there, or is it just taking too long?
      - kitkat_new 5y ago
        taking too long is a fundamental problem here
gefhfff 5y ago
Stop the crap. Nuclear is neither clean (long term waste problem) nor a solution (building nuclear plants will take too long) And even less does it make sense to waste resources on mining hardware as well as mining farms that produce heat just as a by product. "Heating their homes" is as likely as Santa being real
forgotmyoldname 5y ago
I’m fine with nuclear, but producing excess nuclear waste simply to produce random bits to do absolutely nothing isn’t something I’d support.
- vadfa 5y ago
  I agree with you, but how exactly do you check for that? Put a telescreen in every home?
  - forgotmyoldname 5y ago
    Treat crypto no different from stocks. You can’t just buy, trade, and cash out stocks from some random guy online. Crypto is basically no different from stocks at this point—things change in value just because people think others expect the price to change and follow the herd.
progre 5y ago
As someone living near one of europes largest uranium deposits, i can tell you that nuclear itself might be clean, but getting the fuel is anything but. Uranium dont come in nice nuggets like gold, its mixed up with other things so that its only fractions of grams per ton of rock you have to mine. When this rock is processed we are left with big holes in the ground that shifts the level of the waterbed, and big piles of toxic rock dust that leaks all kinds of nasty shit into said ground water.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  Same for the minerals needed for batteries or most other things. This is mining.

peakaboo 5y ago

I feel like you guys are completely inside the matrix here so allow me to explain... Bitcoin is being fought by banks and governments because it threatens the dollar and the banking system. The future they want is a global coin, not a decentralized currency.

agilob 5y ago
>Bitcoin is being fought Proof of Work coins are being fought for governments because they committed to goals decided in Paris Agreement and PoW CCs are making it harder to achieve the goals. Swedes discuss banning Bitcoin, but not PoS coins or premined coins that do not have PoS or PoW
karamanolev 5y ago
How about the people win against the evil banks and governments ... and then proceeds to drown in the rising oceans, burn in increased wildfires, freeze in extremely cold weather (including all the gas and coal power plants used to mine BTC, see recent Texas events).
- amjnsx 5y ago
  We could ban bitcoin and still drown in rising oceans. 100 companies contribute to 70% of Earth’s pollution. Why aren’t we banning them? https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
  - karamanolev 5y ago
    Classic whataboutism. Don't. The fact that we aren't banning some things that we should (if we have an alternative) doesn't mean we shouldn't ban anything. To be clear, I'm all for banning climate change activities that we have an alternative for. Also for accelerating research into things for which we don't. Bitcoin can be regulated in order to limit the climate change effects, right now it's a huge tulip mania.
5y ago

VMG 5y ago

This merely pushes Bitcoin mining to countries that do not have this kind of regulation (and probably have less renewable energy).

rebuilder 5y ago
It would still raise the cost of mining. And those countries that do not ban mining will face increasing pressure to do so, due to miners pushing energy prices up. But yes, an international treaty banning PoW crypto mining would be more effective. Then confiscate the equipment and use it to attack the networks.
- agilob 5y ago
  Unless they buy their own coal plant?
- louloulou 5y ago
  How about an international treaty instituting a carbon tax, if C02 is what you actually want to minimize. Sounds like that's not the goal based on your comment though.
- VMG 5y ago
  High mining cost is what provides network security. I doubt there will be popular support for military interventions against Bitcoin. But if a "War against Bitcoin" were to happen, it would probably be as successful as the "War on Drugs" and "War on Terror"
  - Jensson 5y ago
    It would actually make the network more secure, since mining would shift from big industry players to local private users who mine from home electricity. You can't hide a power dependent business and poor countries lack the power production for significant mining operations.
  - skohan 5y ago
    Security is the argument of last-resort for so many bad technologies.

swman 5y ago

Honestly do we really need cryptocurrency? I don’t want my transactions public. I like exchanging cash for weed (legal in California) and nobody needs to know regardless. I also don’t understand what’s wrong with USD. I grew up in a third world country so maybe it could help people there but in USA? I’m happy with the dollar fluctuations vs four digit fluctuations daily. Can someone give me a good explain?

ur-whale 5y ago
> I don’t want my transactions public. First, not all cryptos share Bitcoin's open ledger characteristics. Look up Monero, ZCash, Grin, Beam : they all implement untraceable transactions, not just pseudo-anonymous ones like Bitcoin. Second, pseudonymous transactions is far from being the only interesting property of Bitcoin. Among others, no centralized control is a key aspect.
- ninepoints 5y ago
  Complete transaction anonymity is not a feature. There are no protections against wash trading, and you have no way to gauge true market demand or pricing from transaction volume data alone.
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  > they all implement untraceable transactions As a non-criminal, what use would I have for untraceable transactions?
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    > As a non-criminal, what use would I have for untraceable transactions? As a non-criminal, what you would you have a need for privacy?
  - lawn 5y ago
    Imagine if you have a business and someone uses their tainted coins (from a hack or extortion or whatever) and buys something from you. You then deposit this on an exchange... And get your account locked. Or worse, imagine using your Bitcoin wallet in a store, and the business owner sees that you have $100k in the wallet you just paid with (because it's public knowledge). He then calls his friends who will follow you and try to kidnap and torture you to hand them over.

avereveard 5y ago

Option c: price energy usage accordingly and profit off cryptominers. You'll have the funds to expand energy production capacity to both solve today problem and future proof infrastructure

polaris_mars 5y ago

This is a feature not a bug. What I'm hearing is, it takes the energy necessary to drive 1.8m kilometres to forge one bitcoin. Perfect. And humanity is not on the verge of climate extinction, although it is the dogma of our times.

opaov 5y ago

Meanwhile the bitcoin marketing mega machine is going into over drive. Full/Front page ads in newspapers, targeted campaigns on the most misguided, propping up talking heads and influencers, 24*7 sms bombardment in countries all over the world offering free coins, games and wallets to rope in more and more people who have clue about anything. Show growth. Get funds to buy more marketing, target the most ignorant, produce more growth, rinse and repeat. The whole process is like a death sprial that gets more effecient every year. The marketing industry has turned into such a global exploitative scam with the tools that have today.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
Everything is a scam nowadays, from tap water to US presidency. It’s almost if the rich people stopped caring about morals and just started setting up traps to entertain themselves with the suffering of others.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >It’s almost if the rich people stopped caring about morals and just started setting up traps to entertain themselves with the suffering of others. There is even a successful Korean TV show depicting this current situation.

lordnacho 5y ago

The thing is it doesn't matter whether there are a few miners or a lot. Bitcoin will continue to mine a block every 10 minutes. It's like an energy sink, you can drip in tiny amounts and get the same, or you can pour in all future fusion power plants, you get the same. So actually it won't affect bitcoin, but it will release the energy to other uses.

throw298340 5y ago
This is just wrong. The hashrate is proportional to the network security, eg 51% attack. The sentiment on HN against crypto strikes me as odd… it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s … Give it some time to evolve and embrace the future!
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  The very first time I saw email, I immediately knew I wanted to have it. Ditto with the web. Ditto with video conferencing. I've known about crypto for almost ten years. I worked in the field writing bits of the rippled code for a couple of years. And I still have no idea why anyone would want to use cryptocurrencies, except of course for crime. > it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s … Hmm, is this comment intended to be a parody? Well, it certainly turned out that the car was the Devil's tool, because we are running as fast as we can to devastate our climate by turning fossil fuels into carbon dioxide.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >car was the Devil's tool, because we are running as fast as we can to devastate our climate by turning fossil fuels into carbon dioxide. To be fair, mankind evolved a lot due to the use of cars. Off-rail transportation has changed the way we live, not just for the worse. The coffee and bananas I bought today was transported by a motor vehicle for the last mile. The ambulance that drove my friend to the hospital was also a motor vehicle. Most of our agriculture that is responsible for us having cheap food, is also powered by motor vehicles. Motor vehicles have benefited nearly everyone, whereas crypto currencies haven't benefited almost anyone so far except the speculators who advocate for more people to buy in, to push the price up, so they can cash out (in fiat of course) at a higher price.

mytailorisrich 5y ago

It is a very slippery slope, though, when a small group of people starts deciding what use of electricity is allowed. Also, I think it is absolutely BS to claim that allowing bitcoin mining equals not "letting society transition to a more sustainable future". If electricity production is constrained then this should be addressed generally on both demand and supply sides instead of essentially finding scapegoats. (I don't like bitcoin, by the way, but it's not a reason to go over the top)

oytis 5y ago

Or maybe just invest in atomic energy that is capable of producing enough power for current and future needs?

bothandeach 5y ago

Seu, you are absolutely right. "The required climate transition" is 100% on the button. We cannot allow the moneyed class to close the future for humanity IMNSHO. Thanks for such clarity.