Hacker News Reader

Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

I do notice a certain glee we have when we can frame other people wasting energy in ways we don't happen to waste ourselves. As if wireless phone charging or bitcoin mining or X are the last unturned stones in the pursuit of zero waste. Some condescension we can share on HN before we drive to Walmart for a single gallon of milk.

It's weird how tempting it is. I had a roommate that used our clothes dryer daily. I have to admit I felt a little bit of ecosuperiority over him as I hung my clothes. Perhaps briefly pondering how much better the world would be if everyone gave up a luxury I personally could do without (while retaining all of my preferred luxuries for myself, of course).

It's even funny just to think of all the apparatuses involved in me leaving this snooty comment on the internet, a pleasure you'll have to pry from my corpse!

View on HN

Lol at your false dichotomy with bitcoin. Bitcoin mining uses a mind-boggling amount of power, and we don't get anything useful for all those emissions.

I agree that we're quick to look at other people's small wastes with condescension, but bitcoin is not a small waste.

Yup. Also, the shape of the growth curve matters. It's superlinear with the number of participants, and even with no new participants, the amount of waste grows over time by design.

If an evil overlord wanted to exacerbate our climate and energy problems, pushing Bitcoin to mainstream use is probably the ideal way to do it.

Can you explain why amount of waste grows over time by design?

Here's my reasoning. Miners spend electricity. They're getting block rewards and fee rewards, they'll exchange earned bitcoins to dollars and pay their bills. So ultimately energy spent per block = (block reward + fee reward) x bitcoin price.

Right now block reward is 6.25 BTC. Last block fee reward was 2.13 BTC. Block reward will go down as time goes on.

I don't really understand economics of fee rewards and whether they'll grow over time linearly or exponentially. I checked historical data and it does not seem to grow at all. So I'll suppose that reward fee will not grow.

So in the end you'll have block reward of 10-20 BTC. That's all you have to pay your electricity bills after you mined block. So basically energy spent per block is directly correlated to bitcoin price, and that's about it.

Obviously bitcoin price won't grow to the moon and its price is limited by some economical factors.

So while bitcoin network might draw non-negligible amount of electricity, it still is limited by design.

Now if miners will decide to change bitcoin design, for example to increase block size, that's another matter. But it's not clear if that would happen.

> Can you explain why amount of waste grows over time by design?

Mining bitcoin is essentially printing money, so miners with profitable setups have an incentive to expand these setups. As mining capacity grows, a parameter called "difficulty" - which represents how much power you need to waste to mine a block - is adjusted so that the mining rate remains constant. Since mining is necessary to maintain network security, difficulty will grow to compensate for expanding mining capacity, but not high enough to kill it off.

If you look at the history of the adjustments to difficulty, you'll find a pretty much clean exponential.

(In other words, Bitcoin is as close as we've ever come to expressing greed in units of kilowatt hours.)

While the network with no new participants is in some sense static, the participants themselves aren't. The income of most people tends to grow over time, which would imply an increasing demand for bitcoin from those participants.

Since supply will become more and more constrained over time, while demand has no realizable upper limit (that we know of), this assumption is wrong:

> Obviously bitcoin price won't grow to the moon and its price is limited by some economical factors.

If bitcoin were to be fully adopted by the mainstream, BTCs would be easily in the M$ range.

So the question is: if bitcoin replaces US dollar as an international currency, what would look it like today? According to some Google searches, there are 80 trillion dollars in the world. Total Bitcoin supply is 21 million. It means that 1 BTC would be valued around $3.8 million or 277 times more of its current valuation. Currently bitcoin eats around 7.46 GW, so it'll become 2 TW. Current world energy consumption is 157 TW.

So that's a rough estimate upper bound if Bitcoin would become our civilization currency of choice: 1.2% of total energy spent.

Not the end of the world, if you ask me.

1.2% extra energy spent.

> It's superlinear with the number of participants, and even with no new participants, the amount of waste grows over time by design.

Incorrect, growth curve is driven by mining power and forces innovation in lower cost of electricity. The worldwide cost of Bitcoin usage in KW has been compared to the headquarters of Bank of America's usage.

The BoA headquarters uses 8 million KW of electricity? Jesus Christ, the shareholders should sue everyone on the board.

> The worldwide cost of Bitcoin usage in KW has been compared to the headquarters of Bank of America's usage.

You seem to be missing a couple units there...

Maybe they mean in the sense that the numbers are literally comparable :)

> Bitcoin mining uses a mind-boggling amount of power, and we don't get anything useful for all those emissions.

I see this take quite regularly and it seems a normal response to clickbaity headlines like "BTC has same power usage as Switzerland", but I think it misses some important nuance to the debate.

* Most studies locate miners and then assume their CO2 output based on energy use assuming a general energy mix of the country, this is not useful because energy usage != CO2 output, it depends very much what energy source is used * Miners are strongly incentivized to find the cheapest possible electricity, often means finding pockets of excess wasted energy, which is also often renewable or hydro and using it rather than letting it go to waste * BTC can be thought of as converting frequently excess wasted units of energy into a commodity which can be sold * The above might change and if for some reason coal became the most competitively priced energy source then this would be very bad for the environment indeed.

Whether or not BTC is useful, it undeniably holds value, in the literal sense that if I gave you 1 now you could sell it at a market rate

All the above notwithstanding, a lot of research is going into finding an alternative to Proof-of-Work that is less energy intensive and I would hope that in the future a secure alternative will be found.

It holds value because countries currently permit bitcoin to be exchanged for real currency. That should change. When it does, BTC goes back to being the valueless thing it always was.

We get a distributed ledger that’s very expensive to tamper with. Coordination is costly, rationality 101.

Uhh, wireless charging and Bitcoin mining are literally orders of magnitudes apart. Bitcoin is estimated to have consumed over 64tWh of electricity last year, more than Switzerland.

Were you hanging your clothes above your mining rig?

Whether or not bitcoin was a good example, the sentiment still rings true for me. I have felt this sense of superiority myself and seen it in others. There is a taboo around "wasting" energy, but what is or isn't waste seems to depend on the individual.

> As if wireless phone charging or bitcoin mining

Love the bitcoin submarine. lol.

To add something informative to the conversation ...

The reason that the big bitcoin farmers are located in China is that the power generation model is different in China than the West.

China is controlled by about 8 Dragon Families in concert with the CCP (you'll notice that in news stories the prominent actors all descended from Maoist leaders, etc.)

So if you're a bitcoin miner, you just talk to the Dragon Family in charge of power generation (for example, one family owns the Three Gorges Dam profit stream, plus most other dams), and hook up to a hydroelectric dam. No published electricity rates for you.

The above also explains why the arrest of the Huawei CFO in Canada is such a big deal in China - she is royalty, and the West is treating her like a common peasant.

That's because she is a common peasant.

She only thinks she's somebody.

No one knows who the fuck she is outside of China.

Well put. I’ve noticed a definite condescension towards those “wasteful” people in climates that virtually require air conditioning in the summer (e.g. almost anywhere in the Southern US). Yet they conveniently forget that heating in cold climates is usually more energy intensive than A/C is in warm climates.

Or you can just get a sweatter and let the house get cold. So long as the pipes don't freeze, a furnace can easily be run less without a substantial reduction in comfort. On the other hand when it's hot, there is only so nude you can get.

Winter is already miserable enough with a warm house

Humans evolved to handle heat, we created tools to handle cold.

Unfortunately our secret weapon for handling heat has a weakness: humidity.

Sweating just not good enough for me, even when it's dry. I can cope with it, it's not like being hot would kill me (within reason and if I stay hydrated), but it has a serious impact on my performance. When it's hot my brain gets foggy and my thoughts slow. Maybe I could still operate at a caveman level of performance in that sort of weather, but I couldn't do my job.

Thermal power plants generate lots of waste heat that can be used for district heating. If you don't use that waste heat it will still be there. Worse if you need electricity for cooling you end up with even more waste heat.

Your assumption falls flat because a lot of people don't need to generate extra heat from electricity, they already have too much of it.

First off, AC is a heat pump, and heat pumps are always much more efficient than direct heating. A well designed AC system can be up to 500% efficient, since it only needs to move heat and not generate it.

Secondly, municipal heat is pretty rare in the US; few cities have it and the number keeps getting smaller each year. What few municipal heat systems that do exist are largely for business districts too, unless if you live in NYC as an American you most likely will be using either AC or forced air natural gas heat. Given the choice between the two[0], AC would be the best possible one from an efficiency perspective.

0: Heat pumps can be used to heat too, which is even better. Its my hope that heat pumps will become more common in the coming decades to assist in electrification.

> few cities have [municipal heat] and the number keeps getting smaller each year

I'm assuming by "municipal heat" you mean district heating. Can you explain why those systems keep getting rarer in the US? Over here in Europe, we are investing a significant amount of money in expanding those systems and connecting more houses.

Natural gas is dirt cheap in the US. Except in extremely dense urban environments with the physical plant already in place (NYC is the only one I can think of), it just would never pay back financially to use district heating. And if greenness/efficiency is the goal, using extremely efficient heat pumps and solar are probably a bigger win in most areas of the U.S.

My own district heat is also coming from a natural heat power plant, FWIW. I wager it's more efficient because they also produce electrical power (the heat is what remains in the steam after it's been run over the turbine to generate electricity).

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=139417...

And district heating basically doesn’t exist in the US outside of NYC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com