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I'm as concerned as the next person about energy use, but I did read some counterpoints in an article published yesterday [1] The House Energy and Commerce Com

I'm as concerned as the next person about energy use, but I did read some counterpoints in an article published yesterday [1] The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee is reportedly going to investigate cryptocurrency’s effect on the environment... But the meme that bitcoin or cryptocurrency uses as much power as one country or another, promoted by The New York Times last September, for example, deserves a bit of pushback on a couple of fronts. [1] https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/no-hearing-on-bitcoins-energy-use-is-complete-without-nic-carter/ https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/no-hearing-on-... Edit: and then someone pushes back on Nic Carter today: https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-fallacy-of-bitcoin-and-renewables.html https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-fallacy-of-bitcoin...

quickthrowman 5y ago
This piece argues that we should listen to a VC partner that is invested in cryptocurrency about the energy usage of cryptocurrency. This is like listening to an oil company giving advice about fighting climate change. You’ll have to do better than this. I’m not sure why I expected any better from a partisan think tank. They pushed back on Nic Carter (I’m guessing here) because he has a financial incentive to make crypto look good. This is not hard to understand.
- skybrian 5y ago
  This is reason for suspicion but not for blanket dismissal. If you dismiss every self-interested argument you miss a lot.
Zamicol 5y ago
NTF's aren't on Bitcoin. They're on Ethereum which is switching over to PoS.
- dralley 5y ago
  >They're on Ethereum which is switching over to PoS. It's been switching over to PoS for years. I distinctly remember articles in 2019 about how they'd switch by the end of 2020, articles in 2020 about how they'd switch by the end of 2021, and here we are in 2022. The point holds until they actually do make the switch.
  - Zamicol 5y ago
    Ethereum is already running PoS for over a year. Just not all of Ethereum is running PoS. All of Ethereum will switch over and it's currently planned for July.
    - brian_cloutier 5y ago
      This is only true in an extremely technical sense. For practical purposes Ethereum is not running PoS. When you make an Ethereum transaction you are interacting with the PoW chain. Every single NFT transaction runs on the PoW chain. Yes, there is also a PoS chain, confusingly also called "Ethereum", and yes it will soon become the primary chain, but that does not negate the fact that today nearly all activity happens on the PoW chain.
  - heckerhut 5y ago
    Update your facts my friend this criticism is stale and has been superseded by a million major events by now. Read the news or hold back on your deprecated knowledge.
  - 0x64 5y ago
    In 2019 you probably read about the launch of the PoS beacon chain, as in the "phase 0" of what was then known as the Eth2 roadmap. Beacon chain launched in December of 2020, and since then the work on the merge has been ongoing, which is the hotswap of the network's consensus from Pow to PoS. We're now in the phase where public testnets of full PoS Ethereum are running [1, 2]. Ideally, we'll have the merge before the next difficulty bomb goes off in June. [1] https://kintsugi.themerge.dev/ https://kintsugi.themerge.dev/ [2] https://beaconchain.kintsugi.themerge.dev/ https://beaconchain.kintsugi.themerge.dev/
edmundsauto 5y ago
The specifics of this pushback don't seem that strong to me. FTA: 1. "standard method of inferring miners’ collective electricity use from the “hash rate” of networks relies on guessing what kind of mining equipment did the hashing." 2. "The energy-consumption profile of cryptocurrencies leans toward stranded energy and renewables" #2, in particular, is completely irrelevant to how much energy is used - it's just hand waving and saying that some of the energy is renewable. Pushback #1 is just saying there are assumptions about miner efficiency in the energy use estimates - valid point, but it's not really a pushback, just the explicit statement of an assumption the analysis makes. These do not strike me as particularly powerful arguments, especially since one of them (#2) is irrelevant to the question at hand: how much energy does crypto use?
Uehreka 5y ago
What bothers me personally is that they use so much energy _now_, even though they’re still pretty fringe. Sure, a lot of people have a little crypto floating around, but not most people, and almost no one is using it as a medium for exchange on a daily basis. And yet it’s still using ~0.5% of the world’s energy (aka as much as a mid-sized country). I feel like you have to pick one: Either argue that crypto is a niche hobby that won’t get much more traction, and that 0.5% of humanity’s total power usage is not that bad. Or express your ambition for crypto to run the world and become a fundamental part of everyone’s life, and have an explanation for how to square this with a multiplication of humanity’s total energy usage and the effects that will have on energy prices, silicon prices and the climate. But I’m tired of people arguing for tomorrow’s revolution using today’s energy usage numbers.
betterunix2 5y ago
Your citation is full of errors and fallacies. More efficient mining rigs is basically irrelevant, because Bitcoin miners have no incentive to reduce energy consumption while computing the same number of hashes; it is to compute more hashes using the same amount of energy. So as long as you know the lowest possible energy-per-hash of all available mining hardware you can compute a lower bound on Bitcoin's energy utilization. Then comes the claim that we do not have data on the energy consumed by mainstream finance, but in some cases we do and it really drives home the point about Bitcoin. Visa emitted over 1000 times less carbon in 2020 than Bitcoin, and processes over 1000 times more transactions per second (7 for Bitcoin versus 1700 for Visa). So Visa is at least a million times more energy efficient than Bitcoin as a transaction processing system. Then the "pushback" claiming that it's really OK because Bitcoin mining can be switched on when energy is abundant, which could, maybe, possibly, subsidize the cost of renewables. Except there are alternatives that also could be switched on only when there is an energy surplus -- beginning with any energy-storage technology, of which there are many at different stages of development. Every joule devoted to Bitcoin is a joule not charging an electric car, and every dollar spent on Bitcoin is a dollar not spent developing better storage. There are also industrial processes that could be selectively turned on during periods of abundant energy, like electric arc furnaces widely used in steel mills (the ability to turn the furnace on and off as needed is one of the big advantages of electric arc furnaces over blast furnaces). The outright denial that there even is a problem to solve is a classic example of people becoming religious about a technology. Fortunately better responses have been offered from the blockchain crowd, like pointing to PoS as a technical solution to the problem.
rsynnott 5y ago
I mean, always consider the source. Most people wouldn't consider the AEI trustworthy on energy/emissions issues.

quickthrowman 5y ago

This piece argues that we should listen to a VC partner that is invested in cryptocurrency about the energy usage of cryptocurrency. This is like listening to an oil company giving advice about fighting climate change. You’ll have to do better than this. I’m not sure why I expected any better from a partisan think tank. They pushed back on Nic Carter (I’m guessing here) because he has a financial incentive to make crypto look good. This is not hard to understand.

skybrian 5y ago
This is reason for suspicion but not for blanket dismissal. If you dismiss every self-interested argument you miss a lot.

Zamicol 5y ago

NTF's aren't on Bitcoin. They're on Ethereum which is switching over to PoS.

dralley 5y ago
>They're on Ethereum which is switching over to PoS. It's been switching over to PoS for years. I distinctly remember articles in 2019 about how they'd switch by the end of 2020, articles in 2020 about how they'd switch by the end of 2021, and here we are in 2022. The point holds until they actually do make the switch.
- Zamicol 5y ago
  Ethereum is already running PoS for over a year. Just not all of Ethereum is running PoS. All of Ethereum will switch over and it's currently planned for July.
  - brian_cloutier 5y ago
    This is only true in an extremely technical sense. For practical purposes Ethereum is not running PoS. When you make an Ethereum transaction you are interacting with the PoW chain. Every single NFT transaction runs on the PoW chain. Yes, there is also a PoS chain, confusingly also called "Ethereum", and yes it will soon become the primary chain, but that does not negate the fact that today nearly all activity happens on the PoW chain.
- heckerhut 5y ago
  Update your facts my friend this criticism is stale and has been superseded by a million major events by now. Read the news or hold back on your deprecated knowledge.
- 0x64 5y ago
  In 2019 you probably read about the launch of the PoS beacon chain, as in the "phase 0" of what was then known as the Eth2 roadmap. Beacon chain launched in December of 2020, and since then the work on the merge has been ongoing, which is the hotswap of the network's consensus from Pow to PoS. We're now in the phase where public testnets of full PoS Ethereum are running [1, 2]. Ideally, we'll have the merge before the next difficulty bomb goes off in June. [1] https://kintsugi.themerge.dev/ https://kintsugi.themerge.dev/ [2] https://beaconchain.kintsugi.themerge.dev/ https://beaconchain.kintsugi.themerge.dev/

edmundsauto 5y ago

The specifics of this pushback don't seem that strong to me. FTA: 1. "standard method of inferring miners’ collective electricity use from the “hash rate” of networks relies on guessing what kind of mining equipment did the hashing." 2. "The energy-consumption profile of cryptocurrencies leans toward stranded energy and renewables" #2, in particular, is completely irrelevant to how much energy is used - it's just hand waving and saying that some of the energy is renewable. Pushback #1 is just saying there are assumptions about miner efficiency in the energy use estimates - valid point, but it's not really a pushback, just the explicit statement of an assumption the analysis makes. These do not strike me as particularly powerful arguments, especially since one of them (#2) is irrelevant to the question at hand: how much energy does crypto use?

Uehreka 5y ago

What bothers me personally is that they use so much energy _now_, even though they’re still pretty fringe. Sure, a lot of people have a little crypto floating around, but not most people, and almost no one is using it as a medium for exchange on a daily basis. And yet it’s still using ~0.5% of the world’s energy (aka as much as a mid-sized country). I feel like you have to pick one: Either argue that crypto is a niche hobby that won’t get much more traction, and that 0.5% of humanity’s total power usage is not that bad. Or express your ambition for crypto to run the world and become a fundamental part of everyone’s life, and have an explanation for how to square this with a multiplication of humanity’s total energy usage and the effects that will have on energy prices, silicon prices and the climate. But I’m tired of people arguing for tomorrow’s revolution using today’s energy usage numbers.

betterunix2 5y ago

Your citation is full of errors and fallacies. More efficient mining rigs is basically irrelevant, because Bitcoin miners have no incentive to reduce energy consumption while computing the same number of hashes; it is to compute more hashes using the same amount of energy. So as long as you know the lowest possible energy-per-hash of all available mining hardware you can compute a lower bound on Bitcoin's energy utilization. Then comes the claim that we do not have data on the energy consumed by mainstream finance, but in some cases we do and it really drives home the point about Bitcoin. Visa emitted over 1000 times less carbon in 2020 than Bitcoin, and processes over 1000 times more transactions per second (7 for Bitcoin versus 1700 for Visa). So Visa is at least a million times more energy efficient than Bitcoin as a transaction processing system. Then the "pushback" claiming that it's really OK because Bitcoin mining can be switched on when energy is abundant, which could, maybe, possibly, subsidize the cost of renewables. Except there are alternatives that also could be switched on only when there is an energy surplus -- beginning with any energy-storage technology, of which there are many at different stages of development. Every joule devoted to Bitcoin is a joule not charging an electric car, and every dollar spent on Bitcoin is a dollar not spent developing better storage. There are also industrial processes that could be selectively turned on during periods of abundant energy, like electric arc furnaces widely used in steel mills (the ability to turn the furnace on and off as needed is one of the big advantages of electric arc furnaces over blast furnaces). The outright denial that there even is a problem to solve is a classic example of people becoming religious about a technology. Fortunately better responses have been offered from the blockchain crowd, like pointing to PoS as a technical solution to the problem.

rsynnott 5y ago

I mean, always consider the source. Most people wouldn't consider the AEI trustworthy on energy/emissions issues.