Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C: study from 2018
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> At each time step, CO2e emissions for the given number of transactions were estimated based on the emissions generated to mine that number of transactions in 2017.
Bitcoin network does not work that way. Energy is spent securing the blockchain, not per transaction.
Now "Nature" (the publisher) has many journals, and many of them has a name that starts with "Nature", but they are different journals, with different teams and different qualities. https://www.nature.com/siteindex#journals-N
Then anyone can correct mistakes
Is that a joke? Have you ever been in academia? Bias is everywhere. Bias towards certain hypotheses, political outlooks, methods, etc. The more senior someone is in a field, the more biased they tend to be! I've seen the founder of a field vote to reject a paper because it was "already known" because he skimmed the paper and misread it. There are entire fields of Alzheimer's research that are suppressed because they don't work with the Field's Favorite Aggregating Protein. I've witnessed people add spin to the conclusion section of a paper so that it looks less politically incorrect, and I've also witnessed that this step is both necessary and effective for getting a "dicey" paper published. Get out of here if you're going to assert that scientists are these objective Vulcan types that are "above the fray". They are some of the most "biased" and opinionated people in existence!!
Yes, did several studies and also a PhD with a Nobel laureat and some publications. I don't claim our present system is perfect; it's far from it; but I don't know a better one; thus my question: Do you have a better concept?
EDIT: Preprints are actually not a replacement, but essentially loosen the submission deadline and increase the number of (potential) reviewers. But even with this, many disadvantages you criticise still exist; the public reviewers not appointed by the publisher can also be wrong, and the outcry of indignation can be so loud that the author's superiors enforce a withdrawal of the publication.
Publishing is taken far too importantly in academia
>Reviewer are expected to have a suitable qualification and experience and no bias
But they do not. My last paper was rejected when the reviewers hardly understood the basics of the topic. And I have been assigned papers to review about topics I have never worked on
>In a wiki, where anyone can publish or change anything without control, the scientific level - at least in certain areas - will inevitably level down.
Not every edit needs to be approved
Open source with pull requests was not so bad for software quality
>There is no perfect system, but there are many worse than we already have.
The current system is especially bad. It takes to much time to find the papers, read the papers, write the papers, and review the papers
If you're polite and respectful to people, they respond better. Give it a try. :-)
It’s a mistake to assume that the ratio is the thing that’s fixed. Energy expenditure is related to fees and the blockchain reward.
This is true of pretty much every industrial process. The idea of running production only when the sun is shining to absorb excess solar seems like a universally poor idea.
The capital expenditure argument makes sense when mining is the primary business. Using old and otherwise unprofitable (but cheap) hardware makes sense where there is intermittent excess energy.
Where are you seeing evidence of this?
Almost nowhere accepts bitcoin anymore because they failed to solve the issue that transactions cost on the level of dollars to process so its only useful as a speculative investment and not a practical currency.
Cryptos have basically burned the idea and the general public will probably not care of any future solution since all of the previous ones were scams or not very useful.
These cryptos all promise the world and deliver nothing.
For example, Uniswap is a decentralized exchange living on top of Ethereum that frequently has volume higher than Coinbase. A couple years ago that was the "end vision". Now it's an everyday reality.
Loans, mutual fund like assets, lending etc. The ecosystem is booming.
Ethereum is absolutely fulfilling it's mission.
I even see it myself, and I don't speak for anyone in that community. I bought some BTC ~4 years ago to buy something and did the math on current value. It's kind of shocking.
It’s got that sweet hype-commodity power though.
Although what can I say, when I saw my non-tech family talking about it I assumed it was dead. That was at $3000. I know nothing.
I have no idea if or when that circle will break but I can't believe that it will last I definitely.
However I don't think institutions of this size and nature buy millions of dollars worth without some sort of analysis and strategy.
Instead it's basically $186 million from Square and $5 billion from a questionable Microstategery investment decision.
JPMC has trillions under management, seems like they would want to invest, right? Or are they worried that Tether is currently untethered to reality?
Fuck tether though.
To fail, all of the 2nd layer networks have to fail, and it has to keep its position of a store of value, keeping transaction costs out of reach of regular folk.
If tomorrow there was a big price crash back to $1, and all transactions dried up, it would have a 2nd shot at being a payment network.
It's not that simple. As I recall the last time a block size change was proposed it fractured the entire community and produced a splinter "currency".
An example would be that me not driving to the beach saves some fuel but bitcoin is just a train constantly driving to the beach and back regardless of how much I use it. You could grab the number of trips and the power usage and calculate a power usage per trip but its not an entirely useful metric since the power usage does not scale up as more people use the service.
This is completely wrong. Most mining happens currently on underutilized hydropower stations, because grid energy or fossil fuels wouldn't be as profitable. Because of the mining difficulty adjustment and diminishing returns in improving ASIC hardware, the only way to profit is to find cheaper energy sources than all other miners.
In the long term, Bitcoin mining accelerates the development of abundant and cheap energy, which is not fossil fuels.
Yes, but does it reduce the total reliance on fossil fuels? If we start with X coal plants and build a Y hydro plants to support btc mining, we're still running the original X coal plants.
It incentivises stealing electricity because you can't beat free.
Energy is finite on the grid, so yes mining takes energy which could have been used for (arguably) better purposes
Could you provide a source for this?
While price is the main factor affecting profits, fees/volume and the constantly decreasing block reward also play a part.
The key objections from the first such article [1] are as follows (quoted verbatim, though the article itself obviously contains more details):
> First, the use of transactions as the driver of future Bitcoin emissions is questionable, given the tenuous correlation between transactions and mining energy use...
> Second, all three Bitcoin adoption scenarios designed by Mora et al. represent sudden and improbable departures from historical trends in Bitcoin transactions...
> Third, Mora et al. applied outdated values for mining rig efficiencies and electric power CO2 intensities, which inflated their estimated 2017 Bitcoin energy use and CO2 emissions values considerably.
> Fourth, by analytical design, Mora et al. applied 2017 per-transaction energy use and CO2 emissions values in all future years, multiplied by annual transactions... This decision effectively held both mining rig efficiency and grid CO2 intensities constant for the next 100 yr... This unprecedented choice ignores the dynamic nature of mining rig and power grid technologies and violates the widely followed practice of accounting for technological change in forward-looking energy technology scenarios...
> Fifth, in constructing their scenarios, Mora et al. committed key errors when analysing adoption rates within their 40-technology comparison pool...
[1] 'Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions', available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0535-4
The whole global warming and climate change problem could be solved (while also stimulating the economy through job creation), but economic and political incentive to not solve the problem thwarts any real progress.
If you're curious or skeptical, it's worth considering the arguments of people like Michael Shellenberger[1] and Alex Epstein[2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19...
I'm sympathetic to the argument for nuclear energy as part of the answer to global warming, but... Schellenberger? No, sorry, it's not worth considering his arguments for anything. His arguments go like this...
- We don't need to worry about the Amazon burning and being cut down because it's not actually the "lungs of the world"
- We don't need to worry about sea-level rise because the Netherlands
- Burning wood is much worse than burning petroleum, so let's keep burning petroleum
Etc. Schellenberger is an idiot trying to be an iconoclast... and failing miserably because the icons he's tilting at are windmills. Let's leave Schellenberger out of this.
Geothermal has a much better chance of supplying baseload power than nuclear does at this point.
Is that what we call FUD? News to try and scare people from a specific company or technology? There's literally no new arguments, just fear mongering.
No biggie though, eh
But that is whataboutery: bitcoin is still extremely bad.
Ever heard of "whataboutism"?
The article is 2 years old. Bitcoin and the overall cryptocurrency ecosystem are near all-time high values. Shining a light into this article is probably a maneuver made by someone interested in decreasing the value of Bitcoin. It's possible that this person is a concerned environmentalist, but Occam's razor suggests that this person is someone that wants to buy Bitcoin at lower prices, or that shorted its value in an exchange and wants to increase the benefits before executing the options.
Or even “is there a consensus yield curve for BTC?”
Kind of how you can think the internet is great but think google is a blight.
All energy expenditure == global warming, but that doesn't mean no energy should be spent. As one of my favorite humorist/economist/lecturers, Jeffrey A. Tucker, somewhat trolling-ly put it: "Sometimes conserving is not a good idea. There are some life activities that cry out for the expenditure of resources, even in the most generous possible way."
Hard to imagine anything more colossally wasteful than burning precious energy sources for ... imaginary points.
You can compare the environmental impact of physical currency to Bitcoin if you want, but I don't think it will work out in Bitcoin's favor.
I don't have any real opinion on the environmental effect of bitcoin, if we do that then maybe we should start thinking about the environmental effects of javascript.
Art?
Movies?
all of these things are inherently not about intrinsic utility but they all weigh heavily into human societies.
If I can utilize Bitcoin as a store of value against inflation or as free speech money or even just as a middle finger to the USD then it has utility.
You can argue about how useful it is to move gold, but at least it's a physical process that requires a well-defined amount of energy - and can be optimised if you want to spend less.
With bitcoin, there is no set amount of power that is needed to mine a block. The answer is literally "as much power as possible".
Now let’s say that someone would make a chip that would use only 10% of the power of the current ones. What do you think would happen: People would keep current hashrates and just consume 10% of energy.
Or: People would scramble to get these chips and keep on burning the same amount. As your rewards are basically due to your ratio of the total hashrate. Not any absolute amount.
See this article for a short history: https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-history-and-evolution-of-...
Citation sorely needed. A "large sum" of gold would fit in a small suitcase. Who the fuck is filling airplanes with significantly more than that, save for exceptional circumstances?
Most "store of value" gold sits in vaults around the world and is never moved. When ownership changes because someone buys a gold ETF, it's just bits moving around in a database.
This is not true of Bitcoin.
Should read: every action (including inaction) has specific, inescapable consequences.
The question is: what matters more? Is the cost worth it?
No one needs bitcoin. No one. You might argue that we need a viable currency, but the two are not equivalent.
What everyone needs, without exception, is a functioning biosphere.
I agree with your humorist. Now is a perfect example of a time when we need to be expending resources and capital on saving the planet. Generous? Or just adequate?
How about
* Video games * movie viewing * 2.0 phone apps no one wants * the entire payments industry * banking energy consumption with all facets factored in (human resources, commuting, logistics)
If an application that uses a lot of energy is very valuable to people than it's a competitive advantage to also service that need with cheap energy.
Having sound money is not at odds with the environment.
Denmark, famous for its wind farms and for having too much renewable energy at times, only has 6.1GW of wind capacity, which is is a few gigawatt short for the Bitcoin network.
So no, there isn't an abundance of energy when you decide to throw it all away as fast as you can.
Also because of how the Bitcoin algorithm and economics work, if energy is cheap then the market will scale up mining thus the Bitcoin algorithm will scale up difficulty. Cheap energy results in more energy waste from Bitcoin.
From my view, and despite the initial promises of Bitcoin, it’s being used by people of means to get even more money than they already have.
Indeed, though I don’t see how BTC could help — it’ll just be one more currency you’re not able to convert local money into, surely?
It’s not that I don’t regret not putting £10,000 into BTC when it was worth $250/coin (I absolutely do!) it’s just that I expect that degree of variability to work in both directions.
In the US, people who wanted to donate to Wikileaks were forbidden to do so.
It would definitely be better if the learning curve was shallower and the UI's easier, so that more people could be saved.
The system pays for itself via transaction fees, which are used to "lock" the transaction history in a completely decentralised way.
Bitcoin is very useful to those who understand it, but if it weren't so hard to understand to common people it would be an even greater success, it would be a practical option to those who have internet and smartphones, that's still a minority in the country, but not as much as zelle.
Despite that almost everyone have heard of bitcoin in venezuela, another big reason for the undeveloped potential of it is the black-mailing from local authorities to anyone they knew had bitcoins, mostly when price went up fast. There's fear in letting know authorities you have cryptocurrencies.
I'm not in Venezuela anymore, but I still use bitcoin on a monthly basis to send money across borders to my family.
And the security of it gives me a guarantee not offered by anything else, by far!!!. I won't get my money blocked, like it happened to me with a US bank account, for trying to spend all of my money at once (~2k$).
So theoretically a central authority should be able to offer all of that, but in practice, they're all made of human being's decisions, which rules change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and susceptible to whims. In other words, unstable and not trustworthy. We have also lived what those central authorities can become
Once you've understand how truly secure money can be, it's hard to go back.
It’s the only cryptocurrency that has institutional financial support.
The problem with Bitcoin is that energy waste is inherent in its design. As Bitcoin value goes up, the value of a Bitcoin relative to energy changes, which encourages more mining, which results in higher energy spend and emissions as the algorithm difficulty adjusts to the new hash rate.
Generating 10,000,000 bitcoins could be done at low energy with a few miners - but the more valuable they become the more energy they use.
My issue with Bitcoin is that while other industries try to save power, Bitcoin tries to waste it and waste is built into the algorithm.
And the more popular Bitcoin gets, the more our planet gets polluted trying to make magic numbers on a ledger.
You can use energy that would otherwise be wasted https://cointelegraph.com/news/oil-companies-will-dominate-b... or clean energy like Nuclear
> What you call energy waste others would call effort
This is my whole issue with it - effort doesn’t have to be tied to wasting energy, but it is in Bitcoin. Why would people call wasting energy ‘effort’ in a system where wasting energy wasn’t intrinsic to the system itself.
Nic Carter has a good piece on this: https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...
Is PoS strong enough to still be 99% as useful?, I don't know, these are all experiments
If you are looking for it to be a currency, traditional currency seems to perform better.
If you are looking to invest in some speculative instrument on the basis that the value is going up then Bitcoin and poppies seem to be good ideas.
Venezuela is the living proof of a government that makes decisions with the only objective of keeping power, WHATEVER IT TAKES, even if it means to the reduce quality of live to a 10% in less than a decade.
So bitcoin, and many cryptocurrencies, are at least neutral in monetary emission. Yes, it's not based on economic analysis, therefore is sub-optimal, but equally predictable by every actor, full transparent, no possibility of inside information or conflicts of interest.
EDIT: Some good points down below WRT heat pumps. I have a window unit AC/Heater for just my room so that I don't need to run the whole house's AC/Heater the vast majority of the time. I'm not sure about heat pumps in such a small scale. Would it be more efficient to run a heat pump for a whole house than to mine to heat my one room?
Heat Pumps can "pump" heat from the outside into the house, and this get more than 1 unit of heat from 1 unit of electricity.
The economy is supposed to exist to surve, not we fidn some way to minimize the oven to serve our PoW god
This is plain wrong. A device that consumes N watts of power (and doesn't output electricity or some other form of energy) will eventually produce N joules of heat per second.
This is already being done, especially the latter, in part because cooling is cheaper in cooler climes. Also some geothermal power is cheaper as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/how-iceland-be...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-miners-nordic-region-...
And, anecdotally, I know at least two people who have installed bitcoin mining farms under their floorboards and use them to heat the house in the winter. I assume there are more.
So we can EITHER choose between heating our house, having a car or travelling once London-NYC per year.
We won’t reach it if everyone is finding excuses.
- You need to isolate your house so that human heating is enough to warm it up.
- Why is anyone even living so far up north. Barely no-one was living in Sweden in 1900, so why do we have to invent schemes so that you can do it (at great energy expense) when clearly, nature wouldn’t allow you to do it?
- Unless all the figures of IPCC scientists are fake, which I’m starting to doubt about, because I’ve studied feminism and I know it is possible to persuade an entire country of false figures. Let’s call that the “mass science” effect, where processes can be twisted in order to gain political leverage.
But if the “mass science effect” isn’t here, you sure shouldn’t think that using mining as a decent offline activity for your computer is a viable solution.
I’m using resistive heating in smaller rooms and it cut my gas usage to near 0, saving me almost 50% in electric and gas costs.
This is the only way to make people change their behavior: show them another way. A realistic way, and make it cheaper or otherwise more desirable for them in shorter timespan
As I understand it, Bitcoin mining rewards are now so low that it's unprofitable to use fossil fuels to mine -- you will pay more for the electricity than you receive through the reward. Hence a lot of people moving their miners to somewhere in the world with unused excess renewable (e.g. hydroelectric) power and setting up there.
For a "professional" miner, price swings are irrelevant. The same quantity of bitcoin is mined independently of the price. Bitcoins mined in March are worth the same of bitcoin mined today even if price is 10x now. And in March the same hardware mined more bitcoins than now.
Big miners are datacenter sized now, and such things are not built during a bull run.
It's true that miners are relocating to locations where energy can be purchased at lower prices.
It's not true that there are large reserves of unused, excess power that would otherwise go to waste if not for these miners putting it to use. Power companies everywhere are experts at sending energy around the interconnected power grid.
Miners running profitable operations have zero desire to establish expensive mining operations and only run them in narrow windows of excess energy capacity, such as peak wind and sun days.
The narrative that mining is relegated to purely unused, renewable energy capacity is an attempt to whitewash the massive power sink that is cryptocurrency mining.
I believe that energy usage was one of the motivations for them making that change.
It's virtually entirely renewables, hydro, wind, solar.
Bitcoin mining is a perfectly elastic operation, one of the only energy consumers that will turn off when rates are high.
They just assume that they're running on the world average energy mix, which they most definitely are not.
Not waste of energy.
> will turn off when rates are high
But doesn’t Bitcoin directly contribute to rates rising? Supply and demand, and all that.
Storage exceeds the value of the energy now and for the foreseeable future.
The energy being used is largely not wasted, it's simply excess.
Also is there a good graph somewhere showing BTC online mining capacity over time?
I think the unique thing with bitcoin (and what offsets them from other large-scale energy consumers) is that the technology is intentionally spending as much energy as possible - at it's core, bitcoin mining is quite literally a race about who can access the most energy.
As such I see the environmental danger in bitcoin in a potential to undo efficiency wins everywhere else: If we make the rest of the economy more energy efficient, then the surplus energy could be used to grow the economy without impacting the climate or might not even need to be produced at all. Now there are incentives to dump this energy into crypto-mining instead.
It's not worth doing except in places where utility rates are artificially inflated to make it worth doing (CA/NY).
Could, but often isn't. I don't have a good source other than an obviously biased one (https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...), but this does sound sensible:
> Sichuan, second only in the hashpower rankings to Xinjiang, is a province characterized by a massive overbuild of hydroelectric power in the last decade. Sichuan’s installed hydro capacity is double what its power grid can support, leading to lots of “curtailment” (or waste). Dams can only store so much potential energy in the form of water before they must let it out. It’s an open secret that this otherwise-wasted energy has been put to use mining Bitcoin
So unless the miners are going out of their way to build their own solar capacity (they aren't), it's all essentially carbon.
Since when does anyone have to heat their house instead of wearing more layers when it gets cold?
This idea that Bitcoin could potentially use only renewable sources of energy is a popular narrative among Bitcoin circles, but it flies in the face of common sense. Crypto proponents keep circulating stories about miners using excess renewable energy, but we all know that this isn't the norm.
It's like making car efficiency relatable by saying that a car can go 180km/h using 5 airbags.
It means that to revert a 1 hour-old transaction, an attacker would have to consume double the energy the whole bitcoin network expended in that hour.
More energy expended == more security.
Number of TX is totally irrelevant.
Cap is irrelevant in this context.
The global market for adding bitcoin blocks is as competitive as it is possible to get. No barriers to entry, no one even has to know who or where you are. As such only miners who can secure the cheapest energy survive.
Excess hydro capacity in China during rainy season; capturing flared gas from shale oil fields in the US; geothermal in Iceland; any source of stranded or wasted energy.. bitcoin mining will soak it up.
Bitcoin mining using fossil fuels is simply not cost competitive.
This "#hashes => #GWh => #tonnes CO2", is broken logic full of unsubstantiated assumptions made by bitcoin haters.
Bitcoin does not generate energy - it consumes it.
And the world does not benefit from any encouragement to produce and consume more energy.
Due to the way economies of scale and learning curves work, there might actually be some benefit from encouraging production of renewable energy.
It's perfectly valid to say that governments should make laws or economic policies to prevent negative externalities like pollution, but that is begging the question of what activity is causing the pollution.
If your bitcoin mining rig is in an area that is powered by a coal power station, then you are indirectly increasing CO2 pollution, but coal that is burnt to supply other customers with power is no less polluting.
Therefore it doesn't seem equitable to single out just one user of the electricity. It is even more inequitable to punish bitcoin miners that use otherwise-curtailed renewable energy for the externalities of non-renewably powered miners.
I believe Bitcoin has served its purpose by being a pioneer, w.r.t popularizing an application of an immutable distributed ledger. However, it's not the one we should use. Ethereum's model (proof of stake) allows for most if not all of the uses of Bitcoin, without the non-scalable energy requirements and transaction costs, along with smart contracts, which have many potentially revolutionary applications (voting, public records, etc.). We could have our cake and eat it too..
Is there some assumption that traditional banking don't consume a significant amount of energy? I think we're all familiar with towering bank buildings full of employees using computers, air conditioners and a range of appliances (alongside their daily commute).
This is without even thinking about banking tech and system infrastructure.
"Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste."
Does playing video games "produce absolutely nothing?" Some would say so, others would say not, that it produces positive emotions in players. But the entire ecosystem of gaming no doubt "wastes" more energy than bitcoin mining. Who gets to decide, to decree, what constitutes "waste?" That it's ok to engage in certain activities, like gaming, which some people would classify as "waste," but not ok to engage in others.
And the climate change argument as the cherry on top. Time to power down everything then. No more bitcoin mining, no more cars, no more travel, watching movies, it's all "wasteful." Shut it all down.
https://twitter.com/Melt_Dem/status/1351175859613429764
Netflix uses more than twice the energy that is spent in Bitcoin mining:
https://twitter.com/onybose/status/1351207551648616449
A lot of the energy used for Bitcoin mining would be wasted otherwise:
What if there was some objective, necessarily incorruptible and public source of random data, and tokens were generated only when certain values appear? The number generated is adjusted by adjusting the range of those values.
Is such a publicly verifiable random source possible? Some kind of cosmic slot machine, like maybe variations in a pulsar? If it is possible, could it actually be a low power way to mint scarce tokens?
The same random source used to generate the tokens could also be used to randomly distribute them. Is that compatible with the incentive structure of crypto coins?
But is it stronger enough to still be 99% as useful? I don't know, these are all experiments.
No, the scarcity of Bitcoin is hardcoded into the protocol. The protocol doesn't care if 1 miner or 1 million miners are validating the blockchain. The number of BTC is the same.
...as long as everyone agrees to use the same Bitcoin, that is. People could simply fork the Bitcoin chain with a different number of maximum Bitcoin and call it "Bitcoin 2". The scarcity relies on Bitcoiners all agreeing to not recognize any other protocol with a higher limit on Bitcoin, which is currently an attractive proposition to all of the BTC early adopters who would profit greatly from forcing the rest of the world to buy their BTC at inflated prices in the future to get anything done.
To use a slightly different analogy, imagine that the pulsar variations determined the outcome of a cosmic roulette wheel. What is to stop miners from "betting" on every possible value on the wheel? If winning a spin gives the right to mint some new coins, then the only reasonable strategies would be to make such a blanket bet, or to never bet at all.
Perhaps, though, your system could be coupled with a system that restricts participants to one (public key) identity per IPv4 address. The cosmic roulette wheel would then pick a participant at random who would mine the next block and receive the block rewards.
I feel like there must be a flaw with this design, other than the fact it rewards hoarders of IP addresses. Perhaps the biggest problem is building a device which can run anywhere on Earth and measure variations in a pulsar, but there must be other globally-measurable random number generators that machines could cheaply reach consensus on.
The bitcoin community is locked in a stalemate. Hard forks seem impossible. If bitcoin cannot be improved, i hope we will move on to something less wasteful.
--
¹ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUy4jh5mGNZvLkjies1RWM4YuvJh5o2FYopNPV...
This is going after symptoms instead of trying to tackle the real issue - we should find / use a better solution than PoW (such as PoS) for decentralized currencies.
The "value" of the mining is based on the sacrifice of something else, in this case energy, unfortunately.
Or am I wrong to assume that there won't simply be new algorithms that are safe from such quantum-based cryptographic attacks?
- bitcoin uses huge amounts of energy
- bitcoin has no cash flow
- bitcoin has no use cases
vs.
- ethereum consumes ~100% less energy via proof of stake
- ethereum has cash flow from fees ($68M last week)
- ethereum has ~infinite use cases since it's an app platform
I'm not even trying to make any claims on magnitude. Just saying it's pretty clear if shipping/housing gold changes to bitcoin, if some amount of finance activity changes to Ethereum or some kind of DeFi, then this is not purely additive. It's replacing, and the article doesn't account for this
Edit: yes, even if we cut emissions drastically, the existing 450ppm CO2 level would be enough to get us 2 degrees.
I know Bitcoin is wasting it for nothing as there are faster and zero-mining (and zero fees) cryptocurrencies that eliminated that problem, but please someone with enough knowledge estimate energy waste from AC in US banks during non-working hours.
Right now, it’s more harm than good?
We're just not going to arrive in a situation where common people would voluntarily choose to manage their own private keys and crypto wallets, full stop. Can you imagine your parents forgetting the password to their retirement account and going bankrupt? Or your grandma getting tricked into a phishing scam that immediately and irreversibly sends her entire net worth to a scammer?
Even the average Bitcoin user prefers to keep their money in something like Coinbase rather than try to manage their own crypto wallet.
Likewise, gold doesn't simply disappear as an asset and get replaced by Bitcoin. The strange thing about crypto is that the crypto market cap keeps going up as new coins are added to the market. Cryptocurrency is a chance to create new asset classes, which altcoin developers are more than happy to oblige as long as the demand exists. Does this mean more money (value) is being willed into existence? No, in fact there's a lot of evidence that cryptocurrency is heavily fueled by an explosion in credit and leverage. There are literally exchanges that will let you purchase altcoins with up to 100x leverage right now.
Average CO2 emissions per US Citizen as of 2018 is 16.6 tonnes. Go buy your carbon offsets while they're cheap - less than $9/tonne over at cooleffects.org, which is what I used yesterday.
Bitcoin's yearly electricity consumption is now estimated at $3.8 billion. This must be sustained indefinitely, and is a huge target for regulation and nation state interference.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
Bitcoin's "store of value" has a forever price tag in the billions yearly. This doesn't make economic sense.
If Ethereum can fulfill Bitcoin's role as a "store of value" at a much lower yearly cost, I don't see how it would not eventually become more attractive as a store of value.
For a great detailed explanation on why PoS is better see Vitalk's blog. Vitalik views attacks on chains in terms of costs, which IMHO is the proper paradigm to quantify attack costs.
https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
(BTW, the TLS cert looks like it has an issue at the moment).
In 2011 I assumed Bitcoin would transition because PoW's weaknesses were obvious. Unfortunately, the majority of the leftovers in Bitcoin no longer share my sentiment. Electricity consumption is a reason that PoW is the most likely downfall of Bitcoin if they don't transition to another technology. To keep PoW Bitcoin will need to morph into something else, like a semi-centralized "reserve" asset which is not a technology that excites me. A scalable ecosystem where large volumes of economic value can be transferred excites me. Everyday use excites me.
You can "hide" an Ethereum PoS server in your basement. You can't hide the massive electricity usage, transportation, and manufacturing of specialized hardware used in a Bitcoin ASIC farm. The specialization also means there's a huge centralization pressure in the Bitcoin network. I personally welcome (reasonable) regulation, but if I was concerned about regulation as many Bitcoiners tout, PoW would not be an effective way of implementing regulation resistance.
Even twenty race cars running a 1-hour race doesn't even hold a candle to the average commuter driving their car back and forth to work for a year.
If you're worried about the next ice age, I think we have more pressing matters as a species than an event that isn't due for another 23,000 to 50,000 years.[0]
To borrow an analogy, that's a bit like worrying about over-population on Mars 500 years from now, while nuclear weapons are being detonated in enough major cities to annihilate human civilisation in the next 0.5 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation#Next_gla...
Nope, lost me there. I'm all for having deep discussions about Bitcoin and the environment and the undeniable fact that Bitcoin mining wastes energy, but not with a person that refuses to understand how value works.
Things have value if and only if there are people that believe it has value. There is no other principle. No "inherent" value, no guarantees, nothing. Everything is exactly as valuable as the majority of people perceive it to be. Dollars, gold, food, Justin Bieber, freedom, Bitcoin.
You may not agree, but then it's still happening, only without you.
If you don't sell Bitcoin, you're not the supply and you don't have a say. If you don't buy Bitcoin, you're not the demand and you don't have a say.
Considering the impact of mining it may touch everyone we can all make our voices heard. No need to buy or sell to justify expressing oneself.
Clearly, some people think there is value. That's it.
This really is beyond the pale. Stephen sounds like a total crackpot here.
How much “waste” does Pixar’s renderfarm generate when creating artistic cinema that people want?
How much “waste” does Sony’s Playstation Network generate distributing games people want?
How much “waste” does the sum total of plastic surgery create?
If a cryptocurrency could decrease such centralization of power and consequent waste of human lives, money and energy it would be excellent.
However, bitcoin has no mechanism to democratize banking - on the contrary, the more wealth you have the more mining you can afford doing.
This makes the whole conversation fall into whataboutism.
Beyond the pale? Beyond the pale to discuss Bitcoin energy usage. Some bitcoin people never cease to amaze me.
On top of that, the answer for all of the above is effectively zero compared to Bitcoin.
https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...
And I think that's part of the issue - a number of people aren't appreciating exactly how incredibly wasteful Bitcoin mining is.
> the bitcoin network in 2020 consumes 120 gigawatts (GW) per second.
GW / s. (/year, I suppose, since it's just 2020. But FFS. Edit: no, GW / s / year is GW, but that's still not… really? right? I mean, maybe it's an average of the energy consumption rate over the year, and so on average, in 2020, it was consuming 120GW?)
If there was some legit discussion in it, that would be fine. There utterly is none.
> “ Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost.”
That is nothing but complete grandstanding decoupled from reality. It deserves to be criticized with pejorative language because Stephen’s comments are so wildly extreme, inflammatory, and totally disconnected from facts or reality. It meets the literal definition of a rambling screed and needs to be called out as such.
By comparison Bitcoin provides nothing other than itself. It’s price is almost entirely powered by speculation at this point. To put it another way: if the PS network disappears tomorrow it will have still entertained millions. If Bitcoin crashes tomorrow, it leaves nothing.
I would argue that BTC has provided significantly more value to its millions of users in its 12 year history than Playstation Network; What is PSN really -- a matchmaking service, and social contact platform. What is a global, peer to peer, censorship resistant, non-government fiat backed economic system worth?
This is where the argument about energy usage per transaction comes in, namely that Bitcoin is terribly, terribly inefficient at providing this value. From the OP:
> A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment.
If someone invented a car that consumed 10,000x as much energy per mile, using that car would generally be considered a waste of resources, or at least a wasteful use of resources.
"Would that be worth something to you, eh?" -- Scotty
So you've built a tiny tower of straw men, attempting to use them to draw a false equivalence between the energy to maintain and expand the bitcoin system.
I suspect bitcoin adherents may also enjoy (along with mining) continuously spraying chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. Big Bad Society does frown on that activity! Increasingly, Big Bad Society does not like the externalities from things like BTC.
Diehl is wrong about speculation being the only use of bitcoin. Investing in crime is the other.