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Crypto miners are not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the fucked-up things that humanity does. The average person causes far more harm and literally

• sascha_sl 4y ago
  Ah yeah sure, people running warehouses full of GPUs and reviving local coal power plants for their energy supply are doing less harm than than someone eating too much beef. Unlike meat consumption, mining doesn't map neatly onto the entire population. It's a rich few that can even buy this much compute power. Bitcoin is 137 TW/h/yr Etherium is 112 TW/h/yr (thanks for pointing out me messing up units) Those are both mid sized countries by now.
  • xvector 4y ago
    How does crypto mining come even close? Sorry, which beings am I immersing in extreme pain and suffering by running hashes on my GPU? Environmentally, Bitcoin and Ethereum's combined production of greenhouse gasses - ~50M tons CO2 - does not come anywhere close to the over 6 billion tons of CO2 of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by meat production. Again, orders of magnitude more environmental damage, alongside the greatest cycle of sheer pain and suffering this planet has ever seen, and we don't even get something out of it. How can people point fingers at crypto miners while engaging in this far more harmful behavior?
    • sascha_sl 4y ago
      It's a really terrible comparison and nothing but a cheap tu quoque. Crypto contributes nothing but a speculative asset to society. Meat production, while derailed into unsustainability, has a lot more utility and is also a lot harder to unwind from current culture. Try running a survey on which of the two people would rather forego, and your 100M to 6B ratio will look rather stupid. One shitty behavior doesn't excuse another.
      • xvector 4y ago
        > Meat production [...] has a lot more utility We will have to agree to disagree that stimulating the taste buds has more utility than providing a trustless financial system.
        • sascha_sl 4y ago
          I've used bitcoin as a currency in 2011, and now people keep telling me I shouldn't have because all I got for 2-million USD equivalent BTC then was a video game. What's the point of a currency that doesn't scale and that everyone is too afraid to spend because of volatility. Speculative asset, that's all you'll ever have there.
          • xvector 4y ago
            That comment belays a misunderstanding of the crypto sphere as a whole. If you don't want to partake in the speculative nature of the asset, you can simply transact with a stablecoin.
        • tehbeard 4y ago
          So, A cryptobro that eats soylent paste? Didn't have that one on my bingo card...
          • trainsarebetter 4y ago
            ha! Made me laugh, this was me 10 years ago
    • nigma1337 4y ago
      I'd say we get more out of meat, having delicious stuff to eat is awesome.
    • cedilla 4y ago
      The one system is providing sustenance for billions of people, the other is used by tens of thousands of people. As is always forgotten to mention when this argument is made. But this is an even worse argument than usual - the people speculating with crypto constructs are very often also part of the groups who consume a whole lot of meat...
      • mrb 4y ago
        "tens of thousands of people" You are off by 3 orders of magnitude. Bitcoin alone validates 7 million transactions monthly. If there were only 50k users, an average user would be sending 140 transactions per month.
        • htlion 4y ago
          What about trading and wash sales? Would not that make the average very high? I have no numbers so I can't say more, but 140 transactions per month per user doesn't sound that high considering the above.
          • nybble41 4y ago
            Much of that trading will happen off-chain using local accounts on some exchange and thus not contribute to the transaction count. Only the deposits and withdrawals require on-chain transactions.
        • salawat 4y ago
          The average centralized financial processor can process that many transactions in about 10 seconds, with the option of reversal, You are not making a great case here.
          • mrb 4y ago
            "in about 10 seconds" Patently false. For example an "average" processor like Western Union processes only 25 million transactions monthly. "with the option of reversal" Which is the whole problem. Bitcoin is irreversible, by design. That's crucial.
    • EdwardDiego 4y ago
      Oh for the love of Christ. Unless you go fully Jainist, and eat only what you grow, after painstakingly removing insect pests and placing them elsewhere gently, nothing you eat is pain/suffering free. Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds. Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust). How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp? Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?" Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?
      • WithinReason 4y ago
        I read somewhere that the death ratio of meat vs vegan diet is about 1 cow vs 30 mice, not sure if it was a reliable figure.
        • erk__ 4y ago
          That sounds incorrect since around 3/4 of the agriculture production is used to feed lifestock
          • EdwardDiego 4y ago
            In your country. In my country, we don't advertise beef as "grass fed" as a market segmentation tactic, because all our beef is grass fed, that's the only way we feed stock raised for beef. Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now. My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle? It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies. So what changed?
  • wcoenen 4y ago
    TW/h doesn't really make sense. I suspect you meant TWh/year.
  • michaelsbradley 4y ago
    At least Ethereum’s energy usage will drop by 99.99% shortly.
    • sascha_sl 4y ago
      It's been vaporware forever, I'll believe it when I see it. And I still wouldn't like it. Proof of Stake is even more directly aimed at making the rich richer, whereas Proof of Work only did it with a few extra steps. But at least they'd no longer be burning the planet.
      • michaelsbradley 4y ago
        Some of the most dedicated software engineers I’ve ever met have been working on it (transition to PoS) intensely for 2 years now and I heard from their own mouths (physically, in person) week before last just how excited they are it’s wrapping up. None of this work has happened in the dark. The regular cross-team meetings, constant stream of commits on GitHub, etc. are in the open for all to see. Next phase will be sharding and splitting out data availability from consensus strictly speaking, exciting times!
        • martin8412 4y ago
          At best it will be another hard fork. The miners need to vote on the change to PoS, and why would they? It would render their mining equipment worthless.
          • arlcode 4y ago
            It's the other way around. The miners can't do anything to prevent the switch since most major Ethereum users (aka Infrastructure providers) are clearly in favour and are already participating in the POS chain (which is currently running in parallel and without transactions). When they update they miners are simply cut off. Furthermore, Ethereum contains a self destruct mechanism that requires a hard fork. Unless miners can coordinate a competing POW fork (and convince rich people that the bad PR and profits for them are worth it) they won't be able to do anything.
  • mrb 4y ago
    It's not TW/h/yr but TWh/yr. For reference, 120 TWh/yr is only twice the production of the Baihetan dam https://web.archive.org/web/20160302215312/http://english.cwe.cn/show.aspx?id=1828&cid=43 https://web.archive.org/web/20160302215312/http://english.cw... Most people don't picture that an entire "mid sized" country could run off only 2 hydro dams.
  • hanselot 4y ago
• gman83 4y ago
  Our overconsumption of meat is idiotic, yes. Not sure what that has to do with the merits of crypto, sounds like whataboutism.
  • baisq 4y ago
    >Our overconsumption of meat is idiotic, yes. And tasty.
• sailingparrot 4y ago
  > The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it. Yes, the feeding habits of 7 billions people produces more CO2 than a virtual casino that benefits... millions? How is that surprising, and how can you try to paint that as worse? And even though we should do more to change dietary habits of people who can, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything else where we can until this is done. This is classic useless whataboutism. Also, we don't get a trustless financial system out of cryptos. We get the utopia of one. > Crypto miners are not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the fucked-up things that humanity does. Crypto miners use as much energy as Norway. It's responsible for 78 million tons of CO2 per year, as much as 15M cars. [1] Yearly emissions for all of humanity is at around 36B tons of CO2. So mining is 1/500th of all our emissions. Since one drop is 0.05mL, your "ocean" is about half of a shot glass, or 5 teaspoons. Or, the other way around, if our emissions are all of our oceans, then mining emissions are 70% of the mediterranean. So much for "not even a drop". [1] https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/pallone-opening-remarks-at-oversight-hearing-on-the-energy-impacts-of https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/pal...
  • trainsarebetter 4y ago
    Second paragraph: “One estimate found that the energy required to process transactions on the Bitcoin network could power a home for more than 70 days” Any interpretation of this doesn’t make any sense. I’m really not sure we can easily make energy per transaction calculations. I don’t have a hard opinion on the energy implications of pow chains yet. part of me sees it pushing clean infrastructure into production. using produced, but previously unused, energy. now there’s the e-waste issue… which I am NOT a happy camper about.
  • xvector 4y ago
    > Yes, the feeding habits of 7 billions people produces Let's be clear, the "feeding habits" are completely unnecessary for 6 out of those 7 billion people and create the largest cycle of suffering this planet has ever seen by several orders of magnitude. People eat meat for their taste buds to go brr - a plant based diet is fine otherwise. It's not "whataboutism" when the sheer scales of suffering involved are so different. Crypto barely harms anyone. The meat industry causes over 60 billion beings a year to undergo extreme suffering. Crypto is not even on the map as an issue in comparison. Complaining about crypto as someone that is fine with meat consumption - or indeed, consumes meat - is simply absurd. But what can I say? People love to throw stones from glass houses.
• Bancakes 4y ago
  Food chains are a natural occurrence. It's the default way and if your disagreement with that is a biological maladaptation. But if you're only vegan for health reasons, that's respectable. There is no sufferosphere, the supposed suffering is intangible. These farm animals were born to eat, reproduce, and be eaten - they had no higher purpose, and without humans wouldn't exist in the first place.
  • empiricus 4y ago
    Unfortunately, it does not mean that the natural way is a good way...
    • Bancakes 4y ago
      Millions of years of evolution proved that it's a good way for different animals. It's only recently that Big Carb tries to paint our ancestors as unhealthy goons. Granted that was tongue in cheek but we can see how easy it is to push experimental food on the market with margarine, spam, and other crap.
      • adrianN 4y ago
        "Big Carb" is what allowed human population to grow to billions.
        • Bancakes 4y ago
          Okay, and you can argue we were naturally never supposed to be in the billions. You can argue if global warming wipes out our farms, we can only blame ourselves, and demographic crashes are a given, not a crysis.
          • adrianN 4y ago
            I'm not particularly religious, so I don't know about "supposed to be", but I see no ethical way of significantly reducing human population quickly enough for it to matter for climate change. It is much easier to change our behavior to reduce environmental impact. Switching everyone to a carnivore diet to spite "Big Carb" is certainly not the right direction.
• EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Great whataboutism. Or evangelical veganism, whatever your poison, really.
• Gordonjcp 4y ago
  • adrianN 4y ago
    You realize that a large fraction of the land that we farm produces fodder for livestock? Everyone being vegan would greatly reduce the amount of land we need to farm. Sure, some meat can be produced from agricultural waste or from grazing on pastures, but the reality of industrialized meat production is so far away from that that you might as well disregard it. Almost nobody would be able to afford meat anymore.
    • Gordonjcp 4y ago
      No, pretty much none of the land that we farm only produces fodder for livestock. When it does, it's because the land has been turned over to grass for a year. This is important, because if you don't do that the soil rapidly becomes useless for growing anything. We then cut and bale up the grass to feed to cattle and sheep over the winter. If you don't do this, you end up with nothing to eat, either from livestock or arable farming. We don't have enough arable land for everyone to be vegan.
      • adrianN 4y ago
        You might want to collect some citations and update the Wikipedia entry, because its citations paint a very different picture.
        • Gordonjcp 4y ago
          Everything on that Wikipedia article should be considered incorrect at best and outright fictional at worst.
          • adrianN 4y ago
            Find citations for that claim and update the article. It's a wiki.
• phatfish 4y ago
  So is it safe to assume you are a vegan who grows all their own food to minimise your impact on CO2 emissions, while you participate in the "trustless financial system"? Otherwise you are a hypocrite. Personally I will not participate in the "trustless financial system" AND try to eat less meat.
  • xvector 4y ago
    The suffering impact of a single cut of meat is greater than any amount of crypto I could ever mine. I am comfortable with my emissions. Those that eat meat are certainly hypocrites if they judge them.
    • phatfish 4y ago
      It is not just about what you alone can "mine", your participation is only made possible by ALL the miners burning electricity to keep the global state of the network. Without that combined wasted energy and CO2 generation there is no system for you to "benefit" from. Anyway, you didn't tell us if you have stopped eating meat.
      • xvector 4y ago
        Yes, I quit meat once I realized the sheer scale of the environmental and suffering footprint it had.
• imtringued 4y ago
  >The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could [1]. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it. I'm pretty sure the humans that developed those trustless financial systems made dietary choices that you would disapprove of. What am I even talking about? They are probably gods in your eyes and therefore allowed to break your arbitrary rules.
• blibble 4y ago
  how is it trustless? instead of policy being decided by elected representatives it's now decided by a few rando developers on github and mining pool cabals hardly an improvement