Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C (2018)

nature.com

279 pointsaburan2813 comments

So what?

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.

The difference is banks don't inherently rely on directly converting electricity into currency at scale.

How do you think coins are made? And distributed? Of course at the moment, both systems exist so it appears that blockchain is additional and therefore unnecessary. Isn't that often how new technology first appears though?

As another example, there have been similar articles about the amount of energy used by internet datacentres. While a lot of energy is certainly used to keep the internet running, such figures are only really meaningful when compared against the existing systems they can replace. What is the environmental impact of building libraries, stocking them with books, heating and lighting them, and the physical journeys that their users have to make to get there?

I'm pretty sure electricity use of the existing currency system does not alone potentially account for 2 degrees C of global warming. Since you know, making a physical coin doesn't require deliberately burning untold numbers of CPU cycles for each transaction once it's made (nor does any corresponding digital record-keeping of it either).

Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a mid-sized country, including it's banking infrastructure. I doubt that if all banks where in one country, they'd consume more energy, including the energy consumed by all banking employees and other infrastructure necessary.

Related, slightly earlier and still ongoing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25814995

Same error as always, already addressed in the sibling thread, Bitcoin energy usage does not scale linearly with transaction count:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25815303

I find it remarkable how people always criticize bitcoin for environmental damage but when people are sending rockets to the orbit that's ok! One technology is apparently bad & the other good. Both damage the environment. What's the framework to judge this?

"The rocket held 440 tons of jet fuel, which has a high carbon content, meaning it releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the air when burned. If SpaceX meets its target of launching a rocket every two weeks, then the company will be releasing roughly 4,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, Whittaker calculated."

Source: https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/space-x-bad-for-the....

I think it does make a difference whether you spend fuel on the necessary or the expendable, the luxury, the frivolous, even if there's no hard and fast framework to judge this.

As for the assumption that SpaceX is getting a free ride on this just because "space!"—you're wrong. SpaceX is getting heavily criticized for littering the skies with tens or hundreds of thousands of satellites, just so people can have internet. I mean it's a laudable goal (probably), but beyond the enormous expenditure in terms of materials, as you write (even keeping in mind that in the rocket business SpaceX is Nr1 when it comes to re-using rockets), there's still the additional material they send into the orbit, material that sooner or later will have to be replaced, material that is not unlikely to cause problems at some point (like a possible Kessler event which could shut down space exporation altogether, not to mention the light pollution they cause).

The biggest issue to me concerns the will of people to distribute other existing methods. For example, establishing fiber, transoceanic as well as transcontinental around the globe. Proper fiber rollout would take longer, but should have started ten years ago. It would consume less energy per Tb of transmission, particularly over its lifetime.

The problem is the overcoming the will to do the work, plus the geopolitics. Vast sections of the rural US still lack usable broadband to this day. Right here in the USA, where large swaths of RF licenses are held by the large cellular carriers, but have never been rolled out.

SpaceX is going to address those communities, as well as communities in other nations, in ways that traditional telecom has completely ignored. I grew up and lived rural until I was nearly thirty. I still have family living rural with completely unmet internet wants. It is shameful that in this day and age, in the USA, we have such huge regions in need of basic internet access.

In addition, satellite service opens up internet in ways that bypasses local governmental control.

I am not saying it is the best solution, by any stretch, but the reality is, we as a nation, and we as a planet, could have short circuited satellite based internet service by properly funding and building out internet infrastructure over the last ten to fifteen years. The technology certainly already existed, but we lacked the commitment, we lacked the will.

And that left a technology void that had to be filled.

We have ourselves to blame.

The figures in the paper are for the carbon footprint of the bitcoin Blockchain electricity consumption at the primary energy level, while the Falcon 9 figures you give are just launch emissions from the propellant. So not exactly fully comparable. And also this omits in both case two other elements needed to do a proper comparison: whole life cycle carbon emission, including hardware manufacturing and development time, and induced footprint of the usage (what it replaces and what is also purely new usage consumption). Without these figures, it is difficult to compare them.

But just as a reminder, the figure quoted in the paper for bitcoin is 10,000 times the yearly figure we have for Falcon 9.

>4,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year

Surprisingly, that's... hardly anything, actually. Considering that annual global emissions measure in the billions, even if a significant number of other rocket companies pop up, as the article predicts, that's still an honestly negligible amount. Pointing the finger at Bitcoin is significantly less ridiculous, considering the paper estimates its footprint at over 30 million tons of CO2.

That article is honestly embarrassingly bad, it links to data that was 4 years old at the time of publication, making it apparent they just took the first google result and stuck it in. I'm all for bashing Musk, but this isn't a good reason.

edit: quick back of the napkin math says convincing a single medium-large company of 1000 employees to go all-WFH, eliminating commutes, would have an equal or greater impact than this hypothetical rocket-a-week. There's a lot of lower-hanging fruit to go after before we worry about rockets, and Bitcoin is increasingly one of those

Bitcoin apparently produces about 22,000,000 tons a year so rather more. Plus rockets are cool.

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