Ask HN: Is the Bitcoin community doing anything about its environmental costs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the Bitcoin community doing anything about its environmental costs?

25 pointsfebin45 comments

Bear in mind, that I would answer this differently about Bitcoin efficiency and energy usage if the question would be asked in a different manner, BUT:

While some claim that it's a "yes", it's actually a NO.

Bitcoin doesn't care (or people mining it) about environmental impact. Heck, most of the people in general do not care about environment.

Currently, the entire community is riding a speculative hype train to earn money, not to save the planet. Also, most miners (one of the most influential groups in Bitcoin) are based in China - does that strike you as an environment-savvy place?

This question reeks of the Californian idealogical bubble. What's next? Is Bitcoin diverse enough?

China is actually quite environment savvy. They understand that environmentally friendly tech is an economic growth machine. The US less so. I do t worry about China as much as I worry about US.

I agree that they started caring about it more now (cancelled plans for future coal plants, big plans for electric cars).

But overall, my impression is that disregard for the environment is rampant: - 60% of the country's rivers suffer from pollution to such an extent that they cannot be safely used as drinking water sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_resources_of_China - https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/24/river-rubbish... - http://www.businessinsider.de/china-factories-shut-down-to-c...

As is it stands now, it is a pretty disgusting place to live in and these habits need a lot of time to be fixed (just because government announced they care environment, it doesn't mean that people/businesses will suddenly start caring as well). However, as you say - they are at least on the right direction for the change.

Reality already beat you to the punch: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bitcoin-s-gender-divide-coul... That article was posted here yesterday. :)

Damm... ;-D

Maybe not necessarily the Bitcoin community, but other cryptos are figuring other solutions to fix this problem. One of these solutions is the Proof of Stake [0] instead of Bitcoin's Proof of Work.

Perhaps after all Bitcoin coins have been mined (currently around 17.000.000 mined, 21.000.0000 total IIRC), not much energy would be needed afterwards, for Bitcoin at least?

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake

> Perhaps after all Bitcoin coins have been mined, not much energy would be needed afterwards, for Bitcoin at least?

Nope, "mining", which is proof-of-work solving, is needed as long as Bitcoin is used, even after coin generation is complete.

But the competition may lower, if the reward they get drops.

For some blocks I checked a week ago the transaction fees amounted for approx. 1/3 of the reward. Like, 12.5btc of newly generated coins and 6btc of fees. Although, to compensate for the next reward halving the fees would need to go further up, and they already aren't acceptable for smaller transactions.

But this is a problem (the high fees) that should be solved by the Lightning Network [0].

From what I understand this will bundle many smaller transactions into 1 big transaction or something like that. This should happen off-chain therefore small transactions will be quicker and cheaper.

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

One theory for what happens when the reward drops (i.e. no new bitcoins are rewareded anymore) is that the already high fees will further increase. If that is not the case, the competition will lower and Bitcoin will become unsafer because it is backed by less mining power.

Coin generation will never be complete, it will slow down infinitely.

This is true, but you can view it as effectively stopped if you get only a very small reward.

This is especially interesting because the number of generated coins is not totally depended on the value (in USD) of bitcoin. This means that you could get a converted reward of just a few dollars in a few decades.

Either fees have to rise or Bitcoin will be much unsafer by then.

You forgot to add mining difficulty in the mix. If you'll get just a few dollars, you also spent just a few dollars on mining the block.

This would only be true if bitcoin were infinitely divisible.

In actuality the block reward will eventually be one 'satoshi' (one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin); then, when it's next due to be halved, dividing by 2 with a fixed precision of 8 decimal places will take the reward down to a value of zero.

See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply#Projected_Bitco... for a table of rewards.

Note that it is possible, by consensus, for the satoshi to become divisible, though I can’t see it becoming infinitely divisible. (From that page: “The total number of bitcoins, as mentioned earlier, has an asymptote at 21 million, due to a technical limitation in the data structure of the blockchain - specifically the integer storage type of the transaction output, this exact value would have been 20,999,999.9769 bitcoin. Should this technical limitation be adjusted by changing the width of the field, the total number will still only approach or be a maximum of 21 million.”)

This isn't exactly the Bitcoin community per se, but Ethereum is working on a proof-of-stake algorithm to replace proof-of-work. This is a much less energy intensive intensive algorithm, and while I'm a bit skeptical that it's as secure as proof-of-work, I'm glad they are trying something.

Yes, both within the formal Bitcoin Community, and extending to the larger crypto asset business space. There are a few broad initiatives that I know of, forwarded by different groups:

* Tennet and Sonnen collaboration to stabilize European power supplies with renewable sources; built on IBM’s blockchain tech[0]

* New tokens with “green” focuses and schemes, represented by SolarCoin, KWhcoin, EverGreenCoin.

* Significant research into “proof-of-anything-but-work” hashing schemes, as previously mentioned by others in the thread. This includes long-running experiments such as Peercoin.

* I count the on-going efficiency gains made by the major mining hardware suppliers. That work isn’t altruism, sure, but arguably more efficient miners are better for the environment...though more efficient miners can also be run in denser clusters, so let’s call this one a wash.

* Anecdoteally, I’ve heard of direct seed and early stage investments by people I know in the community to bootstrap renewables. Partially because they are “pet” interests, partially because they were early miners and would like to find a way to bring a cost effective and sustainable electrical source to the networks they contribute to.

——-

https://www.coindesk.com/tennet-sonnen-ibm-renewable-energy/

If you look at Bitcoin as a store of value like gold, the energy consumption is actually not that high.

From a wired post

But in his paper, Vranken counters that in the 100MW to 500MW range, bitcoin mining requires between 0.8KWh to 4.4KWh per year, but the energy required for mining and recycling gold – which backs US currency – is 138KWh a year, while printing paper notes and minting coins is 11KWh.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-...

Hasn't gold stopped backing US currency since like almost one century?

Can we have the actual paper, because those numbers without context are obviously nonsense? "0.8KWh to 4.4KWh" isn't the total consumption of anything, I'm guessing it's supposed to be per bitcoin mined or is it per dollar value?

> "gold – which backs US currency"

Not true.

This seems to be the paper referenced http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877343517...

>Not true.

Massive gold reserves are still held by all central banks, so I'd say it is true. Gold and the military back the US currency.

This is not how "backing" is normally understood, though; the currency is not exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate. People like to say the military "backs" the currency too, but I've never understood what this means in practice. The stability of the US dollar has caused it to be used by all sorts of countries as a reference, entirely voluntarily.

Receiving tax payments is essential to countries in our current global monetary system. USD are spent by citizens but also by the government itself, both depend on system stability. Now assume that one day a large enough number of people/corporations decides not to pay their USD taxes anymore. The FED would issue new bonds to ensure liquidity of the government. Banks would have to buy these bonds from the government and how would these banks be convinced that this is a one time event and tax payers will return to normal behavior and their large USD reserves don't turn worthless? The military. Trust in the military force is also what gives foreign and domestic investors trust in the dollar.

So you're saying the US would become a military dictatorship, and this is supposed to be reassuring? It's a weird kind of fantasy scenario about a tax strike.

I agree that it's far fetched and an extreme example, but still interesting to think it through. As it does shed some light on the different actors and their potential motivations.

> interesting to think it through

I see a pre-determined conclusion there rather than very much kind of thought. Tax strikes are hard to organise and much tax is collected automatically. If some organisation has the power to organise a tax strike, what are their political demands? Why wouldn't this just result in electoral victory for the Anti-Tax Party? Is there a general strike as well?

There's no need to force people to buy US treasuries either, the open market can support a lot of demand and there is a lot of room to increase yields if they're not selling. Finally there is the option to simply "print", physically or virtually, in order to support operations. This runs the exchange rate down but since the US is pretty physically self-sufficient, especially in terms of oil production, food and pharmaceuticals, that's less of an immediate problem.

Most initiatives, businesses and factories doesn't care until there's a risk of paying a fine, a way to make additional profit or a way of cutting costs. Why would Bitcoin be any different?

What would you suggest?

The currency -- like the internet is so decentralised it could survive a nuclear apocalypse. Even attempting to corral this into an some environmentally friendly structure is far beyond trying to herd cats.

The problem isn't Bitcoin -- it's using fossil fuels for energy -- solve this at a global level and the Bitcoin issue is solved as well.

Theoretically, as all transactions can be tracked, some minors could only use renewables and sell those bitcoins at a higher price. Will be hard to track after a while but at least the initial price could be higher for the premium.

I wonder: if there truly was a nuclear apocalypse, could bitcoins be used ? Would it be more practical than barters or leftover coins and jewels ?

As long as the nuclear apocalypse in question leaves the Internet effectively untouched, sure. Oh, and shipping companies, to deliver things people buy. And power generation infrastructure, to run the Internet, and fuel infrastructure, to run the trucks. To whatever extent the nuclear apocalypse leaves these things functional, Bitcoin can still be used. That the extent to which the nuclear apocalypse leaves these things functional, is inversely proportional to the extent to which the nuclear apocalypse is a nuclear apocalypse, seems a detail not worthy of much regard among serious-minded cryptocurrency aficionados.

(On a more local level, if your postapocalyptic enclave finds it more practical to denominate transactions in cryptocurrency instead of barter or some physical medium of exchange, congratulations! The power, time, and effort required to maintain such an infrastructure, in such a time and place, represent unimaginable luxury. Try to enjoy it, in whatever moments you can spare from repelling raiders drawn by the prospect of gaining access to a working power plant and all your other riches.)

I doubt bitcoin could survive a nuclear apocalypse. Bitcoin requires a working internet and excessive power to be available.

Why would anyone trying to survive in a nuclear apocalypse bother to mine bitcoin? Cigarettes or Bullets would be far more valuable.

The problem is most definitely Bitcoin, considering several other coins have either moved or are planning to move to more efficient methods of consensus.

Scalability solutions should help (SegWit and Lightning Network), but energy cost is closely related to the potential gains.

Other crypto currencies use Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work for consensus. I think one of them will emerge as a better technical solution and will dethrone Bitcoin.

I wrote an article on this topic:

https://hackernoon.com/dummies-guide-to-bitcoin-energy-use-5...

Andreas has given his point of view about the matter recently:

https://youtu.be/2T0OUIW89II

There are new promising minerless coins on the works that look promising. They might end up being a substitute or alternative to bitcoin.

This sounds like an academically interesting question. Is there an academic community around these questions?

Driving up electrical demand/prices so, power stations have more money to invest in solar and stuff.

No.

Green Mining ;)

Bitcoin doesn't have this problem. Each mined block have limited bitcoins in reward and bitcoin price won't skyrocket to the infinity, so sum of all miner expenses is limited by some fixed number, nobody would spend their money and mine with negative result.

> Each mined block have limited bitcoins in reward

This is true, but the value of bitcoin is not limited. If more people buy bitcoins, it's value (compared to USD) rises and so will the reward if converted to USD. Because you pay the mining costs in a real currency like USD, the total mining expenses are definitely not capped.

World economics is finite, so bitcoin price is limited, even if we would assume that it'll skyrocket and other currencies would collapse.

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