Use of Bitcoin causes around 22 megatons in CO2 emissions annually
eurekalert.org
eurekalert.org
It's socially irresponsible, at this juncture in time, to be promoting such schemes. At this point in history it's abundantly clear that "alternative islands" cannot avoid confronting the "mainstream morass" as the "mainstream morass" is currently on a direct collision course with life itself.
I'm not saying bitcoins CO2 product is good or bad, just that there are so many things that create so much CO2 that we never question or consider.
Not only do miners and printers work to make their processes more efficient and cheaper, but once the gold coins are minted or paper money is printed, they can be used for N transactions at extremely low cost per-transaction. Contrast this with bitcoin where EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION has to be bundled in a block, so every single transaction involves more energy than an average household uses in a week[1].
Imagine burning a whole tank of gasoline to pay for a cup of coffee and you'll start to see why Bitcoin is an ecological atrocity.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...
Tell me more about strawman arguments.
I specifically alleged that "proof of work" is a bad idea.
By forbidding Bitcoin large countries might make a dent in its adoption curve and push the problem back a couple of years, but that won't be a long term solution.
Sooner or later we will probably have a globally accepted uninflatable reserve currency that uses a lot of energy, until another genius finds a more economical way to keep our savings safe.
Gold mining produces several orders of magnitude less CO2 pollution than Bitcoin. Besides that, gold mining processes are ever increasingly more efficient, while Bitcoin, by design, is every increasingly less efficient to mine.
I love the cryptocurrency arguments on HN because they are melting pots of philosophy and arguments of fundamentals that question the very foundations of our modern economy. Very fun reading!
I suppose that there is really very little pressure upon current crypto-currency implementations to alter their fundamentally flawed idea, as long as the currency can "pay for" itself LOL
Externalities. They have successfully externalized the problems they are causing on to everyone else.
As of 2019, the absolute cheapest subsidy free energy in the world is Chilean solar power. In the next 5 years solar will indisputably become the cheapest if you consider the proliferation in China, Saudi Arabia's plans ect.
What is unique about mining vs almost everything else is that location is irrelevant. It doesn't need to be connected to any supply chain or residential areas. Accordingly we are seeing heavy investment to exploit areas that are very well suited to wind and solar but are hard to connect to the grid, meaning there is currently no demand even though there is potential supply. One such project is in Morocco
If BTC has merit as a network it will have staying power well past 10 years, at which point the carbon output should be null.
We’ll also need it for food production as agriculture moves toward being carbon neutral.
Anyway, BTC can’t scale to a even a negligible fraction of the population on the transaction processing side, so it will keep being niche until it is significantly improved, replaced, or collapses.
Also the methodology used to get the miners IP is very questionable
How many megatons of CO2 are released globally every year due to people setting their air con to 72 when they could just deal with it being at 76. Or heat their homes in winter to 75 when they could just put an extra layer on and heat it to 70.
The point is energy is there to be used and people will choose to use it however it suits them for whatever they like within the confines of what they think is a reasonable use of their money. Bitcoin is no different. But these articles and the comments are all about attacking Bitcoin with an attitude that we should prohibit this particular use of energy. The correct thing to do is to properly price in the externalities to energy so that all uses are effected and if a use is then truly bad it will be priced out, or at worst it’ll at least pay for its environmental cost (such as setting your thermostat too high).
I am. I'll make that case. Proof-of-work cryptocurrency should be banned for the same reason truck drivers idling diesel engines in cities should be banned: It harms the environment and produces nothing useful for society.
If these crypocurrency developers are such geniuses, and cryptocurrency is really solving a critical problem, then banning PoW will spur innovation in alternative mechanisms like proof-of-stake or proof-of-luck [0] to meet those use cases with far less ecological devastation.
I also think that proof of work crypto currency needs to be eliminated, at least until the economy is carbon negative and everyone has food, shelter, etc.
Banning diesel? That probably should never happen, because niche use cases will need it until it isn’t a global problem anymore. For the same reason, it doesn’t make sense to ban coal fired steam engines. (99% of current use cases should go electric, to be clear).
A number of cities have prohibited or are considering prohibiting sitting in your truck or bus with the engine running when you aren't planning to drive anywhere.
https://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/air/prob_...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/11/ban-cars...
Gambling isn’t useful either, what are the megatons of CO2 emitted by casinos? Movie theaters are pretty useless, how much is spent air conditioning those. I don’t like that massive data centers are processing images so people can have silly AR videos. We shouldn’t have that. Etc.
We can’t (and probably shouldn’t) dictate what people do with electricity once it’s on the grid and so articles like this are just baiting peoples value judgements without contributing to solving the problem: If we don’t like that we have polluting coal and gas plants pumping CO2 into the atmosphere we should take action to fix that, not try to pick and choose how people use electricity to make ourselves feel better.
You are correct that the ecological damage from bitcoin is only one of the things that makes it harmful. It happens to be my primary objection to proof-of-work cryptocurrency because I'm very worried about climate change, but I'm also not a huge fan of tax evasion or ransomware, either.
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A really, really big (like the biggest FAANG had last year) ML cluster would use at most four or five DGX-N’s to train a model, because that is the current scaling limit for CNNs.
Each draw 3500W:
https://docs.nvidia.com/dgx/dgx1-user-guide/introduction-to-...
3500 * 5 is 17,500W. A US space heater maxes out at 1600 watts.
Training for a week (5 days) is 2100 kWh, which is less than 60 gallons of gasoline, or 2-6 tanks of gas, depending on your vehicle:
https://www.convertunits.com/from/kWh/to/gallon+%5BU.S.%5D+o...
By my figuring, a car uses about a thousand gigajoules, or $20,000 worth of gasoline, over its lifetime, American gas prices. Depending on where you buy your electricity, that comes out to 10 to 20 grand's worth of power (gasoline is relatively expensive per joule). So this figure implies that training an AI model costs 100 grand in electricity. Is that right?
Because I thought "training an AI model" was more of a "1 week on a single GPU" kind of thing.