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> 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

> 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.
  - zeptonaut22 5y ago
    As I mentioned in the article > If there’s a way to reduce Bitcoin’s environmental impact, it’s certainly above my paygrade. I think it's a really hard problem. I guess I'm not sure what "rallying against certain kinds of sites" means in practice - encouraging regulation? Social media campaigns against those sites? It seems like bitcoin mining has proven resilient to regulation because as soon as one place regulates the miners slip away to somewhere else. Getting ~200 countries to collectively agree on a set of regulations in such a quickly shifting landscape seems near impossible. As for social media campaigns, it might shame some people but not others. I don't have much of an answer for what to do here besides "hey, if I want to do a crypto project, I'm going to choose a chain that I feel like is being ethical".
    - vmception 5y ago
      > I don't have much of an answer for what to do here besides "hey, if I want to do a crypto project, I'm going to choose a chain that I feel like is being ethical". My problem with that is blockchains are akin to lightbulbs in this regard. They use the same amount of energy whether you are meeting with your colleagues under the light or not. Aka, they use the same energy whether you use them or not. It is a very miniscule difference. This bolsters the anti-blockchain/proof-of-work stance, I find it ironic that if skeptics and critics understood it to this level of detail they would wind up contributing to its improvement instead of the wishful thinking towards prohibitions It would be more productive use of sentiment
walnutclosefarm 5y ago
> 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, but these people never even bothered to notice. A headline talking just about the amount of energy should therefore always be a big red flag as it is intended to manipulate you. Sorry, but this makes no sense at all. Burning gas that would have been flared to produce electricity to mine Bitcoin doesn't meaningfully reduce the environmental impact - all the carbon from the methane still ends up in the atmosphere. Furthemore, unless you think mining Bitcoin is actually useful to society, it still ends up in the atmosphere to no good purpose. The truth is that proof of work as implemented in Bitcoin is just a bad idea. It's elegant from a game theory and mathematical point of view, but practically, a complete waste and environmental mess.
- vmception 5y ago
  > Burning gas that would have been flared to produce electricity to mine Bitcoin doesn't meaningfully reduce the environmental impact - all the carbon from the methane still ends up in the atmosphere. They just use a catalytic converter, it's not that complicated. There is a decent consensus on that kind of device reducing carbon and methane compared to the absence of one.
  - walnutclosefarm 5y ago
    In some theoretical world that doesn't actually exist, you could use carbon capture and storage technology (which is a catalytic process, but is far from as simply as bolting on a catalytic converter to something) to mitigate the carbon from burning methane. But the electricity you'd get would be far too expensive to build a mining operation on. For what you're describing to be viable, the mining group would have to pay for 1) the technology to capture the flare gas and transport it to a generating station (all doable, but the reason the gas is being flared in the first place is because it's not cost effective to do so); 2) CCS technology for the generating plant (again, a known tech that because of cost is used only where there is a market for the CO2 byproduct; 3) some kind of deep geological or other storage for the CO2, or they'd have to find a new market for the gas that did not result in its eventual release. And after all that is done, you'd have electricity that cost enough you couldn't make mining pay, and it would also be true that the electricity you so generated could, given all that you've done, be sold and used for some actually useful, environmentally sound project. The notion that flare gas somehow solves the environmental impact problem of mining is a rationalized fantasy, in other words.
giaour 5y ago
While flare is a waste product that was previously just vented, its production still scales relative to the price of oil: if it's not economically feasible to drill a certain oil reservoir, then no flare gas will be produced. If mining bitcoin by burning flare gas becomes a wide spread practice, all this would do is reduce the overall cost of drilling for oil, which would decrease the cost of petroleum products, which would increase the demand for them. So burning flare gas has consequences, too. Outside of your one cherry-picked, non-representative example energy source, bitcoin miners are competing in the same energy market as everyone else.
- vmception 5y ago
  > Outside of your one cherry-picked, non-representative example energy source, bitcoin miners are competing in the same energy market as everyone else. It wasn't a defense of bitcoin mining. It was an observation of that one sector within a sector, which is on a path to becoming much more representative because it is one of the most viable for bitcoin miners too. It lowers the energy cost for bitcoin miners well enough, it doesn't lower the exploration price for flaring sites enough, just reduces their emissions.
  - giaour 5y ago
    > It lowers the energy cost for bitcoin miners well enough, it doesn't lower the exploration price for flaring sites enough, just reduces their emissions Another commenter pointed this out, but whether the flare gas gets burned or not is orthogonal to what is done with the energy produced thereby. Oil wells are supposed to burn flare gas, but it's hard to capture and sell that energy, so it's mostly just released as heat. I'll grant that a well that is selling this energy is more likely to quickly notice and plug a flare gas leak, but that's the only real differentiating factor in terms of emissions.
    - 8note 5y ago
      That's a good differentiator though. As methane, the gas is a significantly stronger greenhouse gas, and leaks are a persistent problem with natural gas
Jasper_ 5y ago
When a coal mine went down in China a year ago because of flooding, the global Bitcoin hashrate visibly dropped by about a third. This is maybe the only insight we have into the energy sources used by Bitcoin, and it's not a good look. https://decrypt.co/68591/flooded-coal-mine-highlights-chinese-bitcoin-miners-reliance-on-dirty-power https://decrypt.co/68591/flooded-coal-mine-highlights-chines...
- vmception 5y ago
  That article is still mixing terms, and is not the only insight. It mentions the cambridge study check them out. Even my example is saying fossil fuels would be used and reduce the environmental impact of those existing fossil fuel plants Reaching that goal is not as simple as renewable vs fossil fuel.
dangerface 5y ago
You are exactly right our energy crisis is much more complicated than x bad but detailed nuanced explanations don't get the same sort of clicks as "Buzzword literally destroys the planet!" People constantly ignore where does the energy come from? They seem to forget or more likely just don't know that we have an energy surplus of renewable energy. Solar produced during the day can't be easily stored and used at night when its needed, and it can't be used for industrial production like steal production. So what do we do with all the surplus free green energy thats produced around the world 24 hours a day? If only there was a way to convert that wasted energy into lets say a distributed world currency that could serve the unbanked and make it easy to transfer money around the world with smaller fees than western union. I am glad journalists are focused on clicky headlines and not solutions to world problems like climate change and economics.

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.
- zeptonaut22 5y ago
  As I mentioned in the article > If there’s a way to reduce Bitcoin’s environmental impact, it’s certainly above my paygrade. I think it's a really hard problem. I guess I'm not sure what "rallying against certain kinds of sites" means in practice - encouraging regulation? Social media campaigns against those sites? It seems like bitcoin mining has proven resilient to regulation because as soon as one place regulates the miners slip away to somewhere else. Getting ~200 countries to collectively agree on a set of regulations in such a quickly shifting landscape seems near impossible. As for social media campaigns, it might shame some people but not others. I don't have much of an answer for what to do here besides "hey, if I want to do a crypto project, I'm going to choose a chain that I feel like is being ethical".
  - vmception 5y ago
    > I don't have much of an answer for what to do here besides "hey, if I want to do a crypto project, I'm going to choose a chain that I feel like is being ethical". My problem with that is blockchains are akin to lightbulbs in this regard. They use the same amount of energy whether you are meeting with your colleagues under the light or not. Aka, they use the same energy whether you use them or not. It is a very miniscule difference. This bolsters the anti-blockchain/proof-of-work stance, I find it ironic that if skeptics and critics understood it to this level of detail they would wind up contributing to its improvement instead of the wishful thinking towards prohibitions It would be more productive use of sentiment

walnutclosefarm 5y ago

> 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, but these people never even bothered to notice. A headline talking just about the amount of energy should therefore always be a big red flag as it is intended to manipulate you. Sorry, but this makes no sense at all. Burning gas that would have been flared to produce electricity to mine Bitcoin doesn't meaningfully reduce the environmental impact - all the carbon from the methane still ends up in the atmosphere. Furthemore, unless you think mining Bitcoin is actually useful to society, it still ends up in the atmosphere to no good purpose. The truth is that proof of work as implemented in Bitcoin is just a bad idea. It's elegant from a game theory and mathematical point of view, but practically, a complete waste and environmental mess.

vmception 5y ago
> Burning gas that would have been flared to produce electricity to mine Bitcoin doesn't meaningfully reduce the environmental impact - all the carbon from the methane still ends up in the atmosphere. They just use a catalytic converter, it's not that complicated. There is a decent consensus on that kind of device reducing carbon and methane compared to the absence of one.
- walnutclosefarm 5y ago
  In some theoretical world that doesn't actually exist, you could use carbon capture and storage technology (which is a catalytic process, but is far from as simply as bolting on a catalytic converter to something) to mitigate the carbon from burning methane. But the electricity you'd get would be far too expensive to build a mining operation on. For what you're describing to be viable, the mining group would have to pay for 1) the technology to capture the flare gas and transport it to a generating station (all doable, but the reason the gas is being flared in the first place is because it's not cost effective to do so); 2) CCS technology for the generating plant (again, a known tech that because of cost is used only where there is a market for the CO2 byproduct; 3) some kind of deep geological or other storage for the CO2, or they'd have to find a new market for the gas that did not result in its eventual release. And after all that is done, you'd have electricity that cost enough you couldn't make mining pay, and it would also be true that the electricity you so generated could, given all that you've done, be sold and used for some actually useful, environmentally sound project. The notion that flare gas somehow solves the environmental impact problem of mining is a rationalized fantasy, in other words.

giaour 5y ago

While flare is a waste product that was previously just vented, its production still scales relative to the price of oil: if it's not economically feasible to drill a certain oil reservoir, then no flare gas will be produced. If mining bitcoin by burning flare gas becomes a wide spread practice, all this would do is reduce the overall cost of drilling for oil, which would decrease the cost of petroleum products, which would increase the demand for them. So burning flare gas has consequences, too. Outside of your one cherry-picked, non-representative example energy source, bitcoin miners are competing in the same energy market as everyone else.

vmception 5y ago
> Outside of your one cherry-picked, non-representative example energy source, bitcoin miners are competing in the same energy market as everyone else. It wasn't a defense of bitcoin mining. It was an observation of that one sector within a sector, which is on a path to becoming much more representative because it is one of the most viable for bitcoin miners too. It lowers the energy cost for bitcoin miners well enough, it doesn't lower the exploration price for flaring sites enough, just reduces their emissions.
- giaour 5y ago
  > It lowers the energy cost for bitcoin miners well enough, it doesn't lower the exploration price for flaring sites enough, just reduces their emissions Another commenter pointed this out, but whether the flare gas gets burned or not is orthogonal to what is done with the energy produced thereby. Oil wells are supposed to burn flare gas, but it's hard to capture and sell that energy, so it's mostly just released as heat. I'll grant that a well that is selling this energy is more likely to quickly notice and plug a flare gas leak, but that's the only real differentiating factor in terms of emissions.
  - 8note 5y ago
    That's a good differentiator though. As methane, the gas is a significantly stronger greenhouse gas, and leaks are a persistent problem with natural gas

Jasper_ 5y ago

When a coal mine went down in China a year ago because of flooding, the global Bitcoin hashrate visibly dropped by about a third. This is maybe the only insight we have into the energy sources used by Bitcoin, and it's not a good look. https://decrypt.co/68591/flooded-coal-mine-highlights-chinese-bitcoin-miners-reliance-on-dirty-power https://decrypt.co/68591/flooded-coal-mine-highlights-chines...

vmception 5y ago
That article is still mixing terms, and is not the only insight. It mentions the cambridge study check them out. Even my example is saying fossil fuels would be used and reduce the environmental impact of those existing fossil fuel plants Reaching that goal is not as simple as renewable vs fossil fuel.

dangerface 5y ago

You are exactly right our energy crisis is much more complicated than x bad but detailed nuanced explanations don't get the same sort of clicks as "Buzzword literally destroys the planet!" People constantly ignore where does the energy come from? They seem to forget or more likely just don't know that we have an energy surplus of renewable energy. Solar produced during the day can't be easily stored and used at night when its needed, and it can't be used for industrial production like steal production. So what do we do with all the surplus free green energy thats produced around the world 24 hours a day? If only there was a way to convert that wasted energy into lets say a distributed world currency that could serve the unbanked and make it easy to transfer money around the world with smaller fees than western union. I am glad journalists are focused on clicky headlines and not solutions to world problems like climate change and economics.