14 ms·

Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

239 points by CharlesW 3y ago

superkuh 3y ago
And how much energy does maintaining the military that backs US currency use? Much more and it's violent. The use of energy to protect bitcoin from attack from nation states is non-violent. It really is an efficient and ethical use of the energy.
- IncreasePosts 3y ago
  Do you think the US wouldn't need or want a military if the whole world switched to bitcoin tomorrow?
- Ma8ee 3y ago
  Your argument could be valid if bitcoins were actually useful.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  While yes, the military uses a ton of energy and shouldn't exist at its size, that doesn't mean the crypto internet casino is a good use of energy. I'm curious about the statistics of crypto use to buy goods and services vs the crypto use for investment, gambling, scams, rugpulls, etc. I wonder how much energy was used for NFTs which are neither efficient or ethical.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  I wish US military could additionally use that 2.3% power.
  - estebank 3y ago
    > The Department of Defense spews so much greenhouse gas every year that it would rank as the 55th worst polluter in the world if it were a country, beating out Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal, according to a new paper from Brown University’s Costs of War project. > Why so much? Well, first off, there’s all those military buildings (some 560,000 on bases around the world) to power, heat, and cool. That accounts for about 40 percent of the total. The rest goes toward operations like moving troops and carrying out missions. The biggest CO2 culprit is, by far, planes. “Aircraft are extremely thirsty,” Crawford said. https://grist.org/politics/u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-most-countries/ https://grist.org/politics/u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-... US: 14.9 tons of co2 Sweeden: 3.6 tons https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Billion tons.
- throw0101d 3y ago
  > The use of energy to protect bitcoin from attack from nation states is non-violent. It really is an efficient and ethical use of the energy. Can Bitcoin be used to stop people from attacking ships going through the Suez Canal? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis Can Bitcoin be used to discourage people from grabbing marine territory from other countries? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line
  - afroboy 3y ago
    If the US Army didn't assault and helped terrorists nation there, those attacks wouldn't happen in the first place.
- mminer237 3y ago
  Are you implying that we could or should replace USD with BTC? Bitcoin uses over 2% of the energy to process 0.02% of the transactions. Aside from all the geopolitical & economic detriments that would incur, scaling Bitcoin up to the national level would require us to increase our energy production roughly 10000% just to power the mining. And then you're further implying that doing so meant we could or should disband the military? Uh, I don't know what to say to that other than that there are plenty of non-economic reasons to have militaries. Bitcoin really is a complete waste of time and energy.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    Nope. I'm just pointing out that the energy isn't wasted and it's is appropriately proportional to the task it faces. It would be a much worse world if basic utilities started refusing to provide service just because they had opinions about your usage and emotionally didn't like it.
- Bitbitcowurgh 3y ago
  Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem: as soon as you do anthing offchain, bitcoin doesn't protect you. Bitcoin doesn't gurantee that if you give someone money and exchange it for bitcoin that you will get the bitcoin. It will not guarantee that if you want to buy something, that you receive the item in the expected quality, time and condition. The only use case for bitcoin are ON chain transactions and the only solution to this are smart contracts which also don't solve the problem because its still only for digital things and it requires the same amount of capital which doesn't make sense because rich people could block you from ever accessing your money if they want to destroy you. Please please please please start reading up on blockchain!1 :(
  - lurking15 3y ago
    > as soon as you do anthing offchain, bitcoin doesn't protect you except that most, if not all, off-chain networks are still based on-chain and have mechanisms for being a relatively secure way for exchanging day-to-day without having to settle on-chain for every transaction
    - Bitbitcowurgh 3y ago
      Imagine a world were someone with a private key could send money transparently to someone else by just signing the transaction publicly. Suddenly you don't need PoW anymore. The only thing bitcoins gigantic energy consumption does is making sure there is only one central blockchain. Nothing more. And for that it needs 2% of total US Power usage...
      - lurking15 3y ago
        Except the whole point of bitcoin is that it's a scarce commodity enforced through power consumption (something that's a limiting factor to adversaries) > The only thing bitcoins gigantic energy consumption does is making sure there is only one central blockchain. which is how you constrain supply in a decentralized way with an independent time-keeping mechanism
Y_Y 3y ago
Look how many company are using most of the crude oil. They're allowed to buy this commodity and they profit from using it, what did you expect would happen?
- gipp 3y ago
  Yeah those companies generally use that energy to produce things of value to people
  - Hash-Basher 3y ago
    A global, decentralized, censorship-resistant monetary asset is not of value to people?
    - gipp 3y ago
      Not when it has repeatedly demonstrated over more than a decade that it is completely incapable of supporting a sane, usable model for financial transactions that isn't 99% scams, drugs, and burning giant piles of energy every time someone actually tries to use it as money. Decentralizing the monetary system is potentially a laudable goal. Bitcoin has failed to accomplish it. Failed. Move on.
    - malermeister 3y ago
      No. It's not. Censorship-resistant is just another word for fraud- and crime enabling. It's a negative attribute, not a positive one.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        This. Censorship resistance === Cannot undo fraud. A money system that cannot claw back ill-gotten gains is NOT "giving power to the users", but rather giving power to the con-men! Worse, fraud is such a huge return on investment that any system that enables it such as bitcoin does inevitably will have a market driven by fraud, because it easily out-competes the more legitimate business. Bitcoin isn't full of fraud because "it's hard to track", or "there's nothing better to do" or "because it's new/unregulated" Bitcoin is full of fraud and only fraud because a system that doesn't allow you to take back transactions unilaterally makes legitimate business HARDER than fraud, and for less return. The other main "easy fraud" monetary system is gift cards, and they have to expend enormous effort and money on anti-fraud measures and just eating losses so users don't constantly have their money stolen. Crypto doesn't even have that, and in fact, literally cannot have that, because there is no empowered entity to do so.
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hugryhoop 3y ago
How much energy do the data-centers of the 4 hyperscalers use?
- spankalee 3y ago
  Those data centers generally do useful things though.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    To be fair, the bulk of what they do could probably be missed without anybody noticing other than that there would be a large collective sigh of relief. There is so much junk produced that I would not be at all surprised if that dwarfed the crypto computers, but it is much harder to identify.
- maxlamb 3y ago
  These data centers actually serve apps that 100's of millions of people use every day...
- cma 3y ago
  Normalized per transaction?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- timeon 3y ago
  At least that is not poor technology as Bitcoin. Which is ineffective by design.
robbick 3y ago
Fixing this is not going to fix the energy crisis but as uses of fossil fuels go it is among the most egregious
- saalweachter 3y ago
  It's a "stop shooting yourself in the foot" win-win. Like, the last time I did a back-of-the-envelope, physical spam mail was also a surprisingly large (but still tiny) fraction of US CO2 emissions. We could just stop sending spam mail, and save like a quarter percent of the US CO2. Not big, but you're also not losing anything of value.
- jmull 3y ago
  There is no single fix, of course. In situations like this you prioritize... you cut the larger things that have the least value per amount of energy used. Ending crypto mining is the easiest no-brainer in the history of energy systems.
  - digging 3y ago
    > Ending crypto mining is the easiest no-brainer in the history of energy systems. Ending any profit-generating activity is incredibly difficult. I suspect you're not referring to ending it, but allowing it to be transferred offshore and losing the ability to regulate it. But if it's banned in the US, good luck getting every other country on earth to ban it in solidarity.
    - uni_rule 3y ago
      Considering how broadly unpopular the idea is to average people who don't aspire to own cryptocurrency (especially after FTX publicly ate its own organs) I don't see it being particularly difficult to find support for such laws in more liberal places such as the EU.
      - digging 3y ago
        Again, if you can't stamp it out globally, you're very likely just shifting it to places that may care less to regulate it. I would genuinely love to read a plan somebody has to end cryptocurrency on Earth, but I can't imagine one working even a little bit.
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malermeister 3y ago
Ban it already. We're in a global energy and climate crisis. Stop wasting it for make-believe computer money.
- lurking15 3y ago
  it's like people can't understand it was engineered to be un-killable
  - malermeister 3y ago
    You can't engineer your way out of a social dilemma. If the government says "anyone caught using bitcoin goes to jail" and actually puts effort into enforcing it, all the fancy engineering in the world isn't going to help you, unless you never want to actually use it in the real world.
    - lurking15 3y ago
      But if bitcoin can operate in China now where it's been repeatedly banned and the network chugs along completely uninterrupted it seems like a stretch that governments (of which the entire world would have to band together) have any say here.
      - malermeister 3y ago
        "actually puts effort into enforcing it" being the key. China is corrupt as shit and the enforcers are all bribed.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    Corporations were also engineered to be un-killable. The way to reach them is to go after the people who run them. Obviously, if that’s the analogy, then the miners are quite secure anyway.
    - lurking15 3y ago
throw0101d 3y ago
Keep going back to: >> Explain Bitcoin as completely as possible in a single tweet. > It's like if idling your car 24/7 occasionally produced solved Sudoku puzzles that you could then exchange for heroin. * https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/1135243595273986048 https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/113524359527398604... Edit: per /u/tgamblin (of Spack fame), this was originally from @Theophite.
- JoeCortopassi 3y ago
  Bitcoin is cryptographically secured distributed accounting ledger, that created a novel way to incentivize participation
  - Andrex 3y ago
    Thank you HackerNewsGPT.
    - rendang 3y ago
      Would ChatGPT have omitted the article? Maybe ESL-ChatGPT
  - wolf89618 3y ago
    [dead]
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Thank you!
  - throw0101d 3y ago
    As someone who has used cryptography† since he downloaded PGP 2.x in the early 1990s, and was around for the Crypto Wars (using the "non-us" Debian repos), I am aware what Bitcoin is technically-speaking. † This includes using chained hashes: * https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=opie&sektion=4 https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=opie&sektion=4 * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1760 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1760 * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289
ck2 3y ago
I don't follow crypto news but I am curious how the "proof of work" alternative is working out? or not?
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  there are much more efficient ones out there without mining
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
  Ethereum, the second biggest coin by market cap and the network that allows for NFTs, completed their transition to proof of stake in 2022. Ethereum’s energy usage is now almost completely negligible. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... Since Bitcoin is completely decentralized, there’s no way to change the protocol without everyone just stopping using it, which miners don’t want to do.
  - digging 3y ago
    > Since Bitcoin is completely decentralized, there’s no way to change the protocol without everyone just stopping using it, which miners don’t want to do. That's completely wrong though. The protocol gets changed by a majority of miners accepting new protocols, as has happened many times before.
    - FabHK 3y ago
      Not only that, when once there were 194bn BTC due to a bug, the miners "just stopped using it", rolled back, fixed the bug, and went forward from there. Blockchain is immutable! Code is law! Sure, unless it isn't.
- sspiff 3y ago
  Most other cryptos have migrated to proof of stake, which requires magnitudes less resources.
codegeek 3y ago
Why is crypto still a thing ? I may be dumb but just don't get it.
- sircastor 3y ago
  My wife has a saying "If you want to know why a thing is a thing, the reason is money" Either poor(ish) people trying to get rich, or rich people trying to get richer.
- ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago
  Money laundering, ransomware, speculation/gambling, purchasing illegal goods and services
- aierou 3y ago
  Crypto literally cannot be stopped, turned off, banned, or otherwise censored. That is its entire purpose and design. Whether that is good or bad is a different question. (Yes, crypto can be regulated. Of course it can. The point is that it will continue to exist irrespective of regulation.)
  - keyringlight 3y ago
    As I understand it, the regulation is largely on how it interacts with a country's own currency or banking system, which indicates to me that users need to do this in order to have real-world use. You can have all the virtual currencies you like online and as far as I'm aware no government cares, the taxman isn't looking at your millions of gold in WoW or Eve-online ISK, but they would if it's used the same way crypto currencies have been in their jurisdictions.
  - FabHK 3y ago
    It can certainly be banned, prohibited, and censored to an extent (current BTC gossip protocol is unencrypted via TCP, if I'm not mistaken), plus the on/off-ramps can be outlawed.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    "You can't regulate it away" "Of course, you can regulate it away."
015a 3y ago
The crypto industry financed a 2.3% expansion of the US's power generating capacity. I don't care what we're spending energy on. Being stingy about it just makes all of us poorer. There's a quadrillion-cubic-kilometer flaming ball of plasma in the sky. We have the ability to generate literally infinite electricity; and quite literally the only way we get to that is by increasing the amount of electricity we're using, and thus need to generate. Everything gets cheaper when electricity gets cheaper.
- AustinDev 3y ago
  Agreed 100% Build more nuclear, build more natural gas (cleanest 'fossil fuel') to replace coal and pipelines to pipe it. Doing anything other than vastly expanding energy production will result in the US economy being left behind as automation rises and demands more and more energy.
- Retric 3y ago
  This 2.3% mostly came from fossil fuels not new green generation capacity. You need to consider where these miners are located based on electricity costs and what infrastructure is built there not simply a hypothetical grid where arbitrary power can be moved anywhere at zero losses.
  - hamburga 3y ago
    Source?
    - Mathieu95 3y ago
      Look up US energy mix.
  - keyringlight 3y ago
    Yes, it's hard to get much distance out of that logic. If that was the case there'd be little reasoning for efficiency as incandescent lightbulbs would also be incentive to expand power generation. It delays turning off dirtier generation even if more modern and efficient plants get built.
librish 3y ago
2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. This is the type of tragedy of the commons issue where regulation is needed. For any one actor they can justify spending infinity energy as long as their ROI is positive. There are enough justifications out there that it's easy to convince oneself that you're doing the world a favor ("I'm just librating finance and fighting the good fight against the central bankers").
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sgu999 3y ago
  I wonder what kind of shape it could take with the current mindset of putting weak signals to steer the market (ie. carbon tax, etc.). Mining bitcoin is far from being the only example of resources waste for pure profit... I can only imagine a vague but serious threat of being accused of ecocide to have an effect.
  - Prashanthills 3y ago
    [flagged]
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  [dead]
- pton_xd 3y ago
  > 2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. It kind of is! But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation. As governments print increasingly more money, and the amount of BTC stays the same, each BTC becomes worth more. It's very simple. The demand for such an asset is apparently quite high; high enough to spend up to 2.3% of total US energy. If the world operated on non-inflationary systems there would perhaps still be a small need for BTC, such as providing liberty in committing financial transactions, but I doubt it'd be nearly as big as it is today on that basis alone.
jonathan-adly 3y ago
Power usage by itself is meaningless. The real question is the power providing utility or not. Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad. They provide real benefit and utility. But, perhaps power wasted on cloth dryers and Christmas lights are a western frivolity. So, the real argument is Bitcoin useful or not. Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.
- Bitbitcowurgh 3y ago
  Lucky enough, we are not living in a free market. Otherwise we would all be fucked. Just in case you don't get it: have you ever seen a company making a high quality, sustainable and save product because of free market? Nope they do it because of laws we as a society make. And in this particular case, i'm absolutly for banning it globally.
  - dazc 3y ago
    A true free market would have plane crashes every day and Boeing being hailed for their excellent safety record.
- lgleason 3y ago
  Except the US electricity market is not a free market. Most people only have one provider to choose from.
- raincole 3y ago
  It's really hard to gauge how much utility cryptos are providing. After all, people who need cryptos the most are those who can't use "proper" channels to transfer money.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    PoW is stupid and currencies need to evolve off of this. Within Crypocurrency world there are Bitcoin maximalists who believe it is the only true coin and probably like PoW. However other ones are moving to PoS which is better for the environment. Can’t comment on security but reckon they can make it secure.
jd3 3y ago
The only word I can think of is shameful. We should be ashamed. Digital currency with strong cryptographic protection will continue to evolve and will eventually be widely adopted, but the industry and platforms that have arisen concomitant with the Bitcoin hype are simply shameful.
lgleason 3y ago
Meanwhile we have this. https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2023/03/24/americas-electric-grid-is-weakening/?sh=4a1d8e2af7e9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2023/03/24/america... ....all for a casino ponzi scheme that is creating a very volatile "asset". I'm all for free market, but electricity production in the US is highly regulated and very far from being free market. Also, I'm not an environmentalist, but one of the things that has hurt electric car adoption has been the cost of charging, especially at DC fast chargers. Getting rid of this waste would reduce strain on the grid and help to drive down electric costs which could alleviate that problem. It's surprising that environmental protestors have not started to show up at mining faculties.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
4ad 3y ago
So what? Surely they are paying for it.
- francisofascii 3y ago
  Since the negative externalities are not accounted for, none of us are truly paying for it.
hugepuppy 3y ago
Never thought a site called "Hacker News" would be so anti-technology as I'm seeing in these comments. Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits.
- krasin 3y ago
  I would be with you, if bitcoin was only allowed to use carbon-free electricity. The reality is that they sometimes buy coal mines ([1]) and burn coal onsite without paying for the externalities. And that's something to be worried about. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-miners-revive-fossil-fuel-plant-co2-emissions-soared https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
  - lurking15 3y ago
    > And that's something to be worried about. not even remotely in my opinion, bitcoin uses cheap electricity, and if carbon-free is cheaper like everyone proposes then it should be quickly adopted by bitcoin miners
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- Atreiden 3y ago
  This ignores the negative externalities - namely, the degradation of our ecosystem - of this increased energy production. Our climate has a carrying capacity, beyond which habitability decreases.
- tempest_ 3y ago
  Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits. Ehh https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-miners-revive-fossil-fuel-plant-co2-emissions-soared https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
- Bitbitcowurgh 3y ago
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Carbon tax The energy source of my wall outlets shouldn't be my problem. Electricity is cheap because fossil fuels are cheap because they externalize the true carbon cost. I assume with a carbon tax that less BS would be profitable.
digging 3y ago
I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven that crypto is intrinsically bad for everything I love - except insofar as I believe it can't be stopped.) 1. There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry. 2. The title of the article is itself editorializing the content of the article and is speculative according to their own words. From TFA: "[The EIA] released a study suggesting that cryptocurrency mining represents up to 2.3% of U.S. power demand." It could be less, much less, or much less, although I haven't read the actual report yet (I'm criticizing this article only), because "suggesting" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting 3. "Just 137" isn't meaningful AFAIK. Who cares if it's 100 or 10 or 10,000 miners? The point is the amount of crypto being mined. (The number of miners will always be in flux by design anyway.) And the answer to that, from TFA: "The EIA found that the global share of Bitcoin mining that takes place in the U.S. grew from 3.4% in 2020 to a whopping 37.8% in 2022." So roughly ~2% of US power is generating over 1/3 of the world's Bitcoin. This is only obviously bad if you believe Bitcoin is a total waste of energy, which I don't, but I understand that some do. 4. Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist. Fossil fuel consumption is. From TFA: "We intend to ... quantify the sources of electricity used to meet cryptocurrency mining demand." Meaning this has not been done, and publishing scary warnings is premature. If Bitcoin mining ends up using a higher proportion of renewable energy than, say, traditional banking, it could be seen as a net good for crypto use to rise.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  The "security" of btc cryptocurrency is proportional to how much energy it wastes; that's radically different than the banking system. The more billions it costs to run bitcoin, the more it costs to 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system. It would be useful it some state, eg., russia or china, would just cut off networks and forge bitcoin network traffic -- and hence bring the whole thing down. Or, do a 51% attack by controlling 51% of the hashing power. The whole thing is a joke, one only tolerated by states because it's supports joke levels of economic transactions. Were any % of an economy to run on this, states would just seal the network in their borders and end the whole charade.
cookiengineer 3y ago
In the same context: How many top ranking games on steam waste the same amount of electricity? Shouldn't they be responsible for building fusion reactors, too, by that logic? If not, why?
- Pigalowda 3y ago
  This comparison doesn't make that much sense. Games are a product and bitcoin is a digital "currency" mainly used for financial speculation, fraud, gray and black market goods/services, and money laundering.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bonton89 3y ago
  Every piece of inefficient software is wasting tons of energy. But since we're using it for economy activity that makes money it is OK...which is actually the same reason people are mining bitcoins.
- pimlottc 3y ago
  > How many top ranking games on steam waste the same amount of electricity? Clearly less than 50, at the very maximum. 2.3% is an absurd amount of power.
fromMars 3y ago
This is why I am not a fan of crypto. It's environmental impact is disastrous in its current form.
- hk__2 3y ago
  > This is why I am not a fan of crypto. It's environmental impact is disastrous in its current form. *Bitcoin, not crypto. Ethereum doesn’t work like that.
thelastgallon 3y ago
A Texas Town's Misery Underscores the Impact of Bitcoin Mines Across the U.S: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235518 An energy poor country, Ethiopia, builds a new dam for hydro, all that supply goes to bitcoin! Chinese bitcoin miners are flocking to Ethiopia, attracted by cheap energy, ideal climate: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3251352/chinese-bitcoin-miners-are-flocking-ethiopia-attracted-cheap-energy-ideal-climate https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3251352/chines...
55555 3y ago
There's an argument to be made for crypto to be used to turn power that wouldn't otherwise be economical / linked to the grid / used into money, which can then be turned back into power (in a purely economic sense) later. For example wave energy could power GPUs in the middle of the ocean, with no need to then transmit electricity to shore. Solar could be captured in the middle of the desert. Some oil rigs are mining crypto with the natural gas that leaks from their wells. So long as there's a starlink satellite above, energy can be turned into money on the spot, and then that money can buy energy in another place and time. (Ofcourse, this doesn't actually create new energy.) Something to think about.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
  The energy market already works like this today (sans blockchain), any multinational provider is doing energy arbitrage across different markets and energy sources (electrical production, natural gas, etc)
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Actually, the idea of a bitcoin operation in the middle of a desert is maybe the only decent defense of its waste of energy I've heard. Someone harvesting solar power in the middle of the desert doesn't have to connect to any other energy grids to conduct mining, so in theory it's not driving up costs for other consumers or wasting energy that could be used for literally anything else. It'd still be a waste of the solar panels and resources though, and the setup would certainly involve some externalities with other impact. And realistically the overwhelming majority of mining operations are not doing this, so it's just smoke and mirrors by people arguing in bad faith. But I'd have much less of a problem with bitcoin if all its mining came from remote locations that would see no development otherwise, using energy harvested from the environment.
- lottin 3y ago
  This argument is nonsense though. The energy that is used to secure the bitcoin network is spent. It can't be recovered later.
hello_computer 3y ago
It is interesting how much media/politicians focus on the energy expended to preserve value outside of fiat currency, but are somehow far less concerned with how much energy (and human life) we expend to prop up the petrodollar and various private interests abroad. It is also interesting how little they complain about the energy we expend on ML training for next-gen spambots and copyright infringement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_States_military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta... The United States Department of Defense is one of the largest single consumers of energy in the world, responsible for 93% of all US government fuel consumption in 2007 (Air Force: 52%; Navy: 33%; Army: 7%. Other DoD: 1%).[1] In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity, at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD's electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.3 million average American homes. In electricity consumption, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 58th in the world, using slightly less than Denmark and slightly more than Syria (CIA World Factbook, 2006).[1] The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons (1.7×1010 L) of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons (48,000,000 L) of fuel per day. A large Army division may use about 6,000 US gallons (23,000 L) per day. According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden.[1]
mandibles 3y ago
Due to the extremely competitive nature of Bitcoin mining, the miners must seek out the cheapest power on the market. By definition, cheap power has low demand, so the miners are not crowding out other "higher" uses of the power. In many cases, this power would be otherwise wasted. In some cases, miners are capturing vented or flared waste gasses from other processes (gas wells, landfills). Many miners have power purchase agreements and curtailment arrangements in place with grid operators that perform two very useful functions: - Allow grid operators to better plan for demand, since they can anticipate the large load from the miner. Secondary effect: overbuild generation capacity when building new power plants, since there is a ready buyer for the new power. - Sell energy back to the grid when weather strains capacity. Bitcoin miners can switch off instantly when the grid operator sends a signal, so the grid is more resilient to both predictable (cloudy days) and unpredictable (plant failure) supply changes. So Bitcoin mining is good for power grids, both from the standpoint of capacity and stability.
- peer2pay 3y ago
  Or, you know, sell all the GPUs and buy a bunch of batteries. Crypto mining is not needed to do grid balancing and wasting energy on pointless computation is always worse than short-term storage.
- FabHK 3y ago
  > In many cases, this power would be otherwise wasted. What do you mean, "otherwise"?
fromMars 3y ago
What happened with Ethereum's proof of stake? Have there been successful alternatives that eliminate the need for mining?
- cwbriscoe 3y ago
  Ethereum is using proof of stake now.
- almenon 3y ago
  Ethereum switched to proof of stake a while ago. So yes. Hardcore crypto fans don't like it because theoretically it could be subject to the 51% attack. Personally, Ethereum is big enough where A) I don't think that attack is likely and B) the efficiency gains are worth the risk Disclaimer: I have Ethereum so i benefit from other people buying it. I do honestly think it's better for the environment.
- FabHK 3y ago
  PoS instead of PoW is about 1000x more efficient, meaning that instead of being about 1,000,000,000x more wasteful than the work it effectively does it's only about 1,000,000x more wasteful.
- patriksvensson 3y ago
  It's running proof of stake, successfully for over 512 days! Uses validators instead of mining, the power footprint of the ENTIRE network was reduced by 99.995%. Crypto isn't power inefficient, BITCOIN MINING is power inefficient. Can't wait for the typewriter (Bitcoin) to be replaced by the computer (Ethereum).
webignition 3y ago
I live in a house house exclusively warmed by electric heating (underfloor downstairs, wall-mounted upstairs). The heating system takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with no other direct benefits. As a whole the heating system can be quite power-hungry during cold periods. A crypto mining rig takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with the possible benefit of creating some valuable digital assets. Serious crypto mining setups can be quite power-hungry. Crypto mining for the sole purpose of making money is often considered an egregious and possibly wasteful use of power resources. Is crypto mining for the purpose of using the heat to warm my house, with the possible benefit of generating valuable digital assets, similarly egregious, wasteful or inconsiderate in some way?
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  It's been tried and it doesn't work because hardware designed for crypto mining needs to be utilized 100% 24/7 or it won't ever pay back or be meaningful, and it that case you either size it to be such a small heat contribution that you don't mind a small heater on during the hot months, or so big that it is impossible to offset in the summer. Nevermind the fact that resistive electric heat in this day and age is wildly stupid except for maybe the northernmost parts of Siberia. Why pay X to get A heat plus almost no bitcoin, when you could pay X to get 3A heat using a heat pump?
- fifilura 3y ago
  Heating your house with direct electricity is wasteful. You should get a heat pump. You will get your money back in no time. This changes the equation.
  - GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
    Seriously, I want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient
    - kraftman 3y ago
abeppu 3y ago
> The EIA found that the global share of Bitcoin mining that takes place in the U.S. grew from 3.4% in 2020 to a whopping 37.8% in 2022. What drove that? Since this is the kind of thing that you could do pretty much anywhere, why should a such a disproportionate amount of it happen in the US?
- GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
  "China Banished Cryptocurrencies. Now, ‘Mining’ Is Even Dirtier." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/climate/bitcoin-china-energy-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/climate/bitcoin-china-ene...
  - abeppu 3y ago
    But it does seem like US electricity prices are meaningfully higher than for a number of countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East. I wonder what stops mining from going to places where electricity appears to be cheapest. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1391069/cheapest-residential-electricity-by-country-world/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1391069/cheapest-residen...
- tiborsaas 3y ago
  Banning crypto mining in China.
- EasyMark 3y ago
  China push them out after they figured out bitcoin was a huge waste of resources and also that they couldn't control it like they could their own potential digital currencies
jgilias 3y ago
The whole idea that you can sort energy usage into useful for society or not buckets is pretty ridiculous. Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn? The very idea of sorting energy use like that is a very slippery slope. We have markets for a reason. They help us determine how the aggregated society values one or another thing without relying on value judgment.
- dr-detroit 3y ago
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- hk__2 3y ago
  > The whole idea that you can sort energy usage into useful for society or not buckets is pretty ridiculous. > > Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn? As other have pointed out, Bitcoin relies on a larger and larger usage of energy by design. You could to a more energy-efficient Netflix, but you cannot do a more energy-efficient Bitcoin.
  - greyface- 3y ago
    > larger and larger usage of energy by design It's actually the opposite: its energy usage shrinks and shrinks, by design. Every 210,000 blocks (~4 years), the block reward (mining subsidy) drops in half. At the limit, it approaches zero, and the network can only afford to spend as much on energy as users pay in transaction fees. Admittedly, "the limit" is quite a few years off, and there's a big subsidy still. I'm surprised we haven't seen taxing authorities go after block rewards specifically - they're why miners are currently willing to spend 10~20x on energy vs what users pay them for transactions.
  - RedNifre 3y ago
    Sure you can, what is called "Proof of work" in the context of Bitcoin is actually "Proof of money lost" in the form of paid electricity. If you taxed mining at 90%, you would also reduce mining and thus electricity consumption by 90%. (Ideally, this would be a global tax and not too high, since reducing mining too much would compromise security)
Dowwie 3y ago
Isn't the increased demand for electricity driving the price of electricity upward? In the short term, if demand increases faster than supply, prices will rise. Externalities need to be addressed..
- FabHK 3y ago
  Incidentally, Bitcoin miners make around $15bn a year (45k $/BTC * 6.25 BTC/block * 1 block/10 minutes * 60 minutes/h * 24 h/d * 365 d/a), of which probably more than half is cost, so running a profit of a few $bn a year. On the other hand, the externalities of burning 15 GW amount to about $5bn a year. So, the mining does not generate economic surplus, but constitutes a transfer of value from the public to miners.
andrewla 3y ago
The original estimate is "0.6% to 2.3%" -- only reporting the high end of this figure is misleading, even if we accept the premise that the underlying report [1] is correct. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 is the EIA report, which in turn references [2] [2] https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci, which uses a series of approximations based on economic and technical factors (https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/methodology https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/methodology)
sackfield 3y ago
If this is economically unproductive work, why are the miners being rewarded for it? Is it just that the market hasn't figured out what the detractors here seem to know? Or is it that they don't understand as much about economics as they think they do?
- Symbiote 3y ago
  The miners are rewarded as bitcoins are useful for scamming, and kept as speculative investments. Many people don't think either use justifies the environmental cost.
- lottin 3y ago
  Owners of bitcoins pay for all this unproductive work. They pay for it by buying the new bitcoins being issued by the miners every 10 minutes. So long as these idiots continue to buy the coins, miners can continue to waste resources.
- EasyMark 3y ago
  because they don't have to pay carbon taxes on it, because the current market doesn't price in environmental damage for nearly no useful return currently.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Previous discussion, 6 days ago: "Over 2 percent of the US's electricity generation now goes to Bitcoin (arstechnica.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232838 The EIA analysis suffers from lack of comprehensive coverage and equal treatment of energy consumers - e.g. where's the EIA report on energy consumed by running high-frequency trading algorithms, which apparently are involved in 50% of stock market transactions these days? If the EIA's method for calculating cryptomining electricity consumption was applied across the board to all economic sectors, would they end up concluding total consumption was 2X total production or something nonsensical like that?
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
The underlying problem is energy creation, not usage. If we had nuclear power plants everywhere and energy "too cheap to meter", no one would bat an eye at BTC energy usage. We need to stop thinking energy conservation, and start thinking on how we can GROW sustainable energy usage. People live better with more energy.
- Arainach 3y ago
  This is incorrect. Any increase in production would be consumed by miners without turning down other energy sources. This is sheer energy waste.
- timeon 3y ago
  This thinking drives climate change. There is no perpetual motion.
  - TheCaptain4815 3y ago
    That's because we're stuck with loads of dirty energy. The ultimate goal should be unlimited energy for everyone, but only sustainable energy. That first portion is rarely mentioned in the climate change community.
Wh1skey 3y ago
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Devasta 3y ago
Sincerely, every single person involved in a crypto mining operation should be arrested. Just pretend they are financing the Houthis or something and apologize for it in a decade or two, we are way beyond the 11th hour to get our carbon emissions under control and nonsense like this isn't helping.
dj_gitmo 3y ago
Has anyone estimated when it will not longer make economic sense to mine Bitcoin?
andrewheekin 3y ago
This article completely glosses over the hardest problem in the power industry - grid transmission constraints. What's a transmission constraint? Well, eventually the electrical resistance on high voltage power lines reaches a maximum threshold at which no more power can flow through the line, shoutout Ohm's Law :) I work in financial power derivatives, and there are entire trading desks devoted to "congestion trading" - ie the financial right to transmit power between grid locations with inherent transmission congestion. From the EIA map of mining operations, crypto mining tends to take place in remote areas where electricity is plentiful but hard to deliver to major load zones (cities) due to grid transmission constraints. On the whole, most crypto mining operations choose to operate in regions where the price of electricity is cheap (remote locations). Paradoxically, these operations running during off-peak times contributes to grid stability by smoothing the load curve and preventing expensive curtailment of alternative generation resources (think along the lines of a wind turbine needing to shut down on a windy day bc it's generating more power than the grid can consume)
- ninepoints 3y ago
  I'm very familiar with congestion trading and was in that industry at one point, but cmon, this is a bad crypto talking point. It's already quite apparent that bitcoin mines actually destabilize grids just as much while driving up electricity prices for local consumers far more than any positive net effect from an energy perspective.
pcdoodle 3y ago
There's no second best.
kwar13 3y ago
Same old tired argument. The proof of work employed in mostly Bitcoin by now (most cryptos use proof of stake which has drastically lower energy consumption). Let's compare it to: 1- How much it takes to run the banking industry, even a JPM Chase would do. 2- Bot accounts on Instagram or Tiktok. 3- Gas flared on oil rigs. Nobody slams the above three for "wasting" energy because they are closed systems that cannot be measured. Crypto is mostly an open system so it's easy to just point to a number with a headline "bitcoin used more energy than x country"
FabHK 3y ago
One nitpick: It's not "total U.S. power", but electricity production. Power comprises (broadly speaking) electricity and fuel (which in turn is used for heating and transportation).
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
The most interesting and fitting comparison IMO is the comparison to gold mining: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/comparisons https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/comparisons estimates 175.34 TWh per year for Bitcoin mining and 131 TWh per year for Gold mining. Most gold is used in a similar way like Bitcoin (hoarded as a store of value because people believe that other people will continue to consider it valuable). With Bitcoin mining, I believe the only relevant environmental issue is the power consumption (there's also some e-waste but I assume that's negligible compared to the power). With gold, the power consumption is a complete afterthought, the massive amounts of toxic waste and the abuse of workers are much bigger issues. I'm shocked that both industries seem to be consuming a similar order of magnitude to be honest (I expected Bitcoin mining to be more energy intensive compared to gold). In terms of value stored, gold stores low double-digit trillions, Bitcoin about one trillion.
- downrightmike 3y ago
  The thing about bitcoin mining is that it requires more power, the more power you use. They network can work on far smaller resources.
  - andy81 3y ago
    That would require the price to drop proportionally (or waiting for halvings).
    - gregable 3y ago
      So in the limit, buying POW coins is using that money to consume energy. Selling the coins is taking that money away from energy consumption.
gabrieldance 3y ago
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shashasha2 3y ago
Stop worrying guys. Mining energy expenditure will stop when reward won’t match the price anymore. Bitcoin mining as we know it will come to an end soon. Infinite energy waste is a myth. Simple math will give you the ending date. As for now, miners will mine.
AnitaNaulty 3y ago
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Vincentduff 3y ago
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Garypaul 3y ago
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Giovanniamien 3y ago
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Prashanthills 3y ago
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- Castellanavito 3y ago
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- Giovanniamien 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing this here. A lot of beginners Like me are smashed out there every day. It's a good thing we have nice people here who want others to become successful as they are.
Jakesben 3y ago
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nojvek 3y ago
Likely gonna get downvoted for saying it. Wasn’t this the whole point of bitcoin? To guarantee a slow increasing supply of coins with a fine upper limit of 21 million bitcoins. Only 2 million more left and they get increasingly take more energy to mine. There was a joke amongst my peers that the last bitcoin will take a Dyson sphere around the sun to mine. Bitcoin makes sense as an instrument to hedge against inflation, but the charts correlate with stock market. So it is as speculative as the rest of market. Unlike say gold which usually has an inverse graph as a holder of value. IMO the insane trading fees of bitcoin have ruined it for me. I love what ethereum is doing with proof of stake.

239 points by CharlesW 3y ago

And how much energy does maintaining the military that backs US currency use? Much more and it's violent. The use of energy to protect bitcoin from attack from nation states is non-violent. It really is an efficient and ethical use of the energy.

IncreasePosts 3y ago
Do you think the US wouldn't need or want a military if the whole world switched to bitcoin tomorrow?
Ma8ee 3y ago
Your argument could be valid if bitcoins were actually useful.
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
While yes, the military uses a ton of energy and shouldn't exist at its size, that doesn't mean the crypto internet casino is a good use of energy. I'm curious about the statistics of crypto use to buy goods and services vs the crypto use for investment, gambling, scams, rugpulls, etc. I wonder how much energy was used for NFTs which are neither efficient or ethical.
KptMarchewa 3y ago
I wish US military could additionally use that 2.3% power.
- estebank 3y ago
  > The Department of Defense spews so much greenhouse gas every year that it would rank as the 55th worst polluter in the world if it were a country, beating out Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal, according to a new paper from Brown University’s Costs of War project. > Why so much? Well, first off, there’s all those military buildings (some 560,000 on bases around the world) to power, heat, and cool. That accounts for about 40 percent of the total. The rest goes toward operations like moving troops and carrying out missions. The biggest CO2 culprit is, by far, planes. “Aircraft are extremely thirsty,” Crawford said. https://grist.org/politics/u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-most-countries/ https://grist.org/politics/u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-... US: 14.9 tons of co2 Sweeden: 3.6 tons https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Billion tons.
throw0101d 3y ago
> The use of energy to protect bitcoin from attack from nation states is non-violent. It really is an efficient and ethical use of the energy. Can Bitcoin be used to stop people from attacking ships going through the Suez Canal? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis Can Bitcoin be used to discourage people from grabbing marine territory from other countries? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line
- afroboy 3y ago
  If the US Army didn't assault and helped terrorists nation there, those attacks wouldn't happen in the first place.
mminer237 3y ago
Are you implying that we could or should replace USD with BTC? Bitcoin uses over 2% of the energy to process 0.02% of the transactions. Aside from all the geopolitical & economic detriments that would incur, scaling Bitcoin up to the national level would require us to increase our energy production roughly 10000% just to power the mining. And then you're further implying that doing so meant we could or should disband the military? Uh, I don't know what to say to that other than that there are plenty of non-economic reasons to have militaries. Bitcoin really is a complete waste of time and energy.
- superkuh 3y ago
  Nope. I'm just pointing out that the energy isn't wasted and it's is appropriately proportional to the task it faces. It would be a much worse world if basic utilities started refusing to provide service just because they had opinions about your usage and emotionally didn't like it.
Bitbitcowurgh 3y ago
Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem: as soon as you do anthing offchain, bitcoin doesn't protect you. Bitcoin doesn't gurantee that if you give someone money and exchange it for bitcoin that you will get the bitcoin. It will not guarantee that if you want to buy something, that you receive the item in the expected quality, time and condition. The only use case for bitcoin are ON chain transactions and the only solution to this are smart contracts which also don't solve the problem because its still only for digital things and it requires the same amount of capital which doesn't make sense because rich people could block you from ever accessing your money if they want to destroy you. Please please please please start reading up on blockchain!1 :(
- lurking15 3y ago
  > as soon as you do anthing offchain, bitcoin doesn't protect you except that most, if not all, off-chain networks are still based on-chain and have mechanisms for being a relatively secure way for exchanging day-to-day without having to settle on-chain for every transaction
  - Bitbitcowurgh 3y ago
    Imagine a world were someone with a private key could send money transparently to someone else by just signing the transaction publicly. Suddenly you don't need PoW anymore. The only thing bitcoins gigantic energy consumption does is making sure there is only one central blockchain. Nothing more. And for that it needs 2% of total US Power usage...
    - lurking15 3y ago
      Except the whole point of bitcoin is that it's a scarce commodity enforced through power consumption (something that's a limiting factor to adversaries) > The only thing bitcoins gigantic energy consumption does is making sure there is only one central blockchain. which is how you constrain supply in a decentralized way with an independent time-keeping mechanism

Y_Y 3y ago

Look how many company are using most of the crude oil. They're allowed to buy this commodity and they profit from using it, what did you expect would happen?

gipp 3y ago
Yeah those companies generally use that energy to produce things of value to people
- Hash-Basher 3y ago
  A global, decentralized, censorship-resistant monetary asset is not of value to people?
  - gipp 3y ago
    Not when it has repeatedly demonstrated over more than a decade that it is completely incapable of supporting a sane, usable model for financial transactions that isn't 99% scams, drugs, and burning giant piles of energy every time someone actually tries to use it as money. Decentralizing the monetary system is potentially a laudable goal. Bitcoin has failed to accomplish it. Failed. Move on.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    No. It's not. Censorship-resistant is just another word for fraud- and crime enabling. It's a negative attribute, not a positive one.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      This. Censorship resistance === Cannot undo fraud. A money system that cannot claw back ill-gotten gains is NOT "giving power to the users", but rather giving power to the con-men! Worse, fraud is such a huge return on investment that any system that enables it such as bitcoin does inevitably will have a market driven by fraud, because it easily out-competes the more legitimate business. Bitcoin isn't full of fraud because "it's hard to track", or "there's nothing better to do" or "because it's new/unregulated" Bitcoin is full of fraud and only fraud because a system that doesn't allow you to take back transactions unilaterally makes legitimate business HARDER than fraud, and for less return. The other main "easy fraud" monetary system is gift cards, and they have to expend enormous effort and money on anti-fraud measures and just eating losses so users don't constantly have their money stolen. Crypto doesn't even have that, and in fact, literally cannot have that, because there is no empowered entity to do so.

deleted 3y ago

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hugryhoop 3y ago

How much energy do the data-centers of the 4 hyperscalers use?

spankalee 3y ago
Those data centers generally do useful things though.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  To be fair, the bulk of what they do could probably be missed without anybody noticing other than that there would be a large collective sigh of relief. There is so much junk produced that I would not be at all surprised if that dwarfed the crypto computers, but it is much harder to identify.
maxlamb 3y ago
These data centers actually serve apps that 100's of millions of people use every day...
cma 3y ago
Normalized per transaction?
deleted 3y ago
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timeon 3y ago
At least that is not poor technology as Bitcoin. Which is ineffective by design.

robbick 3y ago

Fixing this is not going to fix the energy crisis but as uses of fossil fuels go it is among the most egregious

saalweachter 3y ago
It's a "stop shooting yourself in the foot" win-win. Like, the last time I did a back-of-the-envelope, physical spam mail was also a surprisingly large (but still tiny) fraction of US CO2 emissions. We could just stop sending spam mail, and save like a quarter percent of the US CO2. Not big, but you're also not losing anything of value.
jmull 3y ago
There is no single fix, of course. In situations like this you prioritize... you cut the larger things that have the least value per amount of energy used. Ending crypto mining is the easiest no-brainer in the history of energy systems.
- digging 3y ago
  > Ending crypto mining is the easiest no-brainer in the history of energy systems. Ending any profit-generating activity is incredibly difficult. I suspect you're not referring to ending it, but allowing it to be transferred offshore and losing the ability to regulate it. But if it's banned in the US, good luck getting every other country on earth to ban it in solidarity.
  - uni_rule 3y ago
    Considering how broadly unpopular the idea is to average people who don't aspire to own cryptocurrency (especially after FTX publicly ate its own organs) I don't see it being particularly difficult to find support for such laws in more liberal places such as the EU.
    - digging 3y ago
      Again, if you can't stamp it out globally, you're very likely just shifting it to places that may care less to regulate it. I would genuinely love to read a plan somebody has to end cryptocurrency on Earth, but I can't imagine one working even a little bit.

deleted 3y ago

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malermeister 3y ago

Ban it already. We're in a global energy and climate crisis. Stop wasting it for make-believe computer money.

lurking15 3y ago
it's like people can't understand it was engineered to be un-killable
- malermeister 3y ago
  You can't engineer your way out of a social dilemma. If the government says "anyone caught using bitcoin goes to jail" and actually puts effort into enforcing it, all the fancy engineering in the world isn't going to help you, unless you never want to actually use it in the real world.
  - lurking15 3y ago
    But if bitcoin can operate in China now where it's been repeatedly banned and the network chugs along completely uninterrupted it seems like a stretch that governments (of which the entire world would have to band together) have any say here.
    - malermeister 3y ago
      "actually puts effort into enforcing it" being the key. China is corrupt as shit and the enforcers are all bribed.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Corporations were also engineered to be un-killable. The way to reach them is to go after the people who run them. Obviously, if that’s the analogy, then the miners are quite secure anyway.
  - lurking15 3y ago

throw0101d 3y ago

Keep going back to: >> Explain Bitcoin as completely as possible in a single tweet. > It's like if idling your car 24/7 occasionally produced solved Sudoku puzzles that you could then exchange for heroin. * https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/1135243595273986048 https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/113524359527398604... Edit: per /u/tgamblin (of Spack fame), this was originally from @Theophite.

JoeCortopassi 3y ago
Bitcoin is cryptographically secured distributed accounting ledger, that created a novel way to incentivize participation
- Andrex 3y ago
  Thank you HackerNewsGPT.
  - rendang 3y ago
    Would ChatGPT have omitted the article? Maybe ESL-ChatGPT
- wolf89618 3y ago
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- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Thank you!
- throw0101d 3y ago
  As someone who has used cryptography† since he downloaded PGP 2.x in the early 1990s, and was around for the Crypto Wars (using the "non-us" Debian repos), I am aware what Bitcoin is technically-speaking. † This includes using chained hashes: * https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=opie&sektion=4 https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=opie&sektion=4 * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1760 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1760 * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289

ck2 3y ago

I don't follow crypto news but I am curious how the "proof of work" alternative is working out? or not?

dvngnt_ 3y ago
there are much more efficient ones out there without mining
deleted 3y ago
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MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
Ethereum, the second biggest coin by market cap and the network that allows for NFTs, completed their transition to proof of stake in 2022. Ethereum’s energy usage is now almost completely negligible. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... Since Bitcoin is completely decentralized, there’s no way to change the protocol without everyone just stopping using it, which miners don’t want to do.
- digging 3y ago
  > Since Bitcoin is completely decentralized, there’s no way to change the protocol without everyone just stopping using it, which miners don’t want to do. That's completely wrong though. The protocol gets changed by a majority of miners accepting new protocols, as has happened many times before.
  - FabHK 3y ago
    Not only that, when once there were 194bn BTC due to a bug, the miners "just stopped using it", rolled back, fixed the bug, and went forward from there. Blockchain is immutable! Code is law! Sure, unless it isn't.
sspiff 3y ago
Most other cryptos have migrated to proof of stake, which requires magnitudes less resources.

codegeek 3y ago

Why is crypto still a thing ? I may be dumb but just don't get it.

sircastor 3y ago
My wife has a saying "If you want to know why a thing is a thing, the reason is money" Either poor(ish) people trying to get rich, or rich people trying to get richer.
ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago
Money laundering, ransomware, speculation/gambling, purchasing illegal goods and services
aierou 3y ago
Crypto literally cannot be stopped, turned off, banned, or otherwise censored. That is its entire purpose and design. Whether that is good or bad is a different question. (Yes, crypto can be regulated. Of course it can. The point is that it will continue to exist irrespective of regulation.)
- keyringlight 3y ago
  As I understand it, the regulation is largely on how it interacts with a country's own currency or banking system, which indicates to me that users need to do this in order to have real-world use. You can have all the virtual currencies you like online and as far as I'm aware no government cares, the taxman isn't looking at your millions of gold in WoW or Eve-online ISK, but they would if it's used the same way crypto currencies have been in their jurisdictions.
- FabHK 3y ago
  It can certainly be banned, prohibited, and censored to an extent (current BTC gossip protocol is unencrypted via TCP, if I'm not mistaken), plus the on/off-ramps can be outlawed.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  "You can't regulate it away" "Of course, you can regulate it away."

015a 3y ago

The crypto industry financed a 2.3% expansion of the US's power generating capacity. I don't care what we're spending energy on. Being stingy about it just makes all of us poorer. There's a quadrillion-cubic-kilometer flaming ball of plasma in the sky. We have the ability to generate literally infinite electricity; and quite literally the only way we get to that is by increasing the amount of electricity we're using, and thus need to generate. Everything gets cheaper when electricity gets cheaper.

AustinDev 3y ago
Agreed 100% Build more nuclear, build more natural gas (cleanest 'fossil fuel') to replace coal and pipelines to pipe it. Doing anything other than vastly expanding energy production will result in the US economy being left behind as automation rises and demands more and more energy.
Retric 3y ago
This 2.3% mostly came from fossil fuels not new green generation capacity. You need to consider where these miners are located based on electricity costs and what infrastructure is built there not simply a hypothetical grid where arbitrary power can be moved anywhere at zero losses.
- hamburga 3y ago
  Source?
  - Mathieu95 3y ago
    Look up US energy mix.
- keyringlight 3y ago
  Yes, it's hard to get much distance out of that logic. If that was the case there'd be little reasoning for efficiency as incandescent lightbulbs would also be incentive to expand power generation. It delays turning off dirtier generation even if more modern and efficient plants get built.

librish 3y ago

2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. This is the type of tragedy of the commons issue where regulation is needed. For any one actor they can justify spending infinity energy as long as their ROI is positive. There are enough justifications out there that it's easy to convince oneself that you're doing the world a favor ("I'm just librating finance and fighting the good fight against the central bankers").

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sgu999 3y ago
I wonder what kind of shape it could take with the current mindset of putting weak signals to steer the market (ie. carbon tax, etc.). Mining bitcoin is far from being the only example of resources waste for pure profit... I can only imagine a vague but serious threat of being accused of ecocide to have an effect.
- Prashanthills 3y ago
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oldpersonintx 3y ago
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pton_xd 3y ago
> 2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. It kind of is! But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation. As governments print increasingly more money, and the amount of BTC stays the same, each BTC becomes worth more. It's very simple. The demand for such an asset is apparently quite high; high enough to spend up to 2.3% of total US energy. If the world operated on non-inflationary systems there would perhaps still be a small need for BTC, such as providing liberty in committing financial transactions, but I doubt it'd be nearly as big as it is today on that basis alone.

jonathan-adly 3y ago

Power usage by itself is meaningless. The real question is the power providing utility or not. Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad. They provide real benefit and utility. But, perhaps power wasted on cloth dryers and Christmas lights are a western frivolity. So, the real argument is Bitcoin useful or not. Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.

Bitbitcowurgh 3y ago
Lucky enough, we are not living in a free market. Otherwise we would all be fucked. Just in case you don't get it: have you ever seen a company making a high quality, sustainable and save product because of free market? Nope they do it because of laws we as a society make. And in this particular case, i'm absolutly for banning it globally.
- dazc 3y ago
  A true free market would have plane crashes every day and Boeing being hailed for their excellent safety record.
lgleason 3y ago
Except the US electricity market is not a free market. Most people only have one provider to choose from.
raincole 3y ago
It's really hard to gauge how much utility cryptos are providing. After all, people who need cryptos the most are those who can't use "proper" channels to transfer money.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  PoW is stupid and currencies need to evolve off of this. Within Crypocurrency world there are Bitcoin maximalists who believe it is the only true coin and probably like PoW. However other ones are moving to PoS which is better for the environment. Can’t comment on security but reckon they can make it secure.

jd3 3y ago

The only word I can think of is shameful. We should be ashamed. Digital currency with strong cryptographic protection will continue to evolve and will eventually be widely adopted, but the industry and platforms that have arisen concomitant with the Bitcoin hype are simply shameful.

lgleason 3y ago

Meanwhile we have this. https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2023/03/24/americas-electric-grid-is-weakening/?sh=4a1d8e2af7e9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2023/03/24/america... ....all for a casino ponzi scheme that is creating a very volatile "asset". I'm all for free market, but electricity production in the US is highly regulated and very far from being free market. Also, I'm not an environmentalist, but one of the things that has hurt electric car adoption has been the cost of charging, especially at DC fast chargers. Getting rid of this waste would reduce strain on the grid and help to drive down electric costs which could alleviate that problem. It's surprising that environmental protestors have not started to show up at mining faculties.

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4ad 3y ago

So what? Surely they are paying for it.

francisofascii 3y ago
Since the negative externalities are not accounted for, none of us are truly paying for it.

hugepuppy 3y ago

Never thought a site called "Hacker News" would be so anti-technology as I'm seeing in these comments. Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits.

krasin 3y ago
I would be with you, if bitcoin was only allowed to use carbon-free electricity. The reality is that they sometimes buy coal mines ([1]) and burn coal onsite without paying for the externalities. And that's something to be worried about. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-miners-revive-fossil-fuel-plant-co2-emissions-soared https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
- lurking15 3y ago
  > And that's something to be worried about. not even remotely in my opinion, bitcoin uses cheap electricity, and if carbon-free is cheaper like everyone proposes then it should be quickly adopted by bitcoin miners
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Atreiden 3y ago
This ignores the negative externalities - namely, the degradation of our ecosystem - of this increased energy production. Our climate has a carrying capacity, beyond which habitability decreases.
tempest_ 3y ago
Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits. Ehh https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-miners-revive-fossil-fuel-plant-co2-emissions-soared https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
Bitbitcowurgh 3y ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Carbon tax The energy source of my wall outlets shouldn't be my problem. Electricity is cheap because fossil fuels are cheap because they externalize the true carbon cost. I assume with a carbon tax that less BS would be profitable.

digging 3y ago

I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven that crypto is intrinsically bad for everything I love - except insofar as I believe it can't be stopped.) 1. There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry. 2. The title of the article is itself editorializing the content of the article and is speculative according to their own words. From TFA: "[The EIA] released a study suggesting that cryptocurrency mining represents up to 2.3% of U.S. power demand." It could be less, much less, or much less, although I haven't read the actual report yet (I'm criticizing this article only), because "suggesting" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting 3. "Just 137" isn't meaningful AFAIK. Who cares if it's 100 or 10 or 10,000 miners? The point is the amount of crypto being mined. (The number of miners will always be in flux by design anyway.) And the answer to that, from TFA: "The EIA found that the global share of Bitcoin mining that takes place in the U.S. grew from 3.4% in 2020 to a whopping 37.8% in 2022." So roughly ~2% of US power is generating over 1/3 of the world's Bitcoin. This is only obviously bad if you believe Bitcoin is a total waste of energy, which I don't, but I understand that some do. 4. Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist. Fossil fuel consumption is. From TFA: "We intend to ... quantify the sources of electricity used to meet cryptocurrency mining demand." Meaning this has not been done, and publishing scary warnings is premature. If Bitcoin mining ends up using a higher proportion of renewable energy than, say, traditional banking, it could be seen as a net good for crypto use to rise.

mjburgess 3y ago
The "security" of btc cryptocurrency is proportional to how much energy it wastes; that's radically different than the banking system. The more billions it costs to run bitcoin, the more it costs to 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system. It would be useful it some state, eg., russia or china, would just cut off networks and forge bitcoin network traffic -- and hence bring the whole thing down. Or, do a 51% attack by controlling 51% of the hashing power. The whole thing is a joke, one only tolerated by states because it's supports joke levels of economic transactions. Were any % of an economy to run on this, states would just seal the network in their borders and end the whole charade.

cookiengineer 3y ago

In the same context: How many top ranking games on steam waste the same amount of electricity? Shouldn't they be responsible for building fusion reactors, too, by that logic? If not, why?

Pigalowda 3y ago
This comparison doesn't make that much sense. Games are a product and bitcoin is a digital "currency" mainly used for financial speculation, fraud, gray and black market goods/services, and money laundering.
- deleted 3y ago
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bonton89 3y ago
Every piece of inefficient software is wasting tons of energy. But since we're using it for economy activity that makes money it is OK...which is actually the same reason people are mining bitcoins.
pimlottc 3y ago
> How many top ranking games on steam waste the same amount of electricity? Clearly less than 50, at the very maximum. 2.3% is an absurd amount of power.

fromMars 3y ago

This is why I am not a fan of crypto. It's environmental impact is disastrous in its current form.

hk__2 3y ago
> This is why I am not a fan of crypto. It's environmental impact is disastrous in its current form. *Bitcoin, not crypto. Ethereum doesn’t work like that.

thelastgallon 3y ago

A Texas Town's Misery Underscores the Impact of Bitcoin Mines Across the U.S: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235518 An energy poor country, Ethiopia, builds a new dam for hydro, all that supply goes to bitcoin! Chinese bitcoin miners are flocking to Ethiopia, attracted by cheap energy, ideal climate: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3251352/chinese-bitcoin-miners-are-flocking-ethiopia-attracted-cheap-energy-ideal-climate https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3251352/chines...

55555 3y ago

There's an argument to be made for crypto to be used to turn power that wouldn't otherwise be economical / linked to the grid / used into money, which can then be turned back into power (in a purely economic sense) later. For example wave energy could power GPUs in the middle of the ocean, with no need to then transmit electricity to shore. Solar could be captured in the middle of the desert. Some oil rigs are mining crypto with the natural gas that leaks from their wells. So long as there's a starlink satellite above, energy can be turned into money on the spot, and then that money can buy energy in another place and time. (Ofcourse, this doesn't actually create new energy.) Something to think about.

GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
The energy market already works like this today (sans blockchain), any multinational provider is doing energy arbitrage across different markets and energy sources (electrical production, natural gas, etc)
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Actually, the idea of a bitcoin operation in the middle of a desert is maybe the only decent defense of its waste of energy I've heard. Someone harvesting solar power in the middle of the desert doesn't have to connect to any other energy grids to conduct mining, so in theory it's not driving up costs for other consumers or wasting energy that could be used for literally anything else. It'd still be a waste of the solar panels and resources though, and the setup would certainly involve some externalities with other impact. And realistically the overwhelming majority of mining operations are not doing this, so it's just smoke and mirrors by people arguing in bad faith. But I'd have much less of a problem with bitcoin if all its mining came from remote locations that would see no development otherwise, using energy harvested from the environment.
lottin 3y ago
This argument is nonsense though. The energy that is used to secure the bitcoin network is spent. It can't be recovered later.

hello_computer 3y ago

It is interesting how much media/politicians focus on the energy expended to preserve value outside of fiat currency, but are somehow far less concerned with how much energy (and human life) we expend to prop up the petrodollar and various private interests abroad. It is also interesting how little they complain about the energy we expend on ML training for next-gen spambots and copyright infringement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_States_military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta... The United States Department of Defense is one of the largest single consumers of energy in the world, responsible for 93% of all US government fuel consumption in 2007 (Air Force: 52%; Navy: 33%; Army: 7%. Other DoD: 1%).[1] In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity, at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD's electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.3 million average American homes. In electricity consumption, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 58th in the world, using slightly less than Denmark and slightly more than Syria (CIA World Factbook, 2006).[1] The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons (1.7×1010 L) of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons (48,000,000 L) of fuel per day. A large Army division may use about 6,000 US gallons (23,000 L) per day. According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden.[1]

mandibles 3y ago

Due to the extremely competitive nature of Bitcoin mining, the miners must seek out the cheapest power on the market. By definition, cheap power has low demand, so the miners are not crowding out other "higher" uses of the power. In many cases, this power would be otherwise wasted. In some cases, miners are capturing vented or flared waste gasses from other processes (gas wells, landfills). Many miners have power purchase agreements and curtailment arrangements in place with grid operators that perform two very useful functions: - Allow grid operators to better plan for demand, since they can anticipate the large load from the miner. Secondary effect: overbuild generation capacity when building new power plants, since there is a ready buyer for the new power. - Sell energy back to the grid when weather strains capacity. Bitcoin miners can switch off instantly when the grid operator sends a signal, so the grid is more resilient to both predictable (cloudy days) and unpredictable (plant failure) supply changes. So Bitcoin mining is good for power grids, both from the standpoint of capacity and stability.

peer2pay 3y ago
Or, you know, sell all the GPUs and buy a bunch of batteries. Crypto mining is not needed to do grid balancing and wasting energy on pointless computation is always worse than short-term storage.
FabHK 3y ago
> In many cases, this power would be otherwise wasted. What do you mean, "otherwise"?

fromMars 3y ago

What happened with Ethereum's proof of stake? Have there been successful alternatives that eliminate the need for mining?

cwbriscoe 3y ago
Ethereum is using proof of stake now.
almenon 3y ago
Ethereum switched to proof of stake a while ago. So yes. Hardcore crypto fans don't like it because theoretically it could be subject to the 51% attack. Personally, Ethereum is big enough where A) I don't think that attack is likely and B) the efficiency gains are worth the risk Disclaimer: I have Ethereum so i benefit from other people buying it. I do honestly think it's better for the environment.
FabHK 3y ago
PoS instead of PoW is about 1000x more efficient, meaning that instead of being about 1,000,000,000x more wasteful than the work it effectively does it's only about 1,000,000x more wasteful.
patriksvensson 3y ago
It's running proof of stake, successfully for over 512 days! Uses validators instead of mining, the power footprint of the ENTIRE network was reduced by 99.995%. Crypto isn't power inefficient, BITCOIN MINING is power inefficient. Can't wait for the typewriter (Bitcoin) to be replaced by the computer (Ethereum).

webignition 3y ago

I live in a house house exclusively warmed by electric heating (underfloor downstairs, wall-mounted upstairs). The heating system takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with no other direct benefits. As a whole the heating system can be quite power-hungry during cold periods. A crypto mining rig takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with the possible benefit of creating some valuable digital assets. Serious crypto mining setups can be quite power-hungry. Crypto mining for the sole purpose of making money is often considered an egregious and possibly wasteful use of power resources. Is crypto mining for the purpose of using the heat to warm my house, with the possible benefit of generating valuable digital assets, similarly egregious, wasteful or inconsiderate in some way?

mrguyorama 3y ago
It's been tried and it doesn't work because hardware designed for crypto mining needs to be utilized 100% 24/7 or it won't ever pay back or be meaningful, and it that case you either size it to be such a small heat contribution that you don't mind a small heater on during the hot months, or so big that it is impossible to offset in the summer. Nevermind the fact that resistive electric heat in this day and age is wildly stupid except for maybe the northernmost parts of Siberia. Why pay X to get A heat plus almost no bitcoin, when you could pay X to get 3A heat using a heat pump?
fifilura 3y ago
Heating your house with direct electricity is wasteful. You should get a heat pump. You will get your money back in no time. This changes the equation.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
  Seriously, I want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient
  - kraftman 3y ago

abeppu 3y ago

> The EIA found that the global share of Bitcoin mining that takes place in the U.S. grew from 3.4% in 2020 to a whopping 37.8% in 2022. What drove that? Since this is the kind of thing that you could do pretty much anywhere, why should a such a disproportionate amount of it happen in the US?

GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
"China Banished Cryptocurrencies. Now, ‘Mining’ Is Even Dirtier." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/climate/bitcoin-china-energy-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/climate/bitcoin-china-ene...
- abeppu 3y ago
  But it does seem like US electricity prices are meaningfully higher than for a number of countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East. I wonder what stops mining from going to places where electricity appears to be cheapest. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1391069/cheapest-residential-electricity-by-country-world/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1391069/cheapest-residen...
tiborsaas 3y ago
Banning crypto mining in China.
EasyMark 3y ago
China push them out after they figured out bitcoin was a huge waste of resources and also that they couldn't control it like they could their own potential digital currencies

jgilias 3y ago

The whole idea that you can sort energy usage into useful for society or not buckets is pretty ridiculous. Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn? The very idea of sorting energy use like that is a very slippery slope. We have markets for a reason. They help us determine how the aggregated society values one or another thing without relying on value judgment.

dr-detroit 3y ago
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hk__2 3y ago
> The whole idea that you can sort energy usage into useful for society or not buckets is pretty ridiculous. > > Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn? As other have pointed out, Bitcoin relies on a larger and larger usage of energy by design. You could to a more energy-efficient Netflix, but you cannot do a more energy-efficient Bitcoin.
- greyface- 3y ago
  > larger and larger usage of energy by design It's actually the opposite: its energy usage shrinks and shrinks, by design. Every 210,000 blocks (~4 years), the block reward (mining subsidy) drops in half. At the limit, it approaches zero, and the network can only afford to spend as much on energy as users pay in transaction fees. Admittedly, "the limit" is quite a few years off, and there's a big subsidy still. I'm surprised we haven't seen taxing authorities go after block rewards specifically - they're why miners are currently willing to spend 10~20x on energy vs what users pay them for transactions.
- RedNifre 3y ago
  Sure you can, what is called "Proof of work" in the context of Bitcoin is actually "Proof of money lost" in the form of paid electricity. If you taxed mining at 90%, you would also reduce mining and thus electricity consumption by 90%. (Ideally, this would be a global tax and not too high, since reducing mining too much would compromise security)

Dowwie 3y ago

Isn't the increased demand for electricity driving the price of electricity upward? In the short term, if demand increases faster than supply, prices will rise. Externalities need to be addressed..

FabHK 3y ago
Incidentally, Bitcoin miners make around $15bn a year (45k $/BTC * 6.25 BTC/block * 1 block/10 minutes * 60 minutes/h * 24 h/d * 365 d/a), of which probably more than half is cost, so running a profit of a few $bn a year. On the other hand, the externalities of burning 15 GW amount to about $5bn a year. So, the mining does not generate economic surplus, but constitutes a transfer of value from the public to miners.

andrewla 3y ago

The original estimate is "0.6% to 2.3%" -- only reporting the high end of this figure is misleading, even if we accept the premise that the underlying report [1] is correct. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 is the EIA report, which in turn references [2] [2] https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci, which uses a series of approximations based on economic and technical factors (https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/methodology https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/methodology)

sackfield 3y ago

If this is economically unproductive work, why are the miners being rewarded for it? Is it just that the market hasn't figured out what the detractors here seem to know? Or is it that they don't understand as much about economics as they think they do?

Symbiote 3y ago
The miners are rewarded as bitcoins are useful for scamming, and kept as speculative investments. Many people don't think either use justifies the environmental cost.
lottin 3y ago
Owners of bitcoins pay for all this unproductive work. They pay for it by buying the new bitcoins being issued by the miners every 10 minutes. So long as these idiots continue to buy the coins, miners can continue to waste resources.
EasyMark 3y ago
because they don't have to pay carbon taxes on it, because the current market doesn't price in environmental damage for nearly no useful return currently.

photochemsyn 3y ago

Previous discussion, 6 days ago: "Over 2 percent of the US's electricity generation now goes to Bitcoin (arstechnica.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232838 The EIA analysis suffers from lack of comprehensive coverage and equal treatment of energy consumers - e.g. where's the EIA report on energy consumed by running high-frequency trading algorithms, which apparently are involved in 50% of stock market transactions these days? If the EIA's method for calculating cryptomining electricity consumption was applied across the board to all economic sectors, would they end up concluding total consumption was 2X total production or something nonsensical like that?

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

The underlying problem is energy creation, not usage. If we had nuclear power plants everywhere and energy "too cheap to meter", no one would bat an eye at BTC energy usage. We need to stop thinking energy conservation, and start thinking on how we can GROW sustainable energy usage. People live better with more energy.

Arainach 3y ago
This is incorrect. Any increase in production would be consumed by miners without turning down other energy sources. This is sheer energy waste.
timeon 3y ago
This thinking drives climate change. There is no perpetual motion.
- TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  That's because we're stuck with loads of dirty energy. The ultimate goal should be unlimited energy for everyone, but only sustainable energy. That first portion is rarely mentioned in the climate change community.

Wh1skey 3y ago

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Devasta 3y ago

Sincerely, every single person involved in a crypto mining operation should be arrested. Just pretend they are financing the Houthis or something and apologize for it in a decade or two, we are way beyond the 11th hour to get our carbon emissions under control and nonsense like this isn't helping.

dj_gitmo 3y ago

Has anyone estimated when it will not longer make economic sense to mine Bitcoin?

andrewheekin 3y ago

This article completely glosses over the hardest problem in the power industry - grid transmission constraints. What's a transmission constraint? Well, eventually the electrical resistance on high voltage power lines reaches a maximum threshold at which no more power can flow through the line, shoutout Ohm's Law :) I work in financial power derivatives, and there are entire trading desks devoted to "congestion trading" - ie the financial right to transmit power between grid locations with inherent transmission congestion. From the EIA map of mining operations, crypto mining tends to take place in remote areas where electricity is plentiful but hard to deliver to major load zones (cities) due to grid transmission constraints. On the whole, most crypto mining operations choose to operate in regions where the price of electricity is cheap (remote locations). Paradoxically, these operations running during off-peak times contributes to grid stability by smoothing the load curve and preventing expensive curtailment of alternative generation resources (think along the lines of a wind turbine needing to shut down on a windy day bc it's generating more power than the grid can consume)

ninepoints 3y ago
I'm very familiar with congestion trading and was in that industry at one point, but cmon, this is a bad crypto talking point. It's already quite apparent that bitcoin mines actually destabilize grids just as much while driving up electricity prices for local consumers far more than any positive net effect from an energy perspective.

pcdoodle 3y ago

There's no second best.

kwar13 3y ago

Same old tired argument. The proof of work employed in mostly Bitcoin by now (most cryptos use proof of stake which has drastically lower energy consumption). Let's compare it to: 1- How much it takes to run the banking industry, even a JPM Chase would do. 2- Bot accounts on Instagram or Tiktok. 3- Gas flared on oil rigs. Nobody slams the above three for "wasting" energy because they are closed systems that cannot be measured. Crypto is mostly an open system so it's easy to just point to a number with a headline "bitcoin used more energy than x country"

FabHK 3y ago

One nitpick: It's not "total U.S. power", but electricity production. Power comprises (broadly speaking) electricity and fuel (which in turn is used for heating and transportation).

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

The most interesting and fitting comparison IMO is the comparison to gold mining: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/comparisons https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/comparisons estimates 175.34 TWh per year for Bitcoin mining and 131 TWh per year for Gold mining. Most gold is used in a similar way like Bitcoin (hoarded as a store of value because people believe that other people will continue to consider it valuable). With Bitcoin mining, I believe the only relevant environmental issue is the power consumption (there's also some e-waste but I assume that's negligible compared to the power). With gold, the power consumption is a complete afterthought, the massive amounts of toxic waste and the abuse of workers are much bigger issues. I'm shocked that both industries seem to be consuming a similar order of magnitude to be honest (I expected Bitcoin mining to be more energy intensive compared to gold). In terms of value stored, gold stores low double-digit trillions, Bitcoin about one trillion.

downrightmike 3y ago
The thing about bitcoin mining is that it requires more power, the more power you use. They network can work on far smaller resources.
- andy81 3y ago
  That would require the price to drop proportionally (or waiting for halvings).
  - gregable 3y ago
    So in the limit, buying POW coins is using that money to consume energy. Selling the coins is taking that money away from energy consumption.

gabrieldance 3y ago

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shashasha2 3y ago

Stop worrying guys. Mining energy expenditure will stop when reward won’t match the price anymore. Bitcoin mining as we know it will come to an end soon. Infinite energy waste is a myth. Simple math will give you the ending date. As for now, miners will mine.

AnitaNaulty 3y ago

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Vincentduff 3y ago

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Garypaul 3y ago

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Giovanniamien 3y ago

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Prashanthills 3y ago

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Castellanavito 3y ago
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Giovanniamien 3y ago
Thanks for sharing this here. A lot of beginners Like me are smashed out there every day. It's a good thing we have nice people here who want others to become successful as they are.

Jakesben 3y ago

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nojvek 3y ago

Likely gonna get downvoted for saying it. Wasn’t this the whole point of bitcoin? To guarantee a slow increasing supply of coins with a fine upper limit of 21 million bitcoins. Only 2 million more left and they get increasingly take more energy to mine. There was a joke amongst my peers that the last bitcoin will take a Dyson sphere around the sun to mine. Bitcoin makes sense as an instrument to hedge against inflation, but the charts correlate with stock market. So it is as speculative as the rest of market. Unlike say gold which usually has an inverse graph as a holder of value. IMO the insane trading fees of bitcoin have ruined it for me. I love what ethereum is doing with proof of stake.