10 ms·
Every Bitcoin payment 'uses a swimming pool of water'
- colesantiago 3y agoHow is this the future of finance? This is such a waste of energy on an unprecedented scale for a 'coin' with no legitimate usecase other than ransomware payments and crime.
- infotainment 3y agoOnly useful for ransomware and crime? You forgot the most important use-case of all: pump and dump scams!
- superkuh 3y agoMy most important use case is paying my monthly online services bills (like VPSes, domain leasing, etc). But I guess we're all touching different parts of the elephant.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- incrudible 3y agoFor a totalitarian definition of crime, perhaps.
- vidarh 3y agoI don't do many bitcoin payments, but I can safely say that none of them have been for ransomware or crime. Not so sure I buy the "future of finance" part, but this framing is equally fanciful.
- ThalesX 3y agoI pay my VPN with Crypto and I love that I have the possibility to do this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gardenhedge 3y agoCan they just reuse the same water over and over?
- c22 3y agoThat's basically what we're all doing.
- vasco 3y agoI never really get this "used up the water". Unless it seeps deep into the core or "evaporates" into space we should be fine. Only bother might be at some point needing to use more energy for desalination and use cases for the brine that results.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoWhat is used is not water, but fresh water flow. In a given unit of time, in a certain region, a certain amount of water that will flow through it, due to rivers, rain or water stored in a dam. You can use some or all of that flow in that time period. If that flow is not used, then it is gone. If you use part of that flow on one thing, usually you can't use it for something else. The last tradeoff is what is often concerning.
- tripplyons 3y agoThey don't even need to reuse the water, it will find its way through the water cycle most of the time.
- superkuh 3y agoEvery fiat payment is backed by similar energy and resource usage by the standing military (or dependence on another nation's via other exchange) that gives it worth and stability. Bitcoin is laudable in that it's energy and resource use is at least non-violent.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoThese days cryptocurrency transactions are also backed by standing military and police, since fraudulent cryptocurrency transactions is a crime now in many countries [1]. > A Serbian man has been extradited to the United States, where he faces charges in two separate federal indictments in the Northern District of Texas and Eastern District of New York for his alleged participation in coordinated cryptocurrency and binary options schemes. [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-70m-cryptocurrency-and-binary-options-fraud-schemes-extradited-us https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-70m-cryptocurrency-and...
- abosley 3y agoI'm experiencing 4090 pricing violence.
- chollida1 3y ago> Every fiat payment is backed by similar energy and resource usage by the standing military (or dependence on another nation's via other exchange) that gives it worth and stability This has always struck me as a terrible rebuttal. This essentially means that the only reason that countries have armies is that they have a currency, which is obviously false, thus destroying the argument. I mean, France, doesn't have their own currency but still has a standing army.
- danShumway 3y agoBitcoin is as entangled in the military as any other currency. It only works with a functioning Internet, functioning power grid, with the ability to buy computer parts with regular currency, and it's regularly valued in fiat currency. So the idea that the military is an extrinsic cost that only applies to fiat currency is a complete myth, Bitcoin relies on the government. And even ignoring the fact that Bitcoin is regulated and there are government policies and laws dictating how exchanges work and it is seen by a large portion of the community as a speculative asset alongside traditional assets like stocks and bonds, the truth is that Bitcoin would collapse if society collapsed because global connectivity in order to synchronize the blockchain with everybody using the currency is a literal requirement of the technology. It isn't a federated system, there is one database that gets replicated everywhere. And that global connectivity and ability to replicate the database and to connect to miners is enforced by a standing military. It's especially silly to look at Bitcoin as independent from military presence given that the complaint is that Bitcoin uses a ton of power and water, and control of energy sources and access to natural resources is historically a giant influential factor in US foreign policy.
- JCharante 3y agoAnimal agriculture uses more water and yet advocates are silenced. People are willing to denounce anything as long as it doesn't personally affect them.
- danShumway 3y agoVegan here! If you're an omnivore you have my full permission to complain about Bitcoin's water usage. I personally give you my "vegan blessing" or whatever to do so even if you still eat lots of meat. I would love for more people to become vegan, our current meat industry has a very large negative environmental impact. But please do not use veganism as an excuse to care less about the world. People's inability or unwillingness to give up meat should never be used as an excuse to avoid conversations about other inefficiencies and bad behaviors. I'd love for people who care about the environment to give veganism a try or at the very least to reduce meat consumption. But if I can't get someone to do that, I'd still like for an omnivore to not use Bitcoin, especially given that veganism is an uphill social battle and Bitcoin thrives on hype and vibes and could genuinely see significant reduction with more conscious avoidance of the tech. So at the least, don't use Bitcoin, but also consider looking critically at meat consumption as well.
- npoc 3y agoI'm a vegan and bitcoiner and I'm afraid you have no idea what you're talking about concerning bitcoin. I recommend you watch some Michael Saylor interviews.
- danShumway 3y agoI've been watching Bitcoin since the early days, I understand the tech. "Bitcoiners" love to say that critics just don't understand what we're talking about, but unfortunately a lot of us do. Linking to yet another interview is not going to change that. Saylor started heavily pushing Bitcoin in 2020; frankly, I have been in this space significantly longer than he has. And Saylor is particularly funny to link to because Saylor is a poster child for treating Bitcoin as a primarily speculative asset. He is one of the prime examples I would give for why Bitcoin is not a useful currency. Early proponents of Bitcoin used to tell me that people like Saylor wouldn't exist and that the coin would be used as... well, a coin. I honestly wish they had been right, but they weren't. Instead the community pivoted from calling Bitcoin a currency to calling it a store of value; the whole point became getting as much of it as possible, holding it, not using it as a currency, and then trying to spark interest so that the held asset would rise in value. Suffice to say, I don't think there's much real-world value in that, I think it's a pointless shell game. There are lots of speculative assets that people can buy and lots of gambling games that people can play that don't waste this kind of energy. And even if you want to play a gambling game with a speculative asset, Bitcoin is a terrible cryptocurrency to play it with. It's been surpassed by other coins on pretty much every single technical measure from privacy to bandwidth to energy usage, and the fact that people are still consolidating around what is pretty objectively inferior technology at this point compared to other coins is proof positive to me that this is about the confidence game, not about the technology or about a movement. One more interview is not going to change that.
- kipchak 3y ago>In total, bitcoin consumed nearly 1,600 billion litres - also known as gigalitres (GL) - of water in 2021, the study, published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, suggests. It's too bad the study isn't linked, but the math seems a bit fudged to me. Maybe they're using the amount of water per block (144 per day) which records multiple transactions? For 2021 there were about 250,000-ish[1] daily transactions on BTC, so roughly 91 billion transactions. With 91 billion transactions using 1600 billion liters of water you get about 18 liters of water per transaction instead of the 75,000 or so liters a pool is. If you assume a 24 x 12 x 4 pool and use blocks instead of transactions, each block uses about as much water as a pool. [1]https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_transactions_per_day https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_transactions_per_day
- tripplyons 3y agoI agree. Measuring per-transaction mining work seems like a bad choice of metric because mining uses blocks of transactions. Maybe someone mixed up the two.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoThe correct answer to all this type of smear campaign (they do this to beef, among other thigns) is "yah, so what? If there's a sustainability problem raise the price of water until a sustainable amount is being used across all uses. If there's a claimed externality not being priced that externality exists for all uses, so raise the price until the externality is covered and see who is using what after that." This whole line of argument is utterly stupid because it assumes incorrectly that the complainer should have input into what I do in my life and that is the polar opposite of how a western country, especially the USA, works constitutionally.
- Simbio 3y agoCurrent bitcoin price is around 35k USD. This means that mining of one BTC going to cost you up to 35k USD (including the cost of equipment, electricity and everything else like the probability of finding a block). Why so? If the cost of production was higher than market BTC cost then it would be not profitable to mine. If cost is much lower then it's worth to buy a mining rig and start mining. 1 block gives 6.25 BTC for the block and around 0.5 BTC from transactions. 1 block contains 4k transactions.So 35k US/BTC * (6.25 BTC + 0.5 BTC) / 4k transactions ~= 59$ per transaction. That includes all energy spent by all active miners and full cost of equipment. Not sure if a "swimming pool of water" costs 60$. I guess not.
- woleium 3y agoonly useful if compared to e.g. a visa transaction though, right? we gotta have a payment system of some kind
- noipv4 3y agoCan we run these computers in space using tiny nuclear reactors where water cooling won't be necessary?
- npoc 3y agoAbsolutely we can, nice idea - although Antarctica might be more economically viable. Not that the water concern is at all legitimate.
- audray124 3y ago[flagged]