7 ms·

Blockchains will maybe not destroy the planet

27 points by zeptonaut22 5y ago

k__ 5y ago
I think, it's a technology that has potential, but I understand why many people hat on it. The whole space is divided drastically. When I get told I should talk to a friend of a friend, because "he's also into crypto" I'm quite weary. I like the diverse and queer part of crypto, filled with artists and technologists from different walks of life. But I don't get along with the cryptobro faction that wants to shill their next NFT collection. The crypto space is big and very mixed, so don't let yourself get alienated by a bunch of critics that hate on BAYC etc., because there are many people in crypto that are different.
- zeptonaut22 5y ago
  Definitely agree - it probably says more about me than crypto, but the primary thing that turned me off of crypto for so long was the people telling me how world-changing it was going to be that had clear incentives to pump up their own project. Weirdly enough, though, I do think that's a superpower of crypto: it encourages people to recruit others to a team that's trying to achieve something. Figuring out how to co-opt that superpower for good is the hard part.
  - k__ 5y ago
    Yes. People should stop strawmanning themselves with this "it will change the world" narative. Nobody wants to hear that, even if it's true. There should be more talk about the small things where blockchains can improve things. Otherwise people from the outside feel like they get recruited to a cult or made fun of for using "outdated tech".
    - zeptonaut22 5y ago
      Amen. One of the things I'd like to work on is silly, local, small crypto projects that will be appealing to people that don't give two craps about blockchains or crypto. I think if you can make projects like that, then you could be onto something. (I have some interesting-in-theory running club stuff, local scavenger hunts, etc.)
      - cuteboy19 5y ago
        If a crypto project doesn't solicit investment, it should be treated with very little scrutiny. Unfortunately its also pretty much useless for anything else.
- NylaTheWolf 5y ago
  There's a whole queer part of crypto??? I'm definitely a huge Web3 skeptic but I'm actually kind of curious what's up with this most diverse and queer and, for lack of a better word, nicer part of crypto.
  - k__ 5y ago
    To name a few accounts in that direction: https://mobile.twitter.com/jemgold_ https://mobile.twitter.com/jemgold_ https://mobile.twitter.com/damedoteth https://mobile.twitter.com/damedoteth https://mobile.twitter.com/dystopiabreaker https://mobile.twitter.com/dystopiabreaker https://mobile.twitter.com/SHL0MS https://mobile.twitter.com/SHL0MS https://mobile.twitter.com/__tux https://mobile.twitter.com/__tux
vmception 5y ago
> Bitcoin - the most popular blockchain - uses about half a percent of the world’s energy: the same as the country of Finland. > If you’re in the camp of “this thing is fairly useless”, then the horrific externalities of Bitcoin mining clearly outweigh the minuscule benefits. This group of people is obligated to latch on to incomplete information like this. Because it doesn't matter what the truth is, the goal post has to move to "this is fairly useless so the energy must be useable for some other purpose and bitcoin mining must therefore be wasting it" when that's not true either. Where Bitcoin mining is used to reduce flare gas emissions, it is reducing the environmental impact while increasing the amount of energy used. Emissions that were happening for decades, straight up into the atmosphere, with no other economical way of stopping it until bitcoin miners came along. A headline talking just about the amount of energy, and not the source of the energy, should therefore always be a big red flag as it is intended to manipulate you. Large mining companies tried delaying this information coming out for years, because it was beneficial to them to keep their energy sources secret.
- zeptonaut22 5y ago
  That's totally fair. I do think that any discussion of Bitcoin has to be evaluated through the lens of "did Bitcoin meet Satoshi's original vision of a digital replacement for cash", and I just don't think that Bitcoin has the transaction throughput to justify its cost to society. I feel like if you were to ask Satoshi if he thought 7tx/s was high enough to achieve his vision, his answer would have been an immediate "no". Even if it uses no energy to do the actual mining, it still has used huge amounts of computing resources (CPUs, GPUs) which have a very real carbon cost to produce. Call me a skeptic though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - vmception 5y ago
    Yes, there are carbon costs. I think your observation and sentiment would be best used in being vigilant about where Proof of Work is done and the emissions improvement it is having in those places, and rallying against certain kinds of sites. Its almost not really about what the network does, its about how it is an economically viable emission reduction for fossil fuel sites - in the absence of anything else - as they produce this digital commodity sellable on the open market. Just a different perspective that relies on acknowledging that it isn't going away. I can see that being a hard pivot, but I think the sentiment is very useful in making sure Proof of Work isn't used in things like more re-commissioned coal plants, or co-opted by governments in the future to gain control of the network at a financial and environmental loss.
etchalon 5y ago
A fair point (different blockchains used different amounts of energy per transaction), but the popularity of any given chain matters when comparing its transactional costs. PoW is designed to become less energy efficient as the network becomes more popular.
- zeptonaut22 5y ago
  That makes sense to me, but I... fully admit to not being enough of a crypto expert to factor that into the post. More than anything, this post was written as a defense to myself, family, and friends about why crypto is worth digging into deeper even if there's some bad stuff that goes along with it. I wanted something I could link to and say "hey, it's a little more complicated that it seems - if you're interested, you can take a look here".
  - leshow 5y ago
    With respect, I don't feel you've defended anything. Some blockchains may be less wasteful than others, but almost every popular one is very energy intensive and IMO you haven't even talked about the elephant in the room: do they provide value in the first place? You mention some lofty things that would be nice to solve like housing, but there exists no connection between blockchain and those things, and no information on how blockchain would re-organize incentives or even if it is the right tool for the job. I fail to see the defense here.
- garren 5y ago
  I’d say that the security matters more when considering transaction costs, no? The article mentions solana as being significantly less resource hungry than bitcoin or ethereum, but solana is using a variation of PoS as far as I can tell. He mentions that ethereum is moving to something more efficient, which I understand it is, but again that is PoS. POS might be less resource intensive, but is prone to it’s own kind of centralization (e.g., those with the largest stake make the rules ,or decide transactions as the case may be). So the author’s argument that blockchains don’t have to be as wildly inefficient as bitcoin isn’t wrong. However, so far, that improved efficiency introduces various degrees of centralization. Centralization in a system that is effectively marketed as being secure because of its decentralized nature.
Comevius 5y ago
Electricity works for blockchain technologies because you can't spoof the result of the algorithm, you have to do the work, which consumes a lot of energy. You can do the work more efficiently, but that has a limit, or you can switch to a different blockchain technology that uses less energy, but then you run into a different problem with supply and demand, and if you try to fix those you run into a different problem with scalability. Carbon capture would not work as an incentive, because it can be spoofed. It's not something that you must absolutely do, you can just say that you did.
- dasyatidprime 5y ago
  I can't speak in detail to whether it'd work or be a good idea, but there has been an attempt to design a fraud-resistant carbon capture coin. https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin
- zeptonaut22 5y ago
  Like I mentioned in the post - I'm still a noob here and don't pretend to know enough to support or refute what you're saying, but what you said certainly makes sense. I can confidently say that it seems not-too-difficult to tweak certain assumptions about mining (e.g. have a central authority that can issue tokens in response to offline proof, like proof of capturing X amount of carbon). With that in place and assuming you now have $CARBONCOIN, you can leverage all of the existing financialization that exists within the crypto ecosystem and you have a functioning carbon capture marketplace having only implemented a fraction of it. Like I said - I'm a noob and I'm trying to learn more to understand what the problems with stuff like would be. But I'm really interested in "what rules of crypto can you tweak to accomplish real things".
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    The decentralization is maybe the key purpoted advantage of blockchain. I don't think it's tremendously useful, but hey, it's what people cite as a major advantage. If you're proposing switching to a centralized authority to determine carbon credits, well, we already have that: carbon tax credits for out existing financial system. Carboncoin already exists.
birracerveza 5y ago
I like how this article went almost ~40 minutes with barely any vote and no comment and was immediately pushed to page 2, whereas any article speaking negatively about crypto, with the usual regurgitated tirades of how blockchains are going to destroy humanity, get front paged with hundreds of points and flaming comments repeating the same old "crypto is a scam" within 10 minutes. But snark aside. Hopefully in the long term PoW will eventually be abandoned altogether... aside from BTC and maybe some inconsequential stragglers. But this is a very big nuance that people refuse to address. All blockchains are evil, period. I've seen people outright dismiss the fact that eco-friendly blockchains exist, even when linked to Tezos' wiki's energy consumption explanation. [1] Their opinion is that no matter what, blockchains are a bloated solution because it's an append only database replicated across the globe. But what they fail to understand is just how much redundancy is hidden from the user in the traditional web. Just think that every website has a database, likely replicated and with multiple backups, with all the infrastructure to keep it up and serve its data, all of which is likely not optimized at all because hey, as long as it works. For each and every website! On the other hand, blockchains are likely highly optimized for their use case (well, aside from Ethereum), with no need for backups, replicas and all that jazz as it's already built in the protocol. Consider also that traditional websites' servers have to run 24/7, even with no visitors. Sadly, NFTs completely shut down any possibility of rational discussion, but in my opinion blockchains are breaking ground for new ways to develop websites by using decentralized, highly optimized, shared infrastructure. (Example: The Graph[2]) We'll see. [1] https://wiki.tezosagora.org/learn/baking/tezos-energy-consumption https://wiki.tezosagora.org/learn/baking/tezos-energy-consum... [2] https://thegraph.com/ https://thegraph.com/
- zeptonaut22 5y ago
  I'd like to be indignant with you, but until a week or two ago, I was definitely in that camp. There's so much hype around crypto that it almost felt like there had to be nothing there, and if there was, it was hard to identify what it was. And yeah - there's definitely some cool stuff happening with NFTs, but at least for me, there's a lot more "what in the world is this money laundering" than there is "oh cool".
  - 5y ago
Apreche 5y ago
I do not dispute anything this article says. I just want to point out that the current reality of blockchains is harm. All the positives of blockchains are hypothetical scenarios, none of which currently exist. That's all there is to it.
- zeptonaut22 5y ago
  One of the things that I'm trying to say in the article, though, is that it's not super helpful to lump all blockchains together. Bitcoin is an impossible-to-dislodge behemoth that in my opinion fails to meet its original goals and has had ample chance to prove its worth, but has largely failed to do so. Stuff like Solana is still "wasteful" in the sense that leaving a Digital Ocean droplet running in an infinite loop is wasteful, but it's on such a different order of magnitude that it certainly deserves a chance to prove its worth. It's also had much less time to do so than Bitcoin. As mentioned above: I'm a noob at all of this and reserve for myself the right to flip-flop in the future :-)
  - doomroot 5y ago
    > is that it's not super helpful to lump all blockchains together. So you directly compare a proven 13 year old blockchain moving billions of dollars to a centralized blockchain that goes offline monthly? > I'm a noob at all of this and reserve for myself the right to flip-flop in the future :-) Then refrain from having strong opinions like this: > in my opinion fails to meet its original goals and has had ample chance to prove its worth, but has largely failed to do so.
- juanci_to 5y ago
  >All the positives of blockchains are hypothetical scenarios, none of which currently exist. [Citation needed]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tromp 5y ago
> Ethereum, the second most popular blockchain, uses about 1000x less energy per transaction That can't be right. Bitcoin and Ethereum use comparable amounts of power according to the daily rewards available (column "PoW Produced (24h)" in [1], while Ethereum's transaction rate is barely 5x greater than Bitcoin's. [1] https://www.f2pool.com/coins https://www.f2pool.com/coins
- zeptonaut22 5y ago
  This is definitely a lesson to me to include sources in footnotes - I think my source here was googling "energy usage ethereum transaction" and using the info card at the top of the search page, which appears to be from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/bitcoin-consume-more-power-than-world-2020/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/bitcoin-consume-more-... and... is an outdated and not great source. Noted that my numbers for Ethereum are almost certainly not correct, but I think the point still stands that "the carbon footprint of crypto and blockchains depends hugely on which blockchain you're talking about"
softwarebeware 5y ago
Is it perhaps a straw man argument? I've only heard people talk about high energy consumption in specific contexts like _bitcoin mining_. I'm glad the tech community is starting to look at their environmental impact though. While they're at it, can they please consider how many wasted resources they use on things like inefficient test automation which is usually only inefficient because they were lazy.

27 points by zeptonaut22 5y ago

k__ 5y ago

I think, it's a technology that has potential, but I understand why many people hat on it. The whole space is divided drastically. When I get told I should talk to a friend of a friend, because "he's also into crypto" I'm quite weary. I like the diverse and queer part of crypto, filled with artists and technologists from different walks of life. But I don't get along with the cryptobro faction that wants to shill their next NFT collection. The crypto space is big and very mixed, so don't let yourself get alienated by a bunch of critics that hate on BAYC etc., because there are many people in crypto that are different.

zeptonaut22 5y ago
Definitely agree - it probably says more about me than crypto, but the primary thing that turned me off of crypto for so long was the people telling me how world-changing it was going to be that had clear incentives to pump up their own project. Weirdly enough, though, I do think that's a superpower of crypto: it encourages people to recruit others to a team that's trying to achieve something. Figuring out how to co-opt that superpower for good is the hard part.
- k__ 5y ago
  Yes. People should stop strawmanning themselves with this "it will change the world" narative. Nobody wants to hear that, even if it's true. There should be more talk about the small things where blockchains can improve things. Otherwise people from the outside feel like they get recruited to a cult or made fun of for using "outdated tech".
  - zeptonaut22 5y ago
    Amen. One of the things I'd like to work on is silly, local, small crypto projects that will be appealing to people that don't give two craps about blockchains or crypto. I think if you can make projects like that, then you could be onto something. (I have some interesting-in-theory running club stuff, local scavenger hunts, etc.)
    - cuteboy19 5y ago
      If a crypto project doesn't solicit investment, it should be treated with very little scrutiny. Unfortunately its also pretty much useless for anything else.
NylaTheWolf 5y ago
There's a whole queer part of crypto??? I'm definitely a huge Web3 skeptic but I'm actually kind of curious what's up with this most diverse and queer and, for lack of a better word, nicer part of crypto.
- k__ 5y ago
  To name a few accounts in that direction: https://mobile.twitter.com/jemgold_ https://mobile.twitter.com/jemgold_ https://mobile.twitter.com/damedoteth https://mobile.twitter.com/damedoteth https://mobile.twitter.com/dystopiabreaker https://mobile.twitter.com/dystopiabreaker https://mobile.twitter.com/SHL0MS https://mobile.twitter.com/SHL0MS https://mobile.twitter.com/__tux https://mobile.twitter.com/__tux

vmception 5y ago

> Bitcoin - the most popular blockchain - uses about half a percent of the world’s energy: the same as the country of Finland. > If you’re in the camp of “this thing is fairly useless”, then the horrific externalities of Bitcoin mining clearly outweigh the minuscule benefits. This group of people is obligated to latch on to incomplete information like this. Because it doesn't matter what the truth is, the goal post has to move to "this is fairly useless so the energy must be useable for some other purpose and bitcoin mining must therefore be wasting it" when that's not true either. Where Bitcoin mining is used to reduce flare gas emissions, it is reducing the environmental impact while increasing the amount of energy used. Emissions that were happening for decades, straight up into the atmosphere, with no other economical way of stopping it until bitcoin miners came along. A headline talking just about the amount of energy, and not the source of the energy, should therefore always be a big red flag as it is intended to manipulate you. Large mining companies tried delaying this information coming out for years, because it was beneficial to them to keep their energy sources secret.

zeptonaut22 5y ago
That's totally fair. I do think that any discussion of Bitcoin has to be evaluated through the lens of "did Bitcoin meet Satoshi's original vision of a digital replacement for cash", and I just don't think that Bitcoin has the transaction throughput to justify its cost to society. I feel like if you were to ask Satoshi if he thought 7tx/s was high enough to achieve his vision, his answer would have been an immediate "no". Even if it uses no energy to do the actual mining, it still has used huge amounts of computing resources (CPUs, GPUs) which have a very real carbon cost to produce. Call me a skeptic though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- vmception 5y ago
  Yes, there are carbon costs. I think your observation and sentiment would be best used in being vigilant about where Proof of Work is done and the emissions improvement it is having in those places, and rallying against certain kinds of sites. Its almost not really about what the network does, its about how it is an economically viable emission reduction for fossil fuel sites - in the absence of anything else - as they produce this digital commodity sellable on the open market. Just a different perspective that relies on acknowledging that it isn't going away. I can see that being a hard pivot, but I think the sentiment is very useful in making sure Proof of Work isn't used in things like more re-commissioned coal plants, or co-opted by governments in the future to gain control of the network at a financial and environmental loss.

etchalon 5y ago

A fair point (different blockchains used different amounts of energy per transaction), but the popularity of any given chain matters when comparing its transactional costs. PoW is designed to become less energy efficient as the network becomes more popular.

zeptonaut22 5y ago
That makes sense to me, but I... fully admit to not being enough of a crypto expert to factor that into the post. More than anything, this post was written as a defense to myself, family, and friends about why crypto is worth digging into deeper even if there's some bad stuff that goes along with it. I wanted something I could link to and say "hey, it's a little more complicated that it seems - if you're interested, you can take a look here".
- leshow 5y ago
  With respect, I don't feel you've defended anything. Some blockchains may be less wasteful than others, but almost every popular one is very energy intensive and IMO you haven't even talked about the elephant in the room: do they provide value in the first place? You mention some lofty things that would be nice to solve like housing, but there exists no connection between blockchain and those things, and no information on how blockchain would re-organize incentives or even if it is the right tool for the job. I fail to see the defense here.
garren 5y ago
I’d say that the security matters more when considering transaction costs, no? The article mentions solana as being significantly less resource hungry than bitcoin or ethereum, but solana is using a variation of PoS as far as I can tell. He mentions that ethereum is moving to something more efficient, which I understand it is, but again that is PoS. POS might be less resource intensive, but is prone to it’s own kind of centralization (e.g., those with the largest stake make the rules ,or decide transactions as the case may be). So the author’s argument that blockchains don’t have to be as wildly inefficient as bitcoin isn’t wrong. However, so far, that improved efficiency introduces various degrees of centralization. Centralization in a system that is effectively marketed as being secure because of its decentralized nature.

Comevius 5y ago

Electricity works for blockchain technologies because you can't spoof the result of the algorithm, you have to do the work, which consumes a lot of energy. You can do the work more efficiently, but that has a limit, or you can switch to a different blockchain technology that uses less energy, but then you run into a different problem with supply and demand, and if you try to fix those you run into a different problem with scalability. Carbon capture would not work as an incentive, because it can be spoofed. It's not something that you must absolutely do, you can just say that you did.

dasyatidprime 5y ago
I can't speak in detail to whether it'd work or be a good idea, but there has been an attempt to design a fraud-resistant carbon capture coin. https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin
zeptonaut22 5y ago
Like I mentioned in the post - I'm still a noob here and don't pretend to know enough to support or refute what you're saying, but what you said certainly makes sense. I can confidently say that it seems not-too-difficult to tweak certain assumptions about mining (e.g. have a central authority that can issue tokens in response to offline proof, like proof of capturing X amount of carbon). With that in place and assuming you now have $CARBONCOIN, you can leverage all of the existing financialization that exists within the crypto ecosystem and you have a functioning carbon capture marketplace having only implemented a fraction of it. Like I said - I'm a noob and I'm trying to learn more to understand what the problems with stuff like would be. But I'm really interested in "what rules of crypto can you tweak to accomplish real things".
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  The decentralization is maybe the key purpoted advantage of blockchain. I don't think it's tremendously useful, but hey, it's what people cite as a major advantage. If you're proposing switching to a centralized authority to determine carbon credits, well, we already have that: carbon tax credits for out existing financial system. Carboncoin already exists.

birracerveza 5y ago

I like how this article went almost ~40 minutes with barely any vote and no comment and was immediately pushed to page 2, whereas any article speaking negatively about crypto, with the usual regurgitated tirades of how blockchains are going to destroy humanity, get front paged with hundreds of points and flaming comments repeating the same old "crypto is a scam" within 10 minutes. But snark aside. Hopefully in the long term PoW will eventually be abandoned altogether... aside from BTC and maybe some inconsequential stragglers. But this is a very big nuance that people refuse to address. All blockchains are evil, period. I've seen people outright dismiss the fact that eco-friendly blockchains exist, even when linked to Tezos' wiki's energy consumption explanation. [1] Their opinion is that no matter what, blockchains are a bloated solution because it's an append only database replicated across the globe. But what they fail to understand is just how much redundancy is hidden from the user in the traditional web. Just think that every website has a database, likely replicated and with multiple backups, with all the infrastructure to keep it up and serve its data, all of which is likely not optimized at all because hey, as long as it works. For each and every website! On the other hand, blockchains are likely highly optimized for their use case (well, aside from Ethereum), with no need for backups, replicas and all that jazz as it's already built in the protocol. Consider also that traditional websites' servers have to run 24/7, even with no visitors. Sadly, NFTs completely shut down any possibility of rational discussion, but in my opinion blockchains are breaking ground for new ways to develop websites by using decentralized, highly optimized, shared infrastructure. (Example: The Graph[2]) We'll see. [1] https://wiki.tezosagora.org/learn/baking/tezos-energy-consumption https://wiki.tezosagora.org/learn/baking/tezos-energy-consum... [2] https://thegraph.com/ https://thegraph.com/

zeptonaut22 5y ago
I'd like to be indignant with you, but until a week or two ago, I was definitely in that camp. There's so much hype around crypto that it almost felt like there had to be nothing there, and if there was, it was hard to identify what it was. And yeah - there's definitely some cool stuff happening with NFTs, but at least for me, there's a lot more "what in the world is this money laundering" than there is "oh cool".
- 5y ago

Apreche 5y ago

I do not dispute anything this article says. I just want to point out that the current reality of blockchains is harm. All the positives of blockchains are hypothetical scenarios, none of which currently exist. That's all there is to it.

zeptonaut22 5y ago
One of the things that I'm trying to say in the article, though, is that it's not super helpful to lump all blockchains together. Bitcoin is an impossible-to-dislodge behemoth that in my opinion fails to meet its original goals and has had ample chance to prove its worth, but has largely failed to do so. Stuff like Solana is still "wasteful" in the sense that leaving a Digital Ocean droplet running in an infinite loop is wasteful, but it's on such a different order of magnitude that it certainly deserves a chance to prove its worth. It's also had much less time to do so than Bitcoin. As mentioned above: I'm a noob at all of this and reserve for myself the right to flip-flop in the future :-)
- doomroot 5y ago
  > is that it's not super helpful to lump all blockchains together. So you directly compare a proven 13 year old blockchain moving billions of dollars to a centralized blockchain that goes offline monthly? > I'm a noob at all of this and reserve for myself the right to flip-flop in the future :-) Then refrain from having strong opinions like this: > in my opinion fails to meet its original goals and has had ample chance to prove its worth, but has largely failed to do so.
juanci_to 5y ago
>All the positives of blockchains are hypothetical scenarios, none of which currently exist. [Citation needed]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tromp 5y ago

> Ethereum, the second most popular blockchain, uses about 1000x less energy per transaction That can't be right. Bitcoin and Ethereum use comparable amounts of power according to the daily rewards available (column "PoW Produced (24h)" in [1], while Ethereum's transaction rate is barely 5x greater than Bitcoin's. [1] https://www.f2pool.com/coins https://www.f2pool.com/coins

zeptonaut22 5y ago
This is definitely a lesson to me to include sources in footnotes - I think my source here was googling "energy usage ethereum transaction" and using the info card at the top of the search page, which appears to be from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/bitcoin-consume-more-power-than-world-2020/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/bitcoin-consume-more-... and... is an outdated and not great source. Noted that my numbers for Ethereum are almost certainly not correct, but I think the point still stands that "the carbon footprint of crypto and blockchains depends hugely on which blockchain you're talking about"

softwarebeware 5y ago

Is it perhaps a straw man argument? I've only heard people talk about high energy consumption in specific contexts like _bitcoin mining_. I'm glad the tech community is starting to look at their environmental impact though. While they're at it, can they please consider how many wasted resources they use on things like inefficient test automation which is usually only inefficient because they were lazy.