Youll be glad to know most btc mining comes from renewable energy and the existing financial infrastructure uses more energy. Also replacing gold would be a net win for the environment. So really there is no need to fake virtue signal.
Any sources? Any time I've tried to investigate this, I've found this to very much not be the case. A majority of mining pools are in places where energy is cheap, but not necessarily renewable.
> and the existing financial infrastructure uses more energy.
And you expect that's just going to... disappear once Bitcoin wins? JP Morgan & Chase are going to go "oh, guess we've been beat" and pack their bags?
The existing financial infrastructure costs a lot, but Bitcoin isn't too far behind, and Bitcoin can only do a ~3 transactions per second [0]. Visa's data center they built back in 2012 is completely renewable, and can do 2,500 transactions per second. [1]
[0] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second [1] https://www.cnbc.com/id/46867832
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co....
Basically they say mining is reported in areas that have certain levels of renewable energy therefore the bitcoin was mined using the renewable energy.
Finally, the report says they made no attempt to verify any of the numbers they claim so the entire thing is worthless IMHO. I won't even bother pointing out the conflict of interest of the entire report to begin with...
> It is necessary at this point to caveat that while
we do our utmost to accurately pinpoint the
location of global mining centres, the Bitcoin
mining industry remains a highly private and
secretive industry. As a result, our estimates may
be subject to significant potential uncertainty.
While we have made no attempt to formally
quantify these uncertainly levels, we intuitively
guesstimate that, e.g. our renewables
penetration figures should be taken to include a
tentative uncertainty of around ±10%.
Forgive my skepticism, but this seems biased. Would they not benefit from a positive outlook on BTC?
If we have to burn our resources and cause the resulting pollution, at least let it be as a result of something productive.
Further, building a bunch of mining/blockchain machines has environmental impact. Things aren't quite as bad as they were - I hope - but Silicon Valley's contaminated groundwater, Google being built atop a superfund site - strong, close-to-home for many evidence that the processes are materially & energy intensive[1] and quite toxic. Building data-centers of mining machines has impact. And like the energy use question, we must ask: what else could we being doing with this capacity?
The 'it's mostly renewables' thing keeps getting raised & it's really frustrating/exhausting. It feels like a dismissal or denial. Ultimately that is potential that could be allocated elsewhere, and even with renewables, there is an impact to this planet.
You can waste energy after we have renewable energy. That we will have renewable energy later doesn't change that we don't have it now.
There's a difference between putting on a bandaid and actively pouring acid in the wound. This is the latter.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bit...
There is no other way to put it, your are delusional. And no, you are not a unrecognised visionary.
This is so wrong you can't even disprove it. Like you can't argue against the hobo next door who arguing sincerely he has been to Jupiter.
As above: Disclosure, very early bitcoin adopter, made money, so i have a skin in the game.
It would matter far less if the externality of carbon were taxed properly [0], but I think it's appropriate to be horrified at PoW when other low-energy mechanisms exist (PoS, memory/storage-based). The fact that existing financial infrastructure is also inefficient and untaxed is no excuse to double-down on passing ecological debt to our grandchildren (at a usurious interest rate).
Disclaimer: I have some Bitcoin so “you’re just jealous” isn’t a valid retort.
Mining a block is a brute force mathematical operation. The rate of mining is kept at a constant rate by the protocol, to do that the protocol must increase the complexity of mining blocks to meet the arms race of miners competing for the block reward. This means the energy required to mine those blocks is not bounded.
Regarding the first paragraph though, I don’t think the transactions substantially contribute to the difficulty of mining the blocks. If you didn’t include as many transactions in the block, it wouldn’t make it substantially less costly to mine?
You're right: the number of transactions in each block is not relevant to the amount of energy is used to mine that block. The network could decide to include more transactions in a block. Some Bitcoin forks tried doing exactly that, actually.
Right now it's 500, but if enough miners agree tomorrow it could be 1000. All it does is change the number in the denominator of the energy cost per transaction calculation, but it won't change the fundamental incentive structure of the network.
See, I like the idea of a "amazon for drugs", but bitcoins cost is just not worth it.
Disclosure: Adopted bitcoin 0.2, make money with it.
Can you substantiate this claim somehow? And perhaps also normalize per volume?