Comment by jude- | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jude- | Hacker News Reader

There's lots of misdirected anger these last few days towards Bitcoin.

First, the only thing that's energy-intensive about Bitcoin is block production. Making transactions, relaying them, validating them and storing them have negligible energy cost.

Second, nothing about the Bitcoin protocol requires block production to use fossil fuels. Just like with every other energy-intensive industry, the problem isn't the industry. The problem is the fossil fuel use.

Therefore, if you want to get mad about the high energy use of block production leading to environmental pollution, you should direct that anger at the appropriate target: miners who use fossil fuels to mine.

How do we fix this? The same way we fixed it in every other energy-intensive industry: through taxes and regulation. Let's get some laws passed to require miners in your area to use only renewable energy, and to require exchanges to impose a carbon tax on coins whose miners rely on fossil fuels to mine. Properly applied, these laws would make fossil-fuel mining unprofitable, which is exactly what we want.

Bitcoin and PoW aren't going anywhere at this point. So let's make sure it's continued existence doesn't make the world worse. Sound good?

I've been wondering about this. Once all the easy to get blocks have been mined, the energy consumption of the network will drop to negligible amounts? Is there a source out there that explains this and when it will likely happen?

No, mining will continue as usual even after the block reward drops to 0. At that point, miners will only receive transaction fees, and not transaction fees + the block reward as they do currently.

Does that negate the original poster's point that "Making transactions, relaying them, validating them and storing them have negligible energy cost."?

The original poster was being pedantic in distinguishing between "Making transactions, relaying them, validating them" and "block production" (mining). So they are technically correct, but I'd agree that they're being disingenuous. Sure, "making a transaction" is cheap, as well as nodes "validating" transactions in produced blocks. But without mining to make those blocks to be validated, nothing would progress on the Bitcoin blockchain.

No need to talk about me like I'm not here ;)

The energy spent on block production is something that, in theory, _could_ be regulated so as to reduce or cap the pollution it may create. We already do this with other industries, like banning CFCs from refrigerants. Why not do the same with mining?

But before we can have a serious conversation about this, the folks on this site need to understand that the problem is _using fossil fuels to mine blocks_. It makes no sense to talk about how much electricity a Bitcoin transaction consumes, as if that meant anything. Loading and rendering HN takes more electricity, and no one complains about that.

You are correct that energy consumption that relies on fossil fuels is more damaging than energy consumption that comes from many other sources, but your claim that massive energy consumption means nothing it comes from other sources is not.

Even "clean" energy isn't free energy.

We need to consider both the costs on the supply side as well as what's driving the demand side for our energy consumption if we want sustainable systems.

The costs of running both our Internet as well as the Bitcoin blockchain are components of that, and if we aren't considering them, it's a mistake.

The energy costs of the Bitcoin blockchain will become highly significant very quickly if the network continues to grow at the pace that it has to date, even if the work is done by machines relying on energy sources multiple times cleaner than those that currently exist.

If we want to alleviate this, I suspect that we'll have to consider what the underlying social factors are that are driving the demand for such a network.

> Even "clean" energy isn't free energy.

No one said it was. But some energy sources produce far less pollution than others, and are far safer. Also, everything I'm saying about regulating and taxing pollution from PoW applies to every single energy-intensive industry; PoW just happens to be the particular industry at hand.

> If we want to alleviate this, I suspect that we'll have to consider what the underlying social factors are that are driving the demand for such a network.

This is literally what regulation and taxation could address. If you tax cryptocurrency transactions based on how much pollution their miners create, the problem could fix itself -- miners would then be incentivized to use only clean energy to mine (and prove that they are doing so), since that's the way to stay competitive. Also, because literally every transaction is a public record, a government could (a) require KYC for you to trade crypto -- up to requiring you to register your address(es) -- and (b) send you a tax bill each year for the pollution caused by each block that included one of your transactions. Exchanges operating under its jurisdiction would only let you cash out once you paid that tax.

In addition, suitable regulation could require that no more than X% of a utility's electricity can go towards mining (e.g. only during off-peak hours; only if its excess; etc.).

> No one said it was

You said "It makes no sense to talk about how much electricity a Bitcoin transaction consumes, as if that meant anything".

The only way for the amount of consumption to not matter is if there is a free or nearly free energy source.

For what it's worth, I agree with you somewhat that regulation and taxation could help, at least to the extent that such actions are enforceable - my issue is simply with your proposition that it is only the source of the energy that matters and not the amount, when in fact it is both.

> You said "It makes no sense to talk about how much electricity a Bitcoin transaction consumes, as if that meant anything".

Yes, but that's not saying that energy is free. I was saying that the energy used to create a Bitcoin transaction is negligible. It only takes a handful of ECDSA signing and cryptographic hash operations, as well as some serialization operations to produce a transaction. The act of validating a Bitcoin transaction only takes a handful of ECDSA verifying and cryptographic hash operations, as well as some deserialization operations (such as evaluating Bitcoin scripts). Loading HN takes more CPU cycles than this, but as I was saying here and elsewhere, it's quite often the case that people mistakenly believe that the high energy cost of producing a block must also mean that the act of producing and validating a Bitcoin transaction takes a lot of energy. This simply is not the case, per the above.

> my issue is simply with your proposition that it is only the source of the energy that matters and not the amount, when in fact it is both.

We're trying to control pollution, not energy output. They are linked, but we shouldn't penalize low-pollution high-yield power plants (like hydro-electric dams or wind farms).

My proposition considers how to effectively regulate miners (really, any high-energy industry) who can easily pack up operations and move between countries. To me, this means that it makes more sense to apply a universal carbon tax/tariff than it is to try and target individual industries. This is something we can actually get decent data for -- all we need to do is use satellites to monitor how much pollution gets emitted from each country or other political division, and apply a tax/tariff on its goods/services proportional to the pollution emitted per capita. Pollution data is something that already gets tracked; we just need to translate it into tax policy.

Life as we know it doesn't care about which industry creates which pollutant, nor does it care about how many gigawatt-hours we can create. Life as we know it only cares that the environment is not so polluted that it can't keep on living.

Can you share some sources where I can read up on this?

I checked the bitcoin docs - but couldn't find much about energy use (or I'm just not very good at searching ;) )

Mining a block requires a lot of calculations, calculations are done on computers, computers use electricity, and producing electricity necessarily produces pollution. Ergo, bitcoin is bad.

Of course, the estimates of how much energy is used are always a bit suspect. I've seen articles like this that just don't quote any sources at all, and I've seen a number of them that all ultimately refer the same reddit comment from a decade ago where someone made an estimate of the per-hash electricity cost. They then scale that up to the current hash rate and use that as an authoritative figure.

Of course, nobody adds up all the electricity used heating and cooling all the bank branches in the world, or the cost of the looping animations on the screens of all the ATMs in the world, or the food eaten by all of the bank tellers in the world. Single-book accounting can make anything look bad.

But aside from that, the real story here is that the proof of work implementation allows the bitcoin system to spend money on something that makes certain kinds of attacks difficult or impossible. Other banking systems have to protect against those same attacks, but they do it by using trust between humans, exhaustive reporting and accounting requirements, and so on. As a result, those attacks are easier than in the bitcoin system, especially when international banks are involved. That big scandal in Germany where Wirecard told it's auditors that it had €1.9B in a bank in the Philippines comes to mind. It turns out that they forged the documents in an attempt to cover up their failing business. Forging a bitcoin transaction like that is impossible.

I've written code to sign and validate Bitcoin transactions (see my profile). Believe me, they're cheap -- loading this site and rendering it in your browser probably takes an order of magnitude more watts. It's really not that different -- both in principle and execution -- than signing and verifying a SSL certificate.

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