Bitcoin is now worth $50k – and it's ruining the planet faster than ever
thephoenix.substack.com
thephoenix.substack.com
"Bitcoin is deeply colonial, deeply extractive, and deeply damaging to the environment and marginalized people around the world. This privileged crypto-colonialism almost exclusively benefits white men"
While just a few paragraphs before that, the author states that most Bitcoin mining is now happening in China...
I hate this neo-racist narrative so much, it sucks out oxygen and reason from every space it occupies. Is nowadays ecology subsumed under critical race theory? Can't you make an environmental argument without dumping on someone's skin color?
At least the author does not try to argue that Bitcoin is intrinsically transphobic, I would frankly expect it to be added to the mix above.
Similarly, there are many stories on HN by people who are very angry about the energy usage of Bitcoin. Curiously, they're not at all bothered by far greater wastes of energy from other technologies and industries. It's pretty obvious they're not actually angry about the energy use, it's Bitcoin they don't like.
If I'm not mistaken, that was the case with mining since pretty much forever...
Owners of said computers are part of group A, and they are unlikely to sell freshly mined Bitcoin under market value.
It is probably impossible to map ethno-religious structure of Bitcoin trade exactly, given that it often serves to circumvent regulations and thus necessarily partly lives in the shadows. But a lot of Bitcoin-related activity happens in East Asia, so the participants aren't probably majority white.
In other words, it is another globalized and pretty efficient market, but without outright slavery or serfdom on the chain beginning. Compared to guano mines or Potosi mines or even today's cobalt mines in Congo, the first humans in the chain are not miserable.
What do you imagine bitcoin mining is like? It seems a bit weird to compare it to actual underground mining.
If Bitcoin mining is using 0.5% of the world's electricity output (a frankly astonishing number) and mining is concentrated in Xinjiang, then what percentage of Xinjiang's electricity usage is going to mining?
This is a genuine question, I’d like to understand the argument you’re making, vis-a-vis what the balance of who is benefiting and how much is.
Imagine that the author dedicated a whole paragraph to the thought that Jews reap disproportional benefits from Bitcoin mining and that it is consistent with their long-term pattern of cartelizing, scheming and plotting to dominate the world economy on the backs of goyim.
He would certainly come with some names, too, because the techno-nerd crowd in America has a sizeable Jewish component.
But it would still scream to heaven.
And this take is not much better, this kind of demonization of ethnicity is plain evil.
> There is no physical, economic, or social justification for something like this.
Personally I do feel there is very much an economic justification for Bitcoin to exist and to a lesser extent a social justification (privacy).
Bitcoin allows people to keep their wealth outside of the hands of the government and I feel this is a good thing.
Bitcoin makes it cheap and easy to transfer value to another country. Much cheaper compared to using banks with their crazy interbank currency conversion that is very expensive. Also, banks are often quite slow to do the transfers, especially in weekends.
I like the facts that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be traded 24-7. Again this to me is a good thing. The markets are always open.
I don't like what Western central banks have been doing in the last few years: Quantitate Easing (QE). QE basically caused the rich to become richer and the poor to become poorer since most of the printed money arrived in the stock markets. And rich people own stocks. So rich people in turn might have rebalanced their portfolios by selling some stocks in order to buy property, causing property prices to increase as well. Inflation is visible in the stock and property markets.
But wages at the same time have not grown much (if at all) in some countries for a very long time now. At least Bitcoin is doing the opposite - keep it in your wallet and its value grows. Now I am not sure if the Bitcoin approach is the best idea, to me it seems a very small consistent inflation (~2%) every year is a good thing - especially since wallets get lost and such, but I guess we'll see how it pans out.
But ... perhaps it's a good thing in the long run to have a currency that increases in value if it's not being used. Such a currency might encourage saving and thus reduce consumption which might be good for the environment as well.
I can't think of another case where supposed technologists cling to a terrible, inefficient protocol even when better alternatives are available. It's not like we still use token ring networks.
The only reason I can see for people to love BTC so much is that they are hoping to get rich from speculation.
What it does do is advantage debtors (since the intrinsic value of their outstanding debt, which is a fixed number of dollars, has gone down) and disadvantage creditors and holders of cash (since the intrinsic value of their loan/deposit or cash, which is a fixed number of dollars, has gone down).
Some rich might be debtors (those who've borrowed to invest in assets), but some poor might be debtors too (eg. student loans, large credit card debts). It would seem less likely for poorer classes to be creditors or holders of large quantities of cash, though.
Wage stagnation is a different matter. A priori, you would expect increasing the money supply to cause wage price inflation alongside asset prices. The fact that this isn't occurring means some other effect is in play.
No, but Quantitative Easing inherently causes the rich to become richer
> A priori, you would expect increasing the money supply to cause wage price inflation alongside asset prices. The fact that this isn't occurring means some other effect is in play.
Again, no. It's a common tactic to redirect these conversations to talk about how increasing money supply causes inflation. It does not. It depends on how you increase the money supply. QE causes asset inflation, which means it's harder for the poor to acquire assets, and asset holders benefit from the inflation. Who owns assets? The wealthy.
QE is class warfare.
Does any of that apply if you compare bitcoin to other crypto alternatives, rather than traditional finance?
Is there a justification for using Bitcoin over Celo, Stellar, Cardono, Ethereum (with proof-of-stake), etc, which don't have the same environmental impact?
Not necessarily no, other cryptos might fill the gap fine as well.
If we really need a way to transact without using banks, there's alternatives that have massively lower energy footprints such as Nano. Do we need Bitcoin? Should there be regulations around digital currencies and energy usage given the state of play with global warming?
"We estimate that around $76 billion of illegal activity per year involve bitcoin (46% of bitcoin transactions), which is close to the scale of the U.S. and European markets for illegal drugs"
You can find all sorts of people who will justify bitcoin for all its thrilling advantages over traditional finance, and explain why this ecological garbage fire is a good idea. I'm yet to find a single person who even tries to argue that bitcoin's advantages over other cryptos are worth the huge comparative cost.
At the beginning of crypto, bitcoin was the only option. Today, bitcoin is successful purely because it has the highest price, and so the most opportunity to make random investors rich, rather than any technological advantage. When that price eventually crashes so that there's serious competition between crypto alternatives for usage & investment, I don't see how bitcoin can possibly survive without a huge reinvention.
Everyone in this thread parroting the usual lines about bitcoin[0] needs to explain why legacy environmentally destructive proof-of-work coins should not be superseded by vastly more efficient proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies.
[0] "banks also have lights and computers", "it's mined with renewable energy", "something something secure the network"
[1] bypass paywall https://crosat.com/the-environmental-idiocy-of-teslas-bitcoi...
*X= Air Travel, Bitcoin, Cement... whatever creates large amount of CO2
And while we are at it: Overfishing is another huge tragedy of the commons that needs more attention.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-m... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
That differentiates it from air travel, cement, etc. It is a worrying trend, even more so than the prosaic stuff.
Again, I don't disagree with the point you are making, but it seems remiss not to highlight the worst offenders.
So... if Bitcoin can push politics to make better, more air(!)-tight rules for CO2 certificates faster, then it would be clearly have a net benefit for the world.
With all the great minds in the world, instead of fighting and complaining, why hasn't anybody come up with something better than Proof-of-Work to keep Bitcoin alive? Bitcoin is open source, if there is something that can keep the network secure without using all the energy, feel free to submit a bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP).
After all, if the world would agree and shutdown the Bitcoin network today, all the energy after all these years would "really" be wasted.
And saying 'patches welcome' is a cheap way to dismiss the criticism of Bitcoin being extremely wasteful. With the amount of money invested in Bitcoin now changing the way it works goes against the interests of so many Bitcoin investors that I doubt anyone can get it fixed even if a viable solution existed.
> why hasn't anybody come up with something better
In theory, anything with (artificial) scarcity could work, and not all crypto currencies are "energy credits". For example, you could trivially start a new crypto currency where all the coins already exist and from there on out it's just the energy of processing transactions.
I don't think this could be tacked on to BTC as an improvement plan though. Bitcoin being an energy equivalent is just too entrenched in its DNA.
Aside from that, there's the normal point that crypto is moving towards proof of stake which means you no longer use 'mining' to maintain the network which will stop this argument entirely, albeit bitcoin may not go this way itself.
If you compare Bitcoin's environmental footprint to the whole financial system with air cooled offices around the world, with equipment, server rooms it doesn't come close.
A positive side of Bitcoin mining is that it's geographically independent and it can move to where they have too much energy which cannot be stored. In some cases the abundance of energy would be wasted through gas flaring which puts more CO2 into the atmosphere. Now they can get rid of their excessive energy and store it in the form of Bitcoin.
* https://thefactsource.com/how-much-electricity-does-youtube-... * https://research.arcane.no/news/equinor-partners-with-bitcoi...
I guess the terrorists and drug cartels angle is dead since Elon has now btc.
yapping and biting at the ankles
If Bitcoin truly does become the new money to which everyone benefits from, the price will probably go up by several orders of magnitude and so will the hashing power.
What matters for me is how I, as an individual, can use information to change my behavior.
From this standpoint, I have a lot more environmental impact by contributing to bitcoin than by watching a YT video.
I think too that transaction fees will dominate the block subsidy, but the effect of an eventually successful level 2 solution remain to be evaluated.
Part of the fee pressure would be taken off by level 2 transactions. Whether that amounts to 0.01% (which should be close to the current amount) or to 99.99% (which would be the goal/opinion of a bitcoin maximalist) remains to be seen.
There's also the argument that relieving fee pressure will boost adoption, and fees would remain the same.
Anyway, back to my point: it should have been mentioned, and it never is. IMHO the goal of these articles is not to inform, but to modify or confirm the readers' opinion.
Be the change you want in the world and all that.
Bitcoin is bad for environment? Yes it is but did any of these critics ever bother to study or complain about all banks and mining industries around the world?
I can guarantee you that these two other industries produce much more harm to the environment in several scales of magnitude than bitcoin
Also, never seen such propaganda about those industries like they are doing to bitcoin...
I will be awaiting.