5 ms·

Isn't that worse. Bitcoin is a huge energy hog.

exdsq 5y ago
Up for interpretation. You’re very right environmentally. From a crypto perspective you could see a lot of it as fluffy marketing and rug pulls, while Bitcoin is a little more stable and ‘mature’
- emteycz 5y ago
  Energy and environment are very distinct. Yes, BTC uses a lot of energy - but it's also helping the environment. For example, here they do heating of historical buildings (old castles etc - necessary for preservation of wall paintings and other artefacts) with BTC mining. That's good for environment because without the additional funds they would have to burn coal. There are renewable energy projects that are economical only thanks to Bitcoin, for example a nearby solar park. Not every place has year round sunshine, so you must overbuild significantly - but that costs a lot of money and also destabilizes the electrical grid when there's too much sunshine in the summer. Solution is simple - use the excess energy for mining, fund half the park with revenue from it. The same is done with wind energy.
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
    Don’t have strong opinions on this, but not sure why the above got downvoted. Seems like an informed comment.
    - dTal 5y ago
      Probably because it's painfully obvious that "Bitcoin is good for the environment" cannot possibly be true, and rather than expend energy unpicking the logical fallacy in the reasoning they'd rather downvote and move on.
      - emteycz 5y ago
        If it was painfully obvious, there wouldn't have been 10 years of debate and new projects wouldn't be coming up and wouldn't be successful.
        bradlys 5y ago
        Murder is said to be bad yet murder keeps happening. Why could it ever be? Murder must be successful! Same logic.
        emteycz 5y ago
        Yeah, and Hitler blah blah
    - exdsq 5y ago
      HN has very strong views on crypto along the lines of it's all bad, so even fairly reasoned arguments (that may well be flawed) are downvoted into oblivion without a decent debate on the points. It's why I wish Crypto was just banned from HN - it is rarely a decent conversation here.
      - shanusmagnus 5y ago
        I like it for that reason -- the attitude of a bunch of technically-proficient hacker types is a good bellwether for what can be expected from society in general. If even the HN crowd is making the calibre of comment HN people usually make, then either we are still super early, or I'm super wrong. Time will tell I guess.
      - SantalBlush 5y ago
        The points have been debated ad nauseum on HN. There's really nothing more to say, hence the downvoting.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Resistive heating is terribly wasteful. If you're going to heat a building electrically, far better to do it with a heat pump. The fact that some perverse quirk of economics makes it more economically viable to mine bitcoins than run a heat pump makes it bad for the environment, not good. No matter how creative you get with the accounting, in the final analysis you're burning a lot of electricity with nothing tangible to show for it.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Heat pump is way too expensive. The issue here is cost.
      - bradlys 5y ago
        No, no it isn't. Heat pumps are cheap compared to 3090s and whatever other ASICs you're going to be using. Electricity costs also scale. You're paying 1/4 the electricity cost to heat your "castle" with a heat pump. That - in itself - is very important.
        emteycz 5y ago
        The castle is paying like 1/3 they were paying for coal+transport, they're paying for the heat as they go and the crypto mining company is handling the ASICs or GPUs or whatever - the castle doesn't care about that at all (this kind of project is not unusual around here, it's not one-off - energy companies have special tariffs for them now). Unless you know about someone here who would offer this kind of deal with heatpumps, it's passe. The castle does not have enough money to invest, they're using donations from people to at least fix the most important problems - so projects like this are extremely important because every cent counts. They can't invest $XXk and hope it returns in 30 years because they're never going to have that sum to invest, and if they had, they would use it to fix the castle, not for heat pumps. The castle needs it now, not in 30 years.
  - ohyoutravel 5y ago
    Wow! Can someone help me describe the rhetorical device being used here? “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind, which describes a win where the cost was so severe it outweighs the benefits, like considering “heating old castles” to be an environmental win while the cost of such is running roughshod over the rest of the world’s environment, but that’s the name for a concept that describes this argument, not the rhetorical device.
    - dTal 5y ago
      I think there's a few false dichotomies? Either warm castles with electricity Bitcoin OR warm them with gas; Bitcoin is better than gas (is it actually though? where's the electricity come from?), therefore Bitcoin is "good". No mention of not heating the leaky old castles at all.
      - emteycz 5y ago
        How is that a false dichotomy when that's exactly the choice this particular place has faced? No alternatives were available due to cost and non-existent gas infrastructure. Not like we want to expand our gas usage anyways as here we buy it all from Russia, right?
        dTal 5y ago
        Maybe they shouldn't be heating them at all! We don't owe it to old leaky castles to make it economically viable to heat them. Cheap gas is an ecological nightmare. That doesn't mean that other methods are not also ecological nightmares. How do you even know that the electricity they're burning to mine bitcoin didn't also come from Russian gas? There's no economic principle that says it can't. All Bitcoin does is make it profitable to waste energy - that doesn't mean wasting energy is good! How can paying people to use up electricity possibly be a net win?
        emteycz 5y ago
        Sorry but here we like to preserve our 2000+ years old culture. This particular castle is 1200 years old. I can understand you're not excited about preserving some random few hundred years old buildings, but this is highly valuable cultural legacy and one of the few remains from that age. Czech electricity companies allow you to choose your energy mix (green/standard).
  - exdsq 5y ago
    I don't know if the energy required to heat a historical building from servers is 'good' from a Utilitarian viewpoint - the energy consumed to do this is surely greater than the amount of coal required to run some effective heaters and on the other hand if people aren't willing to fund green initiatives to keep the historical building going is it really worth the effort? On the other hand if you can have a green energy project fund itself with bitcoin while being even slightly net positive then I think that's useful, if only because it'll increase funding to green energy producers and that's a good thing (more users should allow for the benefits of economy of scale).
  - synthc 5y ago
    BTC uses a lot of energy, some of it excess clean energy, but mostly just dirty energy. It is far from helping the environment. Storing excess clean energy, now that would help the enviroment. Using excess clean energy for BTC means storage needs to compete with BTC, making storage economically less feasible. So BTC not only uses lots of dirty energy, it also hinders innovation in using excess clean energy. BTC is just terrible for the environment.
lvl102 5y ago
My point was really that he’s only about himself. I am not a proponent of crypto but even with crypto he’s literally only about what he has and nothing else. So in effect he’s not _really_ about crypto and what it stands for.

Up for interpretation. You’re very right environmentally. From a crypto perspective you could see a lot of it as fluffy marketing and rug pulls, while Bitcoin is a little more stable and ‘mature’

emteycz 5y ago
Energy and environment are very distinct. Yes, BTC uses a lot of energy - but it's also helping the environment. For example, here they do heating of historical buildings (old castles etc - necessary for preservation of wall paintings and other artefacts) with BTC mining. That's good for environment because without the additional funds they would have to burn coal. There are renewable energy projects that are economical only thanks to Bitcoin, for example a nearby solar park. Not every place has year round sunshine, so you must overbuild significantly - but that costs a lot of money and also destabilizes the electrical grid when there's too much sunshine in the summer. Solution is simple - use the excess energy for mining, fund half the park with revenue from it. The same is done with wind energy.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  Don’t have strong opinions on this, but not sure why the above got downvoted. Seems like an informed comment.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Probably because it's painfully obvious that "Bitcoin is good for the environment" cannot possibly be true, and rather than expend energy unpicking the logical fallacy in the reasoning they'd rather downvote and move on.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      If it was painfully obvious, there wouldn't have been 10 years of debate and new projects wouldn't be coming up and wouldn't be successful.
      - bradlys 5y ago
        Murder is said to be bad yet murder keeps happening. Why could it ever be? Murder must be successful! Same logic.
        emteycz 5y ago
        Yeah, and Hitler blah blah
  - exdsq 5y ago
    HN has very strong views on crypto along the lines of it's all bad, so even fairly reasoned arguments (that may well be flawed) are downvoted into oblivion without a decent debate on the points. It's why I wish Crypto was just banned from HN - it is rarely a decent conversation here.
    - shanusmagnus 5y ago
      I like it for that reason -- the attitude of a bunch of technically-proficient hacker types is a good bellwether for what can be expected from society in general. If even the HN crowd is making the calibre of comment HN people usually make, then either we are still super early, or I'm super wrong. Time will tell I guess.
    - SantalBlush 5y ago
      The points have been debated ad nauseum on HN. There's really nothing more to say, hence the downvoting.
- dTal 5y ago
  Resistive heating is terribly wasteful. If you're going to heat a building electrically, far better to do it with a heat pump. The fact that some perverse quirk of economics makes it more economically viable to mine bitcoins than run a heat pump makes it bad for the environment, not good. No matter how creative you get with the accounting, in the final analysis you're burning a lot of electricity with nothing tangible to show for it.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Heat pump is way too expensive. The issue here is cost.
    - bradlys 5y ago
      No, no it isn't. Heat pumps are cheap compared to 3090s and whatever other ASICs you're going to be using. Electricity costs also scale. You're paying 1/4 the electricity cost to heat your "castle" with a heat pump. That - in itself - is very important.
      - emteycz 5y ago
        The castle is paying like 1/3 they were paying for coal+transport, they're paying for the heat as they go and the crypto mining company is handling the ASICs or GPUs or whatever - the castle doesn't care about that at all (this kind of project is not unusual around here, it's not one-off - energy companies have special tariffs for them now). Unless you know about someone here who would offer this kind of deal with heatpumps, it's passe. The castle does not have enough money to invest, they're using donations from people to at least fix the most important problems - so projects like this are extremely important because every cent counts. They can't invest $XXk and hope it returns in 30 years because they're never going to have that sum to invest, and if they had, they would use it to fix the castle, not for heat pumps. The castle needs it now, not in 30 years.
- ohyoutravel 5y ago
  Wow! Can someone help me describe the rhetorical device being used here? “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind, which describes a win where the cost was so severe it outweighs the benefits, like considering “heating old castles” to be an environmental win while the cost of such is running roughshod over the rest of the world’s environment, but that’s the name for a concept that describes this argument, not the rhetorical device.
  - dTal 5y ago
    I think there's a few false dichotomies? Either warm castles with electricity Bitcoin OR warm them with gas; Bitcoin is better than gas (is it actually though? where's the electricity come from?), therefore Bitcoin is "good". No mention of not heating the leaky old castles at all.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      How is that a false dichotomy when that's exactly the choice this particular place has faced? No alternatives were available due to cost and non-existent gas infrastructure. Not like we want to expand our gas usage anyways as here we buy it all from Russia, right?
      - dTal 5y ago
        Maybe they shouldn't be heating them at all! We don't owe it to old leaky castles to make it economically viable to heat them. Cheap gas is an ecological nightmare. That doesn't mean that other methods are not also ecological nightmares. How do you even know that the electricity they're burning to mine bitcoin didn't also come from Russian gas? There's no economic principle that says it can't. All Bitcoin does is make it profitable to waste energy - that doesn't mean wasting energy is good! How can paying people to use up electricity possibly be a net win?
        emteycz 5y ago
        Sorry but here we like to preserve our 2000+ years old culture. This particular castle is 1200 years old. I can understand you're not excited about preserving some random few hundred years old buildings, but this is highly valuable cultural legacy and one of the few remains from that age. Czech electricity companies allow you to choose your energy mix (green/standard).
- exdsq 5y ago
  I don't know if the energy required to heat a historical building from servers is 'good' from a Utilitarian viewpoint - the energy consumed to do this is surely greater than the amount of coal required to run some effective heaters and on the other hand if people aren't willing to fund green initiatives to keep the historical building going is it really worth the effort? On the other hand if you can have a green energy project fund itself with bitcoin while being even slightly net positive then I think that's useful, if only because it'll increase funding to green energy producers and that's a good thing (more users should allow for the benefits of economy of scale).
- synthc 5y ago
  BTC uses a lot of energy, some of it excess clean energy, but mostly just dirty energy. It is far from helping the environment. Storing excess clean energy, now that would help the enviroment. Using excess clean energy for BTC means storage needs to compete with BTC, making storage economically less feasible. So BTC not only uses lots of dirty energy, it also hinders innovation in using excess clean energy. BTC is just terrible for the environment.

lvl102 5y ago

My point was really that he’s only about himself. I am not a proponent of crypto but even with crypto he’s literally only about what he has and nothing else. So in effect he’s not _really_ about crypto and what it stands for.