Hacker News Reader

Comment by ymse | Hacker News Reader

This is somewhat off-topic, but I think the cryptocurrency craze came at the worst possible time. Here we are, amidst an ecological crisis, the poles are melting, and people are using insane amounts of energy on...mining digital "currencies".

Yes, blockchains are useful, cryptocurrency has its place, but if the current (ecological) trend continues, even fiat money will be worthless in many parts of the world in 20 years.

Please consider the environment before buying a $3000 mining rig with expected profits of $100/month.

View on HN

I’m not saying we shouldn’t look for better solutions, but just to put things in perspective, Bitcoin uses approximately 30 TWh/year, while global energy consumption is more than 100,000 TWh/year (so 0.03%).

People have also hypothesized that energy used in mining cryptocurrency will tend to be cleaner since mining operations can be located close to cheap/renewable electricity.

The problem is that bitcoin is used by less than 0.03% of the people in the world. Bitcoin energy spenditure is proportional to demand for bitcoin and we should expect mining costs to go up drastically if Bitcoin becomes more popular. (Mining costs are proportional to mining rewards, which in turn is proportional to prices, which are a function of demand).

True, but mining rewards also halve every 4 years.

currently the most energy efficient places are mainly used for the large crypto mines. places with "excess" energy such as new hydroelectric dams in rural China and recently wind and solar with excess production.

Also for perspective the old school equivalent of bitcoin mining, gold mining uses about 220 TWh/year or rather more.

That's still the equivalent of 2.3 million people, more than the population of a third of the countries in the world.

And? The global population increases by about 80 million people per year.

Comparisons like yours feel like they're designed to inflate the scale of a problem.

I guess you could argue it's ironic or hypocritical in some way to squander electricity in the era of climate change, but it's completely wrong to identify cryptocurrency as a serious contributor to climate change.

We can even set aside the fact that renewable sources of electricity can be and are used to mine cryptocurrency (e.g. the vast bitcoin mines co-located with Chinese hydro dams). The real problem with this argument is it represents the same fallacy you see with "violent video games are driving kids to be more violent"

Even if it were true, it tackles the social problem in question backwards. Instead of asking "do video games make kids more violent" we should be asking "what are the main drivers of violence in our society?"

Climate change is caused by fossil-fuel power generation, trucking, personal automobiles, greenhouse gas emitting industry, and agriculture. It's not caused by bitcoin, even if bitcoin mining contributes to it in some minuscule way by comparison to the real drivers.

It is very much relevant. In the oft-recited "Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.", they're ranked in order of descending effectiveness: it's most effective to look for ways to reduce energy consumption. Yes, we need to look at which sources we're getting energy from, but just like the most bug-free code is the code that's never written, not needing the energy in the first place makes the first question moot. Of course, this is important across all energy consumption, but that doesn't make it irrelevant or hypocritical to discuss in the context of cryptocurrency mining.

Do you heat your house? Maybe not, maybe you live somewhere warm, but many people do.

Consider that bitcoin mining (or hashing for science) is a much more efficient way to make heat than simply converting energy into heat for the sake of heat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com