Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C: study from 2018

https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350880234917285888

by rossjudson • 6 years ago

136 352 6 years ago

pstrateman4• 6 years ago

There's been a number of articles and papers on this topic, but I've yet to see one that attempted to look at the energy mix miners use.

It's virtually entirely renewables, hydro, wind, solar.

Bitcoin mining is a perfectly elastic operation, one of the only energy consumers that will turn off when rates are high.

mod2• 6 years ago

The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard

pstrateman4• 6 years ago

They assert that without making any attempt to analyze the energy mix of the miners.

They just assume that they're running on the world average energy mix, which they most definitely are not.

afavour4• 6 years ago

I’d be interested to see a citation on that. But even still, couldn’t those renewables be used for other applications if Bitcoin isn’t using them?

will turn off when rates are high

But doesn’t Bitcoin directly contribute to rates rising? Supply and demand, and all that.

pstrateman4• 6 years ago

I'm the citation, I've done large scale mining.

Storage exceeds the value of the energy now and for the foreseeable future.

The energy being used is largely not wasted, it's simply excess.

yardstick• 6 years ago

I didn’t realise miners were that sensitive to electricity pricing. Does this make a 51% attack easier if you can spike power prices in key mining regions?

Also is there a good graph somewhere showing BTC online mining capacity over time?

lern_too_spel• 6 years ago

It's even easier than that. Since the majority of mining happens in China, the CCP can control the chain by fiat.

xg156• 6 years ago

I don't think this would really make a difference: Even if miners work only with renewable energy, they waste energy that could be used for other things.

I think the unique thing with bitcoin (and what offsets them from other large-scale energy consumers) is that the technology is intentionally spending as much energy as possible - at it's core, bitcoin mining is quite literally a race about who can access the most energy.

As such I see the environmental danger in bitcoin in a potential to undo efficiency wins everywhere else: If we make the rest of the economy more energy efficient, then the surplus energy could be used to grow the economy without impacting the climate or might not even need to be produced at all. Now there are incentives to dump this energy into crypto-mining instead.

ancientworldnow• 6 years ago

Actually this ramping up and down when the price is profitable is good for utilities who need to keep power supply and demand in check. When electricity is cheap to produce, they need demand to go up to balance the grid - sort of the opposite of peaker plants when demand outpaces supply. This is partially why a few electrical companies run their own Bitcoin mining farms.

nirushiv• 6 years ago

Why do they consider Square and Paypal dirty companies? Do they support Bitcoin?

tomComb2• 6 years ago

I'm finding Eth2 attractive because of its move to Proof Of Stake which addresses the concern raised in this tweet.

I believe that energy usage was one of the motivations for them making that change.

jtsiskin• 6 years ago

For sure. It’s the “green” option at this point.

mlthoughts20186• 6 years ago

It is so shameful for people to characterize resource use as “waste” like this. Not surprised to see more sanctimonious nonsense from Stephen Diehl, the same guy who thinks all us programmers not using functional languages are neanderthals still in “the bloodletting and leeches” era of software engineering.

This really is beyond the pale. Stephen sounds like a total crackpot here.

How much “waste” does Pixar’s renderfarm generate when creating artistic cinema that people want?

How much “waste” does Sony’s Playstation Network generate distributing games people want?

How much “waste” does the sum total of plastic surgery create?

superkuh• 6 years ago

I agree. How much waste do fiat currencies generate protecting their themselves with standing armies (or the alliances with a country that has one)? Far more than the amount of energy used to secure bitcoin currency against other nation states using proof of work.

wwtrv5• 6 years ago

Iregardless of what ones opinion on maintaining standing armies might be usually it creates significant added value (unlike mining bitcoin) for the economy. All those people in the military or working in industries producing for the military have to be paid etc.

eeZah7Ux3• 6 years ago

All traditional currencies are backed by military might and the constant threat of war.

If a cryptocurrency could decrease such centralization of power and consequent waste of human lives, money and energy it would be excellent.

However, bitcoin has no mechanism to democratize banking - on the contrary, the more wealth you have the more mining you can afford doing.

This makes the whole conversation fall into whataboutism.

wwtrv5• 6 years ago

Pixar and PSN provide actual value to some people, while mining bitcoin is completely superfluous (not saying that bitcoin itself is necessarily useless but that the same result can be reached without wasting as much energy needlessly)

mlthoughts20186• 6 years ago

That is a radical claim to make with no evidence and huge evidence to the contrary.

BoiledCabbage• 6 years ago

This really is beyond the pale.

Beyond the pale? Beyond the pale to discuss Bitcoin energy usage. Some bitcoin people never cease to amaze me.

On top of that, the answer for all of the above is effectively zero compared to Bitcoin.

https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...

And I think that's part of the issue - a number of people aren't appreciating exactly how incredibly wasteful Bitcoin mining is.

deathanatos• 6 years ago

I was curious about the actual number; how much energy does Bitcoin use?

the bitcoin network in 2020 consumes 120 gigawatts (GW) per second.

GW / s. (/year, I suppose, since it's just 2020. But FFS. Edit: no, GW / s / year is GW, but that's still not… really? right? I mean, maybe it's an average of the energy consumption rate over the year, and so on average, in 2020, it was consuming 120GW?)

mlthoughts20186• 6 years ago

Uhh no. Stephen is not discussing BTC energy usage. This is sanctimonious, moralistic grandstanding that presupposes “Bitcoin bad” as a moral absolute straw man to set up a nasty, useless screed railing against it.

If there was some legit discussion in it, that would be fine. There utterly is none.

afavour4• 6 years ago

I don’t really think those are fair comparisons. For one, the PlayStation network provides entertainment. I know from a hard economic perspective that might not be “valuable”, but it is. People need entertainment. And I’m sure the PS network is more energy efficient than everyone driving half an hour to a movie theatre, or something.

By comparison Bitcoin provides nothing other than itself. It’s price is almost entirely powered by speculation at this point. To put it another way: if the PS network disappears tomorrow it will have still entertained millions. If Bitcoin crashes tomorrow, it leaves nothing.

rfd4sgmk8u2• 6 years ago

Saying that BTC provides nothing other than itself is too reductionist -- indeed the Playstation Network also provides nothing other than itself, the ability for users to play online games with each other. If bitcoin crashes tomorrow, it will still have enabled censorship resistant, peer to peer value transfer for millions. People use it to pay for games, buy things, sell things, donate and preserve the value of money earned in depreciating fiat.

I would argue that BTC has provided significantly more value to its millions of users in its 12 year history than Playstation Network; What is PSN really -- a matchmaking service, and social contact platform. What is a global, peer to peer, censorship resistant, non-government fiat backed economic system worth?

_vertigo2• 6 years ago

I think the point is that Bitcoin uses an insane amount of energy for what it accomplishes, if one considers only the financial transaction aspect (and not all of the other benefits that Bitcoin might provide - depending on your position on Bitcoin, that may or may not be fair to do).

If someone invented a car that consumed 10,000x as much energy per mile, using that car would generally be considered a waste of resources, or at least a wasteful use of resources.

rfd4sgmk8u2• 6 years ago

To continue the abstract car analogy, what if this car that used 10,000x the energy per mile also had some magic properties -- like that anyone could build the car themselves from the blueprints, it could magically teleport anywhere on earth and nobody could tell you where you could drive it (traffic signs are ignored).

"Would that be worth something to you, eh?" -- Scotty

asddubs• 6 years ago

i highly doubt any of those 3 examples use enough energy to be meaningfully measured as a percentage of the total global energy consumption

rossjudson2• 6 years ago

A 2019 thread on Hacker News has the Pixar Renderfarm core count at around 60K. That is...microscopic...in terms of data center scale and energy usage.

So you've built a tiny tower of straw men, attempting to use them to draw a false equivalence between the energy to maintain and expand the bitcoin system.

I suspect bitcoin adherents may also enjoy (along with mining) continuously spraying chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. Big Bad Society does frown on that activity! Increasingly, Big Bad Society does not like the externalities from things like BTC.

Diehl is wrong about speculation being the only use of bitcoin. Investing in crime is the other.

Toutouxc• 6 years ago

TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do.

Nope, lost me there. I'm all for having deep discussions about Bitcoin and the environment and the undeniable fact that Bitcoin mining wastes energy, but not with a person that refuses to understand how value works.

Things have value if and only if there are people that believe it has value. There is no other principle. No "inherent" value, no guarantees, nothing. Everything is exactly as valuable as the majority of people perceive it to be. Dollars, gold, food, Justin Bieber, freedom, Bitcoin.

You may not agree, but then it's still happening, only without you.

If you don't sell Bitcoin, you're not the supply and you don't have a say. If you don't buy Bitcoin, you're not the demand and you don't have a say.

xg156• 6 years ago

You could say the exact same thing about pyramid schemes.

paulryanrogers• 6 years ago

Gold has a modest industrial usage. Fiat is backed by a government in control of resources or a military. Bitcoin is fiat without anyone to guarantee anything.

Considering the impact of mining it may touch everyone we can all make our voices heard. No need to buy or sell to justify expressing oneself.

bhickey• 6 years ago

Bitcoin is useful for funneling money to the DPRK and scamming libertarians.

eddietejeda• 6 years ago

There are lots of issues with bitcoin, but the inherent value one is the least interesting.

Clearly, some people think there is value. That's it.

erulabs2• 6 years ago

Nothing in life is free. While I concur BTC mining is expensive (and I'm a huge fan of movements to Proof-of-Stake (Vitalik is a genius)), I'd love to see a comparison to the movement of gold. Large sums of gold are regularly moved on passenger planes, not to even start on the environmental cost of minting, coining, holding and protecting gold stores.

All energy expenditure == global warming, but that doesn't mean no energy should be spent. As one of my favorite humorist/economist/lecturers, Jeffrey A. Tucker, somewhat trolling-ly put it: "Sometimes conserving is not a good idea. There are some life activities that cry out for the expenditure of resources, even in the most generous possible way."

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

Irrelevant equivalencies. What has gold to do with anything?

Hard to imagine anything more colossally wasteful than burning precious energy sources for ... imaginary points.

erulabs2• 6 years ago

My understanding of the world suggests that the value of gold and the value of bitcoin are equally "imaginary". Should humans not spend energy on their imaginations?

j0ej0ej0e• 6 years ago

aren't most fiat currencies in the developed world basically imaginary points now too?

xg156• 6 years ago

I think the difference is that bitcoin mining is an intentional race about who can spend the most energy.

You can argue about how useful it is to move gold, but at least it's a physical process that requires a well-defined amount of energy - and can be optimised if you want to spend less.

With bitcoin, there is no set amount of power that is needed to mine a block. The answer is literally "as much power as possible".

cassepipe4• 6 years ago

IIUC your point is that energy is wasted in the mining process. But I am not sure you can say it is a competition for who spend the most energy... Is power consumption linear with computing power, I am curious. Anyways, just as gold moving, computing power can be optimised for energy efficiency. Also it would have been better for OP to compare not with gold moving but with gold ... mining, an extremely energy hungry ans environmentally destructive industry.

gweinberg2• 6 years ago

It's actually like that with gold also: the amount it costs to mine/refine an ounce of gold is always almost the same as the value of an ounce of gold, because whether or not it is worth exploiting a marginal deposit depends on the value of gold.

jayd163• 6 years ago

How about a comparison to something electronic, like a credit card transaction? This is (purposefully?) derailing as I don't think a single person is suggesting gold coins is a better alternative to BTC.

dsomers• 6 years ago

He did, he claimed a Bitcoin transaction takes half a million times more energy then a credit card transaction. 621 kwh

dgellow2• 6 years ago

I might be wrong but I don’t believe that Vitalik had anything to do with the development of Proof-of-Stake.

See this article for a short history: https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-history-and-evolution-of-...

ohazi• 6 years ago

Large sums of gold are regularly moved on passenger planes, not to even start on the environmental cost of minting, coining, holding and protecting gold stores.

Citation sorely needed. A "large sum" of gold would fit in a small suitcase. Who the fuck is filling airplanes with significantly more than that, save for exceptional circumstances?

Most "store of value" gold sits in vaults around the world and is never moved. When ownership changes because someone buys a gold ETF, it's just bits moving around in a database.

biolurker16• 6 years ago

Gold doesn't swim. It needs to be mined too. Not with shovels.

wmf3• 6 years ago

Now add Avalanche to that comparison.

aporetics• 6 years ago

Nothing in life is free.

Should read: every action (including inaction) has specific, inescapable consequences.

The question is: what matters more? Is the cost worth it?

No one needs bitcoin. No one. You might argue that we need a viable currency, but the two are not equivalent.

What everyone needs, without exception, is a functioning biosphere.

I agree with your humorist. Now is a perfect example of a time when we need to be expending resources and capital on saving the planet. Generous? Or just adequate?

mr_woozy11• 6 years ago

All of these posts are false equivalency until we are willing to compare energy usages of other "frivolous" uses.

How about

* Video games * movie viewing * 2.0 phone apps no one wants * the entire payments industry * banking energy consumption with all facets factored in (human resources, commuting, logistics)

nmlnn5• 6 years ago

Bitcoin doesn't waste energy. Bitcoin consumes energy waste.

The global market for adding bitcoin blocks is as competitive as it is possible to get. No barriers to entry, no one even has to know who or where you are. As such only miners who can secure the cheapest energy survive.

Excess hydro capacity in China during rainy season; capturing flared gas from shale oil fields in the US; geothermal in Iceland; any source of stranded or wasted energy.. bitcoin mining will soak it up.

Bitcoin mining using fossil fuels is simply not cost competitive.

This "#hashes => #GWh => #tonnes CO2", is broken logic full of unsubstantiated assumptions made by bitcoin haters.

Fellshard• 6 years ago

I think both can be true. Specifically, Bitcoin mining would itself encourage greater energy production; it doesn't merely skim off the excess energy, as you suggest. It generates its own market forces, it's not merely floating above them.

xg156• 6 years ago

Indeed. This reminds me of the cobra effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

cjbprime2• 6 years ago

While that's plausible, I'd still agree with the parent comment in general -- it's true that it's not cost-effective to mine using fossil fuels (you would lose money doing it), and this alone requires a different way of talking about the issue.

eeZah7Ux3• 6 years ago

Bitcoin mining would itself encourage greater energy production

Bitcoin does not generate energy - it consumes it.

And the world does not benefit from any encouragement to produce and consume more energy.

Muromec• 6 years ago

So 72 TWh per year in electricity is between 3 and 5 billions of dollars. Which is a lot, but the question is — should it be compared with electricity bills and environmental footprint of Visa Inc. or with a budget of U.S. military?

spiorf13• 6 years ago

Why does every article about this talks about the energy per transaction? Energy spent is completely independent from the number of transactions.

ajkdhcb22• 6 years ago

Exactly. This is the key point. All fear-mongering about cryptomining energy usage is based on this completely invalid logic.

dgellow2• 6 years ago

As a way to make it somehow relatable to readers

spiorf13• 6 years ago

But it's wrong.

It's like making car efficiency relatable by saying that a car can go 180km/h using 5 airbags.

twiss2• 6 years ago

Transactions are what makes Bitcoin useful (in theory) for "normal people". Thus it is fair to evaluate the entire Bitcoin network in terms of how much energy it takes versus (i.e. divided by) how many transactions it handles.

spiorf13• 6 years ago

It's still wrong a wrong comparison. Bitcoin network's energy is expended for securing the block.

It means that to revert a 1 hour-old transaction, an attacker would have to consume double the energy the whole bitcoin network expended in that hour.

More energy expended == more security.

Number of TX is totally irrelevant.

wmf3• 6 years ago

On second thought, never mind.

spiorf13• 6 years ago

Yes it is. You can have empty block or full block and energy expended is the same.

Cap is irrelevant in this context.

ajkdhcb22• 6 years ago

No, it truly is completely independent.

rjbwork3• 6 years ago

Personally I'm mining on my new gaming PC right now instead of running my heater when I'm not doing anything intensive. I wonder if decentralizing the hardware into people's homes or putting it in very cold places that need to generate heat during winter would be a way to cut down on some of the excessive waste of energy and thus emissions.

EDIT: Some good points down below WRT heat pumps. I have a window unit AC/Heater for just my room so that I don't need to run the whole house's AC/Heater the vast majority of the time. I'm not sure about heat pumps in such a small scale. Would it be more efficient to run a heat pump for a whole house than to mine to heat my one room?

ognarb2• 6 years ago

Do you realize that PC are not as energy efficient as an heater?

api• 6 years ago

A PC is a resistance heater. Only thing more efficient is a heat pump.

gubby• 6 years ago

Both PCs and fan heaters are 100% efficient at producing heat.

spiorf13• 6 years ago

Actually, the "inefficiency" of everything is converted to heat. So, a PC is more efficient because it does useful work in the meantime.

rjbwork3• 6 years ago

How so? I was under the impression that all energy consumed by computers gets turned into waste heat, which is exactly what a heater does.

gamegoblin• 6 years ago

While that's arguably better than simply running an electric radiator, it's far more expensive than natural gas heating or a heat pump.

gweinberg2• 6 years ago

San Francisco has banned natural gas in new construction. And you'll need some heat source to get through those chilly San Francisco summers.

neaanopri• 6 years ago

You're running a "resistive heater" which turns 1 unit of electricity into 1 unit of heat.

Heat Pumps can "pump" heat from the outside into the house, and this get more than 1 unit of heat from 1 unit of electricity.

SkyMarshal2• 6 years ago

True, but if you're already running bitcoin miners, then you can turn off or get rid of the heat pump and save on your aggregate heating costs.

zionic• 6 years ago

Obviously we need a heat pump crypto miner

Ericson2314• 6 years ago

Well, that's a really depressing solution.

The economy is supposed to exist to surve, not we fidn some way to minimize the oven to serve our PoW god

rjbwork3• 6 years ago

Lol. Well, I'm also making money at the same time, albeit only about $10/day. So I get to ultimately reduce the price of the hardware and not pay to run my heater.

throwaway_1237• 6 years ago

This is actually an interesting idea... We could power Bitcoin mining with solar energy, and then generate thermoelectric power with the heat it generates.

tucosan• 6 years ago

It is unlikely that a GPU is an efficient heat source. Cryptomining should be done on green energy, or not at all. Generally, we should move away from proof-of-work based currencies.

drexlspivey• 6 years ago

It is unlikely that a GPU is an efficient heat source.

This is plain wrong. A device that consumes N watts of power (and doesn't output electricity or some other form of energy) will eventually produce N joules of heat per second.

SkyMarshal2• 6 years ago

I wonder if decentralizing the hardware into people's homes or putting it in very cold places that need to generate heat during winter would be a way to cut down on some of the excessive waste of energy and thus emissions.

This is already being done, especially the latter, in part because cooling is cheaper in cooler climes. Also some geothermal power is cheaper as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/how-iceland-be...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-miners-nordic-region-...

And, anecdotally, I know at least two people who have installed bitcoin mining farms under their floorboards and use them to heat the house in the winter. I assume there are more.

laurent92• 6 years ago

Official sources say trees can absorb 3Gtec per year. That’s what we emitted in 1990. Since then we increased emissions by 2.5-3. So we need to divide by 3. And more than that, because what is already emitted is already warming the atmosphere.

So we can EITHER choose between heating our house, having a car or travelling once London-NYC per year.

We won’t reach it if everyone is finding excuses.

- You need to isolate your house so that human heating is enough to warm it up.

- Why is anyone even living so far up north. Barely no-one was living in Sweden in 1900, so why do we have to invent schemes so that you can do it (at great energy expense) when clearly, nature wouldn’t allow you to do it?

- Unless all the figures of IPCC scientists are fake, which I’m starting to doubt about, because I’ve studied feminism and I know it is possible to persuade an entire country of false figures. Let’s call that the “mass science” effect, where processes can be twisted in order to gain political leverage.

But if the “mass science effect” isn’t here, you sure shouldn’t think that using mining as a decent offline activity for your computer is a viable solution.

tobyhinloopen• 6 years ago

Pretty unrealistic standpoint here. Might as well not even try.

I’m using resistive heating in smaller rooms and it cut my gas usage to near 0, saving me almost 50% in electric and gas costs.

This is the only way to make people change their behavior: show them another way. A realistic way, and make it cheaper or otherwise more desirable for them in shorter timespan

agilob3• 6 years ago

I met one guy on a meetup in the UK who installed BTC miners at his parents house in Russia. He told this is a practice in Siberia.

amelius3• 6 years ago

Even better would be to get better thermal isolation of your house.

jude-3• 6 years ago

Since when does Bitcoin have to use greenhouse gas-emitting sources of power?

ognarb2• 6 years ago

Since the time where most of the Bitcoin "farm" are in Mongolia using electricity from coal energy plants.

nmlnn5• 6 years ago

*Citation Needed

tadzik_3• 6 years ago

None of the farms analyzed in the article are in Mongolia: https://github.com/Camilo-Mora/Bitcoin/blob/master/Katie_Tab...

Acrobatic_Road• 6 years ago

they are mostly in western chinese provinces like yunnan and sichuan where hydroelectric power is common. Miners in (inner) mongolia are using geothermal.

tadzik_3• 6 years ago

Exactly. Every article about this seems to cut corners when it comes to this very thing. Even in this one, the small print admits that they averaged the amount of CO2 produced by power plants in a given country, skipping over the fact that cryptocurrency farms will gravitate towards cheap energy sources for obvious economic reasons, which makes them much more likely to be using hydropower than coal, for instance.

viraptor8• 6 years ago

It doesn't matter for a limited supply of energy. If we have hydro power available as well as coal, Bitcoin miners being located near hydro means that they hog that supply. Energy that could supply other uses is now not available and uses which previously relied on coal still rely on coal (because the usage only creeps up).

bpodgursky• 6 years ago

Electricity is fungible, attached to a grid, and we aren't at 100% renewable.

So unless the miners are going out of their way to build their own solar capacity (they aren't), it's all essentially carbon.

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

Since when does anyone have to use a gas-powered car instead of riding a bike?

Since when does anyone have to heat their house instead of wearing more layers when it gets cold?

This idea that Bitcoin could potentially use only renewable sources of energy is a popular narrative among Bitcoin circles, but it flies in the face of common sense. Crypto proponents keep circulating stories about miners using excess renewable energy, but we all know that this isn't the norm.

jude-3• 6 years ago

Governments could pass laws tomorrow requiring all crypto mining use 100% renewable energy by a certain date, just as like they are doing with cars. They could also pass minimum efficiency standards for mining, just as they do for heating appliances. I for one would welcome both moves. Even though your points were meant as counterexamples, what they really illuminate is that the crypto mining industry needs proper regulation, just like cars and heaters.

johndevor• 6 years ago

How is work on proof of stake going?

Tzela• 6 years ago

https://sci-hub.st/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8

spiorf13• 6 years ago

This is completely wrong. They scaled energy with number of transactions.

At each time step, CO2e emissions for the given number of transactions were estimated based on the emissions generated to mine that number of transactions in 2017.

Bitcoin network does not work that way. Energy is spent securing the blockchain, not per transaction.

Rochus14• 6 years ago

You mean peer reviewers of Nature did a bad job?

matzab2• 6 years ago

This was a Comment (dated October 2018), not a paper.

mjfl4• 6 years ago

peer review is not infallible. Stop worshipping it.

hatsunearu• 6 years ago

Not only is peer review not some omniscient god, Nature isn't exactly flawless either. Plenty of top tier journals fuck up all the time.

Spivak• 6 years ago

Yeah “per transaction” cost is calculated by taking total energy expenditure rate divided by the transaction rate.

It’s a mistake to assume that the ratio is the thing that’s fixed. Energy expenditure is related to fees and the blockchain reward.

spiorf13• 6 years ago

It's a mistake to assume energy source composition too. I would guess that a majority of mining is renewable right now (mining is a perfect sink of intermittent excess energy, and because its profitability is related to energy cost, renewables win). More so in the future.

Denvercoder9• 6 years ago

Furthermore, they assume that Bitcoin will follow "the adoption trends of other broadly used technologies", which is unlikely to happen. Even the cryptocommunity is starting to accept that Bitcoin has effectively failed as a payment network.

xwdv• 6 years ago

Even the cryptocommunity is starting to accept that Bitcoin has effectively failed as a payment network.

Where are you seeing evidence of this?

SV_BubbleTime• 6 years ago

Even the cryptocommunity is starting to accept that Bitcoin has effectively failed as a payment network.

It’s got that sweet hype-commodity power though.

Although what can I say, when I saw my non-tech family talking about it I assumed it was dead. That was at $3000. I know nothing.

londons_explore• 6 years ago

Bitcoin has effectively failed as a payment network.

To fail, all of the 2nd layer networks have to fail, and it has to keep its position of a store of value, keeping transaction costs out of reach of regular folk.

If tomorrow there was a big price crash back to $1, and all transactions dried up, it would have a 2nd shot at being a payment network.

TomSwirly4• 6 years ago

I agree with that, but then with that the case, it seems like madness that Bitcoin has any value at all.

rtkwe• 6 years ago

The number of transactions are limited by block size though so each completed block has a maximum number of transactions it can include.. also securing the blockchain isn't an end unto itself it's only really useful when it includes transactions.

sp332• 6 years ago

Segregated Witness (SegWit) was activated in July 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit And overlays like the Lightning network have been in use for even less time.

SulfurHexaFluri4• 6 years ago

The true statement is "We consumed this amount of power and were able to process this amount of transactions" but the power usage does not scale with transactions. You could increase the block size and get far more transactions without changing the power usage because the power is not used to process transactions.

Geee3• 6 years ago

Another major error they made, is that they assume that Bitcoin mining uses grid energy and assume that it follows the CO2 emissions of electricity generation in that country.

This is completely wrong. Most mining happens currently on underutilized hydropower stations, because grid energy or fossil fuels wouldn't be as profitable. Because of the mining difficulty adjustment and diminishing returns in improving ASIC hardware, the only way to profit is to find cheaper energy sources than all other miners.

In the long term, Bitcoin mining accelerates the development of abundant and cheap energy, which is not fossil fuels.

viraptor8• 6 years ago

In the long term, Bitcoin mining accelerates the development of abundant and cheap energy, which is not fossil fuels.

Yes, but does it reduce the total reliance on fossil fuels? If we start with X coal plants and build a Y hydro plants to support btc mining, we're still running the original X coal plants.

konjin3• 6 years ago

In the long term, Bitcoin mining accelerates the development of abundant and cheap energy, which is not fossil fuels.

It incentivises stealing electricity because you can't beat free.

krashidov• 6 years ago

This is really interesting. I wonder if we could invent a coin that can only be mined through renewable energy. This could be the incentive people need to move off of carbon.

salmon30salmon• 6 years ago

That is only really accurate if the electricity used would somehow disappear were it not for the mining. Electricity (minus the energy lost in transport etc etc) is zero-sum. If the miner uses hydro, that means someone further from the dam is using coal, methane etc as the hydro company isn't selling excess on the grid.

Energy is finite on the grid, so yes mining takes energy which could have been used for (arguably) better purposes

carlcarlcarl• 6 years ago

This is completely wrong. Most mining happens currently on underutilized hydropower stations, because grid energy or fossil fuels wouldn't be as profitable.

Could you provide a source for this?

microdrum• 6 years ago

Welcome to progressive politics. Science and logic do not matter. They will use climate change to take your chosen store of value. Because your chosen store of value reduces their power over you. Pretty simple, really.

agedcayenne• 6 years ago

The amount of energy spent does not depend on number of transactions nor how much is needed to secure the blockchain, it's purely determined by how much miners are willing to spend, which is mostly determined by the bitcoin price. So, if you would expect the amount of energy spent on mining to scale with any variable, it would be trading price and price alone.

jasonlingx• 6 years ago

This is it. Amount of energy spent = profits from mining / cost of energy.

While price is the main factor affecting profits, fees/volume and the constantly decreasing block reward also play a part.

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

ok, but I can't help but think there must be some relatively negligible energy cost per transaction that nonetheless might be not so negligible when total number of transactions added together - what that energy cost is I wouldn't be able to say.

wmf3• 6 years ago

It really is negligible compared to mining, like a factor of a million or billion.

Animats• 6 years ago

It's worse than that. The assumption is that Bitcoin transactions eventually become the world's payment system. Then this is multiplied by Bitcoin's very inefficient work per transaction.

imtringued3• 6 years ago

The amount of energy wasted depends on how high the block reward and the transaction fees are. The block reward is going down over time and transaction fees are unlikely to grow beyond a practical maximum.

tromp2• 6 years ago

Transaction fees will have to go up to compensate, else Bitcoin will become insecure as its resistance to 51% attacks falls below critical levels. See discussion at [1].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5306354.0

np_tedious2• 6 years ago

Employing thousands of human beings and computers and offices for processing simple transactions is wasteful too. Both using a bank (with outdated system) and "being your own bank" cost energy

jayd163• 6 years ago

You realize those humans are doing other things besides manually calculating electronic transactions, right?

np_tedious2• 6 years ago

Yes of course. It's a matter of efficiency. Certainly they aren't doing so optimally.

I'm not even trying to make any claims on magnitude. Just saying it's pretty clear if shipping/housing gold changes to bitcoin, if some amount of finance activity changes to Ethereum or some kind of DeFi, then this is not purely additive. It's replacing, and the article doesn't account for this

ojagodzinski• 6 years ago

Really? 9USD for single article? Is this the same article as in here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328581842_Bitcoin_e... (free)?

jonas21• 6 years ago

Well, at least it's cheaper than a Bitcoin transaction.

hazz99• 6 years ago

9USD for a single article is a fair bit more affordable than the standard research article price. They normally run from $30ea up to a few hundred, depending on the source.

cherlin• 6 years ago

If this is the case, we're doomed. The only salvation I can see is if Proof-Of-Work is changed for something else...

jeanlucas• 6 years ago

It's from 2018 and has been discussed many many times. Funny how fast it got to the front-page today.

Is that what we call FUD? News to try and scare people from a specific company or technology? There's literally no new arguments, just fear mongering.

hkt4• 6 years ago

Fear of global warming ending civilization.

No biggie though, eh

spiorf13• 6 years ago

Ignore the millions of 1-ton chunks of metal that move 1 person slower than a bike on average. It's the bitcoin network's fault.

vvillena• 6 years ago

Yeah, but ask yourself: why are you reading this _now_?

The article is 2 years old. Bitcoin and the overall cryptocurrency ecosystem are near all-time high values. Shining a light into this article is probably a maneuver made by someone interested in decreasing the value of Bitcoin. It's possible that this person is a concerned environmentalist, but Occam's razor suggests that this person is someone that wants to buy Bitcoin at lower prices, or that shorted its value in an exchange and wants to increase the benefits before executing the options.

offby37years2• 6 years ago

Prediction, Bitcoin (and decentralisation in general) will be attacked as a vessel for circumvention of financial establishment right-wing censorship next. We must regulate it to prevent fundraising for another insurrection.

konjin3• 6 years ago

You can agree with decentralization and also agree that bitcoin is a terrible protocol.

Kind of how you can think the internet is great but think google is a blight.

mr_woozy11• 6 years ago

ahh so you're for laying down whatever narrative gets you to your end goal. Right, I always trust someone with dishonest motives like that.

1ark• 6 years ago

First part already started by ECB boss last week.

slickrick2162• 6 years ago

Yep it’s fud. For those who aren’t aware let me let you in on a secret. Some people who hold crypto push fud for the coins/tokens they hold to make others not buy them. This seems counter intuitive but gives people whose cash flow is low a longer period to get a decent stake. Then you have sad 4channers who do it just to be mean. Beware the fud. If people are pushing a negative view in something always ask what’s in it for them.

nailk• 6 years ago

How high banking skyscrapers have pushed global warming? Why should I pay $50 (about 1000 kWh) for a swift transaction?

ajuc• 6 years ago

Bitcoin isn't a replacement for them in practice.

psychlops• 6 years ago

We are supposed to assume it's carbon neutral because it's too complex to calculate.

umanwizard• 6 years ago

Irrelevant because wire transfers are only a tiny fraction of what banks do. Bitcoin is not a replacement for banking; it’s a replacement for physical gold. A banking system would still have to be built on top of it.

formalsystem6• 6 years ago

I find this kind of argument bizarre - if something is valuable to humans they will use energy for it whether it's for transportation, watching the Kardashians or mining Bitcoin. Saying one application of energy is moral and another is amoral neglects that people essentially vote with their time and energy what to consume it on.

If an application that uses a lot of energy is very valuable to people than it's a competitive advantage to also service that need with cheap energy.

Having sound money is not at odds with the environment.

noja• 6 years ago

So your argument is that if people want to do something, they should be allowed to?

formalsystem6• 6 years ago

The alternative of stack-ranking what constitutes a good or bad use of energy doesn't seem particularly feasible to me. If energy is cheap, abundant and clean you don't need to create such good/bad energy list.

afavour4• 6 years ago

I’d argue that “valuable for humans” is brushing over something: is Bitcoin valuable for humans as a collective or is it valuable for a small minority who stand to gain from it?

From my view, and despite the initial promises of Bitcoin, it’s being used by people of means to get even more money than they already have.

formalsystem6• 6 years ago

Sure value is subjective - I find it valuable because it's gold I can transmit through space quickly

nmlnn5• 6 years ago

If you're in Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey, Nigeria, etc. where your government is stealing your savings via massive inflation it's pretty useful.

It would definitely be better if the learning curve was shallower and the UI's easier, so that more people could be saved.

_vertigo2• 6 years ago

How much energy is moral to use in pursuit of “sound” money? Maybe Bitcoin hasn’t crossed the threshold yet. But I disagree that we should completely sidestep that conversation.

Closi5• 6 years ago

People don’t vote with their time and energy, they often vote with their wallet regardless of the impact on energy and the environment which is the issue. See: Negative Externalities.

The problem with Bitcoin is that energy waste is inherent in its design. As Bitcoin value goes up, the value of a Bitcoin relative to energy changes, which encourages more mining, which results in higher energy spend and emissions as the algorithm difficulty adjusts to the new hash rate.

Generating 10,000,000 bitcoins could be done at low energy with a few miners - but the more valuable they become the more energy they use.

My issue with Bitcoin is that while other industries try to save power, Bitcoin tries to waste it and waste is built into the algorithm.

And the more popular Bitcoin gets, the more our planet gets polluted trying to make magic numbers on a ledger.

formalsystem6• 6 years ago

What you call energy waste others would call effort. Money should be hard to produce otherwise you end up with central banks putting magic numbers on balance sheets

You can use energy that would otherwise be wasted https://cointelegraph.com/news/oil-companies-will-dominate-b... or clean energy like Nuclear

tomComb2• 6 years ago

Yes, but this information is useful in evaluating alternatives and trade-offs.

_Microft• 6 years ago

“Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders”,

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

brettermeier3• 6 years ago

:D good one

webwielder2• 6 years ago

How do crypto emissions compare with professional car racing?

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

Not even close. Professional car racing is a vanishingly small contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

Even twenty race cars running a 1-hour race doesn't even hold a candle to the average commuter driving their car back and forth to work for a year.

agilob3• 6 years ago

How much energy is consumed by AC systems in USA only? How many ACs are in bank branches, supermarkets and all offices? Please somebody compare AC is USA only to all bitcoin miners.

matzab2• 6 years ago

Why?

agilob3• 6 years ago

Because every month media are happy to bash on bitcoin energy consumption, but no one wants to talk about working ACs in banks during non-working hours or poor housing insulation like single glass windows or uninsulated bricks. I'm sure these cause more energy waste then Bitcoin mining.

I know Bitcoin is wasting it for nothing as there are faster and zero-mining (and zero fees) cryptocurrencies that eliminated that problem, but please someone with enough knowledge estimate energy waste from AC in US banks during non-working hours.

hkt4• 6 years ago

I enjoyed reading this comment almost immediately after reading one above about how people live in places that are too cold and they should move to warmer climates. Ha.

Tepix4• 6 years ago

Whataboutism?

semitones• 6 years ago

I agree that the large energy expenditure required (along with other mining costs, transaction fees, transaction latencies, etc.) to maintain the Bitcoin network ultimately makes it non-tenable for permanent financial infrastructure . However, I think the article could have made that point without completely discrediting the value Bitcoin provides by calling it a "collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do"...

I believe Bitcoin has served its purpose by being a pioneer, w.r.t popularizing an application of an immutable distributed ledger. However, it's not the one we should use. Ethereum's model (proof of stake) allows for most if not all of the uses of Bitcoin, without the non-scalable energy requirements and transaction costs, along with smart contracts, which have many potentially revolutionary applications (voting, public records, etc.). We could have our cake and eat it too..

Rochus14• 6 years ago

Not surprised. There are also a few other popular technologies that eat up a lot of energy unnecessarily, see e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320436353_Energy_ef...

mudlus• 6 years ago

Moral Panic FUD

frongpik• 6 years ago

With their calculations, energy wasted on ads would push that warming by another 2500 C.

rglover2• 6 years ago

One of the many reasons why we need to get over our fear of nuclear power (speaking centric to the U.S.) and focus on safety innovation in that area. It could solve the energy and pollution problems quickly and efficiently, making things like this a non-issue.

The whole global warming and climate change problem could be solved (while also stimulating the economy through job creation), but economic and political incentive to not solve the problem thwarts any real progress.

If you're curious or skeptical, it's worth considering the arguments of people like Michael Shellenberger[1] and Alex Epstein[2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19...

[2] https://energytalkingpoints.com/energy-q-a/

jbotz• 6 years ago

it's worth considering the arguments of people like Michael Shellenberger

I'm sympathetic to the argument for nuclear energy as part of the answer to global warming, but... Schellenberger? No, sorry, it's not worth considering his arguments for anything. His arguments go like this...

- We don't need to worry about the Amazon burning and being cut down because it's not actually the "lungs of the world"

- We don't need to worry about sea-level rise because the Netherlands

- Burning wood is much worse than burning petroleum, so let's keep burning petroleum

Etc. Schellenberger is an idiot trying to be an iconoclast... and failing miserably because the icons he's tilting at are windmills. Let's leave Schellenberger out of this.

rglover2• 6 years ago

Instead of character attacking him, can you present real arguments backed by data? This line of argumentation is not constructive.

CryptoGhost3• 6 years ago

Lots of Bitcoin critics really struggle with the subjective theory of value (which is also the basis of Marginalism and modern mainstream economics). Nobody believes in stuff like labor or intrinsic values outside of a few marxist holdouts.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 6 years ago

The obvious solution here is to use resulting heat for heating. Humans live in a lot of places where you need heating to survive anyway. Currently we use 'dumb' heating, where heat is generated without any useful computation. This can be painlessly replaced with 'smart' heating, when heat is a result of mining. Any home appliance like iron or heater can do some useful work (and even earn some spare change while at it).

The_Colonel2• 6 years ago

Heating with electricity is pretty expensive / inefficient.

This is going after symptoms instead of trying to tackle the real issue - we should find / use a better solution than PoW (such as PoS) for decentralized currencies.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 6 years ago

If you are worried about global warming, you don't really have alternatives to heating with electricity. Or you suggest burning some gas, releasing all that CO2 into the atmosphere?

eeZah7Ux3• 6 years ago

No. If a millions of electric heaters had a bitcoin miner in them that runs "for free" the difficulty of mining would would skyroket accordingly.

The "value" of the mining is based on the sacrifice of something else, in this case energy, unfortunately.

cjbprime2• 6 years ago

This should have a (2018) in the title.

As I understand it, Bitcoin mining rewards are now so low that it's unprofitable to use fossil fuels to mine -- you will pay more for the electricity than you receive through the reward. Hence a lot of people moving their miners to somewhere in the world with unused excess renewable (e.g. hydroelectric) power and setting up there.

Tepix4• 6 years ago

You may have missed the fact that bitcoin went up in price by a lot recently. Whenever that happens, bitcoin mining usually becomes a lot more attractive for a while.

spiorf13• 6 years ago

For the casual observer, yes.

For a "professional" miner, price swings are irrelevant. The same quantity of bitcoin is mined independently of the price. Bitcoins mined in March are worth the same of bitcoin mined today even if price is 10x now. And in March the same hardware mined more bitcoins than now.

Big miners are datacenter sized now, and such things are not built during a bull run.

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

somewhere in the world with unused excess renewable (e.g. hydroelectric) power and setting up there.

It's true that miners are relocating to locations where energy can be purchased at lower prices.

It's not true that there are large reserves of unused, excess power that would otherwise go to waste if not for these miners putting it to use. Power companies everywhere are experts at sending energy around the interconnected power grid.

Miners running profitable operations have zero desire to establish expensive mining operations and only run them in narrow windows of excess energy capacity, such as peak wind and sun days.

The narrative that mining is relegated to purely unused, renewable energy capacity is an attempt to whitewash the massive power sink that is cryptocurrency mining.

codingprograms• 6 years ago

Propaganda

jude-3• 6 years ago

So, pass laws requiring crypto mining to use 100% renewable energy? Sounds like a win-win to me -- no greenhouse gases from crypto mining, and lots of investment opportunities for high-power green tech.

godmode2019• 6 years ago

Sounds better than the ending of the interglacial period we are currently in within a ice age. Let's hope mean revision is not dogma.

dane-pgp4• 6 years ago

the ending of the interglacial period we are currently in

If you're worried about the next ice age, I think we have more pressing matters as a species than an event that isn't due for another 23,000 to 50,000 years.[0]

To borrow an analogy, that's a bit like worrying about over-population on Mars 500 years from now, while nuclear weapons are being detonated in enough major cities to annihilate human civilisation in the next 0.5 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation#Next_gla...

tunesmith• 6 years ago

I don't understand why everyone is arguing about whether their CO2 emissions are less than from some other source, when the whole point is we need to be carbon neutral within the next 15 years.

Average CO2 emissions per US Citizen as of 2018 is 16.6 tonnes. Go buy your carbon offsets while they're cheap - less than $9/tonne over at cooleffects.org, which is what I used yesterday.

EndXA• 6 years ago

Note that three articles were published in response to this one (linked as 'Matters Arising' in the top part of the article), and they all appear to criticize the methodology that was used here.

The key objections from the first such article [1] are as follows (quoted verbatim, though the article itself obviously contains more details):

First, the use of transactions as the driver of future Bitcoin emissions is questionable, given the tenuous correlation between transactions and mining energy use...
Second, all three Bitcoin adoption scenarios designed by Mora et al. represent sudden and improbable departures from historical trends in Bitcoin transactions...
Third, Mora et al. applied outdated values for mining rig efficiencies and electric power CO2 intensities, which inflated their estimated 2017 Bitcoin energy use and CO2 emissions values considerably.
Fourth, by analytical design, Mora et al. applied 2017 per-transaction energy use and CO2 emissions values in all future years, multiplied by annual transactions... This decision effectively held both mining rig efficiency and grid CO2 intensities constant for the next 100 yr... This unprecedented choice ignores the dynamic nature of mining rig and power grid technologies and violates the widely followed practice of accounting for technological change in forward-looking energy technology scenarios...
Fifth, in constructing their scenarios, Mora et al. committed key errors when analysing adoption rates within their 40-technology comparison pool...

[1] 'Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions', available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0535-4

bb883• 6 years ago

One thing that is interesting though is that it seems like BTC mining would increase with the price of BTC. If each BTC is more valuable, it becomes more feasible to use more energy on mining rigs. Am I wrong?

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

Aren't we already well past the co2 needed for a 2C rise? And still accelerating...

Edit: yes, even if we cut emissions drastically, the existing 450ppm CO2 level would be enough to get us 2 degrees.

458aperta• 6 years ago

I love that bitcoin maximalists have now become the ire of the global warming movement. Quite fitting as it literally is the ponzi scheme of our generation helping criminals launder their money. History will not be kind to those who pushed shitcoins, I personally would never ever hire someone who've been associated with such outfit.

hirundo• 6 years ago

The scarcity of bitcoins depends on the scarcity of computational power, and at scale that causes all the problems associated with generating energy. But is that the only viable way to generate scarce tokens?

What if there was some objective, necessarily incorruptible and public source of random data, and tokens were generated only when certain values appear? The number generated is adjusted by adjusting the range of those values.

Is such a publicly verifiable random source possible? Some kind of cosmic slot machine, like maybe variations in a pulsar? If it is possible, could it actually be a low power way to mint scarce tokens?

The same random source used to generate the tokens could also be used to randomly distribute them. Is that compatible with the incentive structure of crypto coins?

Sargos• 6 years ago

Ethereum is starting to use Proof of Stake which provides the same security as Bitcoin's Proof of Work but without the energy waste. Over the long run proof of work will cease to be used.

madacol5• 6 years ago

PoS security is weaker than PoW, that's a fact. See https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/70807/how-does-p...

But is it stronger enough to still be 99% as useful? I don't know, these are all experiments.

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

The scarcity of bitcoins depends on the scarcity of computational power

No, the scarcity of Bitcoin is hardcoded into the protocol. The protocol doesn't care if 1 miner or 1 million miners are validating the blockchain. The number of BTC is the same.

...as long as everyone agrees to use the same Bitcoin, that is. People could simply fork the Bitcoin chain with a different number of maximum Bitcoin and call it "Bitcoin 2". The scarcity relies on Bitcoiners all agreeing to not recognize any other protocol with a higher limit on Bitcoin, which is currently an attractive proposition to all of the BTC early adopters who would profit greatly from forcing the rest of the world to buy their BTC at inflated prices in the future to get anything done.

dane-pgp4• 6 years ago

That's an interesting idea, but I think what proof-of-work (and -stake) provides is an effective Sybil-proof identity system, which your cosmic slot machine wouldn't.

To use a slightly different analogy, imagine that the pulsar variations determined the outcome of a cosmic roulette wheel. What is to stop miners from "betting" on every possible value on the wheel? If winning a spin gives the right to mint some new coins, then the only reasonable strategies would be to make such a blanket bet, or to never bet at all.

Perhaps, though, your system could be coupled with a system that restricts participants to one (public key) identity per IPv4 address. The cosmic roulette wheel would then pick a participant at random who would mine the next block and receive the block rewards.

I feel like there must be a flaw with this design, other than the fact it rewards hoarders of IP addresses. Perhaps the biggest problem is building a device which can run anywhere on Earth and measure variations in a pulsar, but there must be other globally-measurable random number generators that machines could cheaply reach consensus on.

danaliv• 6 years ago

Guy sitting at folding table with large sign in front of it that says, “convince me that Bitcoin is not a massive mis-allocation of resources.”

dane-pgp4• 6 years ago

If you own some resources, under what circumstances should someone else be able to tell you how to allocate/use them?

It's perfectly valid to say that governments should make laws or economic policies to prevent negative externalities like pollution, but that is begging the question of what activity is causing the pollution.

If your bitcoin mining rig is in an area that is powered by a coal power station, then you are indirectly increasing CO2 pollution, but coal that is burnt to supply other customers with power is no less polluting.

Therefore it doesn't seem equitable to single out just one user of the electricity. It is even more inequitable to punish bitcoin miners that use otherwise-curtailed renewable energy for the externalities of non-renewably powered miners.

biolurker16• 6 years ago

What should be measured also is: less banks, bank tellers and massively less gold mining around the world IF Bitcoin is going to succeed.

viraptor8• 6 years ago

The first two are already covered by online banks. People would still need banking even if cryptocurrency somehow got common. Gold would likely not change - there's still trade based around it and currencies are not bound to hold price anymore really.

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

The idea that banks will dwindle if Bitcoin gets adopted is a serious misunderstanding of how banks actually work and the value they provide to people.

We're just not going to arrive in a situation where common people would voluntarily choose to manage their own private keys and crypto wallets, full stop. Can you imagine your parents forgetting the password to their retirement account and going bankrupt? Or your grandma getting tricked into a phishing scam that immediately and irreversibly sends her entire net worth to a scammer?

Even the average Bitcoin user prefers to keep their money in something like Coinbase rather than try to manage their own crypto wallet.

Likewise, gold doesn't simply disappear as an asset and get replaced by Bitcoin. The strange thing about crypto is that the crypto market cap keeps going up as new coins are added to the market. Cryptocurrency is a chance to create new asset classes, which altcoin developers are more than happy to oblige as long as the demand exists. Does this mean more money (value) is being willed into existence? No, in fact there's a lot of evidence that cryptocurrency is heavily fueled by an explosion in credit and leverage. There are literally exchanges that will let you purchase altcoins with up to 100x leverage right now.

biolurker16• 6 years ago

I think thinking that something that does something another sector does will not eat on its profits and personnel is not well thought out.

slickrick2162• 6 years ago

Hahaha you know things are bad when nature is pushing lame bitcoin FUD.

biolurker16• 6 years ago

First think you read is that OP doesn't understand economics and thinks Bitcoin is air. End of reading.would be so much better f he made an argument about ecology and his his biased beliefs about what society should use for money.

spir• 6 years ago

Stephen seems unaware of the fact that his objections to bitcoin are solved by ethereum.

- bitcoin uses huge amounts of energy

- bitcoin has no cash flow

- bitcoin has no use cases

vs.

- ethereum consumes ~100% less energy via proof of stake

- ethereum has cash flow from fees ($68M last week)

- ethereum has ~infinite use cases since it's an app platform

fyll-0000• 6 years ago

If someone can make a very low power / overhead consensus model that can defend it self, and preferably free to use then this tech might actually be worthy.

Right now, it’s more harm than good?

Zamicol2• 6 years ago

This is one of many reasons why Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake (PoS) and ditching Proof of Work (PoW). The already functional Ethereum 2.0 chain has Bitcoin's security guarantees for a tiny fraction of the electricity costs.

Bitcoin's yearly electricity consumption is now estimated at $3.8 billion. This must be sustained indefinitely, and is a huge target for regulation and nation state interference.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Bitcoin's "store of value" has a forever price tag in the billions yearly. This doesn't make economic sense.

If Ethereum can fulfill Bitcoin's role as a "store of value" at a much lower yearly cost, I don't see how it would not eventually become more attractive as a store of value.

For a great detailed explanation on why PoS is better see Vitalk's blog. Vitalik views attacks on chains in terms of costs, which IMHO is the proper paradigm to quantify attack costs.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

(BTW, the TLS cert looks like it has an issue at the moment).

In 2011 I assumed Bitcoin would transition because PoW's weaknesses were obvious. Unfortunately, the majority of the leftovers in Bitcoin no longer share my sentiment. Electricity consumption is a reason that PoW is the most likely downfall of Bitcoin if they don't transition to another technology. To keep PoW Bitcoin will need to morph into something else, like a semi-centralized "reserve" asset which is not a technology that excites me. A scalable ecosystem where large volumes of economic value can be transferred excites me. Everyday use excites me.

You can "hide" an Ethereum PoS server in your basement. You can't hide the massive electricity usage, transportation, and manufacturing of specialized hardware used in a Bitcoin ASIC farm. The specialization also means there's a huge centralization pressure in the Bitcoin network. I personally welcome (reasonable) regulation, but if I was concerned about regulation as many Bitcoiners tout, PoW would not be an effective way of implementing regulation resistance.

iamgopal• 6 years ago

all the Banks and insurance companies should required by law to be Carbon neutral or positive.

Tepix4• 6 years ago

In my point of view, one thing is certain: Technology has advanced since bitcoin was launched. We can do everything that bitcoin can better and more efficiently with newer algorithms like Avalanche consensus¹. Given that our climate is spiraling out of control, i think it is prudent to switch to these more efficient technologies.

The bitcoin community is locked in a stalemate. Hard forks seem impossible. If bitcoin cannot be improved, i hope we will move on to something less wasteful.

¹ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUy4jh5mGNZvLkjies1RWM4YuvJh5o2FYopNPV...

nicklaf• 6 years ago

I'd be curious to know whether a breakthrough in quantum computing that broke cryptographic algorithms that cryptocurrencies depend on could prevent this by making non-quantum cryptography obsolete.

Or am I wrong to assume that there won't simply be new algorithms that are safe from such quantum-based cryptographic attacks?

donjigweed• 6 years ago

The energy "waste" argument against Bitcoin is really one of the silliest there is. One man's waste is another's treasure.

"Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste."

Does playing video games "produce absolutely nothing?" Some would say so, others would say not, that it produces positive emotions in players. But the entire ecosystem of gaming no doubt "wastes" more energy than bitcoin mining. Who gets to decide, to decree, what constitutes "waste?" That it's ok to engage in certain activities, like gaming, which some people would classify as "waste," but not ok to engage in others.

And the climate change argument as the cherry on top. Time to power down everything then. No more bitcoin mining, no more cars, no more travel, watching movies, it's all "wasteful." Shut it all down.

mr_woozy11• 6 years ago

Does no one else see the bitter irony in this coming from a developer with a startup who presumable contributes to the same electricity usage via datacenters and user load?

illustriousbear• 6 years ago

So what?

Is there some assumption that traditional banking don't consume a significant amount of energy? I think we're all familiar with towering bank buildings full of employees using computers, air conditioners and a range of appliances (alongside their daily commute).

This is without even thinking about banking tech and system infrastructure.

gasull• 6 years ago

70% of Bitcoin mining is from renewal resources:

https://twitter.com/Melt_Dem/status/1351175859613429764

Netflix uses more than twice the energy that is spent in Bitcoin mining:

https://twitter.com/onybose/status/1351207551648616449

A lot of the energy used for Bitcoin mining would be wasted otherwise:

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1351216547566669829

Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C: study from 2018

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