Comment by darkcha0s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darkcha0s | Hacker News Reader

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https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Carbon footprint of 1 transaction: Equivalent to the carbon footprint of 731,647 VISA transactions or 55,019 hours of watching Youtube.

Those articles are nice and all, but don't reflect more than opinion. The hard facts are that BTC is wasteful in terms of energy consumption.

>Examples of this include over-built hydroelectric dams in certain regions of China, or stranded oil and gas wells in North America. Bitcoin mining equipment is mobile, and thus can be put near wherever the cheapest source of energy is, to arbitrage it and give a purpose to that stranded energy production.

Way to romanticise the issue; again, here are the actual % that make up electricity production in china: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China It isn't excess hydro power being used, its coal.

It’s an incorrect assumption that mining follows the local energy mix:

Electricity is the main cost of mining, so miners compete in minimizing their electricity costs in order to maintain profitability, including by co-locating mining facilities with point sources of underutilized power (e.g. remote dams). The sources like this, hydroelectric and natural gas flares, the profitable mining electricity rate is regularly competed below the fuel cost of e.g. coal power. So anyone buying coal to mine Bitcoin is losing rather than making money.

E.g. in this example it’s currently hovering around the cost of natural gas: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertanzalone/2020/08/13/bitco...

> As both the cryptocurrency markets and the power markets are constantly fluctuating, we do whichever is more profitable at any given time - either sell the generated power or mine crypto with that power.

Excuse me, do you have any idea how power grids work? You can't selectively choose where the power comes from, its one entire grid, fed by many different sources. Remote dams, coal fired plants, nuclear reactors, all feed into the same grid. Only a tiny subset of btc farms are co-located with an energy producer and use the excess for those purposes.

How can you call that the incorrect assumption? It sounds like you are making the incorrect assumption, based off of some idealistic idea of how this could work.

The article you linked even states that that specific project is unique, i.e. a one off thing, not the general state of things.

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