9 ms·

> Bitcoin is already approaching 1% of global electricity consumption, if it hasn't passed that point already And this is the reason why I cannot take any clim

• snet0 5y ago
  You can't take a discussion of climate change seriously unless it specifically addresses a single-percentage problem?
  • NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    Air travel is about 2.5% of total carbon emissions and is incessantly discussed by climate activists.
  • orthoxerox 5y ago
    Do you think most proposed measures would have a bigger effect?
  • sandworm101 5y ago
    A rapidly-growing 1% problem, one that has the potential to nullify other costly gains. Such problems need to die young, before they grow into 5/10/50% problems.
    • semi-extrinsic 5y ago
      No, like others have stated, the climate challenge is switching our entire energy production (plus other fossile fuel end-uses) to net-zero or net-negative emissions. If Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, it would give a small reduction in energy use, but at best it buys you 6 months extra to decarbonize electricity production.
      • gefhfff 5y ago
        "small" 6 months can be a tipping point happening or not. Additionally, each produced ton of green house gases is contributing to climate change right now The more electricity to decarbonize the more difficult.
        • xyzzyz 5y ago
          edit: deleting the comment because I misunderstood the context
          • kitkat_new 5y ago
            which scientific sources contradict the existence of tipping points?
      • pibechorro 5y ago
        Not to mention pow mining is not location or resource specific. It encourages cheap and efficient use of energy. Miners preffer low cost, surplus energy and will relocate wherever that may be. Pow can use nuclear, thermal, wind, solar and alsoo dirty fuels, just like a Tesla. If you have an issue with the use of dirty fuels, then campaign against that specifically, throwing pow under the bus entirely is short sighted. Also what does btc and crypto replace? The carbon footprint of traditional finance, banking and the military actions to preserve it are massive polluters. Even at its infancy, pow crypto is already a good direction to improve sustainability.
        • lukifer 5y ago
          While I think it's fair to properly account for the carbon footprint of traditional banking and state military infrastructure, it is an utter fantasy that crypto is in direct competition with them. Crypto has been steadily integrating with existing banking institutions and regulations over the last five years; and barring some kind of new free-market, secrets-based "killer drones as a service", no distributed hash table can supplant raw military hegemony (aka, the $5 wrench attack [0]). I think crypto has a lot of socially useful potential, beyond mere speculative gambling and Austrian-school value storage, but that's in addition to the centuries of momentum in our real-world political economy; crypto-currencies are unlikely to replace that entirely, anymore than the internet replaced the New York Times. [0] https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
    • CyanBird 5y ago
      But that won't be the case, bitcoin and Crypto growing to 25% of the energy production is just nonsensical let alone 50% As OP mentioned this issue is already getting addressed and in process to become more debated If anything, solving existing real problems ought be priority rather than such a niche thing
  • xwolfi 5y ago
    He probably speculates, like the degenerate speculators, that it won't end up there. Why push around everyone to consume differently while distributing vast amount of tax money that immediately go into more wasteful crypto ? It will not stay at 1% and I agree with the OP that it's going to be difficulty to reduce electricity wastage on one end while ignore the elephant baby in the crib taking over the room. I'm a random internet person in Hong Kong. I have a friend mining half his rent in a hotel room who decided that he doesn't need to pay rent the "normal way" anymore, he can just sleep next to a cluster of mining machines in a hotel room. Is he the stupid one, or am I, paying 3000 USD of my own money monthly ? I have another friend who lost half his saving in shitcoin speculation, I have colleagues who made a 10x profit this year, I mean it's all fucking around me and it's very hard to say it's just a 1% part of an important problem. I feel sometimes it's going to become the main problem. I can't wait for a mega crash to calm down all this excess. I can't accept I'm the idiot working the traditional way to make traditional money paying for traditional things while the futuristic gamblers mine their hotel room fees on a bet I'm going to eventually be forced into using their tokens at whatever cost when it becomes legal tender, locking the future price into making them billionaires.
    • throwaway6734 5y ago
      >I'm going to eventually be forced into using their tokens at whatever cost when it becomes legal tender, I'm assuming the large nation states would attack these tokens before allowing this to happen and I don't think any token ecosystem could withstand a strong nation state attack
      • Applejinx 5y ago
        We have a test of that unfolding, with China. If bitcoin is more powerful than China's state power I'm prepared to believe it is more powerful than any nation-state. Don't know if it's going to work out quite that way though.
    • dnautics 5y ago
      > I can't accept that... For your own sanity I suggest you stop taking the process of getting rich so seriously. It doesn't make sense, nor is the fact that it doesn't make sense a singularity in the grand scheme of time, it has been known since ancient days (I'm not religious, this is just evidence of it's timelessness): "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all"
  • simondotau 5y ago
    A single percentage problem today. In order to become a mainstream everyday currency, use of Bitcoin will have to increase by three, four, possibly five orders of magnitude.
    • leishman 5y ago
      Bitcoin’s energy consumption is completely unrelated to how many transactions it can process.
      • simondotau 5y ago
        False. It's not linear, it's not directly related, but it's certainly not unrelated. As reliance on a blockchain increases, as it becomes normalised in our daily lives, the number of entities motivated to be part of the blockchain increases. As the number of entities increases, the number of compute cycles per transaction increases.
  • Applejinx 5y ago
    Yes. Bitcoin is a mechanism for arbitraging the conversion of energy production directly into black-market money. As such, there is no other possible use for energy so well adapted to exploiting the most horrible, polluting, illegally-in-operation energy production facilities as they get phased out. What you do is buy up the dirtiest plants, run them until they break, bribe or evade any authorities (if they even exist) who would stop you, and if the plant is being shut down because it's failing to comply with pollution regulation (again, if such even exists) that just puts it in a weaker negotiating position. As such they HAVE to deal with you at whatever price you're willing to pay because they can't go anywhere else because they have to run illegally. But they're powering bitcoin, so it stops mattering if they're running illegally, because bitcoin is the currency in which it doesn't matter if you're being paid for crimes, only that the coin exists. I consider that powerful motivation to arbitrage the energy system and exploit cases where energy suppliers are running out of options because they are too dirty. And this can be happening anywhere. Climate's global. If all the dirtiest coal burners are huddled together on a secret island for warmth and to eke out the last pennies (of real money) they can earn, they'll do that for bitcoin if they can't operate any other way. And it'll still matter. It'll just be happening in secret, because bitcoin don't care.
• efdee 5y ago
  Not taking climate change conversations seriously because a topic that is barely 1%-2% of the total consumption is neglected? That sounds like a poor excuse.
• panicpanicpanic 5y ago
  Did you mean to say "I cannot take any cryptocurrencies conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of climate change"?
• tzs 5y ago
  > And this is the reason why I cannot take any climate change conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin's electricity use (or the electricity use of any other single application) is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to addressing climate change. Proof: • Too much of what we does depends on electricity and has no even remotely feasible substitutes for it to be plausible to give up on electricity. In fact, switching more things to electricity, such as transportation and heating, is a large part of what we will have to do to address climate change. • Therefore to address climate change we are going to have to switch to sources of electricity that are climate neutral, which cleans up Bitcoin (and all the other uses of electricity) from a climate standpoint. EDIT: to clarify, of course Bitcoin's electricity use now has a climate impact. My point is that this will eventually be taken care of by the necessary switch to clean electricity for all our electricity production. Until that happens we of course should be trying to clean up current electricity uses, but there are currently bigger fish to fry on that end than Bitcoin. To dismiss taking climate change plans seriously because most conversation is about things with bigger impact is not sensible. If we take too long on the supply side and Bitcoin continues to grow it may move up the list to where it is one of those uses that we will need to address before we clean up the electricity supply.
  • DennisP 5y ago
    That would be a fine argument if we weren't in a race to switch to new sources of electricity before triggering catastrophic damage, and losing.
  • paulgb 5y ago
    Yes we need to clean up electricity production, but drawing on more electricity doesn’t make that better, it makes it worse. Case in point, there are coal and natural gas plants in Montana and the Finger Lakes that would have been shut down or downsized, but haven’t been due to bitcoin mining.
  • gefhfff 5y ago
    You are making (wrong) assumptions: - electricity is the only part where Bitcoin produces emissions (emissions of mining hardware) - wasting climate neutral energy does not matter (it does: it's harder, takes more time and resources to switch to climate neutral sources; iirc studies estimate Germany needs to cut 50% of energy consumption to achieve 1.5° conformity) - Bitcoin miners don't bypass widely adopted regulations somehow
• specialist 5y ago
  What percentage do you think merits serious consideration?