Legitimizing Bitcoin more than offsets the environmental benefits of electric vehicles.
The basic equation the rewards from mining using X hardware over it’s useful lifetime vs the rewards from using that hardware for a 51% attack.
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue
With every halving, assuming price remains constant, BTC miner revenue, and with it, energy expenditure, declines, until it's 10% of current energy expenditure.
You're right that this could pose problems for Bitcoin's security, but that's unrelated to the fact that Bitcoin miners' energy expenditure as a share of BTC price will decline.
Today's block subsidy is currently 6.25 BTC, and the amount with fees is around 7.2 BTC. That's nowhere close to the pre-halvening about of 12.5 BTC.
Not that 1BTC per transaction is anything close to a constant, maximum rewards over the last 3 years where more than 100x minimum rewards, but it does seem independent of block rewards.
"The total energy usage for the production of cars/yachts/fitness machines/musical instruments/toilets equals that of country X"
What does it even mean? How do you interpret it?
It seems more sensible to compare to total worldwide energy consumption of which Bitcoin takes roughly 0.05%
edit: additionally a lot of small crap is still a pile or crap at the end of the day, the small little energy wasters (comparatively) still make up a combined total that is wortwhile to take on.
This is like saying "killing combustion engines is an easy fix: Just don't drive!"
For example electric engines are an easy fix technically, but there are still lots of political and practical barriers that need to be solved before they can achieve widespread adoption.
It will take time for the market to build the same level of trust in PoS systems that they have in PoW systems.
Its existing directly consumes as much energy as a whole fucking country.
I find that a very visible and easy comparision.
If i would invent something and it would consume that much energy just for transactions, i would consider this a gigantic issue.
Visa is an alternative technology providing a service that bitcoin is intended to replace (preemptive statement: I am simplifying and very familiar with the crypto true believers various conceptions of what crypto currency "really is", don't waste your time not picking this please), so it is a valid comparison to illustrate the inefficiency
But Bitcoin is something that people are doing with energy in countries. It is 1/2000th of the average person's footprint.
Is doesn't seem reasonable to call, say, people flying around in airplanes doing something with energy while calling Bitcoin "waste".
The rest of you argument hinges on the idea that the value created by bitcoin on-chain transactions is equivalent to that of airplane usage (the fact that our current air plane usage is wasteful aside), an argument I won't get into without evidence-of-good-faith
I am not at all arguing that Bitcoin is useful, or that its energy consumption isn't excessive.
As a store of value it is utterly unusable due to volatility. Like gold, another perennial favorite of a similar crowd.
You admit that it's a strawman to say Bitcoin is meant to replace Visa.. but then why argue that?
There is a lot of accusations of "straw manning" when people calmly point out that except as a gamble and to enable relatively small amount of criminal transactions, Bitcoin has as of now failed to do in anything of the many things its true believers want it to achieve.
I have actually been following the crypto space since the cypherpunk days (by reading archives early on because I'm too young to have been around since the true start) and without regret (okay, a little bit of regret :-) missed out on large gains by selling all my crypto early on. One of the more interesting projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler doesn't get enough hype because it doesn't make claims that make you feel like a badass outlaw, sticking it to the man and potentially avoiding taxes. I still hope it takes off because it would be an actual digital cash, privacy preserving while still allowing for societal important things like taxes to work.
It's already successful. First of all: simply by enabling new methods of civil disobedience and eliminating future opportunities for government overreach it is already working to strengthen our democracy. Second, people are actually using it today to escape oppressive currency controls in certain places like Argentina. And there is real potential for Bitcoin to act as an inflation hedge that is much more convenient than gold (we have yet to see the long-term price behaviour).
It seems that Google only uses 10.6 terawatt hours.
https://www.google.co/search?q=google+total+power+consumptio...
Add Facebook's 5.1 and you get the amount of power required to kill half of the planet's productivity.
[Edit] typo
Or about as much as a single large hydroelectric dam.
Fun fact: many miners are located in places with cheap hydro/wind electricity like Sichuan & Yunnan provinces in China. These provinces abandon 100+ TWh/year of hydropower. They literally run water through the dams without powering the turbines. 100 TWh/year is more than what Bitcoin consumes globally.
«single transaction has the same carbon footprint as...»
Misleading. Bitcoin transactions don't consume mining energy. Mining power is completely independent of transaction volume.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_hydroelectric_...
According to this list, there are two dams in the world which generate that much electricity. And if you take the Cambridge estimate, zero dams.
I'm not familiar with the intricacies of bitcoin, but another comment claimed that the block size is limited (without hardforking) and the number of transactions per block surly is limited by the block size?
Besides, the cost of maintaining Bitcoin has to be compared with holding up a fiat currency empire like the US. This requires lots of military, suppression of democracy and generally violence. Seen through that lense it might be quite cheap.
This is false. If there is surplus electricity, prices would drop, and you could expand availability. Government, especially the Chinese government is more than capable of shaping market demand.
Furthermore, you could displace existing coal based electrical demand in the country.
The value of currency comes from trust that you manage it well, not from the number of bombers.
Here's some further reading:
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoins-climate-impact-global-c...
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7
https://decrypt.co/43848/why-bitcoin-miners-dont-use-more-re...
The reason is I don't think the costs for our broken monetary system are fully appreciated, or even appreciated at all, at this point.
I can't back it up adequately right now, but I do believe most of the environmental damage today, most of inequality, most war, and most political corruption is caused by fiat money and its skewed incentives. Crypto at least has a real shot at fixing those.
Interesting question would be, how much of _all_ energy does bitcoin cost? Now I've looked up the numbers. Total consumption of the bitcoin process seem to be 78-87 TWh depending on which source you look at (I found one higher than what one of your source said and will use that, for 2019).
Total annual energy consumption is 584 EJ, or 162,222 TWh (statista numbers, 2019).
That would put bitcoin at 0.05% of total global annual. I feel that is not too high.
Bitcoin's share of carbon emissions is about 0.1% by my rough calculations (based on https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption and https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions). My position is that stopping the worst effects of climate change is going to require lots of relatively small changes across all sectors of life. Bitcoin is nothing compared to, say, heating and cooling homes, but we can't just get rid of heating and cooling. We can distribute more efficient appliances, build more insulated homes, influence behavior to lower usage somewhat. Each of these might give us a .1% improvement. Find a hundred things like this, and we've cut 10% of global emissions, that's pretty good.
I know bitcoin is here to stay, and I'm not suggesting government should try to ban it or something because it's bad for the planet. But until I'm convinced that it's the savior you say it is, it's not something I personally want to be involved in, and not something I can celebrate. Even ignoring mining, the cost per transaction is an enormous hurdle for me that I will need a lot of incentive to get over.
I will put my thoughts on this together, and if you're interested ever hearing about it put some contact in your profile. In that case I'll ping you.
This exchange turned out productive. Thanks for that.
Legitimizing Bitcoin has nothing to do with the environment in the large scale of things.
It's like saying that you need to optimize fast functions instead of slow ones.
I really like this analogy
That's true (-ish).
Here are the numbers:
Modern pure-ICE cars don't got below 100g/km of CO2. Round trip NYC-LHR yields 1 ton of CO2. So the above comment is true-ish for cars that do less than 10k km annually.
Not to mention the enormous amounts of energy used in manufacturing/heavy industry. China's Top 5 emitting industries have nothing to do with transportation of individuals or farming for food, unlike some parts of the world.
I don't disagree that heavy industry is going to be the more important problem to solve, but unfortunately I have few levers at my disposal to influence that. It's going to take treaties, taxes, regulation and sanctions to figure that mess out. Because I have zero faith in that actually occurring, I think the real solution is going to be in remediation technologies. Consumerism isn't going away, especially with fresh faces entering the developed world, eager to take up any slack the west gives.
Non-energy example: trash. Jesus lord I am swimming in trash. Not because I consume in excess but because the everyday things I need come with stupid amounts of packaging that I can’t give back to them and isn’t recyclable or reusable.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
So if every personal vehicle on the planet was an EV charged by a renewable energy source, we would cut GHGs by ~17%
Isn't Tesla aiming to electrify everything and then use clean energy as the source of the electricity? At the moment running heating or cooling should be clean as long as the energy is coming from a renewable source, right?
> Take one intercontinental flight and again, having a fossil fuel car for a year does not exceed the emissions of that flight.
For the entire flight, right? I would be curious how much driving one seat on a flight equates to. I presume flying is at least better than driving on a per-mile basis?
You can’t compare the two so cleanly as to conclude with a simple this is better than that. There’s different effects of different types of pollutions at different altitudes, some unknown. Brake dust, the knock on effects of needing more road due to more miles driven, the infrastructure required to operate an airport, etc.
An entire country's worth of energy is getting burned to run a network capable of a whooping TWO transactions a second.
Now that Tesla has bought these coins, they have so far driven the price up by another 10%. This will eventually be matched by an increase in carbon emissions of 10% of a medium-sized country.
This will most likely completely obliterate all of the carbon reductions that Tesla has managed to achieve so far.
Bitcoin, as it exists today, is a massive ongoing ecological disaster and probably a crime against humanity. And Tesla is now making it worse.
Water pollution, shit pollution, river pollution, ocean pollution, air pollution, probably only the last one somewhat related to bitcoin.
Electric cars and low flow showers / toilets are some of the environmental steps this country takes to make themselves feel good.
For water, domestic use tends to be a small part of the US overall use, around 7% I believe. I haven't dug further into that, but I'd imagine lawns are a big part. https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...
For air pollution, about 14% of worldwide pollution is from transportation. Even if we go full electric the number won't go to zero because electricity is not free. Depending on how electricity is produced and factoring it the initial energy cost of producing batteries, we make that number smaller (maybe 7%, I'm not sure we really know). I do have worries about the amount of rare minerals that you need for batteries and how their life spans aren't all that long. And given their higher cost to produce, they are not as economically accessible.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
If people honestly wanted to fix our environmental impact, we'd have to drastically change our habits like covid made us do. Or we just have to have fewer people on this planet.
I honestly look forward to the environmental studies that come out from how big of an impact Covid had on pollution. I think it will definitely feed our models in an interesting way.
It doesn't have a stopping point, or brakes, and at each point, it is in the interest of the frog to raise the temperature of its water by one more degree.
If I was a hostile AI and wanted universe-scale civilization destruction at near zero-cost, I'd send each civilization the bitcoin "thought-bomb." All the AI has to do is share the bitcoin discovery, perhaps anonymously. Once that is done, it puts it in the short term interest of the metaphorical frogs to boil themselves, and speed along the inevitable natural tragedy of the commons outcome.
Right now, bitcoin is like a program with bad big O math, and we are looking at it while x=2 and concluding everything is great.
My impression is that most miners are located to take advantage of locales with very cheap hydroelectric/geothermal or take advantage of subsidized/overbuilt renewables. But I could be wrong. Any data on this?
We could design cryptocurrency systems that deliberately focus on using excess renewables, or just plain use less energy for mining. But the problem is that "Bitcoin" has come to stand in for "a cryptocurrency using the specific design choices that its inventor made more than a decade ago" and so privileging Bitcoin itself makes these choices impossible. The very best possible outcome is that (small-b) bitcoin tokens will eventually migrate to more efficient consensus networks, and the big-B Bitcoin network itself will be spun down to consume less power.
Could we? I thought Ethereum still had a pretty big digital/physical gap. In that there was no way to digitally ensure a physical truth (barring third party attestation).
I would love to see a real example where you would proof me wrong.
Nonetheless, bitcoin itself is not necssary and it doesn't solve a problem.
People trust currencies. I trust currencies.
Bitcoin also has to have a trust system and right now it is connected to currencies. It is not decoupled. The only thing bitcoin is, its irradical and its basically gambling.
If a miner's power source is on the grid, it doesn't really matter all that much if they own a hydro plant, a solar plant, a coal plant, or are just buying power off the market. Either way, they are increasing the total energy consumption of the grid and their environmental footprint is determined by the grid average emissions and the amount of power the miner uses.
If they've built an off-grid renewable power station, you might argue it would otherwise not been built and is therefore relatively neutral, emission-wise. I think that argument would be wrong, because of the scale of large mining operations.
If you can build new renewable energy capacity at a competitive price and at sufficient scale to power a large mining operation, that's one thing and has nothing to do with whether or not you mine crypto with that energy. Deciding to not sell to the grid at that scale seems irrational, and honestly I doubt miners also operate power stations except maybe at a hobbyist level.
Mining by it's nature has energy as its largest input cost, so it chases lower and more efficient sources of energy which are largely renewable energy
Further, good renewable sources are often poorly located for electricity distribution. You have situations where the power wouldn't otherwise be used, so it is being tapped into Bitcoin.
Iceland has a pretty much infinite supply of clean energy with geothermal. They're not interconnected to the grid so previously they would export that energy via aluminum, today they can export it with bitcoin and other processing (colo compute)
Georgia has also become a destination for bitcoin mining and it is largely hydro power
The reports on what bitcoin's proportion of renewable sources vary very widely from ~75%[0] and ~25%[1]
You can debate the methodologies of these estimates all day - but one thing to note is that the worst case estimates take an emissions factor which is average _for an entire country_ - while large scale mining operations (which account for the vast majority of mining) are often colocated in specific cheaper regions, usually around hydro/renewable power
The only X factor is that a lot of energy for bitcoin is sourced corruptly. The Chinese are already some way towards resolving that (they have an incentive to!) and shut down the heavily subsidized dirty mining that was happening[2]
My main takeaway is that the trends points to bitcoin eventually becoming a lot more efficient, and potentially can be used as a regulating mechanism on grids or as a way to export energy from renewable sources that aren't well interconnected
[0] https://coinshares.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-decem...
[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/bitmain-ebang-bitcoin-mining-energy...
Ok, but now somebody else is making that aluminum.
There's always something we could do with free energy, including making carbon-neutral liquid fuels or ammonia fertilizer, or taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.
If Bitcoin were the only way to have a working cryptocurrency, there'd at least be an argument for it. Now that proof-of-stake is available, Bitcoin's energy consumption is pure waste, since we can have essentially the same product without using the energy.
If you're going to flood a valley, please make it for something actually worthwile.
Depending on the place you pick you might not even need to flood too much
Its also not the responsibility of the world to create unlimited carbon neutral power source for bitcoin.
Bitcoin needs to solve a real issue worth solving, which it doesn't.
That Bitcoin didn't solve your problems doesn't mean it didn't solve real issues worth solving. Bitcoin solved the problem of quickly and cheaply moving money across the world without risking it will be lost. I was unable to move money between Africa and Europe before Bitcoin, now it's quick, cheap and reliable. Moving money between the USA and Europe also used to be problematic (took long and was expensive, at least it was reliable though), now with Bitcoin it's very easy.
Since Bitcoin uses waste electricity (you will immediately loose a lot of money mining with ordinary electricity), it doesn't make anything worse - of course as long as governments don't kick the balance away.
Right.
Not a single bitcoin miner in europe would use waste electricity;
China banned bitcoin mining due to grid issues;
So tell me again who has enough money to waste energy?
Bitcoin is balanced by the energy market otherwise it will deflate. IF its becoming worthless to do that job, bitcoin can't work, therefore it will always be cost effective somehow.
This still doesn't mean, that there is no better alternative.
'waste' energy means energy which you could not have used otherwise.
If it is cost effective to mine bitcoin in europe, then europe will just produce more energy for your usecase independently if it is useful to do so or not as long as it is cost effective.
This is not 'waste' energy; Its energy prodcued for your bitcoin mining.
Would the world be better of without bitcoin? Holy shit yes.
Do you know why farmers produce opium? Not because it is using waste farmland, because others are paying them more money for it then for food to consume. Its the same issue with bitcoin.
> Would the world be better of without bitcoin? Holy shit yes.
Don't speak for others. I never want to go back to world without Bitcoin. Sure, come up with something better, but no world would not be better off without it. Millions of people have better life thanks to it.
Your bitcoin miner don't have load control to make sure they consume the excess power. They just consume as much as possible.
And yes its still the same as opium farming; I can also give you annother example: when crops are used for biofuel, suddenly its financial better to produce energy instead of food. Happend in germany and other places.
I have NO IDEA why you would think that bitcoin mining is done by magical high intelligent controling systems. Haven't you seen any documentation on bitcoin mining operations at all?
I mined bitcoins myself a few years back at home as well.
https://www.primafelicitas.com/5-biggest-bitcoin-mining-farm... none of them did this for using 'waste' energy, they all did it for th emoney.
Missusing subsidised cheap electricity and now increasing competition for energy. And there have been enough stories on grid failers in china and regulators stopping those mining farms due to this.
"Millions of people have better life thanks to it." <<< this sentence is really weird. Are you talking about real people having a real benefit of bitcoin or are you talking about people getting rich of bitcoin by polluting our planet with unnecessary co2 and increased prices for others?
Key words being "few years back". I mined at home few years ago too - nowadays it's absolutely impossible.
You can find data easily yourself, simply check what wholesale electricity costs on the exchange right now, and check what you can earn with the most advanced mining hardware - you'll see that the earnings are three times lower than the cheapest electricity.
> I have NO IDEA why you would think that bitcoin mining is done by magical high intelligent controling systems
Because that's what you have to do if you want to have any profit from mining in 2021. It was different in 2017, I agree.
> this sentence is really weird. Are you talking about real people having a real benefit of bitcoin
Real benefit. Bitcoin makes it easy to transfer and store money where it was previously impossible.
> when crops are used for biofuel, suddenly its financial better to produce energy instead of food
Totally false, that never was and never will be profitable. It's only done because of EU subsidies (and these subsidies destroyed my country's landscape and food self-sufficiency).
It is a fact that bitcoin uses energy; There is no source of your claim of bitcoin using 'waste' energy.
You also assume that the 'waste' energy exists apparently in areas where they have fully isolated energy grids which would make it impossible for anyone else to use this energy better then bitcoin does; You ignore aluminum melting, data centers, normal households, heating etc. You ignore that energy subsidies exist to support people and are missused by bitcoin miners.
You claim bitcoin can store money, which it can do as efficiency as any other commodity out there: gold, shares, a normal bank account;
You claim bitcoin can be used to transfer money easily while ignoring that bitcoin itself has this benefit as every other exchange has; It is highly volatile, everything but userfriendly and is uncontrolled; We have a controlled money system not for the fun of it but because the rich people and unfair people tend to move money around uncontrolled; This costs you and me potentially money if tomorrow everyone would move to an anonymouse currency.
You can transfer money around the world by western union, paypal, amazon/google giftcards, gift cards, my credit card can buy in every currency; I have bought money from iran, usa, spain, japan without any issues.
And you ignore the basic fact, that bitcoin HAS TO BE MINED to be working. It HAS To BE distributed to be working. If only countries with cheap electricity are mining or a majority becomes real, it breaks; It breaks if someone is no longer motivated by earning enough bitcoins through mining as you can't do any transaction any more. The energy price of global economys is not connected to the energy price of bitcoin directly. People will pay the transaction fee as long as they want to be able to do anything with their bitcoins.
EU subsidies where not meant to motivate too many people to make energy out of crops; Thats the exact point i was making about subsidies and energy prices. How can you not see this?
Oh, OK, I get it.
Region A consumes a lot of electricity smelting aluminium. Region B has cheap electricity so a smelting company moves there and ships the aluminium to region A. Region A now has one smelting company's worth of extra electricity available.
It's a little bit surprising to get such pushback on a genuine question when there are substances you could describe as "electricity you can put on the back of a truck" such as hydrogen canisters and various forms of battery!
But then there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery so who knows.
As others have said, I was mostly referring not to the ability to easily convert to and from aluminium, but instead the fact aluminium is easily transportable and such a useful material that there is rarely surplus (if aluminium were cheaper, it would take over lots of places where steel is used, and even some uses of concrete).
That in effect means that if there is excess electricity in a region, it can in many cases work out cheaper to build a decent road to the region and build aluminium smelters than to build power transmission lines out of the region.
The electricity becomes available at its former location.
We've already known PoS is more efficient for like a decade haven't we? When will it become real and actually start to supplant Bitcoin, 2030? It's a very interesting theoretical point but I don't see how it's relevant when we're talking about the environmental impact Bitcoin has been having for years while Tesla is dumping money into it.
Ethereum 2.0 (proof of stake) is currently a hybrid, with the beacon chain operating in conjunction with Ethereum 1.0 (proof of work).
The plan[3] is to merge Eth1 and Eth2 by 2022, though it's an admittedly ambitious plan. My bet is that it will happen before 2024.
eg. the USA inflation rate is 2%, whereas the interest rate is 0%.
Its inevitable that savings will flow out of fiat and into all kinds of other assets. This is the entire purpose of low interest rates - to inflate the value of assets held by retirees, pensioners, and the ultra-wealthy.
Bitcoin is unique because the supply cannot be expanded (beyond what is scheduled as rewards for miners) - unlike gold, shares, living spaces. Its also significantly more liquid and easier to transact than any of those assets because it is digital and global.
Also, the Bitcoin supply may be limited, but the supply of new alt pins or even BitCoin forks continues to inflate every year.
At a certain point, mining BTC could be the only economically viable activity to do with electricity.
If you rationally examine, the money holder will select the money with the least energy waste. All moneys not held imply a higher amount of energy inefficiency. This is why one may hold the USD, as opposed to the Turkish Lira. This is why one may hold btc, as opposed to the USD.
If you want to investigate a bit more in depth, cryptoeconomics Proof of Work fallacy is a great resource by Eric Voskuil.
Link: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o....
The alternative to your narrative is that this is promoting permissionless cryptocurrency that is hard for the government to print and manipulate, not necessarily Bitcoin per se.
Additionally, if proof-of-stake coins and DeFi can take over some of the manual paperwork done by banks, it would amount to energy savings.
Right now bitcoin is the leader and everybody knows what it is. Compared to other coins, it has a more mature ecosystem to support the needs of a corporate treasury. Companies choosing bitcoin now doesn't mean a proof-of-stake coin cannot take over the mantle later. You can consider bitcoin to be the first coin that lands on a beachhead in the disruption of traditional finance.
Also, institutions buy things for lots of reasons besides hedging inflation. Arguably they're buying Bitcoin for the same reason they buy growth stocks.
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/10/21/bitcoin-is-unstable...
If some future generation of bitcoiners is faced with either increasing the reward or putting up with frequent large rollbacks, we can't really predict which they'll choose.
Not in Iceland.
First, I think JPMorgan, GS, MicroStrategy, Grayscale, pumping billions into BTC this year and the OCC announcing that banks can use blockchain for settlement probably has more to do with BTC being viewed as legit than TSLA jumping on board as a tech company.
Second, about 25% of energy is consumed in passenger transportation and Tesla is pretty much single-handedly moving the world to electrifying that making it a) 5x more efficient, b) possible to run from renewables.
Third Tesla is the only organization in the world ramping up to do planet-scale battery production that will make it possible to transition all energy production to renewables. (If people want to pay to produce and consume clean energy for arbitrary purposes that's fine by me... as long as they don't kill me in the process).
The idea that Tesla's influence on BTC mining will waste more energy than their electrification efforts have saved and/or redirected to renewables is nutty.
There are other blockchain currencies of course, but I think they all have the same environmental issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(cryptocurrency)
https://content.nano.org/whitepaper/Nano_Whitepaper_en.pdf
The whitepaper specifically addresses BTC's energy consumption on page one.
While many of these are forks of Bitcoin and use similarly wasteful proof mechanisms, many are also completely new and different. Several different consensus mechanisms are broadly used across these, most of which improve drastically on Bitcoins wasteful Proof of Work (PoW). Some even solve the problem with only very negligible energy footprint, such as the variations on Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). It's been long-debated whether those alternatives trade safety for energy-savings, but after many years it would appear the reverse is true. The majority of projects that have succumbed to some kind of system-inherent weakness have been PoW protocols being "51% attacked", which is generally not a concern for the alternatives.
A fair assessment would be a new BEV versus a new petrol versus a new diesel versus a new hybrid.
It's not about whether you or I buy a used petrol car over a new EV; it's about whether you & I buy a used petrol car over a new EV.
Emphasis on the environmental efficiency of new products in general over the environmental impact of buying new in the first place is a topic that's well worth highlighting.
Cars enter the world by being made, not by being sold. They leave the world by being damaged beyond economical repair, not by being bought.
This is not the same as party politics, even though literally every election and referendum I have voted in would’ve resulted in the same winner had I not voted. The political comparison would be voting ex-politicans off X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing or $COUNTRYs-got-talent etc. (second hand) versus current politicians in elections (new).
To put it another way: how would you react to a study which compared the environmental cost of a second-hand BEV to a brand-new ICE?
If your question is whether a second-hand BEV has higher / lower environmental cost, why would there be a problem doing such a study.
It's not a foregone conclusion either; e.g. (hypothetically) a lifecycle analysis could show an EV to be less optimised for long-term use (spare parts environmental cost, etc.), compared to a new ICE with a more sustainable long-term maintenance story. This might be unlikely but you can't find answers to these questions without such studies.
Sadly, this is not the case. For most products.
That's the argument anyway. Personally, I think such coordinated effort is too hard to pull off because you are up against highly sophisticated media campaigns paid for by politicians and industry.
Was something supposed to be different there?
Well when the government gives people $3 billion to smash their used vehicles (C.A.R.S in 2009)rather than keeping them in the used market, it does tend to cause more new vehicle purchases.
I'm not disagreeing with your point that people will eventually buy a new car if used ones aren't available, but if every vehicle was kept on the road for 25+ years, it would lower demand for new vehicles.
If (and it's a big if) we can get to 10% renewable energy in the next decades, Bitcoin's energy consumption will be much less of an issue.
No, what Tesla has done here will instead wipe out all the gains in reducing carbon emissions it has managed so far, out of pure greed.
This is a disaster.
Cost of running the network also goes down with time as fewer bitcoins are issued as block rewards.
It goes up with the price of bitcoin, as more miners spend electricity on mining.
Those things have historically led to increased energy costs for the network, but in the future they could well lead to decreased energy use too.
This means that more blocks needed = more miners motivated to mine.
Does the higher number of 'failed' mining not also increase with the number of miners?
And proof of work increases with each block does that not imply higher energy cost per mined block?
Correct.
> So higher transaction number = higher block number needed
No. The rate blocks are made is fixed (on average), and that limits the total transaction capacity of the whole network. That's why people are working on things like the Lightning Network as a way to add more transactions.
Other efforts to either have more blocks per hour or more transactions per block have (mostly) failed.