Use of Bitcoin causes around 22 megatons in CO2 emissions annually

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/tuom-bcc061319.php

by vixen99 • 7 years ago

34 44 7 years ago

justaaron3• 7 years ago

This needs to be pushed into the public eye more. There's a lot of green-washing going on in crypto-currency publicity, as of late, and it needs to be emphasized how the MODEL is fundamentally broken. (Example: Proof of work complexity quadrupling in 2018 alone.)

It's socially irresponsible, at this juncture in time, to be promoting such schemes. At this point in history it's abundantly clear that "alternative islands" cannot avoid confronting the "mainstream morass" as the "mainstream morass" is currently on a direct collision course with life itself.

throwaway8573842• 7 years ago

How much pollution does gold mining produce? How much pollution does printing money produce? How much electricity (pollution) does visa use? How much pollution does any service we take for granted produce?

I'm not saying bitcoins CO2 product is good or bad, just that there are so many things that create so much CO2 that we never question or consider.

justaaron3• 7 years ago

Tell me more about the exponentially increasing pollution/costs of printing money, please.

Tell me more about strawman arguments.

I specifically alleged that "proof of work" is a bad idea.

ForHackernews6• 7 years ago

I think you're being disingenuous. Bitcoin is fundamentally different from all of those other things in that it is deliberately designed to be as inefficient as possible. Proof of Work is a Red Queen's Race[0] where the difficulty keeps escalating and you have to keep pumping in more energy or else risk somebody else executing a 51% attack against you.

Not only do miners and printers work to make their processes more efficient and cheaper, but once the gold coins are minted or paper money is printed, they can be used for N transactions at extremely low cost per-transaction. Contrast this with bitcoin where EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION has to be bundled in a block, so every single transaction involves more energy than an average household uses in a week[1].

Imagine burning a whole tank of gasoline to pay for a cup of coffee and you'll start to see why Bitcoin is an ecological atrocity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...

[2] https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin

wtdata• 7 years ago

Again this tired strawman argument?

Gold mining produces several orders of magnitude less CO2 pollution than Bitcoin. Besides that, gold mining processes are ever increasingly more efficient, while Bitcoin, by design, is every increasingly less efficient to mine.

Lordarminius2• 7 years ago

It is socially irresponsible to promote the best alternative we have to fiat currency and the looming disaster that is fractional reserve banking ?

NotPaidToPost2• 7 years ago

Well if that's the best alternative to fiat money it only shows how fiat money will stay with us for a long, long time...

the_trapper• 7 years ago

Between the environmental impact mentioned here and the meteoric rise of ransomware that crypto currency has caused, I have a hard time believing that it is a net positive overall.

throwaway8573842• 7 years ago

Negative press in anticipation of FaceBook-Coin?

nyanloutre2• 7 years ago

That's not so bad considering that it would use the same power even with 100 time the current user base

Also the methodology used to get the miners IP is very questionable

perseusmandate3• 7 years ago

IPs are crucial to understanding the actual carbon output. Often times analyses are simplified to the point that they discount that miners are using uncommonly cheap power sources like Icelandic geothermal

cjbenedikt• 7 years ago

Anyone mentioned training one (1) AI model creates as much CO2 as 5 cars over their life time...??? Nope? Just saying....

dTal• 7 years ago

How big of an AI model?

By my figuring, a car uses about a thousand gigajoules, or $20,000 worth of gasoline, over its lifetime, American gas prices. Depending on where you buy your electricity, that comes out to 10 to 20 grand's worth of power (gasoline is relatively expensive per joule). So this figure implies that training an AI model costs 100 grand in electricity. Is that right?

Because I thought "training an AI model" was more of a "1 week on a single GPU" kind of thing.

imtringued• 7 years ago

The comparison is completely arbitrary. Big AI models require more resources than economy cars because an AI model can serve millions of users whereas the economy car only serves one. What if we stop talking about economy cars? It is only fair to compare a "lamborghini" AI model to a real lamborghini and suddenly the situation is reversed.

hedora3• 7 years ago

Where did you get this number?

A really, really big (like the biggest FAANG had last year) ML cluster would use at most four or five DGX-N’s to train a model, because that is the current scaling limit for CNNs.

Each draw 3500W:

https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx1-user-guide/introduction-to-...

3500 * 5 is 17,500W. A US space heater maxes out at 1600 watts.

Training for a week (5 days) is 2100 kWh, which is less than 60 gallons of gasoline, or 2-6 tanks of gas, depending on your vehicle:

https://www.convertunits.com/from/kWh/to/gallon+%5BU.S.%5D+o...

perseusmandate3• 7 years ago

Given the razor thin margins of BTC the miners are heavily incented to use the cheapest energy possible. And as miners exploit cheaper energy they deploy more ASICs, raising difficulty and decreasing margins for the remainder. As such miners switch to economical power sources faster than perhaps any other industry and many operations have relocated accordingly

As of 2019, the absolute cheapest subsidy free energy in the world is Chilean solar power. In the next 5 years solar will indisputably become the cheapest if you consider the proliferation in China, Saudi Arabia's plans ect.

What is unique about mining vs almost everything else is that location is irrelevant. It doesn't need to be connected to any supply chain or residential areas. Accordingly we are seeing heavy investment to exploit areas that are very well suited to wind and solar but are hard to connect to the grid, meaning there is currently no demand even though there is potential supply. One such project is in Morocco

If BTC has merit as a network it will have staying power well past 10 years, at which point the carbon output should be null.

yvdriess• 7 years ago

With the additional caveat that even if the production of renewables is not emitting CO2, the production of the equipment, installation and maintenance is.

perseusmandate3• 7 years ago

True but that's probably 2 orders less. Ideally it would be done with electric vehicles at carbon neutral factories

drcross• 7 years ago

In an ideal scenario global solar power generation would be over produced so that it would still be of a considerable supply for wintertime use. All the summer over production could be moved to bitcoin mining, or hydrogen creation resulting in ad-hoc, free, follow the sun bitcoin mining or hydrogen storage. When summer switches to winter in the northern hemisphere then the southern hemisphere takes up the load.

ForHackernews6• 7 years ago

I keep seeing these kind of hand-waving justifications like "Oh, BTC miners will surely incentivize renewable energy" but every reputable source that looks at the actual state of the world says that it's mostly Chinese coal powering bitcoin mining: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/

hedora3• 7 years ago

We’re going to need all the electricity we can get for carbon capture, ocean deacidification, and other terraforming efforts. The earth’s ecosystems are already collapsing.

We’ll also need it for food production as agriculture moves toward being carbon neutral.

Anyway, BTC can’t scale to a even a negligible fraction of the population on the transaction processing side, so it will keep being niche until it is significantly improved, replaced, or collapses.

erentz2• 7 years ago

This argument is so misguided and I’m surprised whenever it comes up how many people bite.

How many megatons of CO2 are released globally every year due to people setting their air con to 72 when they could just deal with it being at 76. Or heat their homes in winter to 75 when they could just put an extra layer on and heat it to 70.

The point is energy is there to be used and people will choose to use it however it suits them for whatever they like within the confines of what they think is a reasonable use of their money. Bitcoin is no different. But these articles and the comments are all about attacking Bitcoin with an attitude that we should prohibit this particular use of energy. The correct thing to do is to properly price in the externalities to energy so that all uses are effected and if a use is then truly bad it will be priced out, or at worst it’ll at least pay for its environmental cost (such as setting your thermostat too high).

darkcha0s• 7 years ago

One thing you are missing- bitcoin doesn't solve any problem. We have currency, and the currency in its form today doesn't need to waste electricity as part of its inner-workings (I'm aware it takes energy to produce). AC and its power consumption is a necessary evil in some places to make livable conditions. Bitcoin doesn't have that fallback; I can pay for my coffee without creating CO2, just by using cash. No one here is saying we should forbid/outlaw/block bitcoin because of its CO2 emissions. People are just seeing it as another reason to not blindly buy into the hype.

ForHackernews6• 7 years ago

No one here is saying we should forbid/outlaw/block bitcoin because of its CO2 emissions.

I am. I'll make that case. Proof-of-work cryptocurrency should be banned for the same reason truck drivers idling diesel engines in cities should be banned: It harms the environment and produces nothing useful for society.

If these crypocurrency developers are such geniuses, and cryptocurrency is really solving a critical problem, then banning PoW will spur innovation in alternative mechanisms like proof-of-stake or proof-of-luck [0] to meet those use cases with far less ecological devastation.

[0] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/249.pdf

erentz2• 7 years ago

It’s a value judgement people are making about something they don’t like and justifying it with this emissions thing.

Gambling isn’t useful either, what are the megatons of CO2 emitted by casinos? Movie theaters are pretty useless, how much is spent air conditioning those. I don’t like that massive data centers are processing images so people can have silly AR videos. We shouldn’t have that. Etc.

We can’t (and probably shouldn’t) dictate what people do with electricity once it’s on the grid and so articles like this are just baiting peoples value judgements without contributing to solving the problem: If we don’t like that we have polluting coal and gas plants pumping CO2 into the atmosphere we should take action to fix that, not try to pick and choose how people use electricity to make ourselves feel better.

durdleturtle• 7 years ago

This is why blockchain is a bad technology. It inherently has excessive overhead and the benefits (decentralization) don't pan out in practice.

bytematic• 7 years ago

Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption: Czech Republic[0]

-[0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

rini17• 7 years ago

I propose that this is primarily a failure to invent ways to use surplus electricity in places with poor infrastructure.

Use of Bitcoin causes around 22 megatons in CO2 emissions annually

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