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Over 2 percent of the US's electricity generation now goes to Bitcoin
- octacat 3y ago"Only" 2 percent. Bitcoin mining should be illegal. And usage probably too, because otherwise miners would just move to country without good eco regulations. And eco damage would be just spread across all population.
- lurking15 3y agoYou're basically arguing that Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency is resilient to censorship. Good luck mounting the argument for establishing a global surveillance system that roots out non-compliance, sounds like something that won't be abused if only because of the sinister power it offers.
- octacat 3y agoyea, it is nice way to break local laws, sure. It is easy to track transactions on the block chain though - everyone sees them. I would say it is least anonymous way of doing transactions. Everyone knows about the transaction forever. Everyone sees the transaction. Infinitely worse than doing it in cash.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoStill less than the cost of securing the dollar!
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y agoThis is just so stupidly wasteful. I understand that people like bitcoin because it made them a bunch of money via ponzi economics and allows them to circumvent financial regulations and law enforcement. But its just so stupidly wasteful.
- pokstad 3y agoWhy does the government care about Bitcoin specifically? Why not focus on how much energy Facebook spends on analyzing user activity? Why not focus on how much energy analytics companies spend on tracking every click in the browser? Or video analysis YouTube does? Seems the big fish get away with using enormous amounts of energy because they lobby and pay lots of taxes.
- XCSme 3y agoBecause Bitcoin is useless? At least analytics can provide value for businesses and can help improve their product, or be notified if something goes wrong.
- pokstad 3y agoIf it’s useless, then why are they mining them in the first place? Seems to be a subjective thing to determine.
- XCSme 3y agoUseless, as in, it has no real value. Just like money. Imagine if someone would spend imense amount of non-renewable resources just to print money papers.
- pokstad 3y agoTechnically the US dollar is backed by the US government which includes a massive military to protect its interests. The government and military require enormous energy to do this. So the printing of the money by itself is not the only energy that paper money requires to work. By comparison, Bitcoin uses hardly any.
- XCSme 3y agoI think the military serves to protect the country, not the government. I doubt that the main reason to have an army is financial. There were armies way before the concept of money.
- webninja 3y agoThere’s a halving coming up in about 40 days which means the miners may reduce their mining and energy potentially about half. Then another halving again every 4 years thereafter.
- XCSme 3y agoDoesn't the halving mean that they will require 2x the energy to mine a block, as the rate will be lower?
- webninja 3y agoNo, a halving means miners get half of the Bitcoin rewards given the same amount of mining time and effort. The network emits 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes and that revenue will decrease to 3.25 bitcoin every 10 minutes. The purpose of this is (essentially) to reduce inflation. This will decrease the incentives for mining drastically making it sharply unprofitable for many older mining rigs. The cost of electricity will be more than the value of the predicted Bitcoin rewards many mining rigs could ever generate. Exceptions are low-cost power near remote hydroelectric/geothermal power plants and free electricity that people risk their lives in 3rd world counties to steal (since high-voltage kills). Some households produce extra solar electricity (perhaps incase new tech such as an Apple Vision Pro 2 comes out). Due to backwards lobbying efforts in most states by the local electric monopoly, solar/wind electricity can’t be sold back to the grid anymore so some solar households plug in a Bitcoin miner to burn off the otherwise worthless additional electricity. Some enterprising people use Bitcoin miners to heat pools such as one guy with a spa business. The electricity would’ve been wasted on heating them anyways. Despite these uncommon exceptions, the bulk of mining is elastically centered around the cost of electricity. Think Riot Mining or Marathon Digital Holdings as massive miner companies, whose hashing power is absolutely massive. They will certainly be affected. The price of Bitcoin would have to double from today’s price just for miners to earn the same amount as today. Nowadays, Bitcoin has to contend with Ethereum which uses over 99% less electricity.
- bcrl 3y agoIn other words, each bitcoin mined in the US directly results in more than 264 metric tonnes of CO2. This is based on the following rough calculation: 1.65 billion metric tonnes * 2% / (900 bitcoins per day * 38% * 365 days) Based on 2022 CO2 emissions from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 .
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fuzzieozzie 3y agoThe money laundering business is bigger than I imagined!
- ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y agoAnd the ransomware business!
- Jamustico 3y agoBecause only Crypto is used for money laundering, right? You would never guess what other businesses that your reddit mind thinks are legitimate are also used for money laundering... Shit take
- spaceman_2020 3y agoTry this: go to any OTC crypto market in any African country, or any country with high inflation and poor economic outcomes, like Philippines or Turkey. Ask around for the going rate for USDT/USDC Then check the official USD vs local currency exchange rate Compare the two and ask yourself: why are ordinary people on OTC platforms willing to pay a substantial premium for USDT/USDC? If you’re on HN, you’re likely smart enough to figure out why. And no, its not just plain “money laundering”.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mamidon 3y agoMaybe I'm not so smart.. but why would USD stable coins command a premium over USD itself? I totally get why the official exchange rate is probably bogus, but I would expect the black market rate to be the same for USD/USDT/USDC
- spaceman_2020 3y agoBecause it's hard to acquire and store USD. Banks - if they even have them - won't give them to you easily. Currency traders will charge a huge premium. And neither fixes the problem that you will be limited to hard cash - not easily spendable online and tough to store. USDC/USDT are liquid on exchanges as well as OTC markets, very easy to store, and increasingly easy to spend. Much of the western world is deeply ignorant of the sheer scale of this demand for USDT in the Global South. There are billions of people in these regions, and one thing is clear across all of them: they will prefer USD over their local currencies, but it's too hard to acquire this USD, especially in a digital form. Hence, USDT/USDC. I've personally hired people from Phillippines and Nigeria who preferred getting paid in USDT over their local currencies.
- elevaet 3y agoWhenever this kind of thing comes up, I hear bitcoin enthusiasts use strange logic to claim that it's good because most of this power is coming from renewables, or that if it's not then it's incentivizing the switch to renewables by increasing demand, and so on. Bollocks! Unlike other technologies that are incentivized to become more efficient over time, because of how competition over mining rewards works, this technology has the characteristic of consuming more and more energy the more it succeeds. It's designed to waste energy. Even if that was "green" energy, it's still just making heat out of electricity for pretend internet money. Energy that other things could be using.
- adam_arthur 3y agoEnergy is fungible anyway, so if it comes from renewables that means that renewable energy can no longer go towards other applications. The pollution is simply outsourced to other non-renewable applications
- t0bia_s 3y agoDo we have some comparison with energy consumption by banks?
- gloosx 3y agoBitcoin is actually useful for the people, so spending energy on it is not a waste. The waste is something not useful, like 877 billion U.S. dollars dedicated each year to the military of the United States. Or would you say it is an efficient spend and it is incentivised for even MORE efficiency? Not everyone around is supporting the idea that the government scam and it's "real" money is the best option for us all. Electricity is burned in exchange for the utility of the bitcoin, avoiding operations with traditional state-issued money, having a currency which nobody truly governs or controls but the people, and it is definitely here to stay since it is a revolutionary financial instrument. If it wasn't, it would simply be gone, and no-one in his sane mind would be "turning electricity into heat" for nothing. It is a natural economical progression for the humanity, to have the money nobody owns, and the maths behind it make it happen having it's natural energy toll, which is way more efficient that of any government. Commies go downvote, it is your bread
- 3y ago
- pixelpoet 3y agoIt sure would be nice if more people noticed proof of stake cryptocurrencies (which cut electricity usage by something like 99.99%) like Ethereum instead of the prevailing Bitcoin myopia.
- emurillo510 3y agoproof of stake is efficient but not decentralized in design. the rich get richer in proof of stake
- Zambyte 3y ago> the rich get richer in proof of stake Also true for proof of work. And basically any economic system that exists in the wild AFAIK.
- 0x64 3y agoThe minimum staking amount is very close to zero. Of course, directly participating in consensus by having the opportunity of building blocks requires 32 ETH (≈$75k), or 16/8 ETH ($37k/$18k) if you run a pool for other people through e.g. the trustless Rocket Pool system. The minimum cost to acquire an ASIC so that you can even _contribute_ to the consensus is very high (thousands), and to be profitable you have to have close to free electricity. The ironic thing is, that in PoW the "rich get richer" is abstracted away into a combination of economies of scale, and access to free/very cheap power. Plus all the e-waste and wasted power, whereas PoS runs on e-waste people run in their closet, pulling as little as sub-10 watts.
- everfree 3y agoThis centralizing effect is actually much more powerful in proof-of-work than proof-of-stake. Anyone can stake and earn the same % rewards, regardless of how much they have. But if you're bankrolled with hundreds of millions of dollars, you get a much higher mining % return than the little guys because you can design and manufacture your own silicon (or get bulk discounts), colocate next to power generation, and buy electricity in bulk.
- treyd 3y ago
- varispeed 3y agoObviously this is useful to someone or are we starting the culture of power shaming? Seems like some section of the media found that drugs / money laundering angle doesn't resonate with people so they try going about power usage. Sure if you don't use Bitcoin it may appear to you as wasteful, but so someone who doesn't drive may feel about people charging they cars if they could just walk or cycle. Ultimately, if they pay the bills, then what's the fuss about?
- jrflowers 3y ago> are we starting the culture of power shaming? This is a good point. Once something can be called a culture it becomes invalid and should be shunned, such as with hand washing
- qwytw 3y ago> Ultimately, if they pay the bills, then what's the fuss about? It's massive waste? How would you feel if someone bought 2 billion gallons of gasoline just to burn it in the middle of a desert biggest fire humanity has ever seen?
- everfree 3y agoI would want to make sure their purchase were taxed at a high enough rate to replace that gasoline with renewable energy, on top of the usual sales taxes. If that were the case, I would tell them to go for it, as their purchase would be a net benefit to society. If the energy used by bitcoin mining is irreplaceable, that just means we're not taxing it enough to replace it properly with renewables. The solution is simple, just tax industrial energy use so that it's not underpriced relative to the externalities it creates. Spend that tax revenue on bulking up the grid with renewables. Then let people buy however much they want and do whatever they want with it, at the right price.
- Dylan16807 3y agoBut we know those taxes don't exist right now. That would be a way to fix the problem, but it sounds like you agree that the problem exists and the burning in the thought experiment is a bad thing.
- legitster 3y agoI'm not a bitcoin enthusiast by any means, but this isn't necessarily as bad as it would seem if the miners have wholesale pricing with the power plants. Depending on the time of day and the type of electric source, power plants have excess power to shed. Miners are better situated than other industries to ramp up and down consumption. Some of the largest bitcoin operators in the US are located near hydroelectric power plants - for parts of the year dams literally have to dump water because the river has to flow but there is not enough power demand - and wholesale rates sometimes even go negative.
- viraptor 3y agoThis effectively disincentives expanding storage which would benefit everyone. Mining is getting rid of the issue of temporary excess power, so now the power plant needs to do more work overall to keep up with demand during other times.
- HeadsUpHigh 3y agoIt incentivizes building excess capacity. All you need is dynamic pricing so miners stop when there is grid demand. Texas is using this approach.
- viraptor 3y agoYes, but currently building excess capacity is a problem in itself. We can't install enough green energy production in the time we want, even ignoring the BTC demand. The extra capacity will not be fully carbon neutral and even just putting more generation in place creates negative externalities. Given the options of "more BTC, more energy production" and "no BTC, more energy storage and shifting existing production", we as humans would be better off with the second scenario.
- ephbit 3y ago> .. "no BTC, more energy storage and shifting existing production" .. The underlying claim to this statement is: more storage could easily be built because it is economically feasible. Which is - apparently - not the case. Apparently, the end consumers of electricity (private households, businesses) are not willing to pay enough money for more storage. Or the other way round: storage is too expensive for it to be deployed at a significantly greater scale than it currently is. Cheap electricity storage is a tough problem. If storage was much cheaper, we'd see much more of it being deployed. As always, politics has all the levers to set the direction here. Subsidize storage massively and more storage is what you'll get. What politics can not do through such policies: lower the overall cost of storage for the consumers of electricity (apart from stimulating effects such as economies of scale, ..). Why? Because the subsidies will still be paid by the consumers in their role as tax payers. You don't get around the fundamental principle that everyone is sensitive to prices. If electricity storage were cheaper, we'd have more of it.
- FactKnower69 3y agoI was an early adopter of BOINC, a distributed scientific computing platform powering research projects, often protein folding with applications to Alzheimer's and cancer such as Folding@home and Rosetta@home, which distribute computationally expensive calculations to users' PCs who wished to donate their spare computing power. Sound familiar? Every time I think about how much energy is wasted on worthless speculation, I'm sick to my stomach thinking about how close we came to this technology being useful or productive in literally any way. It is disgusting. It is vile.
- balderdash 3y agoI had a Boinc instance on my home computer, I never understood why there weren’t/aren’t more opportunities to donate cpu time…
- FreeRadical 3y agoIs the existence of Bitcoin limiting BOINC? Did it limit its progress?
- cozzyd 3y agoshould rename to BOINCIT so it's a perfect anagram.
- horacemorace 3y ago[dead]
- webninja 3y agoHow would someone even calculate this? Aren’t all bitcoins mined initially completely anonymous by design? I’d like to see the math behind this calculation because it seems more likely to be a made up number to support some kind of agenda.
- everfree 3y agoFrom the article: > So, the EIA decided it needed a better grip on what was going on. To get that, it went through trade publications, financial reports, news articles, and congressional investigation reports to identify as many bitcoin mining operations as it could. With 137 facilities identified, it then inquired about the power supply needed to operate them at full capacity, receiving answers for 101 of those facilities. > If running all-out, those 101 facilities would consume 2.3 percent of the US's average power demand. That places them on the high side of the Cambridge Center estimates.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- goo_oober 3y agoI'd really like for this to NOT BE TRUE. But let's say that it is. People running bitcoin miners 24/7 are using electricity, which keeps the electric company PROFITABLE. Why is that a bad thing? I know that the shampoo manufacturers would just LOVE it if I bought 10 million bottles of shampoo and poured them straight down the drain. Oh, the sales figures are doing great! Number goes up! I know that the Mountain Dew manufacturers would absolutely LOVE it if I bought 20 million 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew every day. So, BITCOIN is making capitalism PROFITABLE. Discuss why anyone should think this is a bad thing.
- beAbU 3y agoThink of the environmental impact when creating 10M bottles of shampoo, the absolute mess when pouring it down the drain and the resulting plastic waste.
- brewtide 3y agoThis is all happening anyways, just at a far slower scale.
- adlpz 3y agoIt's called externalities. Google it.
- everfree 3y agoIn one word, externalities. Bitcoin is helping reveal that externalities have never been properly factored into electricity prices in the USA. In other words if you purchase too much electricity at market price, you're using more than your "fair share", which should be impossible in a properly functioning market. The simple solution of course is to just tax industrial energy use properly, no matter what you're using it for. As you start using so much energy that you're putting real strain on the grid, your energy taxes should go up asymptotically to the point where if you keep paying, the government can afford to meet your energy demands with renewables construction.
- knorker 3y agoA better comparison is that you bought 10 million bottles of forever chemicals, and poured them down the drain. Dupont would be ecstatic, but it would still not be a good thing.
- happytiger 3y agoX
- jmull 3y ago> let’s examine the hypocrisy of singling out bitcoin specifically It isn't being singled out though. There's widespread concern across a broad set of cases where energy is being used. Also, if you recognize that the use of energy isn't always bad, but it's the overuse of energy that is problematic, it's natural to prioritize: you want more of the energy usage to be on the more beneficial things and less on the less beneficial things. So you might target bitcoin on its merits, not because of hypocrisy. The problem with your argument is that it means either everything should be addressed simultaneously in any discussion of energy usage or nothing should be, since you can make the same argument no matter what the specific topic is.
- sumeno 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- happytiger 3y agoTrue. I removed the comment.
- Scarblac 3y agoBecause what we get in return is so incredibly tiny with Bitcoin. Less than 450k transactions per day, world wide. With most of them just people speculating.
- lgleason 3y agoWhat's funny it that they are trying to green wash Bitcoin by holding events in places like Costa Rica and talking about "green" bitcoin mining is etc... It's kind of like the for profit companies that are "helping" the "underserved" people in the global south with Bitcoin by selling them a volatile and risky asset (while skimming their transaction fees from these people). Feels like an un-sustainable bubble.
- j0ba 3y agoLet's get rid of bitcoin. Then we can use "green" dollars. They don't need servers to run. Well, except for all the banks, federal reserves, and credit card processors. I wonder how much electricity they take to run. Well, probably not 2% of all US electricity. But why are banks so secure? I guess because of police partially. I guess those police need electricity too. But we need them anyways, so I guess that only partially counts. But why dollars? Why not pesos, or euros? The dollar is backed by the US military, of course. I wonder how much electricity the military uses. Anyways. Let's get rid of bitcoin. That will solve the climate crisis! We can sell anti-bitcoin stickers made in China on Amazon to show our support!
- happytiger 3y agoThe existing financial system uses roughly double what bitcoin does.
- sumeno 3y agoHow many orders of magnitude more is the number of transactions supported by the existing financial system? Visa alone can process 24,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin can handle 7
- happytiger 3y agoI’m just answering the question. Not trying to start a war. I do think it’s important to have healthy alternative financial systems. Probably need a more energy efficient one.
- sumeno 3y agoBut it's not an alternative to the financial system, outside of crime in order to do anything useful with it you have to move it back into the existing financial system.
- happytiger 3y ago
- balderdash 3y agoI don’t know how you can have this conversation without talking what the marginal utilization of that energy is - do I care if crypto miners want to mine at night in west Texas when wind is generating energy and the wholesale cost is negative (I.e. there is really no marginal productive use for that generation)? Absolutely not. It’s a trickier question when that mining activity is competing with generation assets that could be charging a car or powering a manufacturing facility…
- XCSme 3y agoThere's also stuff like Folding@Home which would be a better use for that energy.
- acdha 3y ago> do I care if crypto miners want to mine at night in west Texas when wind is generating energy and the wholesale cost is negative (I.e. there is really no marginal productive use for that generation)? Absolutely not. This is complicated though because power grids can resell that slack capacity further away if there’s a persistent surplus and other users will notice (e.g. cheap power really incentivizes overnight EV charging or even industrial users expanding). If all of the slack is being used for unproductive purposes, those positive feedback cycles will be delayed – unlike useful work, there’s no end of cycles which bitcoin mining can use so the potential power consumption is effectively infinite.
- 9dev 3y agoThat’s like saying meat is not bad per se, because there are happy cows raised on green pastures getting petted by children all day. Yea, those cows do exist - the three of them are just outnumbered by the billions of animals kept in killing factories. The amount of bitcoin mined exclusively in west Texas when the energy is at a net negative is negligible compared to the rest of the mining activity, by people who couldn’t care less about anything other than their profits. There is NOTHING charming about that technology.
- bgitarts 3y ago[dead]
- londons_explore 3y agoI question the math here... I suspect that miners are secretly using more effective hardware than exists on the open market, and therefore they probably get more hashes out of fewer watts.
- gregfjohnson 3y agoIf I understand correctly, the computational expense of Bitcoin mining is increased periodically to track any improvements in hardware or software. The value of Bitcoin is thus supposed to be tied to some underlying measure of value. We used to have gold-backed currency. Then we went to fiat currency. It seems like with Bitcoin we are going to coal-backed currency. If nuclear fusion became a thing and energy prices went to near zero, would Bitcoin expand to the point that it was using 99.9% of all electricity? Personally I think this is a ghastly waste of energy.
- njarboe 3y agoIs that more or less money than is spent on Halloween?
- tcmart14 3y agoI like this. Measure distances in giraffes and money in terms of halloween spending.
- mgamache 3y agoYou know I see these FUD articles every so often, there's some truth to it, but more interesting to me is the timing. BTC is probably going to see lower prices before the post-halving run up. This makes me think it's more likely part of an effort to get BTC at a discount then it is an organic event. I'll put Lyn Alden's response to the cliam here: Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Isn’t a Problem. Here’s Why. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
- photochemsyn 3y agoAccording to the article, this assumes mining operations are running full-power 24-7, which is hard to determine. The article does try to match increases in regional power plant output with bitcoin mining center growth, but that's somewhat circumstantial with many confounding factors. The issue is: > "The best data on IT’s energy and emissions characteristics are closely held proprietary secrets among tech companies, which compounds these problems." (2021) "Does not compute: Avoiding pitfalls assessing the Internet's energy and carbon impacts", Koomey & Masanet, Joule https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(21)00211-7 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(21)00211-7 Additionally, whenever you see these kind of estimates you really want the data acquisition method applied across the entire sector in a uniform fashion, to avoid someone trying to cook the data a bit in their favor. This is a very common problem in the energy sector, e.g. energy input/cost estimates for building and operating solar/wind/nuclear/gas/etc power plants tend to suffer from this agenda-driven skewing. Thus, you'd also want to see energy use estimates for all the AWS and Google etc data centers (NSA Utah?) side by side with the bitcoin miners and the high-frequency traders and the industrial manufacturing centers and households etc, and then check that the sum of estimates from different sources obtained via the same method is <= 100% of production and so on.
- lurking15 3y agoBitcoin incentivizes efficient generation and use of energy. Until people can find economic uses for, say, the immense solar energy produced in a desert, bitcoin will use it all up because it can be deployed practically anywhere. Likewise anywhere there's excess wasted energy, it will use it. So in that respect, bitcoin finances the construction of energy generation where it is generated the cheapest but may have no other market otherwise due to geographic isolation and transportation. Unfortunately people are biased for one reason or another against accepting this reality, seemingly due to a lack of imagination and prejudice.
- octacat 3y ago"Efficient" use is using 2% of all energy just to do 7 transactions a second and allow people to speculate?
- lurking15 3y agoEfficient use means ability to be deployed to consume. The point being that energy is over-produced as a matter of fact in order to be a reliable utility and bitcoin can be throttled on a dime to profitably match supply to demand unlike much else. But it sounds like you're purposely misunderstanding.
- octacat 3y agoSo call it easy to deploy, not efficient use. Or "ease of utilisation of excess energy generation". The point is that bitcoin would use as much energy as possible as long as it is profitable regardless of fact it is over-produced or under-produced. And regardless if it is "clean" or not. It also would drive prices up, we already saw it with prices of GPUs/memory.
- lurking15 3y agoYou're playing semantic games when efficient does not exclusively mean "waste-less" it means capable or effective, which is exactly what Bitcoin is, a very effective way to consume energy on command. You're also arbitrarily calling Bitcoin wasteful. You could subjectively categorize any aspect of existing as wasteful or unnecessary. > The point is that bitcoin would use as much energy as possible as long as it is profitable regardless of fact it is over-produced or under-produced. And regardless if it is "clean" or not. It's hard to say that electricity is wasted when no one else is buying it and that's exactly the argument that the article discounts. Low cost and negative cost electricity (that's already produced!) cannot be wasted and consuming it through any means, as someone willing to purchase it, balances the operation of a grid. The fact that no one else is finding a profitable use is their problem and opportunity in a market. Bitcoin will use whatever energy people decide they wish to purchase to use it. It's not a magic energy vacuum. I can't help but imagine you'd be outlawing people to buy solar panels if they wanted to use that off-grid to do whatever you arbitrarily deem wasteful. The entire thrust of the article is about controlling and demonizing the economic decisions of free people in a market at the behest of political agendas. > It also would drive prices up, we already saw it with prices of GPUs/memory. Yes consumption of anything generally drives up prices. Should we ban PC video gaming because they also drive up prices of computer parts? Video games are wasteful too. We could be entertaining ourselves with card games or marbles. Printing money drives up prices too.
- razemio 3y agoAllright. I bite. Why is the energy cheap enough, to make big mining operations profitable? Why isn't it taxed if it is needed elsewhere. What happens, if there is to much energy being produced by plants? Why is it, that sometimes electricity gets sold for negative rates. I am not a hardcore bitcoin fan, but I giggle a little when those transactions versus energy consumption arguments come up. Maybe my views are wrong, I would love to check if somebody can change my opinion on this topic.
- octacat 3y agoEnergy could be taxed higher, but it would make other users (like regular people) of energy unhappy. So far energy is "cheap", but it does not cover the total eco damage it makes.
- razemio 3y agoYou could tax mining. Sure, this won't stop private miners, but it is impossible to hide a big mining operation, if you are using the public grid. Most of them are using their own solar anyway, so I am not sure what all this fuss is about.
- octacat 3y agoWe do not know what kind of generation they use. Probably the cheapest one. We do not know who operates them (probably people who have a lot of money). And they do not produce their own panels, driving cost up for other people on the free market. They would not tax mining/crypto though, because gov is interested in it. And it would be sold to people like "freedom" (but would be used by people who has a lot of money for speculation/tax avoidance).
- octacat 3y agoRegulating mining would be a responsible economic policy. Like not printing money. Or regulating speculative markets (derivatives). But we currently doing our best to be least responsible :)
- randomNumber7 3y agoI wonder what would happen to bitcoin if the war on drugs would be stopped.
- ekns 3y agoPower consumption is one side of the coin. The net utility is another: - With sufficient demand-scaling, Bitcoin incentivizes more power generation capacity since it's the buyer of first resort, establishing some floor on electricity price. This makes additional investment into renewables etc. more sustainable. E.g. where I live, there are days of slightly negative prices, and those clearly are not sustainable, so Bitcoin is the perfect way to ensure we get plentiful cheap energy with continuing investments. - There's a case to be made that there are more and longer wars under fiat currencies since money-printing is a hidden tax that no one votes for, making it possible to fight in wars that exhaust all state resources, whereas under a Bitcoin standard the wars would be few and limited in scope. Additionally, US Space Force's Jason Lowery argues that Bitcoin is a weapons technology in cyberspace, and the global Bitcoin mining competition is a form of "soft war", and further argues that a constant "soft war" is more efficient way to defend property rights. The latter two points are not yet all that salient but imo that is the world we're heading towards inevitably. Bitcoin eventually outcompetes other forms of money as a layered technology and leads to this "hyperbitcoinized" world where they hold true.
- sph 3y agoWhy are we focusing so much on reducing energy usage, rather than making energy, especially green energy, cheaper and more accessible? No one is boiling the oceans to mint BTC. Bitcoin's value (not only the monetary value of it) scales with global access to energy. So what? Why is that such a problem? What it is, is a convenient scapegoat for the anti-crypto mobs to complain about. Bitcoin is not stealing energy from anything, it is not making it more expensive nor it is the direct cause of global warming: a Bitcoin mined on solar is worth the same as a Bitcoin mined on fossil fuels. We are literally missing the forest for the trees, and to me, this topic is a populist slogan for tech-educated people that want another reason to have the big bad cryptocurrencies. Global warming is a major threat to our society, and while the major culprits and those that stand to benefit from the status quo continue with impunity, we, the people, are fighting among ourselves on inconsequential topics like Bitcoin energy usage.
- randomNumber7 3y agoIn the mid term not all energy will be produced green. So more energy usage means more CO2. Putting a fair price on CO2 would solve the problem for bitcoin (and many others). That sadly will never happen, unless the world somehow gets a unified government (imo).
- johnfernow 3y agoYou can have a carbon tax with a border adjustment. If goods are imported from a country without an equivalent (or stronger) carbon tax, then those goods would be subject to a fee at the border. The EU is considering is a system like this, which could be very impactful since they're the 2nd largest economy in the world. If the US, the world's largest economy, also implemented such a system, then there would undoubtedly be a large global impact in reducing emissions. Creating the political will to do so is difficult of course. Citizens' Climate Lobby has been working on trying to pass a carbon fee with a border adjustment since 2007, though unfortunately with increasing political polarization it has been difficult. I wouldn't rule out the possibility though — political change can be very slow in the US, but CCL is clearly a group with extreme patience and a focused goal, but is willing to be pragmatic and advocate for any improvements as opposed to taking nothing. Admittedly I haven't volunteered for them in a quite some time, but in the past (at least at where I was at the time), the people I worked with seemed level headed and goal oriented — they may not have always personally liked the Representatives or staff that they were meeting, but they kept personal opinions to themselves and were laser focused on trying to convince them of joining the Climate Solutions Caucus and sponsoring a carbon fee. Perhaps the EU looking to implement one with a border fee adjustment may be the push the US needs to make it happen here.
- verisimi 3y agoIs this a crypto or BTC issue? Eg if Ethereum were the main crypto, are they more environmentally friendly?
- timbit42 3y agoBTC and any cryptocurrencies that are PoW. Ethereum is PoS and therefore more environmentally friendly, yes.
- gojomo 3y agoNotably: the article text, and referenced source (US Energy Information Administration), contradict the headline's claim. In the text, we see the "over 2%" (specifically "2.3%") number is based on a survey and the conjecture "if [those facilities were] running all-out". But they don't run all-out! The article itself mentions facilities that shut down when grids under peak load. But also, if you click through to the linked US EIA study the article reports about – https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 – you get the following verbatim undistorted information: "Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption." – that is: not necessarily or truly "over 2%" as implied by ArsTechnica's deceptive headline & spin. Perhaps as low as 0.6%! "In addition, cryptocurrency miners in areas with fluctuating power prices have reduced their electricity use in response to periods of high prices in wholesale power markets, given the sensitivity of their operational profitability to electricity prices." "In practice, cryptocurrency mining facilities frequently run at less than their maximum designed capability." Bitcoin mining is specifically drawn to just those times & places where electricity is especially cheap, and stops on a dime the moment rates surge over what's mining-profitable, due to other peaking demand or sagging supply. Thus the strained assumption of always-running-full that's required for the "over 2%" headline is false. The EIA reports they "lack the data to provide a well-sourced estimate" of actual utilization, but at one point hand-waves a guess "80%". I suspect it's even lower, but even at EIA guess: 80% of 2.3% is less than, not "over", 2%. Ultimately, though any negative externalities of Bitcoin's energy consumption can and should be addressed by adding our best estimates of the cost of such externalities into the electric rates paid by miners – & all other electricity consumers. That solves not just Bitcoin's externalities – but those of every other energy user. Further, the way proof-of-work mining works, & difficulty adjusts, forces only those with the lowest-cost electricity to be profitable, in the long run. Difficulty rises to erase the profitability of everyone else. And in any sane energy system, the lowest-cost electricity will tend to be from sagging demand at mismatched-generation places & times: excess wind/nuclear/hydro power at night, excess solar power at peak daylight. That is: electricity that isn't (& for the moment couldn't) be used for other things, and is even sometimes sold at negative prices when grid/generation stability requires someone to take the load. In an ideal & rational generation grid, these regional/diurnal cycles could mean tons of electricity – far more than 2% of annual usage, by raw KWh, but not price paid – could be soaked up with countercyclical users like Bitcoin mining. And in so helping with utilities' fixed-costs & demand-smoothing, that consumption would primarily benefit other grid users' costs and reliability. It also provides de facto subsidies to cleaner-but-spikier generation (wind/solar) or cleaner-but-harder-to-adjust generation (nuclear/hydro) – relative to traditional fossil-fuels. That is, no surprisingly high "X%" (X < 50) of some superficially-disfavored electricity use should necessarily cause concern – it depends entirely on exactly when/where/how that X% is taken. Some uses, & generation, are "essentially free (or better)" with regard to any limited resources or externalities of concern.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]