Bitcoin consumes more electricity than Argentina
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons...
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons...
They only want Bitcoin useful for two things: Buying and holding. These actions drive the price up. As long as no one is using or selling Bitcoin, the price stays high.
Between the high transaction fees ($8 right now), the deflationary nature, and the “HODL” narrative, everything about Bitcoin was designed to disincentivize actually using it. It’s designed for hoarding and speculating.
The more interesting question is what value Bitcoin has created for society besides acting as a speculative good.
The point is that Bitcoin is designed to be inherently power-inefficient. Proof of work systems rely on the work being both difficult to calculate and useless.
Even if Bitcoin transactions went to 0 tomorrow, the system would still consume more energy than Argentina just to keep everyone’s balance.
Worse yet, it the power consumption goes up every year because the system incentivized it.
Do you have to do proof of work when there are no transactions?
My understanding was that the PoW was done to place transactions on the block chain. If nothing has changed, nothing has to be done. The entire system can be offline and archived if we have 0 transactions.
The electricity angle on BTC is, let's admit it, pretty dumb. If people were worried about CO2, like, for reals, we would be talking about concrete, and trying to find something less CO2y for our roads. People want to talk about culture, and approve or disapprove of what they like or dislike. So yeah, if you don't like Bitcoin and want to sniff at it, go ahead and stuff a plastic straw in its nose and call it a seaturtle. You can tweet about it on a platform that uses a comparable amount of electricity, and cause a few servers to get spun up to get your trending hashtag to the concerned masses.
If you actually givea crap about CO2 (unlikely, but possible), become a materials scientist, or advocate for the funding thereof, or fight for more nuclear powerplants. Stop making your ethical decisions based on aesthetics.
This comparison is almost certainly off by orders of magnitude.
In many places Bitcoin is mined electricity is co2 free.
Generally, there are no reasons why electricity needs to emit co2: nuclear power plants can produce enough electricity to power all bitcoins in the world.
> electronic waste environmental disaster
As well as any other consumption. Bought a new car while old one if still running? You damaged the environment.
To reduce the damage to the environment, garbage tax can be introduced, so market can decide what’s more important and less damaging, bitcoins or a new PlayStation.
Bitcoins might be useless, but don’t blame it for all the problems in the world.
And that electricity could otherwise be used to displace the use of electricity that generates co2.
The idea that the majority of the energy used for bitcoin is generated in such places has no real basis in fact.
If sun is shining, and you don't generate solar electricity, if you heat it, and that's it, there's no damage taking solar electricity.
And so on.
> The idea that the majority of the energy used for bitcoin is generated in such places has no real basis in fact.
It is based on fact. For example: "In so doing, the CoinShares team found that bitcoin miners were using a disproportionate share of renewables." https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-...
But the original idea that bitcoin is a gigantic CO2 disaster is definitely not based on facts.
Don't use solar panels where the electricity from them can't be fully utilised, they have an environmental cost to build.
So how far can this go?
But it's fundamentally unstoppable, that's its main selling point.
only if you stay within the ecosystem, but then the moment you want to spend money in real life you need to basically resort to money laundering.
Now, that may not be a problem for some users, but it'd be a serious one for most people, and the price would plummet.
You're confusing Monero and Bitcoin. Those are completely different cryptocurrencies.
They buy Bitcoin in their exchange like Coinbase or Robinhood, they watch the price in the exchange, and they sell in the exchange.
Transaction fees are currently in the $8 range. Losing your password or having it phished away will irreversibly lose all funds. The average person doesn’t care about being their own bank. They only care about seeing the number go up, so they stick to exchanges.
If the exchanges were cut off, Bitcoin would still exist. But the demand would disappear from average people, and the price would fall.
Videogames also run GPU hardware full pelt, so does creating the majority of what you see on the screen for a Marvel movie. How much of the worlds resources are burned daily encoding video for social media.
We can “whatabout” other energy consumers all day, but the bottom line is that everything else is incentivized to use a little energy as possible. Even your GPU example would only benefit from less energy consumption (less heat, faster clock speeds)
Meanwhile, Bitcoin consumes more and more energy all of the time, without ever producing any more transactions.
If you had a fossil-fuel powered car, you would definitely burn fossil fuels to go anywhere. And every time you used the brakes, none of that energy would be re-captured.
Suggesting that electric cars are bad because they might use some amount of fossil-fuel produced energy is a really bad false equivalency, and missing the point of electric cars.
> The energy it uses could power all kettles used in the UK for 27 years, it said.
Comparisons like this only say "one thing consumes more power then another thing". But that's only the tip of the iceberg. It doesn't tell the whole story.
The article doesn't go on to ask the bigger questions.
What's the fraction of global power consumption that's dedicated to Bitcoin? What's the fraction of fossil fuel based versus renewable power consumed by Bitcoin? In what respects does Bitcoin power consumption affect pricing of power on the energy market? Does Bitcoin power consumption directly affect power availability in households and industries? How does this compare between different regions across the globe?
Arguably, mining Bitcoinis going to have a massive environmental hit if a miner relies on power generated by a coal plant, or a hydrothermal plant. Two extreme examples come to mind would be a "dark" mining operation in a non-descript sub-urban building in mainland China, versus a mining operation in Iceland.
To my mind, Bitcoin as a "power hog" isn't the primary issue. The big issue is energy production, delivery and consumption as a whole. Bitcoin is the business case that painfully shows the shortcomings and the inequities in today's energy markets.
I think Bitcoin should prompt us to find answers to these questions.
> "It turned around and spent $1.5bn on Bitcoin, which is mostly mined with electricity from coal. Their subsidy needs to be examined."
That's just token support on the part of Tesla. Moreover, the problem with this criticism is that it attacks a brand, and does not address the underlying problem.
Arguably, Tesla or Apple or Samsung could also be condemned for using natural resources such as rare metals which come with a massive environmental impact as well.
All of that is - ultimately - an example of large private actors externalizing the costs, the impact, associated with their products and services towards society and the biosphere. And that's not a new tale. I think that Tesla buying $1.5bn in and of itself is rather inconsequential towards driving this notion home.
In that regard, the article fails to show the bigger picture and inadvertently ends up painting investing in Bitcoin as "morally wrong". Something which - historically - has always been the case (see: Usury - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury). Only now, it uses a weird, nonsensical argument - "it could power all kettles used in the UK for 27 years" - to make that case.
I guess a very small hedge fund would probably cover it, one with about 15-30 people working at the organisation in total, they probably fit in a small office in London.
For example a national gold reserve does even fewer transactions, but it has power, security, etc. National bank doesn't do many transactions.
Or lets compare it to something useless, how muxh power is used by casinos.
Or better yet: all unused idle devices in the US use more power than bircoin does.
Drug dealers, brothels and mafia also create job. The economic impact of casinos is clearly negative.
Do you have any evidence that casinos consume less power than bitcoin does? In Las Vegas, casinos consume a fifth of all electricity.
In general it's a bad principle to try and justify environmental impact caused by one thing by pointing at environmental impact of another thing.
I don't know the net social value of bitcoin or how to compare it to other applications, but it's fair to be critical of it, at least.
But the question still stands: Is Argentina-levels of energy (now) whether "clean" or not, equal to not using something based around PoW and the inevitable burning of energy.
(IMO) It's bad by design.
No matter how you look at it, Bitcoin’s energy usage is additive.
And no, there isn’t much barrier for other industries to switch to clean energy. They use the same power grid as everyone else. In fact, it would be ridiculous if Bitcoin miners were using clean energy that was somehow divorced from the power grid in a way that made it unusable for anything other than Bitcoin.
To clarify whit an example what I meant re other industries: In order for transportation (cars, trucks, ships, planes) to switch to clean energy, they have to replace their fossil-based vehicles. Bitcoin mining rigs run just fine on clean electricity, hence the lower friction to switch.
Tl;dr: I make the point that Bitcoin is mostly a store of value, and if it can replace Gold for that function, it would be great for the environment, as Gold mining and storing/trading pollutes far more.
[0]: https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...
I would hazard a guess you find crypto overall to be useless.
https://www.mastercard.com/news/perspectives/2021/why-master...
No, I quite like cryptography.
Does the existence of Bitcoin allow better coordination such that the global productivy raises 2%?
And I would with no doubt answer: YES.
Central Banks are distorting the function of Money and bringing economies to their knees. A decentralized and digital form of Money would force the system to self-heal.
I'm guessing it's not true, nor anywhere near true, for such a tiny asset.
> mining gold is ~50 times more expensive than mining bitcoins
> It’s even harder to compare the type of pollution created by mining gold versus mining bitcoin. What’s easy to do is to simply state that mining gold is MUCH WORSE than mining bitcoins. Mining gold is an environmental disaster. Poisoned waters, solid waste, endangered communities, and so on. Producing gold for one wedding ring alone generates 20 tons of waste.
https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...
I mean, Bitcoin also produces less GHG than making concrete, but, so what?