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It's very strange seeing the option near the bottom of the page to donate a fraction of your revenue from Stripe Crypto to carbon recapture efforts. I agree wit

It's very strange seeing the option near the bottom of the page to donate a fraction of your revenue from Stripe Crypto to carbon recapture efforts. I agree with Stripe that, at this point, the solution to our climate problems must include carbon recapture, but it's not an ideal situation to be in. Businesses entering the crypto space always seem to tout carbon offsets and sidechains that use less energy, but offsets are insufficient, and NFTs minted on sidechains inevitably migrate to Mainnet, where they're just as environmentally destructive as any other NFT, or they fail. Stripe's carbon recapture efforts seem to be in the same category. Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place. If Stripe's support of crypto increases the use of blockchains, the overall impact of extra carbon emissions could very easily outpace all the carbon recapture they'll ever achieve. It's a shame. When Stripe announced their carbon recapture efforts, I was impressed by how sincere they seemed in finding solutions to climate problems. Next to Stripe Crypto, however, it appears to just be greenwashing. (And to head off the replies, I know all about proof-of-stake, but it's not relevant here. I'm unconvinced it will work, and even if it does, the ecological damage done and being done in the meantime is massive. If Stripe really cared about carbon emissions, they'd wait to launch Stripe Crpyto only on proof-of-stake blockchains, and only after they proved that the energy usage at scale was similar to the energy use for transferring fiat currency.)

elefanten 5y ago
The “ecological damage” is a rounding error and being mitigated in several ways. This is not a serious concern for cryptocurrency, despite how often and blindly its repeated.
- StewardMcOy 5y ago
  This is not a convincing argument, but even if it were, carbon recapture is currently even more of a "rounding error" in the grand scheme of carbon emissions. Current carbon emissions are somewhere around 50 billion metric tons a year. I've seen varying estimates of crypto emissions, so I'm going to cite one [1] on the low end here, since it's more favorable to your argument, but the highest I've seen is less than double this number, so they're all in the same ballpark. ETH currently emits 7.4 million metric tons of CO2 a year. Bitcoin is much higher. I've seen estimates as low as 16 million and as high as 55. There are other chains as well. To keep the math simple, let's round it to 50 million, so crypto is contributing 0.1% of total carbon emissions. Like you said, a rounding error. I think we're just going to have to disagree on mitigations. I don't think they're working very well. Crucially, at the beginning of 2019, according to the source I linked, ETH was only at 2 million tons a year. It's more than tripled since then. In 2021, Carbon recapture removed an estimated 9 thousand tons of CO2. [2] The CO2 from the growth of ETH eclipses anything that carbon recapture is currently capable of. The technology will get better. The most optimistic estimate I've seen is that carbon recapture will hit 30 million tons a year in 2070. But this year, Stripe Crypto only has to increase crypto transactions, across all blockchains it supports, by 9,000 tons to completely offset all of the money it's putting into recapture efforts. Even if you remove all the other chains, Stripe only has to increase ETH transactions by 1.3% to achieve this own-goal. Long term, Stripe alone could end up causing more CO2 emissions on the blockchains to grow faster than all of carbon recapture. 1: https://kylemcdonald.github.io/ethereum-emissions/ https://kylemcdonald.github.io/ethereum-emissions/ 2: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-plant-capturing-carbon-air-starts-iceland-2021-09-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-...
  - PretzelPirate 5y ago
    On the bright side, Ethereum devs have just launched the final testnet before the switch to Proof-of-Stake. It would be great for Stripe to continue investing the same amount of money into carbon recapture even after Ethereum’s carbon emissions drop over 99%.
    - StewardMcOy 5y ago
      As I said in my original post, it would be great if that happened. I'm skeptical proof-of-stake will work at scale. If it does, great, but Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work. They damage they're doing in the meantime is more detrimental than their recapture efforts are beneficial.
      - rvz 5y ago
        > If it does, great, but Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work. Maybe is that why I see Solana on the front-page of Stripe Crypto? Since that is a blockchain that is not only more eco-friendly [0] and many times faster than both Ethereum and Bitcoin put together but one can use right now today rather than waiting for Ethereum Proof-of-Stake for many years. I am not going to tell merchants to pray on a calendar month when ETH 2.0 will launch. They'll just use other blockchains instead if one was told to 'wait'. [0] https://solana.com/news/solana-foundation-carbon-neutral-2021 https://solana.com/news/solana-foundation-carbon-neutral-202...
        StewardMcOy 5y ago
        > Maybe is that why I see Solana on the front-page of Stripe Crypto? This would be a great argument if Solana were the only cryptocurrency that Stripe was supporting, or if Stripe was only supporting cryptocurrencies with similar carbon footprints, but the top image above the fold is a screenshot of using Stripe to purchase Bitcoin. ETH and other PoW blockchains are also featured on the page. My core argument is that supporting PoW blockchains does more damage than their carbon recapture efforts reduce. The presence of Solana in the list doesn't invalidate that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- root_axis 5y ago
  It's hardly a rounding error, but I'm sympathetic to the fact that there are a lot more important concerns with respect to climate change than PoW, however, there is still a valid ecological critique of PoW due to it's inherent wastefulness relative to every other technology. The amount of waste necessary to support the network must always grow since any new efficiencies are immediately obviated by the incentive to bring on more miners, the total utility provided by the network (i.e. the rate of transactions it securely processes) has no relationship to the amount of energy that the network burns. With every other technology, new effeincies make the technology able to do more useful work while burning less energy, in this way anything based on PoW is fundamentally flawed. You could hook up a fusion reactor of the future to the bitcoin network and it would not provide any more utility, yet the network would eventually consume all the energy produced by the reactor given enough time to increase mining capacity. I know the typical response to this is PoS, and I think a switch to PoS would be great since its impact on the environment is within the realm of normal software. Whether or not PoS can actually work for a large network is a different discussion.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    There’s a full featured testnet for the merge (Ethereum PoS) you can run right now. Yes, the developers were too optimistic with timeframes before, but it’s close and I’d expect it by EOY.
    - StewardMcOy 5y ago
      I'm following the progress. I don't like estimating release dates for other peoples' work, but I wouldn't be surprised if your EOY estimate is correct. The biggest concern I have though, is that you can run as many testsnets as you want, but that doesn't mean the rollout is going to survive contact with the enemy. I'm very pessimistic that PoS can replace PoW in real-world usage. Once everyone is on the PoS ETH, I suspect that problems will eventually manifest, and either ETH will be forced to roll back to PoW, or there will be splits, and one of the PoW chains that splits off will supplant ETH in popularity. I don't think this will happen immediately, but I think it's very likely to happen within a few years of ETH switching over to PoS.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  Which ways?
pjscott 5y ago
> Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place. That's not necessarily true -- it depends on the marginal costs of each. Right now carbon capture is pretty expensive, but I can see that potentially changing with more investment put into it, which is what Stripe is trying to do.
- StewardMcOy 5y ago
  I'm mainly talking about the present and the near future. But there's more to the equation than carbon in, carbon out. Recapture isn't going to fix the non-warming issues with emissions, like ocean acidification. In a world without renewables, we'd never get to a place where the marginal costs of carbon capture would be lower than the marginal costs of burning fossil fuels for energy. The best hope for recapture is to be powered by cheap renewables. This requires having a lot more renewable capacity than we do now, which is absolutely something that's happening and should continue to happen, but it's not environmentally free. Mining and battery production/recycling/disposal have economic consequences. In its best form carbon recapture is trading emissions today for the promise that they'll be mostly recaptured in the future using renewables. But renewables also have to serve our other needs. So all the carbon we burn in the meantime creates more demands for solar panels, wind farms, dams, wave farms, and batteries in the future. Thus, it is better to not emit than to recapture. We recapture because we have ti.
joshmarlow 5y ago
While the energy usage of Proof-of-Stake systems like Bitcoin does seem embarrassingly excessive at first glance, I think there's more nuance here than it first may appear. One of the problems with renewables is that they are spike-y and there's a limit to how much you can control the spike. When renewable sources peak, they can put more energy into the grid than the grid can safely handle (too much power can cause damage). Battery storage tech is currently lacking for dealing with this (though https://www.energyvault.com/ https://www.energyvault.com/ has an interesting take on this) and power degrades quickly when sent over power-lines, so that limits distribution over long distances. In some scenarios, when energy becomes too plentiful, power companies may actually start charging negative costs - ie, they pay people to take more power out of the grid. When you combine these two factors, power producers have an economic incentive not to use renewables. Enter Bitcoin - paying for power consumption is a huge component of operating costs. Mining rigs that are positioned near renewable power sources have an advantage in that they can just stop mining when energy prices get too high and start mining when energy prices are low enough. This provides a profitable way for miners and renewable power suppliers to operate together. Deployed properly, Bitcoin mining actually improves the economics of renewables. Because doing so improves the profitability of mining, there is an economic incentive for miners to move toward renewables and build infrastructure that only mines when it is most profitable - ie, the times when not mining actually hurts renewable efforts. NOTE: in theory non-cryptocurrency applications could serve this same role to make renewables more economical, but many applications have an always-on requirement; you can't run a data center only when the sun shines, but you can mine crypto only then.
- StewardMcOy 5y ago
  If that were the only energy used for blockchains, then that would definitely eliminate the environmental arguments against cryptocurrencies, but I doubt you could run large blockchains on only renewable spikes. Even then, if battery tech improves enough, I think there's a compelling case to be made that the spike energy is better sent there than to mining rigs.
  - joshmarlow 5y ago
    > if battery tech improves enough, I think there's a compelling case to be made that the spike energy is better sent there than to mining rigs. I don't exactly disagree - with better storage tech, we could put the energy to more immediate uses. But why postpone improving the economics of renewables until we have better battery tech (which has an unknown timeline)?
shafyy 5y ago
Stripe doesn't give two shits about the environment. It's just good PR. If they did, they would know that investing money in carbon recapture is not an effective way to combat climate change. I've had it up to here with people trying to find a technofix to all our problems. It's much more simple than that.
- therealdrag0 5y ago
  You think “carbon captures” is better PR than alternatives that do work such that they picked this instead? Or you think they just pulled it out of a hat? Or is your explanation just not that good?
  - shafyy 5y ago
    Yes, I think "we're investing in hightech innovation that will save the Earth" is better PR than "we're helping reforestation projects". This is inline with the disconnected Silicon Valley / Tech elite group think that every single problem on Earth can be solvee with technology.
  - uoaei 5y ago
    The alternative that does work is simple -- don't do crypto until the extreme carbon emissions are handled to a reasonable degree. It is clear that is not the case now. The end goal is vague but with due diligence you can keep mining crypto and the environment can keep at least some of its richness.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      Once the merge happens (proof of stake) and finally shard chains are deployed to mainnet ethereum[0], the main source of high fees and high emissions (ethash GPU farms) will fall tremendously. 0: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/

elefanten 5y ago

The “ecological damage” is a rounding error and being mitigated in several ways. This is not a serious concern for cryptocurrency, despite how often and blindly its repeated.

StewardMcOy 5y ago
This is not a convincing argument, but even if it were, carbon recapture is currently even more of a "rounding error" in the grand scheme of carbon emissions. Current carbon emissions are somewhere around 50 billion metric tons a year. I've seen varying estimates of crypto emissions, so I'm going to cite one [1] on the low end here, since it's more favorable to your argument, but the highest I've seen is less than double this number, so they're all in the same ballpark. ETH currently emits 7.4 million metric tons of CO2 a year. Bitcoin is much higher. I've seen estimates as low as 16 million and as high as 55. There are other chains as well. To keep the math simple, let's round it to 50 million, so crypto is contributing 0.1% of total carbon emissions. Like you said, a rounding error. I think we're just going to have to disagree on mitigations. I don't think they're working very well. Crucially, at the beginning of 2019, according to the source I linked, ETH was only at 2 million tons a year. It's more than tripled since then. In 2021, Carbon recapture removed an estimated 9 thousand tons of CO2. [2] The CO2 from the growth of ETH eclipses anything that carbon recapture is currently capable of. The technology will get better. The most optimistic estimate I've seen is that carbon recapture will hit 30 million tons a year in 2070. But this year, Stripe Crypto only has to increase crypto transactions, across all blockchains it supports, by 9,000 tons to completely offset all of the money it's putting into recapture efforts. Even if you remove all the other chains, Stripe only has to increase ETH transactions by 1.3% to achieve this own-goal. Long term, Stripe alone could end up causing more CO2 emissions on the blockchains to grow faster than all of carbon recapture. 1: https://kylemcdonald.github.io/ethereum-emissions/ https://kylemcdonald.github.io/ethereum-emissions/ 2: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-plant-capturing-carbon-air-starts-iceland-2021-09-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-...
- PretzelPirate 5y ago
  On the bright side, Ethereum devs have just launched the final testnet before the switch to Proof-of-Stake. It would be great for Stripe to continue investing the same amount of money into carbon recapture even after Ethereum’s carbon emissions drop over 99%.
  - StewardMcOy 5y ago
    As I said in my original post, it would be great if that happened. I'm skeptical proof-of-stake will work at scale. If it does, great, but Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work. They damage they're doing in the meantime is more detrimental than their recapture efforts are beneficial.
    - rvz 5y ago
      > If it does, great, but Stripe should have waited until then to support ETH, and not support Bitcoin or other chains currently on proof-of-work. Maybe is that why I see Solana on the front-page of Stripe Crypto? Since that is a blockchain that is not only more eco-friendly [0] and many times faster than both Ethereum and Bitcoin put together but one can use right now today rather than waiting for Ethereum Proof-of-Stake for many years. I am not going to tell merchants to pray on a calendar month when ETH 2.0 will launch. They'll just use other blockchains instead if one was told to 'wait'. [0] https://solana.com/news/solana-foundation-carbon-neutral-2021 https://solana.com/news/solana-foundation-carbon-neutral-202...
      - StewardMcOy 5y ago
        > Maybe is that why I see Solana on the front-page of Stripe Crypto? This would be a great argument if Solana were the only cryptocurrency that Stripe was supporting, or if Stripe was only supporting cryptocurrencies with similar carbon footprints, but the top image above the fold is a screenshot of using Stripe to purchase Bitcoin. ETH and other PoW blockchains are also featured on the page. My core argument is that supporting PoW blockchains does more damage than their carbon recapture efforts reduce. The presence of Solana in the list doesn't invalidate that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
root_axis 5y ago
It's hardly a rounding error, but I'm sympathetic to the fact that there are a lot more important concerns with respect to climate change than PoW, however, there is still a valid ecological critique of PoW due to it's inherent wastefulness relative to every other technology. The amount of waste necessary to support the network must always grow since any new efficiencies are immediately obviated by the incentive to bring on more miners, the total utility provided by the network (i.e. the rate of transactions it securely processes) has no relationship to the amount of energy that the network burns. With every other technology, new effeincies make the technology able to do more useful work while burning less energy, in this way anything based on PoW is fundamentally flawed. You could hook up a fusion reactor of the future to the bitcoin network and it would not provide any more utility, yet the network would eventually consume all the energy produced by the reactor given enough time to increase mining capacity. I know the typical response to this is PoS, and I think a switch to PoS would be great since its impact on the environment is within the realm of normal software. Whether or not PoS can actually work for a large network is a different discussion.
- dannyw 5y ago
  There’s a full featured testnet for the merge (Ethereum PoS) you can run right now. Yes, the developers were too optimistic with timeframes before, but it’s close and I’d expect it by EOY.
  - StewardMcOy 5y ago
    I'm following the progress. I don't like estimating release dates for other peoples' work, but I wouldn't be surprised if your EOY estimate is correct. The biggest concern I have though, is that you can run as many testsnets as you want, but that doesn't mean the rollout is going to survive contact with the enemy. I'm very pessimistic that PoS can replace PoW in real-world usage. Once everyone is on the PoS ETH, I suspect that problems will eventually manifest, and either ETH will be forced to roll back to PoW, or there will be splits, and one of the PoW chains that splits off will supplant ETH in popularity. I don't think this will happen immediately, but I think it's very likely to happen within a few years of ETH switching over to PoS.
Daishiman 5y ago
Which ways?

pjscott 5y ago

> Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place. That's not necessarily true -- it depends on the marginal costs of each. Right now carbon capture is pretty expensive, but I can see that potentially changing with more investment put into it, which is what Stripe is trying to do.

StewardMcOy 5y ago
I'm mainly talking about the present and the near future. But there's more to the equation than carbon in, carbon out. Recapture isn't going to fix the non-warming issues with emissions, like ocean acidification. In a world without renewables, we'd never get to a place where the marginal costs of carbon capture would be lower than the marginal costs of burning fossil fuels for energy. The best hope for recapture is to be powered by cheap renewables. This requires having a lot more renewable capacity than we do now, which is absolutely something that's happening and should continue to happen, but it's not environmentally free. Mining and battery production/recycling/disposal have economic consequences. In its best form carbon recapture is trading emissions today for the promise that they'll be mostly recaptured in the future using renewables. But renewables also have to serve our other needs. So all the carbon we burn in the meantime creates more demands for solar panels, wind farms, dams, wave farms, and batteries in the future. Thus, it is better to not emit than to recapture. We recapture because we have ti.

joshmarlow 5y ago

While the energy usage of Proof-of-Stake systems like Bitcoin does seem embarrassingly excessive at first glance, I think there's more nuance here than it first may appear. One of the problems with renewables is that they are spike-y and there's a limit to how much you can control the spike. When renewable sources peak, they can put more energy into the grid than the grid can safely handle (too much power can cause damage). Battery storage tech is currently lacking for dealing with this (though https://www.energyvault.com/ https://www.energyvault.com/ has an interesting take on this) and power degrades quickly when sent over power-lines, so that limits distribution over long distances. In some scenarios, when energy becomes too plentiful, power companies may actually start charging negative costs - ie, they pay people to take more power out of the grid. When you combine these two factors, power producers have an economic incentive not to use renewables. Enter Bitcoin - paying for power consumption is a huge component of operating costs. Mining rigs that are positioned near renewable power sources have an advantage in that they can just stop mining when energy prices get too high and start mining when energy prices are low enough. This provides a profitable way for miners and renewable power suppliers to operate together. Deployed properly, Bitcoin mining actually improves the economics of renewables. Because doing so improves the profitability of mining, there is an economic incentive for miners to move toward renewables and build infrastructure that only mines when it is most profitable - ie, the times when not mining actually hurts renewable efforts. NOTE: in theory non-cryptocurrency applications could serve this same role to make renewables more economical, but many applications have an always-on requirement; you can't run a data center only when the sun shines, but you can mine crypto only then.

StewardMcOy 5y ago
If that were the only energy used for blockchains, then that would definitely eliminate the environmental arguments against cryptocurrencies, but I doubt you could run large blockchains on only renewable spikes. Even then, if battery tech improves enough, I think there's a compelling case to be made that the spike energy is better sent there than to mining rigs.
- joshmarlow 5y ago
  > if battery tech improves enough, I think there's a compelling case to be made that the spike energy is better sent there than to mining rigs. I don't exactly disagree - with better storage tech, we could put the energy to more immediate uses. But why postpone improving the economics of renewables until we have better battery tech (which has an unknown timeline)?

shafyy 5y ago

Stripe doesn't give two shits about the environment. It's just good PR. If they did, they would know that investing money in carbon recapture is not an effective way to combat climate change. I've had it up to here with people trying to find a technofix to all our problems. It's much more simple than that.

therealdrag0 5y ago
You think “carbon captures” is better PR than alternatives that do work such that they picked this instead? Or you think they just pulled it out of a hat? Or is your explanation just not that good?
- shafyy 5y ago
  Yes, I think "we're investing in hightech innovation that will save the Earth" is better PR than "we're helping reforestation projects". This is inline with the disconnected Silicon Valley / Tech elite group think that every single problem on Earth can be solvee with technology.
- uoaei 5y ago
  The alternative that does work is simple -- don't do crypto until the extreme carbon emissions are handled to a reasonable degree. It is clear that is not the case now. The end goal is vague but with due diligence you can keep mining crypto and the environment can keep at least some of its richness.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Once the merge happens (proof of stake) and finally shard chains are deployed to mainnet ethereum[0], the main source of high fees and high emissions (ethash GPU farms) will fall tremendously. 0: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/