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You can say this about anything that uses lots of electricity. Sure, removing it solves the immediate 'problem' but its also not any more practical than having

You can say this about anything that uses lots of electricity. Sure, removing it solves the immediate 'problem' but its also not any more practical than having everyone walk everywhere solves the immediate carbon impact of driving. The solution is to invest in more solar, nuclear, and energy storage solutions. Our Earth is already plenty rich in resources to scale up power requirements, and our sun provides near unlimited energy. The energy problem isn't unique to Bitcoin. Using a lot of resources is also the main benefit to the security behind proof-of-work because it makes building a duplicate ledger immensely impractical. The security of the chain actually increases the longer blocks are joined after an input which is pretty cool.

ivalm 5y ago
But maybe the real answer is to just have trusted authorities? So much of civilization is possible because of trust, I don’t think we should throw that away.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  You need trusted authorities anyway. Anyone may show at your home and steal your crypto currency at gun point, you may pay for items that are not delivered, your employer may not pay you. Authorities and the rule of law are fully needed for any functional society. Crypto currencies as an anarchist dream are impossible as a very complex society is needed to produce them, and that society requires to be functional. If someone wants anarchism they should simplify and use gold or some other easier to carry and exchange.
  - koolba 5y ago
    > Anyone may show at your home and steal your crypto currency at gun point, you may pay for items that are not delivered, your employer may not pay you. Authorities and the rule of law are fully needed for any functional society. In a crypto anarchist’s dream world, the employee’s income claimable token could be resold, purchased by a loan shark, and the loan shark could provide another permission-less contract where anybody can upload a picture of the employer’s knees being broken, likely verified on chain by some other pain oracle.
  - Vetch 5y ago
    In my experience, your described state of affairs is common in poor economies. Robberies and kidnapping ransoms are relatively frequent. Shootings are rare but still way too frequent. Workers often go unpaid and it's not unusual for wages to total less than transportation costs. Landlords are known to have poor memories about paid rent and it's not uncommon for deliveries to be stolen and containers disappear. There's a real risk of valuable goods ordered internationally "disappearing" in customs. The countervailing factors are, the poor are mostly ignored (except for kidnappings of large groups of children) while the rich can afford private security at an equilibrium price point where betrayal is not rational. Although crime rates are high, most do not participate because people are good for the most part. The major drags are scams, unpaid workers, phone theft (a phone is more likely to be stolen than a laptop), equipment sabotage (from wiring to rail tracks), political campaign related violence and most especially, theft, corruption and embezzlement by government officials. In an environment of rampant corruption, minimizing the surface area exposed to trust is a rational preference. It might even be helpful in exiting a high corruption steady state.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    You obviously live in a society where central authorities are, in fact, trustworthy enough to handle these things. A cursory glance at history—or at other societies even in the present day—shows that this is a shockingly rare state of affairs.
- ichydkrsrnae 5y ago
  These trusted authorities of which you speak are no longer trusted.
  - malermeister 5y ago
    More than I trust whatever the latest crypto get-rich-quick scheme is. Neither are great, but various crypto scams have been more common than even bank fraud, plus they use more energy.
    - tata71 5y ago
      Why not choose one that's been around for a few years, then? Five? Ten?
    - Kranar 5y ago
      No one is suggesting that everyone must use Bitcoin, but please understand that over the past 100 years the majority of the world's currencies have collapsed one way or another. Not every country is the U.S. which has been able to use its military might to maintain the value of its currency. Russia, Mexico, India, many European nations prior to the Euro, most of South America, have all seen their currencies collapse at some point in the past 50 years or so, and in many cases within the past 30 years. It's possible that the US dollar doesn't collapse at all in the next 50 years... and that would be great... but it's also possible that at some point in the next 50 years the US dollar ends up being devalued significantly in which case it isn't such a horrible idea to take some of your cash and store it in a globally accessible cryptocurrency in addition to other assets such as gold.
      - malermeister 5y ago
        Okay so I kind of see where you're coming from, but I still strongly disagree with you. You're saying that because world currencies collapse (your claim is the majority of them have within the past 100 years, which I don't have the data on, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that you're right), bitcoin is needed. But bitcoin collapses not just every 30-100 years, it collapses every 0.5-5 years. [1] How is that in any way better? Why are we spending all this energy on this? [1] https://www.yahoo.com/now/7-biggest-bitcoin-crashes-history-180038282.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/7-biggest-bitcoin-crashes-history-...
iskander 5y ago
>You can say this about anything that uses lots of electricity. Yes. You can. Let's actually generalize it to anything with an outsized carbon footprint (e.g. commuter flights, car dependent housing development, &c). We will almost certainly continue doing that stuff but it's incompatible with any vaguely desirable ecological outcome. PoW crypto is special in that it is both highly optional (it's not essential to the lifestyles of 99.999% of people) and has easy substitutes.
- bko 5y ago
  Why don't we just relay on the price energy to allocate its use kind of like we do with almost everything else? That's the point of prices. If energy is not priced correctly then the government should adjust the price through a tax. But let's drop the morality shtick every time cryptocurrencies come up.
  - mattnewton 5y ago
    We do tax lots of other kinds of energy, but you have the dilemma where crypto will use the least taxed, least cost energy anywhere in the world, dump the externalities into the atmosphere, and no one can tax energy everywhere to make them pay to clean it up. That's why you have things like coal fired electrical plants that used to no longer be competitive firing up at full capacity again to mine cryptocurrencies. Crypto mining can't be curbed by carbon taxes in any energy market like normal electrical consumption.
    - jude- 5y ago
      You address this by taxing at the fiat on/off ramps. The ones with access to the deepest liquidity also happen to operate in jurisdictions that have functioning governments that are amenable to passing taxes on PoW. And if that doesn't work, you impose sanctions and tariffs on the countries that permit limitless PoW mining, up to and including black-holing their IP blocks. It can be done. We banned CFCs after all.
      - 5y ago
malermeister 5y ago
The immediate carbon impact of driving should be solved by improving public transportation and weening people off individual transportation. The immediate carbon impact of proof-of-work should be solved by banning proof-of-work. What is the problem any of this is solving? It seems to me like your defense of proof-of-work is "it needs to be this way to work properly and it's not that big a deal", but why do we even need it to work? If it has a clear carbon cost and no perceivable benefit, then it seems obvious to me we should get rid of it.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > no perceivable benefit I see no “perceivable” benefit in lots of things that other people choose to spend their time and money on. But at least I have the decency not to say it out loud.
BluSyn 5y ago
We're seeing the fruits of years of relentless climate narratives connecting all energy usage to pollution, and therefore all energy consumption (for any purpose) is considered inherently evil. Does that mean everyone who plays video games after work is literally satan for consuming energy for mere entertainment? Life itself consumes energy; does this mean the universe would be better off without us in it? This is obviously a nihilistic viewpoint once you follow it to it's natural conclusion. I expect the future will have a combination of both PoW and PoS due to fundamental trade-offs. So I got news for everyone. Proof-of-work exists and isn't going anywhere. You can't just yell at the clouds wishing we could make it illegal for "environmental reasons". PoW is not "incompatible with climate change mitigation", this is obviously a straw-man. There's plenty of energy to go around, and we have to solve the climate+energy crises either way. Not to mention Co2 emissions alone is just one small part of the overall climate concern. I'm more interested in individuals and organizations willing to actually solve technical problems related to energy and climate, and choose to ignore those just yelling at politicians to solve it for them.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  > Does that mean everyone who plays video games after work is literally satan for consuming energy for mere entertainment? If that replaces them and the three friends they are playing with from each driving in their own car to the bowling alley 25 minutes away then it's a net carbon savings. It's all about the alternatives, and in the case of cryptocurrencies, a lot of people think there are comparable, much more energy efficient alternatives for everything you use crypto for legally. There really is no ridiculous conclusion here, it's about the alternatives.
  - BluSyn 5y ago
    Taking your analogy: that doesn't make going to bowling alley as an evil alternative to video games? We should all acknowledge that's a straw-man argument. But this is the kind of argument you hear against PoW. For all we know they are driving electric cars to the bowling alley. Does that make the scenario different? How's that different from PoW powered by solar?
wpietri 5y ago
> You can say this about anything that uses lots of electricity Sure, but it's especially important to say here because proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are novel, popular, and consume orders of magnitude more electricity per transaction than more common transaction processing systems.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Quantifying the energy per transaction of fiat is hard. Yes, changing a number in a centralized database is cheap, but the cost of maintaining trust in that centralized database is immense and has far-reaching tentacles. Ex. How much of the energy budget of the US military should be included in the cost of a dollar denominated transaction?
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Answer: it doesn't matter. If a relatively small number of people (say, 10m) stop using the US dollar, its military isn't going away. But if the same number of people stop using POW "currencies", the energy impact could drop drastically. And if we were charging for underlying infrastructure costs, then Bitcoin would have to put in its share. Unlike paper/specie currencies, Bitcoin is entirely dependent on a functioning global internet. There are an awful lot of long-tail scenarios under which Bitcoin becomes effectively useless and therefore valueless.
    - cwkoss 5y ago
      > If a relatively small number of people (say, 10m) stop using the US dollar, This is a very weak straw man. The majority of people on the planet interact with the dollar economy, either directly or indirectly, because of its extreme dominance. Of course a ~0.3% reduction in users isn't going to change much. Dollar hegemony is fairly binary: either it's the dominant world currency or it isn't. If hegemony falls, the US military will have to reduce in size, because it can no longer be funded by being the gatekeeper of the global economy.
      - 5y ago
mattnewton 5y ago
Imo this is like arguing we should all have private helicopters instead of bicycles- PoW currencies should be criticized on environmental grounds if the thing they replace (a bunch of bank servers doing ach and whatnot) is an order of magnitude more electrically efficient.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Bitcoin isn't just a replacement for the centralized database: it also replaces the government which administrates the financial system, the courts which enforce rules, and the military which enforces dominance on the rest of the globe.
  - mattnewton 5y ago
    Strong disagree, (some of) those things are all still necessary to prevent me from coming to your house and hitting you with a wrench until you give me your private key; to prevent me from taking payment and then ghosting you; and innumerable other financial system problems we solve with our current system.
pimterry 5y ago
> The solution is to invest in more solar, nuclear, and energy storage solutions. > The energy problem isn't unique to Bitcoin. The unique problem with Bitcoin and PoW in general is that its energy usage is inversely proportional to the cost of energy. If the total value of Bitcoins mined every day is $X, collectively Bitcoin miners will use just a little less than $X of power every day. That means that any time we do improve our energy infrastructure, by increasing supply with more renewable sources or reducing demand via efficiency improvements elsewhere (all of which reduce energy prices) Bitcoin mining becomes much more profitable, miners expand and new miners appear, and PoW's energy usage goes up accordingly to use as much power as they can possibly afford (up to $X). This isn't true for anything else - there's no other industry that so directly turns energy into money without limits. While there is a relationship to other energy usage, if energy drops to 1/100th of its current price, people don't start heating their houses 100x more, they don't start gaming on 100x more power-hungry computers, and they don't start taking 100x more flights than they do today, because in each case, there are significant other limits and marginal costs involved. PoW meanwhile will absolutely increase its power usage by 100x, as fast as the network possibly can. This is why PoW's energy usage is a unique problem.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  > This isn't true for anything else - there's no other industry that so directly turns energy into money without limits. Aluminum refining maybe, but even then you are going to run out of ore to turn into aluminum. This really highlights how novel the mining economics are.
  - Nevermark 5y ago
    Refining more aluminum at a lower energy cost is a societal gain. Using more cheaper energy to hit a higher difficulty to protect the same network isn't a societal gain in the same way. I.e. aluminum still follows the normal supply-demand curve even if it is highly sensitive to energy prices They both suffer from the negative energy externalities, but you get something more with higher aluminum production. You get more aluminum.
- Vetch 5y ago

ivalm 5y ago

But maybe the real answer is to just have trusted authorities? So much of civilization is possible because of trust, I don’t think we should throw that away.

Hokusai 5y ago
You need trusted authorities anyway. Anyone may show at your home and steal your crypto currency at gun point, you may pay for items that are not delivered, your employer may not pay you. Authorities and the rule of law are fully needed for any functional society. Crypto currencies as an anarchist dream are impossible as a very complex society is needed to produce them, and that society requires to be functional. If someone wants anarchism they should simplify and use gold or some other easier to carry and exchange.
- koolba 5y ago
  > Anyone may show at your home and steal your crypto currency at gun point, you may pay for items that are not delivered, your employer may not pay you. Authorities and the rule of law are fully needed for any functional society. In a crypto anarchist’s dream world, the employee’s income claimable token could be resold, purchased by a loan shark, and the loan shark could provide another permission-less contract where anybody can upload a picture of the employer’s knees being broken, likely verified on chain by some other pain oracle.
- Vetch 5y ago
  In my experience, your described state of affairs is common in poor economies. Robberies and kidnapping ransoms are relatively frequent. Shootings are rare but still way too frequent. Workers often go unpaid and it's not unusual for wages to total less than transportation costs. Landlords are known to have poor memories about paid rent and it's not uncommon for deliveries to be stolen and containers disappear. There's a real risk of valuable goods ordered internationally "disappearing" in customs. The countervailing factors are, the poor are mostly ignored (except for kidnappings of large groups of children) while the rich can afford private security at an equilibrium price point where betrayal is not rational. Although crime rates are high, most do not participate because people are good for the most part. The major drags are scams, unpaid workers, phone theft (a phone is more likely to be stolen than a laptop), equipment sabotage (from wiring to rail tracks), political campaign related violence and most especially, theft, corruption and embezzlement by government officials. In an environment of rampant corruption, minimizing the surface area exposed to trust is a rational preference. It might even be helpful in exiting a high corruption steady state.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  You obviously live in a society where central authorities are, in fact, trustworthy enough to handle these things. A cursory glance at history—or at other societies even in the present day—shows that this is a shockingly rare state of affairs.
ichydkrsrnae 5y ago
These trusted authorities of which you speak are no longer trusted.
- malermeister 5y ago
  More than I trust whatever the latest crypto get-rich-quick scheme is. Neither are great, but various crypto scams have been more common than even bank fraud, plus they use more energy.
  - tata71 5y ago
    Why not choose one that's been around for a few years, then? Five? Ten?
  - Kranar 5y ago
    No one is suggesting that everyone must use Bitcoin, but please understand that over the past 100 years the majority of the world's currencies have collapsed one way or another. Not every country is the U.S. which has been able to use its military might to maintain the value of its currency. Russia, Mexico, India, many European nations prior to the Euro, most of South America, have all seen their currencies collapse at some point in the past 50 years or so, and in many cases within the past 30 years. It's possible that the US dollar doesn't collapse at all in the next 50 years... and that would be great... but it's also possible that at some point in the next 50 years the US dollar ends up being devalued significantly in which case it isn't such a horrible idea to take some of your cash and store it in a globally accessible cryptocurrency in addition to other assets such as gold.
    - malermeister 5y ago
      Okay so I kind of see where you're coming from, but I still strongly disagree with you. You're saying that because world currencies collapse (your claim is the majority of them have within the past 100 years, which I don't have the data on, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that you're right), bitcoin is needed. But bitcoin collapses not just every 30-100 years, it collapses every 0.5-5 years. [1] How is that in any way better? Why are we spending all this energy on this? [1] https://www.yahoo.com/now/7-biggest-bitcoin-crashes-history-180038282.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/7-biggest-bitcoin-crashes-history-...

iskander 5y ago

>You can say this about anything that uses lots of electricity. Yes. You can. Let's actually generalize it to anything with an outsized carbon footprint (e.g. commuter flights, car dependent housing development, &c). We will almost certainly continue doing that stuff but it's incompatible with any vaguely desirable ecological outcome. PoW crypto is special in that it is both highly optional (it's not essential to the lifestyles of 99.999% of people) and has easy substitutes.

bko 5y ago
Why don't we just relay on the price energy to allocate its use kind of like we do with almost everything else? That's the point of prices. If energy is not priced correctly then the government should adjust the price through a tax. But let's drop the morality shtick every time cryptocurrencies come up.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  We do tax lots of other kinds of energy, but you have the dilemma where crypto will use the least taxed, least cost energy anywhere in the world, dump the externalities into the atmosphere, and no one can tax energy everywhere to make them pay to clean it up. That's why you have things like coal fired electrical plants that used to no longer be competitive firing up at full capacity again to mine cryptocurrencies. Crypto mining can't be curbed by carbon taxes in any energy market like normal electrical consumption.
  - jude- 5y ago
    You address this by taxing at the fiat on/off ramps. The ones with access to the deepest liquidity also happen to operate in jurisdictions that have functioning governments that are amenable to passing taxes on PoW. And if that doesn't work, you impose sanctions and tariffs on the countries that permit limitless PoW mining, up to and including black-holing their IP blocks. It can be done. We banned CFCs after all.
    - 5y ago

malermeister 5y ago

The immediate carbon impact of driving should be solved by improving public transportation and weening people off individual transportation. The immediate carbon impact of proof-of-work should be solved by banning proof-of-work. What is the problem any of this is solving? It seems to me like your defense of proof-of-work is "it needs to be this way to work properly and it's not that big a deal", but why do we even need it to work? If it has a clear carbon cost and no perceivable benefit, then it seems obvious to me we should get rid of it.

jkhdigital 5y ago
> no perceivable benefit I see no “perceivable” benefit in lots of things that other people choose to spend their time and money on. But at least I have the decency not to say it out loud.

BluSyn 5y ago

We're seeing the fruits of years of relentless climate narratives connecting all energy usage to pollution, and therefore all energy consumption (for any purpose) is considered inherently evil. Does that mean everyone who plays video games after work is literally satan for consuming energy for mere entertainment? Life itself consumes energy; does this mean the universe would be better off without us in it? This is obviously a nihilistic viewpoint once you follow it to it's natural conclusion. I expect the future will have a combination of both PoW and PoS due to fundamental trade-offs. So I got news for everyone. Proof-of-work exists and isn't going anywhere. You can't just yell at the clouds wishing we could make it illegal for "environmental reasons". PoW is not "incompatible with climate change mitigation", this is obviously a straw-man. There's plenty of energy to go around, and we have to solve the climate+energy crises either way. Not to mention Co2 emissions alone is just one small part of the overall climate concern. I'm more interested in individuals and organizations willing to actually solve technical problems related to energy and climate, and choose to ignore those just yelling at politicians to solve it for them.

mattnewton 5y ago
> Does that mean everyone who plays video games after work is literally satan for consuming energy for mere entertainment? If that replaces them and the three friends they are playing with from each driving in their own car to the bowling alley 25 minutes away then it's a net carbon savings. It's all about the alternatives, and in the case of cryptocurrencies, a lot of people think there are comparable, much more energy efficient alternatives for everything you use crypto for legally. There really is no ridiculous conclusion here, it's about the alternatives.
- BluSyn 5y ago
  Taking your analogy: that doesn't make going to bowling alley as an evil alternative to video games? We should all acknowledge that's a straw-man argument. But this is the kind of argument you hear against PoW. For all we know they are driving electric cars to the bowling alley. Does that make the scenario different? How's that different from PoW powered by solar?

wpietri 5y ago

> You can say this about anything that uses lots of electricity Sure, but it's especially important to say here because proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are novel, popular, and consume orders of magnitude more electricity per transaction than more common transaction processing systems.

cwkoss 5y ago
Quantifying the energy per transaction of fiat is hard. Yes, changing a number in a centralized database is cheap, but the cost of maintaining trust in that centralized database is immense and has far-reaching tentacles. Ex. How much of the energy budget of the US military should be included in the cost of a dollar denominated transaction?
- wpietri 5y ago
  Answer: it doesn't matter. If a relatively small number of people (say, 10m) stop using the US dollar, its military isn't going away. But if the same number of people stop using POW "currencies", the energy impact could drop drastically. And if we were charging for underlying infrastructure costs, then Bitcoin would have to put in its share. Unlike paper/specie currencies, Bitcoin is entirely dependent on a functioning global internet. There are an awful lot of long-tail scenarios under which Bitcoin becomes effectively useless and therefore valueless.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    > If a relatively small number of people (say, 10m) stop using the US dollar, This is a very weak straw man. The majority of people on the planet interact with the dollar economy, either directly or indirectly, because of its extreme dominance. Of course a ~0.3% reduction in users isn't going to change much. Dollar hegemony is fairly binary: either it's the dominant world currency or it isn't. If hegemony falls, the US military will have to reduce in size, because it can no longer be funded by being the gatekeeper of the global economy.
    - 5y ago

mattnewton 5y ago

Imo this is like arguing we should all have private helicopters instead of bicycles- PoW currencies should be criticized on environmental grounds if the thing they replace (a bunch of bank servers doing ach and whatnot) is an order of magnitude more electrically efficient.

cwkoss 5y ago
Bitcoin isn't just a replacement for the centralized database: it also replaces the government which administrates the financial system, the courts which enforce rules, and the military which enforces dominance on the rest of the globe.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  Strong disagree, (some of) those things are all still necessary to prevent me from coming to your house and hitting you with a wrench until you give me your private key; to prevent me from taking payment and then ghosting you; and innumerable other financial system problems we solve with our current system.

pimterry 5y ago

> The solution is to invest in more solar, nuclear, and energy storage solutions. > The energy problem isn't unique to Bitcoin. The unique problem with Bitcoin and PoW in general is that its energy usage is inversely proportional to the cost of energy. If the total value of Bitcoins mined every day is $X, collectively Bitcoin miners will use just a little less than $X of power every day. That means that any time we do improve our energy infrastructure, by increasing supply with more renewable sources or reducing demand via efficiency improvements elsewhere (all of which reduce energy prices) Bitcoin mining becomes much more profitable, miners expand and new miners appear, and PoW's energy usage goes up accordingly to use as much power as they can possibly afford (up to $X). This isn't true for anything else - there's no other industry that so directly turns energy into money without limits. While there is a relationship to other energy usage, if energy drops to 1/100th of its current price, people don't start heating their houses 100x more, they don't start gaming on 100x more power-hungry computers, and they don't start taking 100x more flights than they do today, because in each case, there are significant other limits and marginal costs involved. PoW meanwhile will absolutely increase its power usage by 100x, as fast as the network possibly can. This is why PoW's energy usage is a unique problem.

mattnewton 5y ago
> This isn't true for anything else - there's no other industry that so directly turns energy into money without limits. Aluminum refining maybe, but even then you are going to run out of ore to turn into aluminum. This really highlights how novel the mining economics are.
- Nevermark 5y ago
  Refining more aluminum at a lower energy cost is a societal gain. Using more cheaper energy to hit a higher difficulty to protect the same network isn't a societal gain in the same way. I.e. aluminum still follows the normal supply-demand curve even if it is highly sensitive to energy prices They both suffer from the negative energy externalities, but you get something more with higher aluminum production. You get more aluminum.
Vetch 5y ago