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The largest and easiest argument against crypto is the environmental impact. It’s completely ignored in that piece.

by bertil 5y ago

telomero22 5y ago
That's really irrelevant in 2022, since 90% of blockchains are not Proof of Work anymore.
- K0nserv 5y ago
  Maybe 90% by count, but not 90% by volume of transactions, prominence, etc. Bitcoin seems to be entirely resistant to moving away from PoW and Ethereum have been in the process of moving to PoS for years. Pop quiz: What will happen first, Ethereum PoS or the year of linux on the desktop?
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    You realize the merge has already successfully completed on a testnet last month. The Geth client code for the merge is complete. I’m willing to bet any amount you want up to $30,000 that Ethereum main net is running PoS by Dec 31 of this year.
    - saalweachter 5y ago
      At what odds?
      - dcolkitt 5y ago
        1:1 I think is most fair.
        saalweachter 5y ago
        So you think there is only a 50-50 chance of Ethereum being proof of stake by EOY?
        dcolkitt 5y ago
        Absolutely. Again, testnet has already merged.
        saalweachter 5y ago
        Honestly that's a lot more cautious optimism than I would have expected from someone willing to put $30k on the line.
  - telomero22 5y ago
    Yes, 90% by number transactions. Binance chain, Solana, Luna, AVAX, ADA, DOT are doing around 15 million transactions a day altogether while Bitcoin and Ethereum are only doing 1.5 million altogether.
- pid-1 5y ago
  90% by market cap or nominal quantity of projects? Like, if we are using the second metric we could even create 1000s of irrelevant PoS coins to pump that baby up.
jack_pp 5y ago
It's not that easy. Renewable power plants could be setup in areas where it makes no sense due to the logistics of transporting that energy to normal society and that plant could be 100% used to mine crypto which in a way makes crypto a "wireless energy transport technology". Complaining that crypto uses a lot of power is like complaining India is trying to burn fossil fuels which will harm the planet. India wants to boost its economy the same way the west has done. Crypto activists want a democratised / uncontrollable financial system and so far mining and burning energy is the only way we know how to achieve it.
- bertil 5y ago
  I strongly disagree with the points that you make. There are many ways to implement fair financial systems. Crypto activists chose to ignore them, refused to understand the sources of failures and just attact principles. Instead, crypto advocates brandish an apparent technological solution that is at amost a very leaky abstraction. I can’t even stop screaming at how offensive is “wireless energy transport technology”. In doing so, you ignore that the scales in play are absurd: securing dozens of transactions should not have a larger environmental footprint than taking a billion people out of poverty. That you think this is even an argument is horrifying.
  - jack_pp 5y ago
    What's offensive about it? Today energy generation of any kind has to have a way to transport that energy to a consumer. Bitcoin is in a privileged position of being able to use energy to create value locally to the energy producer. You might argue a datacenter could do the same thing but a datacenter requires a lot of staff and infrastructure while a mining operation doesn't. There's also the problem of a high speed high bandwidth internet connection. So what is your solution to this? There are ways to generate energy purely from ocean waves, this is being used near shore for the reasons stated above (you must transport the produced energy to shore) but we could install these way further and just rely on a sattelite connection for internet. How else would you utilize these yet untapped potential energy producing areas? Handwaving and using strong negative words aren't an argument. ---------- > There are many ways to implement fair financial systems Depends on what you mean by fair but please do list those other more efficient ways
brianolson 5y ago
There are new blockchains based on technology a million times more efficient than Bitcoin. Ethereum is trying to upgrade. Bitcoin is terrible, but this is fixable by using things other than bitcoin.
- bertil 5y ago
  > a million times more efficient than Bitcoin That is still a million times less efficient than existing solution and still horrifyingly wasteful. Blockchain principle is that if you have as many people as possible waste an astounding amount of computation and energy, you make over-ruling most of them too wasteful to be possible. You are not solving anything that way, just showing off that you have never heard of Kwakiutl.
  - arriu 5y ago
    You’re comparing database to a trust-less distributed fault tolerant system. Of course the db has a smaller energy footprint but it doesn’t provide the same features. It’s like saying a bicycle rolls down the road just as well as a car so we should not use the car. There are blockchains now that are designed to be optimal for what they provide. The bigger issue is that there are applications running on chains that clearly don’t need the features of the chain.
    - bertil 5y ago
      I’m saying that for 95% of journeys currently done with cars, bicycles would be perfectly fine. I mean that both litterally and figuratively. More importantly, both for transport and for digital services, if we don’t switch to bicyles, there won’t be a planet to run those services for. You are advocating for the end of the world as we know it within ten years.
  - pshc 5y ago
    I wouldn’t say the energy use of non-proof of work chains is millions of times worse than existing traditional finance and web2 solutions. Probably comparable. There is much energy wasted in the products themselves and knock-on effects. Machine learning for ads and analytics, for example. Banks using thousands of warm bodies to push around excel spreadsheets. Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.
floss_silicate 5y ago
But that’s just an argument against any technology that will increase electricity demand, such as EVs. When the web was growing the electrical demands were similarly criticised: “The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.” https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=5dbb8522580b https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=5db...
- bertil 5y ago
  No: EVs has less carbon footprint than ICE, usually several times less. Digital economy has a carbon footprint, but orders of magnitude less than the alternatives: paper for administration, casettes for music or plastic film for movies. You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of people. Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs. Crypto avocates likes to say they _could_ do it with imaginary wealth, but that are very far from being able to afford it; if they could, it would break their business model. In the mean time, they are settled in the countries with the worst carbon footprint possible. They tried to hide it but you can’t really hide that amount of waste. They have distrupted the energy market of China, Kazakstan so much that thousands of people died in energy shortages. For now, all we have from those people is mountains of unrecycled electronic waste. So, no, those two are not the same thing.
  - floss_silicate 5y ago
    > Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs. This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners. Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time. The incentive is towards cheaper renewable sources that would otherwise not be viable.
Capira 5y ago
Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It accelerates our transition to renewable energies. Bitcoin makes renewable energy sources more profitable because it offers a base price for excess electricity. Any time, any place. Furthermore, Bitcoin can lower the hidden costs of the petrodollar. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-petrodollar https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-... And Bitcoin incentivises having a low time preference. This leads to a much more sustainable consumer behaviour. Bitcoin helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
- MrMan 5y ago
ea550ff70a 5y ago
Environmental impact is only an issue if the energy source is dirty (which is becoming less of an issue as cost for renewables goes down and green energy mix in the grid increases) and or if you see no value in it. I agree with the former but at the same time I think the issue is not crypto in specific but ANYTHING whose energy source is dirty. The latter is obvi subjective and at the end of the day irrelevant as, like it or not, there are plenty of people that see value in it (2 trillion total market cap in cryptos right now).
- bertil 5y ago
  You are confusing speculative investment and adoption.
  - ea550ff70a 5y ago
    Well of course there is plenty of speculative investment going on in this field (also not unique to cryptos, just look at what's has been going on with tech stocks and the Nasdaq), there is no doubt about that. But at the same time all adoption metrics have been increasing like crazy. Two things can be true at once here. There are plenty of people gambling (no bueno) and there is also plenty of other people using the tech/network/etc with other intentions as well. You have governments (at regional and country level) adopting the tech (like it or not), you have people in South America using it inflation hedging (yes it works for this when you country's currency devalues like crazy on a weekly basis) and for remittances, etc. The speculation part fuels the volatility, but it is also obvious that it has proven to withstand many bubbles while at the same time increasing its reach an adoption as this (like it or not) fills a need. A need for an alternative that while not the most efficient, is inclusive, fair, and open by design.

The largest and easiest argument against crypto is the environmental impact. It’s completely ignored in that piece.

by bertil 5y ago

The largest and easiest argument against crypto is the environmental impact. It’s completely ignored in that piece.

telomero22 5y ago

That's really irrelevant in 2022, since 90% of blockchains are not Proof of Work anymore.

K0nserv 5y ago
Maybe 90% by count, but not 90% by volume of transactions, prominence, etc. Bitcoin seems to be entirely resistant to moving away from PoW and Ethereum have been in the process of moving to PoS for years. Pop quiz: What will happen first, Ethereum PoS or the year of linux on the desktop?
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  You realize the merge has already successfully completed on a testnet last month. The Geth client code for the merge is complete. I’m willing to bet any amount you want up to $30,000 that Ethereum main net is running PoS by Dec 31 of this year.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    At what odds?
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      1:1 I think is most fair.
      - saalweachter 5y ago
        So you think there is only a 50-50 chance of Ethereum being proof of stake by EOY?
        dcolkitt 5y ago
        Absolutely. Again, testnet has already merged.
        saalweachter 5y ago
        Honestly that's a lot more cautious optimism than I would have expected from someone willing to put $30k on the line.
- telomero22 5y ago
  Yes, 90% by number transactions. Binance chain, Solana, Luna, AVAX, ADA, DOT are doing around 15 million transactions a day altogether while Bitcoin and Ethereum are only doing 1.5 million altogether.
pid-1 5y ago
90% by market cap or nominal quantity of projects? Like, if we are using the second metric we could even create 1000s of irrelevant PoS coins to pump that baby up.

jack_pp 5y ago

It's not that easy. Renewable power plants could be setup in areas where it makes no sense due to the logistics of transporting that energy to normal society and that plant could be 100% used to mine crypto which in a way makes crypto a "wireless energy transport technology". Complaining that crypto uses a lot of power is like complaining India is trying to burn fossil fuels which will harm the planet. India wants to boost its economy the same way the west has done. Crypto activists want a democratised / uncontrollable financial system and so far mining and burning energy is the only way we know how to achieve it.

bertil 5y ago
I strongly disagree with the points that you make. There are many ways to implement fair financial systems. Crypto activists chose to ignore them, refused to understand the sources of failures and just attact principles. Instead, crypto advocates brandish an apparent technological solution that is at amost a very leaky abstraction. I can’t even stop screaming at how offensive is “wireless energy transport technology”. In doing so, you ignore that the scales in play are absurd: securing dozens of transactions should not have a larger environmental footprint than taking a billion people out of poverty. That you think this is even an argument is horrifying.
- jack_pp 5y ago
  What's offensive about it? Today energy generation of any kind has to have a way to transport that energy to a consumer. Bitcoin is in a privileged position of being able to use energy to create value locally to the energy producer. You might argue a datacenter could do the same thing but a datacenter requires a lot of staff and infrastructure while a mining operation doesn't. There's also the problem of a high speed high bandwidth internet connection. So what is your solution to this? There are ways to generate energy purely from ocean waves, this is being used near shore for the reasons stated above (you must transport the produced energy to shore) but we could install these way further and just rely on a sattelite connection for internet. How else would you utilize these yet untapped potential energy producing areas? Handwaving and using strong negative words aren't an argument. ---------- > There are many ways to implement fair financial systems Depends on what you mean by fair but please do list those other more efficient ways

brianolson 5y ago

There are new blockchains based on technology a million times more efficient than Bitcoin. Ethereum is trying to upgrade. Bitcoin is terrible, but this is fixable by using things other than bitcoin.

bertil 5y ago
> a million times more efficient than Bitcoin That is still a million times less efficient than existing solution and still horrifyingly wasteful. Blockchain principle is that if you have as many people as possible waste an astounding amount of computation and energy, you make over-ruling most of them too wasteful to be possible. You are not solving anything that way, just showing off that you have never heard of Kwakiutl.
- arriu 5y ago
  You’re comparing database to a trust-less distributed fault tolerant system. Of course the db has a smaller energy footprint but it doesn’t provide the same features. It’s like saying a bicycle rolls down the road just as well as a car so we should not use the car. There are blockchains now that are designed to be optimal for what they provide. The bigger issue is that there are applications running on chains that clearly don’t need the features of the chain.
  - bertil 5y ago
    I’m saying that for 95% of journeys currently done with cars, bicycles would be perfectly fine. I mean that both litterally and figuratively. More importantly, both for transport and for digital services, if we don’t switch to bicyles, there won’t be a planet to run those services for. You are advocating for the end of the world as we know it within ten years.
- pshc 5y ago
  I wouldn’t say the energy use of non-proof of work chains is millions of times worse than existing traditional finance and web2 solutions. Probably comparable. There is much energy wasted in the products themselves and knock-on effects. Machine learning for ads and analytics, for example. Banks using thousands of warm bodies to push around excel spreadsheets. Google might build some of their data centers up in Iceland, but that’s not the full picture.

floss_silicate 5y ago

But that’s just an argument against any technology that will increase electricity demand, such as EVs. When the web was growing the electrical demands were similarly criticised: “The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.” https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=5dbb8522580b https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=5db...

bertil 5y ago
No: EVs has less carbon footprint than ICE, usually several times less. Digital economy has a carbon footprint, but orders of magnitude less than the alternatives: paper for administration, casettes for music or plastic film for movies. You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of people. Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs. Crypto avocates likes to say they _could_ do it with imaginary wealth, but that are very far from being able to afford it; if they could, it would break their business model. In the mean time, they are settled in the countries with the worst carbon footprint possible. They tried to hide it but you can’t really hide that amount of waste. They have distrupted the energy market of China, Kazakstan so much that thousands of people died in energy shortages. For now, all we have from those people is mountains of unrecycled electronic waste. So, no, those two are not the same thing.
- floss_silicate 5y ago
  > Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs. This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners. Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time. The incentive is towards cheaper renewable sources that would otherwise not be viable.

Capira 5y ago

Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It accelerates our transition to renewable energies. Bitcoin makes renewable energy sources more profitable because it offers a base price for excess electricity. Any time, any place. Furthermore, Bitcoin can lower the hidden costs of the petrodollar. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-petrodollar https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-... And Bitcoin incentivises having a low time preference. This leads to a much more sustainable consumer behaviour. Bitcoin helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.

MrMan 5y ago

ea550ff70a 5y ago

Environmental impact is only an issue if the energy source is dirty (which is becoming less of an issue as cost for renewables goes down and green energy mix in the grid increases) and or if you see no value in it. I agree with the former but at the same time I think the issue is not crypto in specific but ANYTHING whose energy source is dirty. The latter is obvi subjective and at the end of the day irrelevant as, like it or not, there are plenty of people that see value in it (2 trillion total market cap in cryptos right now).

bertil 5y ago
You are confusing speculative investment and adoption.
- ea550ff70a 5y ago
  Well of course there is plenty of speculative investment going on in this field (also not unique to cryptos, just look at what's has been going on with tech stocks and the Nasdaq), there is no doubt about that. But at the same time all adoption metrics have been increasing like crazy. Two things can be true at once here. There are plenty of people gambling (no bueno) and there is also plenty of other people using the tech/network/etc with other intentions as well. You have governments (at regional and country level) adopting the tech (like it or not), you have people in South America using it inflation hedging (yes it works for this when you country's currency devalues like crazy on a weekly basis) and for remittances, etc. The speculation part fuels the volatility, but it is also obvious that it has proven to withstand many bubbles while at the same time increasing its reach an adoption as this (like it or not) fills a need. A need for an alternative that while not the most efficient, is inclusive, fair, and open by design.