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Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

> and it's no more harmful than any other use of electricity

That's a tautological statement. My 50,000 watt bulb that I shine inside a closed box is also "no more harmful than any other use of electricity," but the question is whether I should be using that electricity in the first place.

You can argue whether the "wealth" generated is worth carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, but you can't deny that more carbon dioxide has been released because of BitCoin.

Back to my lightbulb in a box: "If the world switches over to solar and wind my 50,000 watt useless bulb's problem is solved. If the world doesn't switch away from using coal, that's not my fault. It's not a problem I can solve."

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I'd love a fact-based comparison of bitcoin mining vs gold / nickel / aluminum production, in kWh spent per $1000 of value mined. I suspect bitcoin would look relatively favorably, especially if you factor in no space being taken to store the waste, and nearly no water consumed / contaminated.

How about comparing it to fiat currency?

The problem with fiat currencies is that they are not normally mined, but printed.

Printing a $25 or a $100 note must be an involved process, though.

Absolutely not, it has been posted several times in the past the comparison with the world money and bitcoin power waste was simply outrageous compared to the world monetary base. Aluminium, nichel and gold have other real uses other than minting coins.

Gold, nickel and aluminum aren't money, they're resources that get used to produce things in the economy. If you mine a bunch of gold in a new and efficient way you make PCBs and cable connectors cheaper to manufacture and improve life for everyone by a little bit. If you mine a bitcoin in a similarly innovative way we get nothing we didn't have before.

There is a price for a kg of raw gold, and other metals (and not only metals). There is a price for 1 raw bitcoin. Either has energy costs attached; it is quite possible to compare the (market) value created per kWh spent.

You're missing the point. Your flaw is a semantic glitch with the word "value". You're saying in this post that bitcoin has "value" in the sense of exchange, that you can trade it for other stuff. But in the previous post you were describing the "value" of natural resources, which are being created when they are produced and cause economic activity, thus making us all wealthier.

Not the same kind of value. You can mine a billion coins tomorrow and society will still be stuck with the same junk it has today. You could mine a billion tons of cobalt tomorrow and give us all nearly free batteries in perpetuity.

I think for any crypto to have long term (100+ year) life, it must be powered with free, or close to free energy. So solar, wind, etc.

I don't see any way around this limitation. Eventually the difficulties will be so high, and finding blocks gets harder and harder, keeping it on a traditional power source would not be prudent.

>> and it's no more harmful than any other use of electricity > That's a tautological statement.

Sure, if you take it out of the context of the rest of my comment. But OP asked if Bitcoin would stop being an ecological disaster, and my point is was that Bitcoin's ecological costs are primarily about the source of the electricity, not the amount of electricity.

Bitcoin mining uses about 170 MWe, continuously. That's really not very much in the grand picture of things. A few medium-sized fields of solar panels isn't an "ecological disaster".

> That's really not very much in the grand picture of things.

And how does that claim hold up when you compare current level cryptocurrency adoption to the scale of money worldwide?

How does energy usage scale with the number of users in general? Linearly?

> How does energy usage scale with the number of users in general?

You're confusing Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin nodes.

Bitcoin nodes verify transactions. You can run a Bitcoin node off your home PC. It doesn't use much energy.

Bitcoin miners are what use all the energy, and their energy use is driven by the size of the mining rewards not the number of users.

But the size of the mining rewards scales with the value of Bitcoin which roughly scales with the number of users.

> Bitcoin nodes verify transactions. You can run a Bitcoin node off your home PC. It doesn't use much energy.

You basically answered a different question, because this doesn't tell me how it scales

I'm sure I'm off a little bit in my understanding, but I thought part of the idea whole blockchain thing was being a decentralised ledger. How does that scale if everyone is on it? Is the energy use better or worse than a centralised bank, by how much, and is it significant?

It is not very much? How many tons of co2 are produced in 1 hour to get 170MWh?

As others have pointed out, bitcoin mining doesn't tend to happen in places where fossil fuels are used for electricity generation, simply because it isn't profitable to do so.

Instead it tends to gravitate fairly quickly to places that currently have an surplus of energy and therefore extremely cheap power generation.

In the US that is Washington state, near Wenatchee, where the power is the cheapest in the nation: http://www.electricitylocal.com/states/washington/wenatchee/

The reason for that price is that it is all hydro, so no co2 produced. (though depending on how fungible you view power it could be argued otherwise) http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2011/jun/01/cheapest-elec...

But ya, though I agree the amount of power that goes into mining and keeping the blockchain safe is absurd, the crazy competition and economies there have driven most of that to green sources. So yay I guess?

If the power was not wasted in mining it could have been used for something useful therefore reducing the carbon footprint in other places that don't rely so heavily on hydroelectric.

Maybe. See my comment about fungibility. I don't think power transmission costs are insignificant at a distance, and I suspect if it were the case for Wenatchee, Seattle and other large urban centers would happily buy up their cheap power instead of producing their own.

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