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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

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?

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?