Crypto Is Mostly Over. Its Carbon Emissions Are Not

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/03/crypto-bitcoin-mining-carbon-emissions-climate-change-impact/673468/

by gardenfelder • 3 years ago

26 58 3 years ago

theatlantic.com

gardenfelder• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/frBok

joemazerino• 3 years ago

Carbon Emissions compared to what? This is my main issue with The Atlantic's take on modern journalism. All finger pointing and no objective comparison.

Melingo11• 3 years ago

Comparison why?

We are in a state that every emission is a problem.

And if you have a particular technology which create megatons of CO2 but does nothing for society besides transering money from a lot of people to less and less people what does a comparison matter?

mike_d• 3 years ago

We are in a state that every emission is a problem.

Some things will forever burn dinosaurs, like a diesel generator keeping a hospital going in a grid down situation for example.

While cryptocurrencies might not rank as important as a hospital to you, the people fleeing Russia who couldn't take rubles with them or the people of Venezuela who can't trust the banking system have a very different opinion.

Should crypto move to non-PoW systems or use renewables? Absolutely. But some CO2 generation is worth the value crypto brings.

lowkey13• 3 years ago

* Bitcoin mining is by far the largest cryptocurrency consumer of electricity.

* The majority of Bitcoin mining is done exclusively using clean renewable energy sources.

* Bitcoin mining uses a higher percentage of renewable energy than any other industry.

* A huge amount of Bitcoin mining is also done in partnership with energy utilities in a demand-response model where miners go offline immediately if grid demand spikes and come online exclusively during periods of excess electricity supply that would otherwise go to waste. By this mechanism, Bitcoin miners, for example in Texas, actually make the grid more stable and economically enable utilities to provide excess capacity to manage fluctuating supply and demand.

* Bitcoin mining uses electricity to secure the network and protect billions of dollars worth their depositor's savings, allowing Bitcoin savers to avoid counter-party risk and enjoy a 100% reserve ratio, unlike say a fractional reserve bank that speculates with their depositor savings.

We are in a state that every emission is a problem.

Notably, the currently dominant global reserve currency is protected, not by clean energy and mostly not even by electricity which has the potential to come from clean and renewable sources. The US military protects the value of the US dollar.

* The US military is not just the largest single consumer of fossil fuels in the world, they are the largest single consumer of fossil fuels in the history of the world.

* The US military consumes something on the order of 1 million times the energy of Bitcoin mining, mostly from greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels.

* In 2007 Department of Defense consumed over 4.6 billion gallons of fuel per year alone along with almost 30,000 GWH of electricity.

* If the US military were a country it would rank 34th in the world in oil use and 58th in the world by electricity use [0].

I often hear criticisms about how bad Bitcoin mining is for the environment, but rarely hear any concerns about the energy used by the military. Why is that?

If we are going to ban energy use, wouldn't it make more sense to prioritize the largest and most polluting users?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta....

coldtea• 3 years ago

Why compare it? It's not like it's needed in the first place.

It's like asking "Tumor is bad compared to what?"

lowkey13• 3 years ago

See my comment down-thread. Certainly not compared to the US military that protects the value of the US dollar.

Melingo11• 3 years ago

The us military is probably doing slightly more like providing jobs, protecting people etc and not just money.

Independent of this as usual: of course someone should also review the energy usage of everything including the military.

We are talking here about crypto and not military

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

mostly over

Meanwhile in crypto land, a $2bn airdrop (Arbitrum) is taking up the headlines today and is a huge liquidity event for 650,000 addresses. Lots of people cashed out already and price is holding steady in the expected range.

edit: no, not garbage like Kwiktrust. hope you find higher signal influences.

Melingo11• 3 years ago

You mean garbage like this?:

"KwikTrust is airdropping a total of 3,000,000 KTX tokens plus referral rewards to our exclusive airdrop participants. Complete simple social tasks and submit your details to the below airdrop form to receive 50 KTX ($2.5) tokens. Also get 10 KTX ($0,5) for each referral. "

Oh yeah no no one gets rich of this joke...

b3nji• 3 years ago

The predator class sure want crypto to die, don't they?

kylebenzle12• 3 years ago

Yes, crypto is the only threat to big banks

throwing_away• 3 years ago

Only second to their other biggest threat: themselves.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

Why doesn't the US ban mining like China. Such a waste.

kylebenzle12• 3 years ago

Make it illegal to use electricity to solve math problems? How exactly would that work?

haram_masala• 3 years ago

The NSA does exactly that.

senttoschool3• 3 years ago

You don't have to make it illegal for everyone. Just make it illegal to build out data centers to mine crypto.

For those at home, if you want to jack up your electricity bill, then go for it.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

Like Drug Wars? Have the armed people raid ware houses containing crypto miners instead of drug labs or plant farms...

willio58• 3 years ago

Carbon emissions aside, crypto is not mostly over. Saying crypto is over right now is like saying the internet was over in 2001.

morelisp2• 3 years ago

The internet was mostly over in 2001. Of all the parts we really only kept the web, and even that is just a shell for ads now.

nine_k• 3 years ago

Well, no. Bittorent is not web, and it is huge. IMs are not web, and they are ubiquitous. Same with internet phone and video communication, which is mostly not web, even though it can be adapted to running in a browser.

Multiplayer gaming is most.definitely not web, and it's quite popular.

None of the above is esoteric; it's used by tens of millions to billions of people.

Of course the browser has eaten a lot, but there are still large pockets if the internet where it's not really adequate.

monstertank2• 3 years ago

What do you mean mostly over? It's used to run the entire planet these days...how is that over? What am I missing in your comment?

cafard• 3 years ago

Has AWS heard this?

senttoschool3• 3 years ago

People need to stop comparing crypto to the internet. By 2001, there were many many clear internet uses cases that benefit society. Crypto has not demonstrated that since its inception.

At a time when technology improves and moves at lightning paces, crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in society in 15 years. In fact, it's proven to be the opposite of useful - it drains talent and promotes scams and ponzis. I see crypto as a disease.

monstertank2• 3 years ago

No use case? Isn't it extremely useful for money laundering, organized crime fund storage and other criminal uses where cash was previously used?

frbaug• 3 years ago

Crypto is life saving in countries with unstable currencies/bad governments

Krollifi• 3 years ago

ARPANET started in the late 1960s. The internet was mostly crystallized as early as 1982 when TCP/IP was standardized[1]. AOL became common place in the late 1990s.

The Bitcoin network started in 2009. Ethereum, which allows multiple decentralized applications to run on a single chain, started in 2015. The Bitcoin Lightning Network which scales Bitcoin transactions with state channels started in 2019.

Uniswap and MakerDAO are pretty impressive use cases. Ethereum is becoming more efficient as rollups[2] are developed and released which will lead to use cases that we can’t predict yet.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

2. https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/scaling/

Crypto Is Mostly Over. Its Carbon Emissions Are Not

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