Elon Musk wants clean power. But Tesla's carrying Bitcoin's dirty baggage
reuters.com
reuters.com
Wider adoption of bitcoin will likewise increase the consumption of electricity.
Electricity production (not consumption) is what causes emissions. More consumption will increase the demand for production, which will increase investment in production.
Given that we're in the middle of a green energy transition, increasing investment in production will likely accelerate that transition -- the stated goal of Tesla.
Abandoning cars after a few years is far worse to the environment.
(Yes I know, most of the materials of a car will be recycled. But it's just another expression of our throwaway/can't fix that culture).
I wish it was that easy of a choice. Pre-COVID, using public transit would have made my daily commute (one-way) between 1.5 and 2 hours, compared to 20-30 minutes by car.
And where I live, we've been paying hundreds-thousands of dollars on each car registration renewal (% of the car's estimated value) for that new transit system, which might not even get used that much post-COVID because of the germophobia that inflicted society.
With a breakthrough in energy storage technology e.g. solid state, this issue might go away, but right now it compels the production of vehicles specifically designed to be EV and relegates retrofitting to a hobbyist discipline providing relatively disappointing results in range and/or handling.
For retrofitting, locating some batteries in the engine bay is possible. This seems to be avoided by ev manufacturers in favour of locating a monolithic battery pack under the passenger compartment, for weight distribution, simplicity, and (I assume) safety reasons.
Physically swappable battery packs isn’t feasible because of the sheer weight of the packs (a leaf 40k pack for example is 210kg). Plus each car manufacturer has different specs and shape packs. Fortunately we already have a completely fungible, extremely portable unit that can be hot-swapped into every EV at nearly any location just like petrol - a kWh of electricity. Today it takes a bit of time to fast charge, but again with visible-on-the-horizon breakthroughs in battery tech e.g. solid state, fast charge times could drop from ~30 minutes to 3.
Swappable battery packs clearly wouldn't be a single piece, as there are going to be a variety of different bays and sizes. They'd need to be smaller, portable, and stackable, like rectangles or hexagons. It's not really that hard to do if you design for it. If the batteries are under the car then a lift or underground bay you drive onto is fairly easy to do. Or you could just have a kind of dolly that slides under the car and can detach/reattach them.
The fact that we never really thought in this direction seems like a blind spot. I mean, look at how pit crews for racing work. The whole car is designed to be swappable in seconds flat, and also for minimum weight and maximum speed. It's just engineering and design investment.
As for the tradeoff of new EV versus used ICE, the numbers in the video seemed to suggest to me that it's still in favor of EVs, just that the break even point is farther out. Other sources have run the numbers to show it's not the construction or EOL that is the largest factor in emissions, it's the actual use: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8
It's really clear that EV's are just the better option for the environment. The only thing that beats them is public/mass transit or human powered (walking, cycling) transportation.
;)
[more seriously, I wonder what percentage of USD currency is physical vs an entry in a database]
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S [2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm M3 more info https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/m3.asp
Incidentally, that 2nd article mentions that this is equivalent to the power used by inactive-but-on electronic devices in US households alone.
I guess PC gaming was at 75TWh 5 years ago [2], so I'm not going to worry too much yet.
[0] http://climatestate.com/2018/01/15/energy-consumption-bitcoi...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/09/07/the-...
Since energy consumption has historically always increased and since it drives all of human progress and innovation I'm not convinced that the demand side is where we should focus on solving our problems.
I think another point to note is that Bitcoin (and Crypto/DeFi in general) is really just a censorship resistant Casino, and I say this having worked in blockchain and crypto for the last 6 years. As such, the massive electricity usage is all the more egregious.
On the other hand. Banks actually add a lot of value whether we care to admit it or not. They provide a working payment network. They provide credit when you need it etc. Yes, the banking infrastructure probably uses a lot of electricity too - somehow those mainframes need to be powered but I'd like to think we can all agree that society benefits from this. Where as, with Bitcoin, only a small few benefit but the cost of running the infrastructure is so high.
Maybe a better comparison is how much energy the gold industry uses vs bitcoin mining?
Visa, Mastercard, Unionpay, SEPA each settle more than 100 billion transactions per year, bitcoin has less than 0.2 billion transactions per year. Currently bitcoin consumes something like 0.25% of world's electricity for much less than 0.25% of world's transactions, so if we processed all transactions this wastefully, it wouldn't be enough to divert all the power production in the world to do so.
Isn't that the same as a Tesla opting to potentially emit carbon at a centralized power plant? Bitcoin rigs don't burn gasoline directly, but rely on whatever source of power is available at their location. Bitcoin does waste a lot of energy, hopefully we can draw from cleaner sources in the long-run to operate it (and find ways to move Bitcoin off of proof-of-work).
UPCO2 is a new token from Uphold.com, and BTC0 is Bitcoin backed by UPCO2 tokens to offset carbon emissions. Using these crypto assets is one way to offset carbon while still using Crypto.
Let's assume that switching to electric does not, itself, cause an increase in total cars on the road. Let's also assume that both ICE and electric vehicles require roughly equal amounts of energy to travel equivalent distances (this is probably not true, but helps in the analysis). The tradeoff between an ICE or electric vehicle, then, is which produces more carbon emissions for the same amount of energy: the gas/diesel combustion engine or the power plant?
If the plant is more efficient, converting to electric vehicles will produce a net reduction globally, but a net increase locally (at the power plant) in carbon emissions.
If it's equal, then we just shift the source of emissions to the power plants.
If plant is less efficient, then there will be a global increase. This is the worst case, it's also not the likely case.
This gets improved later with the ability to switch to cleaner energy production methods than burning oil, coal, or natural gas. This is not an option if we remain with ICE vehicles, we can't put a wind turbine on them or a nuclear reactor.
BTC doesn't trade anything, it just increases energy consumption (and therefore production). In the near term, at least, BTC will increase carbon emissions because that's how most energy is produced. Not just exchange the location of emissions. BTC isn't replacing oil burning bank ledgers. It's just consuming orders of magnitude more energy to do a similar job.
Edit: Well, at least that is what my impression was. DoE has a paper on this. The example numbers used in this paper seem typical from me taking a brief look at power plant and EV efficiency. I thought the extra energy conversion steps added up to more than 20% thermodynamic efficiency loss. I was wrong.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2000-06-12/pdf/00-144...
What about paying someone with cash, or gold?
You could even send cash in the mail. It would still use less energy than Bitcoin...
Are you sure? What's the energy use of sending $1000 cash in the mail from the US to France?
> If you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there with a Tesla rather than send a Bitcoin transaction. Or alternatively 330 miles roundtrip. For each single transaction.
France is further than 660 miles from the US, and airplanes use more energy than electric cars. However, letters are also shipped in bulk, dramatically cutting down on the energy use of an individual parcel.
So, yes, even though I don't currently have the inclination to calculate the energy use of sending a letter to France, I am very confident it would be more efficient than sending Bitcoin.
Carbon cost is apparently about 986 kg/passenger, based on average passenger weight of 60kg, so for a 0.5kg bundle of cash, that would be approximately 986/120 = 8.2kg of carbon to send a bundle of cash from NY to Paris, assuming it travels in the cargo hold.
Would be interesting to see it sourced/researched properly, but at first glance I'd say that, yes, it is much more efficient to send a letter, even if you drive to the mail box.
Sort of. What you say is true because the energy spent on mining is in equilibrium with the value of the Bitcoin produced by the miners (both the block reward and transaction fees). As the value of Bitcoin goes up, so does the energy they're prepared to buy to mine it.
As the block reward halves, the profitability of mining declines, and so does the energy miners are prepared to buy to mine it (otherwise they make losses).
The final equilibrium will be reached when the block reward goes to zero. At that point it'll be down to transaction fees only, which is proportional to transaction demand. If there's pressure there, then people will be incentivized to transact off-chain and use the chain for clearance only.
In the meantime, the energy spent (in fiat currency) is primarily a function of 1) block reward size; and 2) BTC value.
What's interesting about this is that the block reward schedule is fixed, but BTC value isn't. The energy "burned" is a consequence of Bitcoin's success - it's the area between the two curves. But had the block reward schedule tapered off faster, then Bitcoin might not have successfully bootstrapped at all.
The other interesting aspect is that the block reward, being inflationary, produces downward pressure on Bitcoin's value. It's the upward pressure (whatever its source) that is exceeding this that is creating the energy consumption (since energy consumption is proportional to BTC value, as above).
Surely the reversibility of transactions by a trusted, appointed authority is a feature, not a bug. It's an important safeguard against fraud, money laundering, etc. I've never heard of it being abused, while cryptocurrencies are (so far) a paradise for fraudsters and launderers.
Where I live we had large scale state capture for years. A pivotal moment in clipping the kingpins' wings was when all of the South African banks simultaneously cut off their banking in 2016. That was a good day, now we only have medium scale state capture.
Similar to how no one says we shouldn’t have encrypted web traffic because sometimes you want to see the raw message, you don’t need to weaken the protocol to solve a higher up issue.
I haven't checked on this in a while, but the most energy intensive portion of overall production seemed to be the treatment of batteries during their production. Development for an alternative to the current treatment process to use significantly less energy seemed promising
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electr...
There are numerous reasons for this. One is that oil drilling, shipping, and refining is dirty and uses a ton of energy. Another is that large heat engines are often many times more efficient than small ones. A huge 100+ megawatt steam turbine at a coal plant is going to have 2-3X the thermal efficiency of a small ICE in a car, especially if it's a newer or recently upgraded supercritical steam system.
I recall reading that CO2/mile for a coal powered EV is typically similar to driving a high efficiency hybrid gasoline car like a Prius, but I can't find the reference right now.
No, that's not even close to being correct, the most efficient Prius model you can currently buy supposedly only emits 75g per km.
Tesla Model 3 consumes 14.9 kWh per 100 km, coal plants in the US on average emit ~1kg of CO2 per kWh. The energy loss between the power plant and consumer seems to be between 8 and 15%. So using 8% it's 160g of CO2 per km. I'm not sure if the data reported by Tesla accounts for charger efficiency (which is at maximum 92% and might be as low as 70-80% if you're charging at home) if not that would at least another 8% making it 173g per km or more.
Even a very efficient petrol car like for example WV Golf Rr 1.5 TSI is quite a bit lower than that at 116g per km.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
Switching to Natural gas would decrease CO2 per kWH more than twice, from 1kg to 0.41 kg per kWh would make Model 3 about even with the Prius (71 vs 75 g per km).
I bicycle commute to and from work (before the quarantines, and now I'm moving to 100% WFH), as well to get groceries and other errands around town. The big vehicle is for weekend adventures.
Significantly less than cryptocurrency, and it handles more than a million concurrent transactions every second, with capacity to handle loads in the tens of millions of transactions per second.
Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions for second, and requires more electricity than a small country to do so.
I mentioned the other day that "one of the bad things" about Bitcoin was that it consumed the energy equiv of Ireland.
Then heard yesterday that it's up to Argentina.
Sounded like order of mag change, and yep—🇮🇪 is about to again surpass 5M people, 🇦🇷 approaching 45M. Almost into top 30 countries.
[1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil...
Does printing/minting physical money not have a carbon footprint? What about transporting it everywhere?
Printing a $100 bill costs 20 cents according to [1]. I don't think there is a meaningful way to produce 300 kg of CO2 by spending 20 cents, even if that was all you were trying to do. And then consider that a bill sees on the order of 100 reuses (and coins live significantly longer).
Transportation is far harder to estimate, but unless you're driving hundreds of miles for each (average) transaction, you're not going to get anywhere near 300 kg, as road vehicles are in the ballpark of 20 kg CO2 per 100 km.
So no, CO2 impact of physical money is orders of magnitude below bitcoin. Bitcoin is not remotely offsetting anything there.
To put this in perspective, Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as Argentina (a country with tens of millions of residents), about 121 TWh/year, but for all that energy the network only processes 4-7 transactions per second. Visa processes an average of 1700 transactions per second on its own, and is just one of many large payment processors in the mainstream financial system. Visa's 2018 report (first thing I found on Google) stated a consumption of about 720000GJ, which is 0.1TWh. That is a massive difference, so if cash was anything as energy-intensive as Bitcoin the banks would have figured it out by now and ditched it to save a ton of money (keeping in mind that banks account for the bulk of the overhead spent on cash and coins).
This isn't completely accurate. A big motivator for self-driving cars is to increase the efficiency of their usage. Currently cars sit unused some 90-95% of the day. Once cars are driverless, they can be delivered quickly and automatically to users on demand. This removes a big motivator for individual ownership and can help usher in an era in which most cars are centrally owned. This is exactly what Tesla is planning to do with a fleet of self-driving vehicles. I have no idea when or even if they will get there, but it is a goal that is closely aligned with reducing the number of cars.
I'm not a fan of most of his public transit projects, however there is nothing about them that dictates who owns the cars. It isn't likely that Tesla would block a Tesla owned Tesla vehicle from using those tunnels in favor of a privately owned Tesla vehicle.
>I find this idea that people would be willing to share a car with the whole world pretty naive, majority of car owners are likely to want to keep their cars for themselves.
Will everyone participate? Obviously not. However, the Ubers, Lyfts, ZipCars, Turos, and even the Enterprises and Hertz of the world show that many people would happily share a car given the right circumstances. There doesn't need to be 100% participation to reduce the number of cars in existence.
I can bet that in most big European cities, relying on public transportation + renting a car whenever you need is cheaper than the maintenance costs of car ownership (parking + insurance + gas).
Making the car rental more efficient on a global scale will reduce the need and the utilitarian value of car ownership. There will be of course those that will want to have their own car, but that will be more and more considered a luxury item or status symbol than a need for anyone living in urban areas.
That's already the case though. Having self driving cars doesn't really change the equation on that.
I could live carless in Boston when I was living in Cambridge or downtown Boston. I could not make that if I wanted to live in Medford, even though that is a bare 10-minute drive from Cambridge. A fleet of self-driving cars could be spread around more efficiently in metro areas and suburbs.
I bet a good car share service raises the average duty cycle of cars in the city by a useful amount.
Everyone older than lets say 13 years old could go their own way as needed when needed.
No need to leave work earlier to pick up kids or to send them on after school activities.
As more people switch to not owning the need for parking spots disappears.
Cities can be more dense, real estate cheaper.
Parking needs are a scourge on city density since office buildings and the like require parking structures increasing sprawl as well as the ability to build things like safe bike lanes, wider sidewalks, or pedestrian thoroughfares since street parking is needed for shorter term trips. Reducing parking inside cities would help make them more livable for those of us who do not own vehicles and would hopefully make that type of lifestyle more appealing to more people reducing the number of vehicles on the road.
All that of course would require a level of city leadership I'm also skeptical of but taken on its own the idea of cars being able to self-park further from city centers doesn't immediately strike me as a bad one.
As a value store it is arguably a hedge against M2 inflation, which is wildly out of control right now. All sources of perceived growth are absorbing funds like mad in an attempt to outrace the growth of the money supply.
So: is there a "better" option -- depends on the dimensions along which "better" has utility. I think there's a value in trustless value exchange, there's a value in the brand of Bitcoin, and a value in trying to hedge central bank M2 inflation.
I am a big believer in blockchain/blockdag smart contracts as a future implementation of the capital allocation function of government, especially if the implementation includes a national currency. Built-in taxation through demurrage, funding of proposals voted on and executed automatically as a smart contract, fully auditable and transparent operations -- there are a lot of technical, societal benefits.
I agree that energy consumption is largely a moot point.
There are huge pitfalls to "trustless" value exchange, e.g. you can't implement policy like Magnitsky Act - to through economic means "attack" known bad actors, to try to incentivize them financially to play well before it becomes physical.
"""
Hence why the real solution has always been:
1. Electrify everything possible
2. Shift all electricity production to renewables, massively increase power output with nuclear nuclear nuclear.
3. Carbon capture.
"""
Bitcoin can be included in "electrify everything", as there are a number of problems with our current financial systems which are very hard to electrify as easily, whereas BTC is electricity-native.
Any examples? To me, current financial systems are very much information management systems and information managament is quite easy to electrify.
One of the main problems with bitcoin is that current financial system (well, whole society) is built on the idea that money is credit and credit is money. and bitcoin is anti-credit. I have not heard anyone ever even try to reconcile that seriously. Like, how do you do mortgage with bitcoin without ending up with fractional reserve banking and uncontrolled money supply? I have no clue. But then, I don't think nowadays anyone even thinks that BTC would be money, but something like gold instead. With the distinction that gold actually has some use cases outside crimnal activites and gambling.
And the US Army is used not only to protetct USD payment settlements but the whole society around it. Visa and BTC are really apples to apples in this sense.
Versus other forms of transportation cars are bad for the environment whether they're electric or ICE period.
Electricity consumption (as well as other energy sources) causes plenty of heat release in the atmosphere.
With the ongoing climate catastrophe, this is a problem.
But when you point out that primary energy consumption will decrease people laugh at you.
When you have a 50% efficient thermal power plant it generates 1 kWh worth of electricity for 2 kWh worth of thermal energy in coal or gas. Solar panels are roughly 20% efficient but nobody is counting that 5kWh solar energy hitting the solar panel as primary energy when the solar panel is feeding in 1kWH of energy.
The end result is that you have a meaningless statistic that doesn't tell you anything but makes some people smug that renewables can't ever work and makes others feel helpless when they are posed with the problem of replacing all that waste heat with renewables.
I'm not saying that the way primary energy is counted should be changed. Instead, we should stop looking at primary energy as interchangeable.
- to make money
- for the memes
Anyone trying to justify it with the merit of the technology is either delusional or trying to sell you something.
Feels very much like what happened with Overstock a few years ago with their CEO promoting it, deciding that they'd accept it, etc. Now he's gone full-nut, even more than Musk.
If this scenario were to actually play out, a huge number of people 'hodling' bitcoin will cash out. I guarantee it. I wonder what it will be worth after that sell-off surge?
Many holders have similar ideological beliefs, Michael Saylor also said he doesn't plan on selling any and that he would just borrow against it if he needed the cash.
When the stock came down it snowballed, they hit limits where they had to settle-up their loans, but to do that they had to sell large amounts of Enron stock that then dropped the price further.
This is a dangerous game.
I do not expect the distribution of vendors of essentials to be increasing their acceptance of bitcoin any time soon. In any kind of remotely significant overall crash - which most of us reading this are very likely to see in our lifetimes - it goes back to the barter system & whatever proxy is most stable at the time. Perhaps bitcoin could play a role here, but it remains to be seen how much. I would definitely expect most people owning it to sell it fairly early on in a major collapse. Whether that group collectively owns enough of it at such a point vs. institutional investors to affect the price downward is almost completely unknowable. Which seems like too much of a risk to me.
We have far better ways to establish trust now-- including within the wider cryptocurrency space. I expect the architects of the market(s) will consult knowledgeable engineers who provide them levers of control for multiple variables when opening up new trust systems. When considering these probabilities, in my opinion Bitcoin is clunky legacy tech and a ticking time bomb.
Let's be honest: most people from the early Bitcoin days, or even those who entered at 1k or bought the dip after the crash three years ago, who have enough Bitcoin for a Tesla would have to pay a lot of taxes if they converted it to dollars. Buy a Tesla with them? No way for the IRS to notice that unless they audit you.
Tesla is offering people with an interest in tax cheating essentially an easy way to turn the 2k investment of four or five years ago to a luxury vehicle.
Or the IRS could ask Tesla for a list of everyone who bought Teslas with bitcoins and what their bitcoin addresses were.
However, a lot of people suddenly made a pretty penny on bitcoin this year, so giving them an opportunity to buy their cars easily with it (let's just assume they are paying taxes on it), that alone could foster a lot of good will and make people want to support the company by buying Teslas. I've already started seeing threads on Reddit saying 'Should we replace the Lambo (it was a meme that when Bitcoin went to the moon everyone would buy Lamborghinis) with a Tesla?'
That is in fact the easiest way for the IRS to notice, as crypto is only taxable when it is transacted. And bitcoin is a public ledger.
I don’t really think so, so I’m not sure how Bitcoin is functionally any different.
How many wars started, how many countries destroyed, and how many livelihoods and families ruined for the USD?
No one wants to talk about that, yet we are supposed to wring our hands in grief over some extra computers left running. Give me a break.
Hmm, let me think. The number of countries that were invaded to prop up the USD was... uh... zero.
The US has certainly waged imperialistic wars almost purely for the benefit of its corporations (see, e.g., the Banana Wars), but that has nothing to do with maintaining the power of US currency.
No it has not. The "multiple countries" of which you likely refer to is in fact two: Iraq and Libya, and the declared reason in neither case involved oil. The US went to war against Iraq ostensibly because of Saddam's WMD programs (which were only later conclusively found not to exist), and the intervention in Libya was at the bequest of the United Nations following the popular revolt and civil war against Muammar Qaddafi, itself largely deriving from similar uprests started after a Tunisian set himself on fire and improbably drove the Tunisian dictator on the exile.
In neither case was control of oil a declared reason. And in neither case has control of oil ever been clearly demonstrated to be an actual reason for going to war.
Just because the US manufactures some other excuse doesn’t mean it’s true. Why would you believe the invader?
https://mobile.twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/11918082011...
This position assumes the US is completely incompetent and invaded a country for a fake reason. I’d argue that’s nonsense- they knew exactly what they were doing but the reason wasn’t palatable to the American people so they had to fabricate a “better” reason.
This cost must be taken into account.
At any rate, the narrative that the Somali shilling maintained its value is directly contradicted by Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_shilling#Modern_history
It starts with "Following the breakdown in central authority that accompanied the civil war, which began in the early 1990s, the value of the Somali shilling was disrupted" and gets worse from there. The currency became worthless and they dollarized.
The only reason the shilling is - very recently! - recovering is because they once again have a central government and a central bank.
As bitcoin becomes more popular and stable, it's "appreciation" relative the fiat currencies will reveal how much value governments are secretly stealing through inflation.
Exactly what goldbugs have always claimed about gold, since fiat currencies displaced commodity representational currencies (particularly gold-denominated) currencies.
The thing is, insofar as inflation can be said to “steal” from anything, it's idle holders of dollar-denominated assets. But it's pretty easy to mitigate by moving holdings other than for short-term liquidity into productive assets (which itself promotes real, not merely nominal, economic growth) rather than (or by borrowing against) dollar denominated assets.
Meanwhile, it benefits those with dollar denominated liabilities. Mild, slowly changing inflation (volatility in either price or inflation rate is a problem) isn't much of a problem for anyone in practice, and there's a pretty small audience that is receptive to the scare tactic (and Bitcoin fever has already fully reached that audience.)
That is a huge issue, and I'd love to talk about that. The more people see the world for what it is the better. I don't see how this redirects criticism away from BTC, or how BTC would be immune to the same kind of incentives. The horrendous things that have been done to prop up the USD aren't an inherent property of fiat currency, if an entire nation state had a large stake in BTC would it really be any different?
> yet we are supposed to wring our hands in grief over some extra computers left running
So the fact that we're using as much energy as an entire developed nation to produce <10 transactions per second isn't concerning?
The reason why the US government is willing to take drastic measures to protect the dollar is not because they own lots of dollars, but because they can exert geopolitical influence and control the international redistribution of wealth through the dollar and its associated payment networks.
In fact, the USG does own a nice stack of Bitcoin from the Silk Road seizure, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence agencies have a secret stash, too. But just owning the asset doesn’t mean they can use it to boss people around. Bitcoin’s payment network is open and free, and its inflation schedule is fixed. The only way the USG could stop it is by making it illegal, and no one knows what the opportunity cost of such a move would be.
Transactions per second isn’t a great measuring stick for Bitcoin. I would look at it in terms of savings protected from reckless inflation. If I just throw a number out and say that 50% of Bitcoins have been lost or destroyed, that leaves about $300 billion in value that has been rescued. Is that worth the electricity of a medium sized nation? I don’t know. What if that grows to $3 trillion? Or $300 trillion? How much wealth preserved for future generations is enough to justify the cost?
The alternative to Bitcoin isn't Visa, it's bombs and guillotines. We all have a vested interest in seeing Bitcoin succeed.
I also would like to know what specifically makes Bitcoin the answer, and not some other cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is definitely not the only important crypto. Ethereum, Doge, zCash... all have different roles to play in the ecosystem.
That being said, Bitcoin can exist without the IRS. USD cannot.
Yet you can divest from Bitcoin by simply not buying it.
It's the absolute perfect expression of our greed as a species. Ruining the planet for ephemeral bits. Bitcoin might as well be rebranded the "anti carbon offset". You're literally doing nothing but buying into a speculation market that is backed by only bits, and those bits are obtained at the cost of a supremely inefficient cryptographic process which has attracted massive electricity investment simply to make money. It has zero indirect benefit to society.
The link between BTC and carbon emissions is absolutely not crystal clear. A significant amount of BTC is mined with renewables.
The problem is a dirty grid, not Bitcoin. Green up the grid and how exactly will BTC contribute to CO2 emissions?
Which could be used to replace non-renewable energy usage elsewhere.
The solution is to add more and more renewables (and nuclear), not to ration electricity.
And endless growth is suicide. We could trade absurdist oversimplifications, but the reality is that we live on a finite planet and we are currently in vast ecological overshoot. We need to live within the carrying capacity of the actual world instead of an economics textbook and the stock market that's programmed us to think in quarters and single-year increments. It sounds a lot like we don't share the same urgency about climate change. I won't accuse you of being a denialist but I would encourage you to look at just how deep and fast we need to cut carbon emissions before we just splurge energy on speculation markets like Bitcoin.
Guess you haven't heard of outer-space then.
This is some Thanos nonsense you're championing.
Natural gas producers are TODAY starting up miners to burn excess gas that would otherwise be flared. The concept has been productized - https://www.upstreamdata.ca/ - and is live.
We could as well put spare energy into manufacturing hydrogen fuel cells or running datacenters instead of blowing it on specially-shaped bits.
https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/news/bitcoin-is-an-energy-solu...
The electricity costs of bitcoin is the cost of countering government officials who insist on maintaining the power to inflate their currencies. The cost is analogous to the cost of freedom-seeking citizens of a despotic government. Enormous resources are used up in North Korea as the government seeks to control and restrain its population and some individuals seek to resist and escape. One could blame this cost on the Dear Leader who seeks to impose his will on the population or on the selfish individuals who resist him. It depends on your point of view.
There are any number of things with a fixed supply, and most of them are not valuable. Scarcity is not what makes something valuable, it is some intrinsic value plus scarcity.
As a money, BTC is bad and will get worse if it deflates and people want to hold, rather than spend it. If, conversely, the value collapses, it is also bad money.
Note one thing, btw, which I haven't really seen mentioned:
Currently, BTC mining produces 900 BTC a day in coinbase rewards, or about USD 40m, or about USD 100 per transaction. Once mining rewards halve a few times, and/or BTC drops, and assuming people are willing to pay only around 1 USD per transaction, it'll generate around USD 500k a day, and difficulty will adjust to support that amount of mining.
However, that amount doesn't strike me as being absolutely immune to a 51% attack, if big sums are at stake.
Because pegging your currency to gold only makes sense if you have a static economy. I'd advise you to read a bit about how well the gold standard functioned before 1934 (the 2008 financial crisis or the current recession are fairly insignificant compared to the "Great" and the "Long" Depressions). And bitcoin is several magnitudes worse than gold because it's inherently (hyper)deflationary.
I mean, this has been happening since waaay before BitCoin was a gleam in anyone's eye. You want to take that tack, you start to sound like a Marxist (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Not everyone that buys a stolen phone is complicit of theft... but many are.
Responsibility comes with deliberate, informed choices.
I might be wrong, but I think it comes down to a lot of tech people on here being aware of Bitcoin early on, yet they didn't research it more or invested in it, wrote it off and now it's value is constantly increasing. I suspect they resent others who have invested and are much better off because of it.
This is just personal opinion and I'm sure there are other people who disagree with the electricity consumption or some other things as well.
When the price is down, the opposite is very much true.
When the price is down, they spend three years reassuring the world this is fine.
If you plot bitcoin price vs time in a log-log plot, you can connect the tops and the bottoms with a straight line.
I shit you not and this is at the same time very reassuring and satisfactory when the price is up and very stressful when it is down, as you'll spend 24/7 asking yourself and the world if it will hold this time again.
I live in the US but am originally from a 3rd world country, have family there, regularly send money back home
I didn't invest in Bitcoin but I did have made x000% returns from the same mania that us driving the latest BTC rallies, so I don't have FOMO
And I fucking hate Bitcoin.
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Here's the thing, Bitcoin minus speculation would be great. The idea of decentralized currency is not problematic.
The idea it takes "burning" electricity to facilitate that is not a problem.
The problem is because of speculation the actual amount of energy that goes into the actual use of a currency is dwarfed to a truly mind breaking degree by speculators.
Entire factories literally converting electricity into monopoly money.
Someone brought up how much internet traffic is porn, at least porn satiates some basal wants!
Gold mining is nasty business but at least gold is an intrinsically useful metal, same with silver
99.999999% of Bitcoin hashing is truly useless at this point, only happening because of speculation.
And no I don't have a source for this other than the fact literal factories exist to cash in on speculation, which poor 3rd world people securing their few dollars in BTC is unlikely to compete with...
I just can't believe that now of all the goddamn times we want to add crypto into all the damn waste we're making.
People say stuff like "oh it's only half a percentage point of global electricity usage"... please point me to another place where we can cut half a percentage point of global power consumption without spending a dime and disrupting people's quality of life (because remember, without the speculation decentralized currency can exist and not even be a blip on the amount if electricity used)
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Also I have no idea what the gas station sign comment is meant to mean. Please point me to a currency that hasn't already failed that experienced the volatility BTC has?
If gas prices were in BTC equivalents of dollars how many extra digits would we need since 5 years ago?
Do you have the link to the article? I can't seem to find it.
That is: Bitcoin's "dirty baggage" ain't Bitcoin's. Rather, the dirty baggage is that of electricity production as a whole, and that baggage gets a heck of a lot cleaner once we've moved away from carbon-emitting electricity production. Bitcoin doesn't give the slightest iota of a rat's behind whether a miner's running entirely off solar power or entirely off the dirtiest coal money can buy.
Kinda disappointed in Reuters for putting their name on an article that is outright antithetical to factual reasoning. This is the precise opposite of good journalism; it's a hit piece, and for asinine reasons.
[0]: https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...
Personally, my problem with Bitcoin has been that some of the early adopters cornered large portions of it early on and that governments would never accept that reality. However, cat seems to be out of the bag. It seems to be playing out more like gold rush - whoever cornered, great. At some point governments will catch up and start hoarding it. And then it becomes regularized.
As for no intrinsic value, the high difficulty of mining and high difficulty of faking it, appears to make it a pretty reliable store of value.
Is it? I get that from the perspective of people holding BTC it must be the network effect that gives it value. Otherwise what differentiates it from any of the multitudes of other cryptocurrencies that have been created?
It still looks an awful lot like a big casino to me. A popular one, sure, but still a casino. Not a currency.
Same as the Euro, USD, etc. then.
> It still looks an awful lot like a big casino to me.
Wall St. laughing in the background.
LOL. The USD is backed by the IRS. No network effect required.
It has effectively no utility except "volatile store of value". Most people actually buy it because they expect more than a store of value, they see it as an "investment" which will gain value over time.
But at some point an equilibrium will be reached where x % of world wealth will be allocated in Bitcoin and this x will remain stable over time and Bitcoin growth will slow down to global GDP growth (just thinking aloud, maybe this is wrong).
At that point, people may start to think, why the hell should I have my wealth in something that is expected to have similar returns to long-term government bonds but is also much more volatile and can go down to zero because unlike gold, there's no floor, it has no intrinsic value, it's all based on what people believe.
Interesting that the article totally misses out on that, it's a pretty big opportunity for Tesla and green energy (just have the banks print more money and use aluminum for coins isnt that clean either).
All it takes is one bad actor(s) to fund something nefarious using btc and the governments will make all this illegal in a few hours.
I love the concept of crypto and I think it will be used for lot of use cases in the future, no doubt about that
No evidence at all of any useful innovation happening here. Just churn, waste and grift. it's wishful thinking
I'm legit curious as to how much have you researched bitcoin? How familiar are you with things like defi?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#S...
> One of the core principles of market regulation in the U.S. is transparency—give investors information and let them decide. The GameStop drama was nothing if not transparent.
> “You can sell garbage to the public as long as you say to the public, ‘This is garbage and you’d be an idiot to buy it, but would you like to buy it?’” said Harvey Pitt, a former SEC chairman.
> What appears to have happened in recent weeks is that a massive wave of retail investors answered, “Yes,” to that question, current and former policy makers say.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gamestop-frenzy-is-tough-call-f...
EDIT: remove needless snark
Could you provide additional information?
It matters little if some of the electricity came from green sources because the energy not consumed by bitcoin production could have been used elsewhere. I have yet to hear about bitcoin production that consumes electricity that would otherwise been gone to waste. For example, using one's nVidia GPUs to heat your house does not count because using electricity for resistive heating is wasteful.
I'll keep arguing about this continuously. Bitcoin will never reach the severity that some other industries did.
Bitcoin is a non-issue.
Getting off state backed currency is a prerequisite to social progress. Bitcoin is doing this in a bloodless, warless manner.
Most importantly, no military is needed to secure the value of BTC. The US is in a constant state of warfare to keep its position on the top of the world hierarchy, which is what gives USD the value it has.
I'll take a GPU mining in Iceland over a bomb dropped in the Middle East as the backing to my finances any day of the week.
This is a false choice, clearly.
But regardless, I don't think you're properly accounting for how bad of an externality climate change is, and the (completely unnecessary) CO2 emissions from mining bitcoins is directly linked to a whole future of bad things happening, not just a single bomb.
Man, what koolaid. Bitcoin is a speculation market that has done nothing but benefit rich speculators and its computational demand has led to vast negative externalities for the planet. Stop doing that!
Maybe you should support a bloodless revolution by volunteering at a soup kitchen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
"Bitcoin uses more electricity annually than the whole of Argentina, analysis by Cambridge University suggests. "
Using more electricity than most nations worldwide to run a database seems wasteful to me. Extravagantly wasteful. "Doors and windows open with the A/C cranked" wasteful.
> A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment.
Read for instance this: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064
It's like trying to optimize my internet usage. Instead of having 200Mbit downlink active all the time (because I'm streaming random bits), I'll reduce it to 2Mbit because of energy consumption. Compared to everything else I'm doing, internet usage is a non-issue.
We need to think about optimizing environmental destruction, water pollution, air pollution. Bitcoin consuming as much electricity as Argentina still does magnitudes less damage with that electricity than Argentina.
I really do not see the issue. This Bitcoin environmental/energy footprint subject is getting so much attention and I really can't grok why.
I can't believe someone would try to optimize the fastest functions first, instead of slow ones.
And if you see a "fast function" that's just obviously unnecessary, which is trivial to get rid of, then of course you do that. I do that all the time.
The book The Case for Space Solar Power runs through detailed engineering costs for modern solar power sats, and came up with a cost of $15/kWh at scale. That was before SpaceX. I plugged in Starship costs and it came to 4 cents/kWh.
Of that, the ground station was 0.7 cents/kWh, and of course another big chunk was the microwave emitter. Remove both and you're at least down to 3 cents/kWh for 24/7 power, which is pretty competitive with anything on Earth.
However, if Bitcoin ASICs continue to improve, this wouldn't work, since you'd have to keep replacing the sats' mining equipment.
Also, while it might be possible for SpaceX to make money this way, just being competitive wouldn't make Bitcoin clean; they'd have to decisively outcompete all the other miners, and if Bitcoin is all run by a single miner then we might as well replace it with a SQL database and be done with it.
Sure... /s That's why the solar roofs are very slow to materialize and the rockets/cars/bitcoins get all the focus.
Musk wants to make money. I seriously expect the whole solar-roof brand-bundling of Tesla was a clever PR trick, just like the Mars mission is for SpaceX.
But we use the new infrastructure to justify using more. There is not dream utopia of this all going away with green technology. We’ll find a way to make things worse more efficiently.
There should be forcing functions that make excess consumption more costly, taxes, etc.
Instead of decreasing unnecessary consumption, whole industries have been steering the popular opinion into thinking that recycling and lowering emissions is good enough.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
It’s really not up to humans though, how our planet reacts will eventually be the forcing function.
The summary is that yes they pollute a lot for what they are, but compared to almost any other major polluting industry (travel, freight, construction, etc) it's barely anything and won't be much of a problem for a long time.
Humanity’s famous last words. Just pass the buck down the road.
Maybe governments legislating a sliding scale of regulation or cap here would be a good idea? Like, nothing to do now, but as the industry or any one company grows in this way, regulation or emissions caps grow in that way.
However, in this case, I doubt that he's interested in flying Starships around earth any more than is required to fund the Mars adventure. If there is other funding, I'd bet nobody ever gets that 90min(?) ride from Texas to Australia
We know that making the methane isn't super-expensive, because we've already used the Sabatier process commercially to make methane from CO2. That used carbon-based fuels to get the CO2; to really go carbon-neutral it'd have to be biofuel, or we'd need to pull CO2 from the air using direct-air-capture machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction#Creation_of_...
This releases a bunch of C02 and other much nastier stuff like silicon tetrachloride and radioactive uranium into the environment, and out comes purified polysilicon for making "green" PV panels. :P
In contrast Bitcoin can run on green hydro or nuclear power.
And with the rapidly falling price of PV, it's unlikely we'll see expensive investments that do not reduce costs.
You could add carbon capture equipment and use nuclear or hyrdo electricity to break down the CO2 back into carbon, and this carbon could be reused instead of fresh coal which would also limit the emission of other pollutants. This is a substantial additional cost though, and the conversion of an existing plant to run this way is non-trivial.
Air travel is considered one of the biggest polluters, and reducing air travel is considered one of the highest impact ways that individuals can reduce their carbon footprint. It only stands to reason that Bitcoin should therefore be considered far worse for its impact. The only saving grace is that people don't actually use it to pay for much, else we'd likely be in a much worse place.
Edit: source is here https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption - the 450kg was from 2018, it's currently 310kg (or 685,000 VISA transactions), 651kWh (or 22 days of household energy), and nearly 100g of electronic waste.
Bitcoin is essentially destined to be electricity price arbitrage in the long run, and that's a dangerous proposition.
You get about one block and 2000 transactions every ten minutes.
Figures don't lie, but liars will figure.
The mining-power relationship essentially creates a price arbitrage opportunity between electricity prices and Bitcoin mining fees. This is a very bad thing for the global economy as it ties all other uses of electricity to the Bitcoin mining fees in a very direct way. I can't think of another relationship this direct to energy prices, it could be catastrophic for entire industries. Oh and also it's emitting as much emissions as Argentina at the moment.
A friend of mine called Bitcoin a candidate for The Great Filter, and I'm inclined to agree.
It looks like transaction fees are ~8 dollars right now [1], lets call it 10 dollars for easy math.
The cheapest state/kwh is Louisiana [2], at 7 cents per kwh, let's assume that the cost of mining bitcoin is just electricity, and that you can get it at 10c/kwh for easy math.
You now have 100kwh/transaction... that's 1/6th of what's reported on that site... but the same order of magnitude and the above analysis ignores block rewards...
[1] https://privacypros.io/tools/bitcoin-fee-estimator/
[2] https://www.energybot.com/electricity-rates-by-state.html
That would move my estimate of 100kwh to 1000kwh... still the same order of magnitude as the original claims.
The entire bitcoin mining network which processes all transactions does 120 Exahashes (120,000,000 terahashes) per second. Were all mining done on comparable asics this would be 4.56 GW to run the whole network, which in turn means electricity consumption would be 4.56 million kwh per hour. At the time of this writing bitcoin is averaging 14,814 transactions per hour, meaning the average electricity consumption per transaction is 308 kwh. I could easily see the average hash efficiency for the whole network being half of what a 2020 dedicated mining rig can do.
Do note that this is transaction processing on bitcoin proper, which is artificially limited to processing less than 7 transactions per second. There are lots of things that we would think of as transactions that don't have to go into this number. For example if you have a trusted marketplace, you can have all the transactions which take place within the marketplace in a given time period lumped together as a single transaction, and thus you only need to do a "real" transaction when you deposit or withdraw money from that market. This is the concept behind many cryptocurrencies meant to "speed up" bitcoin. So really it's not so much a 5 hour flight every time you use a credit card, but a 5 hour flight every time you get a new credit card - still inefficient, but far less extreme.
That doesn't seem right.
You do realize that bitcoin transactions are secured by hashrate right?
It's one of the largest distributed computing projects in the world.
Oh purified silicon like also used in making all the computers that people use to mine Bitcoin with a bunch of other resources.
Since you say Bitcoin can run on nuclear, why do you think that generates less “radioactive uranium”, one of your concerns for pv mfg, and other radioactive pollution than pv manufacturing? Does the uranium not get mined, concentrating and releasing its decay products into the env?
How much of the power for Bitcoin is generated by nuclear and hydro right now? How much will that increase in the next 20 years?