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Use of energy is not necessarily incompatible with climate change mitigation. PoW uses electricity and is completely agnostic to whether that electricity is gen

Use of energy is not necessarily incompatible with climate change mitigation. PoW uses electricity and is completely agnostic to whether that electricity is generated by fossil fuels or clean renewables/nuclear. Piddling about how civilization chooses to use electricity as a solution to climate change will be a never ending game of whack-a-mole. The only solution is to address it at it's source, by internalizing the negative externalizes of carbon pollution in the cost of this energy use. Anything else is feel good bullshit. Moreover, to the proponents of PoW, it is not a flaw to be removed, but a necessary foundation that makes the protocol incorruptible and eternally open and permissionless for anyone to join as first class citizens, even late adopters. This stands in stark contrast to PoS which gives an absurd level of power and protocol control to early adopters that potentially can't ever be diluted, and may even increase since PoS rewards holders of coin with even more coin.

iskander 5y ago
This is a mix of climate denialism and Bitcoin religion. 1) A system that turns energy usage into $ will always gravitate towards the cheapest energy source (fossil fuels). Maybe we'll eventually figure out cold fusion, but for the next few decades it's pretty important to promote carbon neutral energy production even if it's more expensive while simultaneously cutting out gratuitous industrial scale waste like PoW mining. 2) "makes the protocol incorruptible and eternally open and permissionless for anyone to join as first class citizens, even late adopters". Ah yes, let me just fire up my warehouse full of ASICs connected to a dedicated power plant. Any old Joe could do it.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  No, you just misunderstood him. He's saying that energy generation and use should be carbon taxed. If you internalize the carbon externality, fossil fuels will not be cheap. There are arguments against these, but yours is a poor one.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Thank you. Everyone replying to this comment seems to be intentionally ignoring my point.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    Since one of the inherent properties of PoW cryptocurrencies is it doesn't matter where the mining takes place, mining will always take place in whichever country doesn't impose a carbon tax. Ironically they're much more "censorship resistant" to carbon taxes than actual attempts by major economies to ban their use (which would only need to be partially effective to squash the price bubble and by extension reduce incentive to spend on mining)
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      That's already a problem. Developing nations are consuming an ever expanding amount of fossil fuels. And they're sure as hell not going to stop, because the advantage to their citizens of developing their infrastructure towards Western standards of living far outweighs projected threats of climate change. Developed countries are already making okish strides on decarbonizing, but how can we in the first world effectively decree that the developing world must halt or slow progress towards the lifestyles that we enjoy. That reeks of a new kind of colonialism, and simply won't go over well without the threat of global violence. The only way we'll actually make strides on decarbonization is with some kind of global carbon tax. I'm not going to pretend I know how we accomplish that, but if we can't, we're not going to mitigate climate change in any reasonable way.
    - cwkoss 5y ago
      Geopolitical energy cost arbitrage is a major climate change issue, but I feel like it's disingenuous to focus on crypto as the main problem. The majority of these harms are in heavy industry, manufacturing, logistics, etc. I'd estimate only 1% of this problem can be attributed to cryptocurrency. If crypto was somehow globally banned, the problem would not be significantly diminished. If bitcoin eventually becomes responsible for 10%+ of dirty energy, only then would this argument be compelling to me.
- ChemSpider 5y ago
  > cheapest energy source (fossil fuels). Renewables are often cheaper - it depends. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new-wind-solar-projects-cheaper-than-coal-report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new...
- javert 5y ago
  This is a mix of Bitcoin denialism and climate religion. 1) Bitcoin mining is increasingly migrating to hydro and geothermal, because fossil fuels are too expensive in comparison. Presumably, nuclear will come eventually. 2) See what I did there in my first sentence? We should have an intellectually hygenic discussion; there is no valid place for the kind of rhetoric you're employing.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    Well, I thought it was clever
- joeldg 5y ago
  meh, just saying something doesn't make it true ... as a miner, I use the cheapest electric this part is true, but for those of us in the USA, 100% of the time that is hydro-electric power and you can look up maps of electric kWh costs and the lowest are all in Eastern Washington state and in Oregon around hydro-electric dams on the Columbia river (I pay residential rate of ~0.06/kWh). Saying you can't store all that energy, simply using it isn't really "polluting" anything and in absolutely no uncertain terms is it contributing to climate change. Outside the USA - There are huge mines in Iceland that use geo-thermal power. China entirely banned mining operations, even though they are ramping up clean-energy far faster the USA—but they are not there yet—mining in China is no longer contributing. This is really just a simple Google search for "largest bitcoin mine in the world" which of the top, only Russia is still using coal for rural power, for the larger areas it is Hydro (RusHydro) and Nuclear so it is not 100% clear if the big mines in Moscow are on coal. Assuming they are, that is still only perhaps a few percentage of the total.
ufo 5y ago
We hear this same story every single time the topic comes up. It's not the most convincing argument. First, the real world experience is that bitcoin miners don't care about whether they are using renewable energy. Furthermore, we should not ignore the substantial carbon emissions from building the mining infrastructure (the mining hardware, plus also the power generation). A protocol that promotes a colossal amount of e-waste is swimming in the wrong direction when it comes to fighting climate change.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  The system we currently rely on is founded on proof of violence, which also creates a colossal amount of waste, and not just in our garbage dumps. And you seem to be ignoring my point, that until we internalize the costs of burning fossil fuels, there will always be someone willing to burn it, even if it's not bitcoin miners.
- nightski 5y ago
  You can't rely on the consumers of electricity to solve the problem of it coming from fossil fuels. This is a policy problem, and unless people start caring about what goes on in government it doesn't matter. Washington, for example, has demonstrated recently that even an administration that is supposed to be taking climate change seriously has encouraged fossil fuels to flourish.

iskander 5y ago

This is a mix of climate denialism and Bitcoin religion. 1) A system that turns energy usage into $ will always gravitate towards the cheapest energy source (fossil fuels). Maybe we'll eventually figure out cold fusion, but for the next few decades it's pretty important to promote carbon neutral energy production even if it's more expensive while simultaneously cutting out gratuitous industrial scale waste like PoW mining. 2) "makes the protocol incorruptible and eternally open and permissionless for anyone to join as first class citizens, even late adopters". Ah yes, let me just fire up my warehouse full of ASICs connected to a dedicated power plant. Any old Joe could do it.

renewiltord 5y ago
No, you just misunderstood him. He's saying that energy generation and use should be carbon taxed. If you internalize the carbon externality, fossil fuels will not be cheap. There are arguments against these, but yours is a poor one.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Thank you. Everyone replying to this comment seems to be intentionally ignoring my point.
- notahacker 5y ago
  Since one of the inherent properties of PoW cryptocurrencies is it doesn't matter where the mining takes place, mining will always take place in whichever country doesn't impose a carbon tax. Ironically they're much more "censorship resistant" to carbon taxes than actual attempts by major economies to ban their use (which would only need to be partially effective to squash the price bubble and by extension reduce incentive to spend on mining)
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    That's already a problem. Developing nations are consuming an ever expanding amount of fossil fuels. And they're sure as hell not going to stop, because the advantage to their citizens of developing their infrastructure towards Western standards of living far outweighs projected threats of climate change. Developed countries are already making okish strides on decarbonizing, but how can we in the first world effectively decree that the developing world must halt or slow progress towards the lifestyles that we enjoy. That reeks of a new kind of colonialism, and simply won't go over well without the threat of global violence. The only way we'll actually make strides on decarbonization is with some kind of global carbon tax. I'm not going to pretend I know how we accomplish that, but if we can't, we're not going to mitigate climate change in any reasonable way.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Geopolitical energy cost arbitrage is a major climate change issue, but I feel like it's disingenuous to focus on crypto as the main problem. The majority of these harms are in heavy industry, manufacturing, logistics, etc. I'd estimate only 1% of this problem can be attributed to cryptocurrency. If crypto was somehow globally banned, the problem would not be significantly diminished. If bitcoin eventually becomes responsible for 10%+ of dirty energy, only then would this argument be compelling to me.
ChemSpider 5y ago
> cheapest energy source (fossil fuels). Renewables are often cheaper - it depends. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new-wind-solar-projects-cheaper-than-coal-report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new...
javert 5y ago
This is a mix of Bitcoin denialism and climate religion. 1) Bitcoin mining is increasingly migrating to hydro and geothermal, because fossil fuels are too expensive in comparison. Presumably, nuclear will come eventually. 2) See what I did there in my first sentence? We should have an intellectually hygenic discussion; there is no valid place for the kind of rhetoric you're employing.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  Well, I thought it was clever
joeldg 5y ago
meh, just saying something doesn't make it true ... as a miner, I use the cheapest electric this part is true, but for those of us in the USA, 100% of the time that is hydro-electric power and you can look up maps of electric kWh costs and the lowest are all in Eastern Washington state and in Oregon around hydro-electric dams on the Columbia river (I pay residential rate of ~0.06/kWh). Saying you can't store all that energy, simply using it isn't really "polluting" anything and in absolutely no uncertain terms is it contributing to climate change. Outside the USA - There are huge mines in Iceland that use geo-thermal power. China entirely banned mining operations, even though they are ramping up clean-energy far faster the USA—but they are not there yet—mining in China is no longer contributing. This is really just a simple Google search for "largest bitcoin mine in the world" which of the top, only Russia is still using coal for rural power, for the larger areas it is Hydro (RusHydro) and Nuclear so it is not 100% clear if the big mines in Moscow are on coal. Assuming they are, that is still only perhaps a few percentage of the total.

ufo 5y ago

We hear this same story every single time the topic comes up. It's not the most convincing argument. First, the real world experience is that bitcoin miners don't care about whether they are using renewable energy. Furthermore, we should not ignore the substantial carbon emissions from building the mining infrastructure (the mining hardware, plus also the power generation). A protocol that promotes a colossal amount of e-waste is swimming in the wrong direction when it comes to fighting climate change.

anonporridge 5y ago
The system we currently rely on is founded on proof of violence, which also creates a colossal amount of waste, and not just in our garbage dumps. And you seem to be ignoring my point, that until we internalize the costs of burning fossil fuels, there will always be someone willing to burn it, even if it's not bitcoin miners.
nightski 5y ago
You can't rely on the consumers of electricity to solve the problem of it coming from fossil fuels. This is a policy problem, and unless people start caring about what goes on in government it doesn't matter. Washington, for example, has demonstrated recently that even an administration that is supposed to be taking climate change seriously has encouraged fossil fuels to flourish.