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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

> "The plant used to only open at peak times in the summer and winter months; the new mining initiative means it now operates all year round."

This is actually pretty sad. This isn't power that would otherwise be wasted: they are emitting more pollution and greenhouse gasses in order to mine Bitcoins.

Bitcoin has created a perverse incentive to pollute here.

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Bitcoin hardly created the perverse incentive; pollution has always been an externalized cost in most parts of the world. We really need a carbon tax (or similar) so that pollution costs aren't externalized.

Unless buyers of the coins were charged based on the carbon footprint of the coins they bought, this would just cause mining to move to places where there was no carbon tax.

It would also reduce supply of locations, increasing the amount people would have to pay. Do this enough, and it would no longer be economically feasible.

Unless copyrighted works couldn't cross borders, copyright infringement would just happen in countries which don't enforce copyright...

The US having worldwide enforcement of IP rules a primary foreign policy goal for the past 50 years has mostly closed that loophole, despite most other countries not having a direct financial incentive to enforce copyrights. The same could be done with worldwide environmental costs.

Yup. This is ultimately the problem with Bitcoin it requires the consumption of energy to produce currency.

The only intrinsic value is the amount of energy wasted to mine the bitcoins.

I wouldn't even call it intrinsic value because it's not like you can convert bitcoins back into the energy used to produce them.

> This isn't power that would otherwise be wasted: they are emitting more pollution and greenhouse gasses

This isn't obvious to me. Natural gas is often a byproduct of extracting other resources like oil, coal etc. If it isn't used for electricity, heat, chemical feedstocks etc. it either gets flared (resulting in zero revenue) or else ends up in the atmosphere as such, with a vastly higher GHG potential compared to the CO2 equivalent.

But it doesn't have to be flared or emitted immediately. There's nothing keeping them from generating less electricity now and burning the natural gas later.

Storage cost vs bitcoin profits. Ezpz

Not any different than dumping massive amounts of cyanide into the environment so we can get some shinny yellow rocks.

That doesn’t make it better. Both are bad.

You and the GP are in agreement with each other and in disagreement with the OP's claim that Bitcoin created this perverse incentive--the incentive to externalize pollution costs has its origins in the Bronze Age or sooner. Bitcoin is further exploiting this incentive.

Why do people find it necessary to argue like this? As if we can't solve ANY problems until every single problem is solved.

The parent noted a similarity. They did not argue for inaction or acceptance.

Edit: For example, it could be interpreted as an argument to be more mindful of gold extraction externalities.

My beef with the statement lies in "not any different". Having qualities in common doesn't preclude differences. In this case, there are differences.

Gold has not been the basis of any economic system for about a hundred years.

Yet investments/central bank is responsible for 44% of total gold demand.

https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/gold-supply-and-demand-sta...

A hundreds years?

Gold is quite useful industrially, however. Last I checked, you can't coat wires with Bitcoin to make them less prone to oxidation.

According to[1], "technology" demand (eg. not for jewelry, investment, or central bank reserves) is only 7.5% of total demand. Your response only excuses a small fraction of the pollution being generated from gold extraction.

I should say there's also 48% used for jewelry, but that doesn't really make a good excuse either. The pollution is necessary because ... people need to display their wealth?

[1] https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/gold-supply-and-demand-sta...

Bitcoin is also quite useful industrially, that is not the problem.

The thing is, it's not.

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