11 ms·

Full disclosure: I'm a bitcoiner. That said -- I feel that any arguments along the lines of "humanity should use less energy" are doomed to failure. More techn

• Telemoto 4y ago
  You clearly favour cheap money over any responsibility or accountability. Yes because of you we will need to lobby and start pushing more for Bitcoin ban. And yes of course we need cheap and lots of renewable energy but if you would actually spend your time and energy to actually read up on things like climate change you would also see that FIRST we need to compensate so much current normal energy consumption before we can start playing again with Bitcoin etc. I really really would like to understand how smart people (assuming people on hn have a certain amount of it, I might just be wrong here) totally ignore critical and relevant topic climate change but spend so much time defending Bitcoin. Have you not seen any drought this year? Have you not seen the pictures around the globe like from floods? Did you not ready anything fr the IPCC? Do you just look at money money money? People on hn also have family and might create new humans. What do you think will help your kids or kids from your siblings more? Bitcoin or a stable planet a?
• silexia 4y ago
  I agree. Nuclear?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • bluepnume 4y ago
    Yes. Please. And soon.
• wmf 4y ago
  Arguments about "humanity should waste less energy" OTOH are in bounds. The number one goal of humanity should be to find or create sources of energy that give us orders of magnitude more supply than there is demand. Unfortunately that's politically off the table so we're left squabbling over scarce energy.
  • imgabe 4y ago
    The people mining bitcoin are clearly getting value from it. Maybe it doesn't have a use for you in your life, but obviously for a lot of people it does, and not just as speculation. If it was not providing benefit to people, they wouldn't be using it. Unilaterally declaring something "waste" because it's not of use to you personally is pretty small-minded.
    • Euphorbium 4y ago
      Unilaterally declaring something not a waste, because it only harms the 99.99% is pretty small minded of you.
    • wmf 4y ago
      I'm not making a personal judgement. PoW is wasteful relative to PoS just like incandescent light bulbs are wasteful compared to LEDs.
      • mw888 4y ago
        The two are fundamentally different. PoS is less secure on a deeper level, you can accumulate stake with no barriers - cheap energy (and that’s just the first step) not so much.
    • thedrbrian 4y ago
      how many are using it compared to those hodling? And how many are using it at 3 TPS?
• 300bps 4y ago
  Searching for less harmful sources of energy can be done at the same time as pointing out frivolous uses of energy. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
  • jkepler 4y ago
    Frappucinos are frivolous uses of energy. Where ought one draw the line?
    • socialismisok 4y ago
      Are they? If they are, then other things we do for pleasure must also be, right? Are videogames? Books? What about theater? I painted my office lavender last year, was the industry that made that possible a frivolous use of energy? What about eating beef? Certainly a hamburger is as frivolous as a frappucino, right? Or, it could be that none of the above are frivolous at all...
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • TheDong 4y ago
      I draw the line at adversarial wasting of energy. Bitcoin needs to waste energy for security. If humanity manages to produce twice the energy, bitcoin needs to waste so much that the economic price of the energy to attack it is similar, so likely bitcoin would have to use twice as much energy to produce the same good. On the other hand, if humanity were to produce twice as much energy, your frappucino would still take the same amount (or less if the machines get more efficient somehow!), and would maybe even become cheaper with the cheaper cost of electricity. Adversarial proof of work is designed to not be able to become more efficient. It is designed to only operate in energy scarcity. Without PoW, creating a fusion reactor may mean energy is effectively free for everyone. With PoW, electricity must have a high enough cost that it deters attacking bitcoin, so anyone who owns bitcoin has a vested interest in wasting electricity until it is scarce and costs money again.
• jedimastert 4y ago
  > It's not a question of whether that's good or bad, it's just inevitable. Things are always inevitable until they aren't. The ozone depleting was "inevitable" until it wasn't. I don't find this "tragedy of the commons" style argument very convincing when you know that what you're doing is harmful. > The number one goal of humanity should be to find or create sources of energy that give us orders of magnitude more supply than there is demand. Agreed. That's in the future. Right now, however, there is an environmental cost to energy usage that's simply being ignored. Costs should always be balanced with what they produce. Currently, the environmental cost of bitcoin is far exceeding the benefits, and the vast majority of people participating aren't even concerned with any of the benefits of bitcoin other than trying to make a buck.
  • gwicks56 4y ago
    Why would we not tax the source of the problem. ie dirty energy generation via a carbon tax? That would then incentivize all energy use to become greener, rather than ad-hoc singling out individual use cases? A decent carbon tax would eliminate most dirty proof of work mining, as electricity is the major cost
    • DennisP 4y ago
      We absolutely should, but it seems unlikely that we will anytime soon. And to reduce Bitcoin's emissions it would have to be a global tax, which seems even more unlikely. For most products, a country can tax imports when other countries don't have corresponding taxes, but that's not really possible with Bitcoin.
• strings29 4y ago
  This is exactly what is happening here. Every discussion around the so called bitcoin climate issues always boils down to. We don't think it's worth while energy usage. Ironically the fact that Bitcoin uses energy is exactly why these attacks will fail. There is no way you are going to convince grid providers to stop serving Bitcoin miners. When miners contribute huge financial intensives to not only pay for grid improvements but for the roll out of greener energy. Green advocates cant foot the bill for cleaner energy. But Bitcoin can.
  • Telemoto 4y ago
    Bitcoin can't do that. Bitcoin will consume as much cheap energy as it can get. This leads to more consumption of energy through Bitcoin and not less. There is a slo nothing worse for Bitcoin to not keeping it running. So the incentive is also to be were you can run it reliable. And as usual the pure capitalistical economy is shit in regulating itself therefore laws are required (we already have tons of laws to protect people because stuff like asbestos is great as long as you don't pay for the hospital bill). Bitcoin takes energy and increases demand for solar etc while consuming it and making it unavailable. It even eats solar panels as Bitcoin is a global market while energy is more often than not local. It's quite depressing to see such kind of nonsense when we clearly in a position were climate change costs us more and more every year and we still talk about bullshit arguments from Bitcoin instead of talking how to cleanup our current mess. IF Bitcoin/crypto can be an interesting side hustle AFTER we solved climate change, I don't know. But Bitcoin will not stop the droughts etc.
    • strings29 4y ago
      Whats nonsense, is this idea that Bitcoin will consume as much energy as it can get. That's complete bullshit. Bitcoin mining is not static. The difficulty adjustment is specifically designed so that blocks are found in an eta of 10min . This means that there are diminishing returns. There is a limit to how much energy can be used before it's no longer economically feasible to mine. Whats worst is you discuss energy locality. But you failed to consider energy capture in locations where is is not feasible to transport the energy or there is no way to use the energy. eg Bitcoin mining at remote natural gas sites using methane which normally just be burnt off to CO2 reaping no financial benefits. This alone could make Bitcoin carbon negative. Not to mention landfill methane etc etc. The idea that using less energy to foster more efficient energy is ridiculous. The only way to drive greener energy is to foster competition and intensives to innovate greener technologies. Which is exactly what Bitcoin does. There no way a free society can dictate what people use energy for, simply because some people disagree on whats useful to them but not others. It's completely anti competitive. And anti-competitive practices will always stifle innovation. I'm not here to change your mind. I'm simply setting the record straight. Due to the distributed nature of Bitcoin your laws are pointless. Bitcoin mining will move to more innovative locations. But beware those place will gain all of the benefits that healthy competition provides and they will end up with far superior electrical grids then locations that stifle innovation.
• xracy 4y ago
  > I feel that any arguments along the lines of "humanity should use less energy" are doomed to failure. I think this is true to the extent that it affects people's day-to-day, but I disagree in that I think uses that aren't integral to people's entertainment, and well-being, are pretty on the table. Bitcoin falls into that category. We could turn off all of the bitcoin miners tomorrow, and other than news headlines, most people wouldn't even notice. That's a ripe area for cutting.
  • junofan 4y ago
    You mean you wouldn’t notice. That’s kinda the problem with authoritarianism.
    • xracy 4y ago
      I said what I meant.
• Aunche 4y ago
  >It's not a question of whether that's good or bad, it's just inevitable. Nonsense. Almost everyone is going to agree that powering ventilators a country that's too poor to upgrade to renenwables is a better use of energy than rolling coal. >The number one goal of humanity should be to find or create sources of energy that give us orders of magnitude more supply than there is demand. Ironically, by calling it our number one goal, you're implying that energy used to develop sustainable energy (e.g. power rare earth metal mining machinery) is a better use of energy than any other type of energy consumption.
• verisimilitudes 4y ago
  The argument is clear. Bitcoin is bad because most of Hacker News missed the boat and because the environment is an easy excuse. Meanwhile, inefficient webshit such as Slack running on millions of computers or sending megabytes of traffic over the Internet for basic shit is fine, because those produce acceptable money. Also, it's much harder to estimate the energy waste from constantly surveilling people to send Turing-complete advertisements to their phones but, again, those make USD, so they're okay.
  • elevaet 4y ago
    I dont think that's a correct assessment of HN. I would wager that if you polled the community you'd find a very high ratio of some of the earliest adopters here. Many of us are very analytical and looked closely at how bitcoin works wrt energy usage and decided that it's not a good technology, and sold our stacks long ago. Personally i got out just before the peak in 2017 or 2018 whenever that was, and this was an ethical decision based on the energy usage. My first btc purchased was probably around 2014, so I made some money, but it feels dirty and I dont want any part in the scheme. The reason I share my anecdote is to provide a counter example to what I think you imagine. I'm quite sure there are many people like me on here. HN as a whole is pretty on top of tech and areas of high growth obviously.
    • strings29 4y ago
      Well a 400b dollar market cap disagrees with you. If the energy usage was not justified then nobody would actually mine it. Which means more people think its worth while than not. The great thing is even though we all respect your choice not to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin will continue to work as it was intended and there is not much you can do about it. You are better of conserving your own energy then Bitcoins.
      • Telemoto 4y ago
  • Telemoto 4y ago
• Ekaros 4y ago
  I view reducing waste as very reasonable goal. If we waste less energy and materials on anything we both improve quality of living and better use resources with less impact. Bitcoin is nothing but waste.
• thefz 4y ago
  > Then we can stop arguing about which uses of energy are legitimate and which aren't. Throwing tons of co2 into the atmosphere for a personal profit alone is questionable and I will always fight it. Especially because unlike the creation of goods, for which co2 might be a byproduct, you are generating no value by mining btc.
  • strings29 4y ago
    what an arrogant proposition. That's so many things that use energy that have zero value subjectively speaking. But nobody suggests people don't do those things. I'm not even going to list some of the for sake of being called a hypocrite. Whats even more insulting. Is people abusing Bitcoin's transparency and deterministic features to spit facts. All while they partake in their guilty pleasures. Pleasures who's energy usage we can't even begin to quantify. And to add insult to injury their are an estimated 1.8 billion people in the world that do not have bank accounts due to things like fees and minimum balances or failed states. It's estimated there are 55 million in the US alone. But you know what? screw those people who can self bank using Bitcoin at zero cost and zero maintenance fees. Because you simply don't see value in that.
    • thefz 4y ago
      > And to add insult to injury their are an estimated 1.8 billion people in the world that do not have bank accounts due to things like fees and minimum balances or failed states. It's estimated there are 55 million in the US alone. I would agree if miners were hobbyists with a spare old PC in their basement crunching blocks, but the network is definitely overprovisioned for the amount of transactions now and you and I both know that miners are in for the money. What was born as an incentive to participate is now the sole reason to mine. > But you know what? screw those people who can self bank using Bitcoin at zero cost and zero maintenance fees. Because you simply don't see value in that. The cost is there, you just don't see it because CO2 is transparent.
      • strings29 4y ago
        yes miners have an incentive to protect the network. Essentially they are providing a service. That's the whole point, Bitcoin is a closed system and because people are inherently greedy that greed is used to benefit the greater good. If bitcoin was over provisioned then miners would capitulate. Which actually does happen from time to time. Also you make an assumption that miners are only providing service per transaction. This assumption is wrong. Due to how merkle tree's work bitcoin makes it expensive to add blocks to the tree but cheap to verify the whole tree. Each new block protects and verifies all previous blocks and transactions.