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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

Again with the energy point. The energy is insignificant compared with almost anything else. Wasn't some article that the sum of all standby electronics uses more energy than bitcoin and that's only in US?

What are you, Apple? That gives no charger for "environmental reasons" while packaging its wireless headphones in a crapload of unnecessary plastics.

If you are so energy consciousness then go bark at US military, those are the biggest polluters and energy hungry of the world.

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Bitcoin consumes more electricity than entire countries - more than the Czech Republic for example. It consumes a third (or was it a fifth?) of all the electricity of all data centers in the world. It is by no means insignificant.

If bitcoins price continues to rise, miners will be greatly incentivized to further decrease power costs. I hope this leads to innovation in clean power tech, especially in developing nations.

If bitcoin price continues to rise, wouldn't the power cost become relatively smaller? Wouldn't miners care less?

The amount of money for a given amount of energy spent mining you get is effectively Bitcoin price / difficulty.

If Bitcoin price goes up, then the return on energy gets greater. Therefore, it's worth it to spend more energy mining. Then difficulty rises and takes this incentive away, reaching a new equilibrium with more energy spent.

Right. 60% of the hashrate in China, where 60% of the power comes from coal, to mine a useless coin.

If miners could burn cyanide to mine, they would. They don't give a single shit about clean energy, just cheap energy

so upwards of ~36% of Bitcoin mining is coal powered. yes, that fits all the estimates that Bitcoin mining is almost a supermajority using renewable energy at some plants and and curbing pollution as a sustainability solution at other plants.

1/ Bitcoin itself might be 100% on renewables. But it's still causing a need for non renewables to be used, to compensate for the fact that you're mining a useless coin. I'd rather have us use this energy in a useful way.

2/ Bitcoin is causing _more_ energy consumption. It's not curbing pollution, in any way. It's just grafting itself where the energy is cheap. Noone's building wind farms for bitcoin.

3/ If I cut off 36% (which is a low bound, other countries are not clean either) of your salary, go ahead and tell me it's okay because you still have the supermajority of it.

2/ at flare gas plants bitcoin is curbing pollution, and this helps the plants and the state meet their climate goals. yes their pursuit of cheap power is what takes them where they are, an economic incentive for sustainability solutions that 50 years of idealists never were able to consider and are now fighting to ignore because this solution doesnt decrease energy use.

3/ I’m not sure what you are saying here? Is this supposed to be an analogy to something? What happens if you get rid of that energy use? The bitcoin network will adapt to a lower difficulty rate... not sure what you think you’re saying here.

>If bitcoins price continues to rise, miners will be greatly incentivized to further decrease power costs.

That's not how bitcoin works. The price of bitcoin is the budget you can spend on mining a single coin. If the price is higher, you can afford to run more miners. If the cost of electricity goes down, you can afford to run more miners. If the efficiency goes up, you can afford to run more miners. Running more miners increases the mining difficulty and you are back where you started.

If Bitcoin is worth $50k people will destroy $50k of energy to acquire Bitcoin.

Miners are motivated by profit, if your cost of electricity is lower, your profit is higher. I’m not sure why you are trying to obfuscate that simple fact.

Miners are motivated by simple profit calculation, not R&D into energy generation. R&D has an unbounded capital risk, while bitcoin is a (relatively simple) statistical calculation of energy-cost which is a bounded cost (at any given time, within a range). Not a single bitcoin MINER is "greatly incentivized to further decrease power cost".

There are industries in much better positions to revolutionize energy production than bitcoin miners. In fact, there basically a single industry that doesn't have this incentive.

If bitcoin is worth $50k, people will destroy MORE than $50k of energy to acquire bitcoin, using resources that are subsidized either intentionally or unintentionally.

That's not a counterpoint if those countries also consume an insignificant amount of energy.

Isn't a rebuttal different than a deflection?

Anyway half - 3/4ths of bitcoin mining is using clean energy that wasn't going to be used for anything else, or a sustainability solution for energy that was going to be used as pollution.

> Anyway half - 3/4ths of bitcoin mining is using clean energy that wasn't going to be used for anything else

While the clean energy claim may be true, why do you claim it wouldn't have been used for anything else?

because a lot of energy is not utilized if it will be lost in transit. they don't send it and there is extra capacity on site and from the specific source of energy. there are gigawatts of energy that can only be used at the source, which has never had a use until the mining machines showed up.

Then why not stop producing it, instead of using it on Bitcoin? Even 'clean' energy production has environmental costs, from environment destruction for hydro to maintenance/production costs for solar and wind.

Excess electricity can be a real problem, and is getting worse with renewables. But surplus energy would be better used to desalinate seawater, or produce hydrogen through electrolysis, or storage.

Except the plants are not built at the sea and desalination is not a clean process.

Or with electrolysis or storage you need to generate it and transport it to where it can be used, getting you back to square one because nobody is doing that because it is uneconomical. Whereas mining is not because it can be all done on site in remote locations and doesn't even need great internet. High latency, spotty internet is good enough for crypto mining.

We know what the ideals are: no pollution and infinite energy, or no pollution and less energy use. Thats not going to happen, and crypto wasn’t part of those 50 year old models, yet it is accomplishing a lot of those ideals and people choose not to respect its existence as it alters their worldview.

Now that we've moved the goal posts, is it still more of an environmental cost than just imagining it was fossil fuels or energy that being pulled away from other use cases?

The answer to your question depends on which power source we are referring to. Where Bitcoin is a sustainability solution, it is reducing waste by products which were already being produced and now are not being produced because they are used for energy.

Bitcoin is a multi-billion industry whether you respect its existence or not, your arguments will simply have to get more nuanced to have a real conversation about what's happening.

Organizations that know better are intentionally omitting the source of energy, in their discussion about the amount of energy. Don't fall for it.

The energy required to provide standby power for every electronic device in the United States is a tremendous amount of electricity.

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