Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cherry-picking a detail and making that the title instead is the primary form of editorializing, so please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Titles are by far the biggest influence on threads, so this matters a lot. Changing the title this way made a flamewar much more likely.
Every neighboring state is connected to the eastern power grid, which can transfer power from the Mexican border to Vermont.
Yes there is a lot of power being used to mine crypto, I mine but it is done on a system that I would normally have running 24/7 regardless of mining. Yes large mining specific "server" or "ASIC" farms use alot of energy but so does every other serverfarm. Maybe we should be talking about the energy cost of watching Pr0n, or TikTok videos both of whic IMHO provide far less benifit to society.
> "Bitcoin uses too much energy[1]"
> "It's only using surplus energy which would go to waste anyway[2][3]"
> "But it still has an environmental impact [4]"
I guess I'm just tired of seeing the same things repeated on every single thread about Bitcoin. When I saw a lazy comment like OPs, I overreacted, sorry.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#:~:text=Cambrid.... [2] https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-in-the-wilderness-11553... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor....
The use of bitcoin, a speculative good, as a sink for electricity creates less pressure for grids to manage electricity production (especially as the acceptable spot price trends towards the commercial price of electricity). It also ignores the innovative ideas that are geographically bound like storing potential energy by pumping water into dams.
The idea that bitcoin only uses surplus energy is disprovable just by looking at the regularity of block completion. If it were dependent on an irregular source like surplus electricity, you wouldn't see that.
There's a limit of how far you can transport electricity, the majority of methane gas burnt and wasted.
Mining gold could be used on other things, energy going into dropping bombs could be used for other things... sadly it's just idealism.
This argument really annoys me because, bitcoin has a purpose, I can buy things with bitcoin, just take a walk in Huaqiangbei and see how many shops accept bitcoin, talk to the people who's governments failed their national currency and they will agree the energy we spend on bitcoin helps them.
Until btc is replaced with a POS crypto currency like cardano[1] the energy we spend on btc is worth it for the people using it.
[1]https://ucarecdn.com/8673f817-d83b-441a-8281-45e8ae68bbec/-/...
There's way more energy available to us than biological humans will ever use.
The analysis can be generalized to say anything that uses 0.05 electricity creates these large harms. Perhaps true, but it’s not going to be unique to Bitcoin
This ignores the USE of the train station, and just focuses on energy costs to build it.
This study is only focused on mining new coins. Heads up, some of the (wildly inflated) value of bitcoin is tied to (arguable) uses and the ability of the blockchain to operate as a non-repudiation public ledger that allows global transfer of value with strong guarantees totally independent of any other central party.
Some quick math.
1 bitcoin is lets say worth $50,000. Let's assume $10K in electricity to mine this. So for every $1 in bitcoin, you need 20 cents of electricity.
Reduced to it's simplest, the claim here is that for every 20 cents of electricity, there is another 50 cents of health impacts.
Fair enough, but if you believe this, then a lot of other things have huge damages.
Pointing out other things also have an environmental impact just dilutes the discussion about Bitcoin and doesn't add anything to it.
If you applied this same damage model to something people had fondness for (ie, driving an electric car) you'd realize we should be working as HARD as we can to kill EV cars dead, because there is a MASSIVE unaccounted for cost to charging them (using this model).
Reality though is bitcoin chases low cost power, and that is currently often actually green (hydro, excess solar during day when their is curtailment and negative pricing etc). I can't imagine the economics making sense to mine using coal power.
(Imagine! Politics! ...)
(I’m extremely skeptical about PoW crypto of all types, BTC included; this is just about the reasonableness of this specific argument).
Bitcoin miners don't put their operations in the middle of nowhere and then ask someone to build hydro plants...
> So we built hydro plants [...] to run bitcoin miners?
> No, organizations built hydro plants for whatever reason in places where supply ended up higher than demand
So... by that logic, it seems that Bitcoin didn't increase the energy supply then.
> Bitcoin miners don't put their operations in the middle of nowhere and then ask someone to build hydro plants...
So now the demand follows the supply?
This has become almost a religious belief amongst cryptocurrency acolytes, but it's simply not true.
--
Edit: please see my comment¹ and piplikoc's comment² below for more detail on this.
Then any "published study" on this topic is automatically going to be flawed as well?
Otherwise nonsense claims can easily destroy the discussion by DoSing the opposition.
Their research indicates that a minority of mining is done using renewable resources:
> The survey findings estimate that on average 39% of proof-of-work mining is powered by renewable energy, primarily hydroelectric energy.
It also specifically addresses this popular claim of mining being powered mostly by renewables:
> China’s oversupply of hydroelectric energy during the rainy season has often been used as evidence in claims that a vast majority of mining is powered by environment-friendly power sources. While it is true that the Chinese government’s strategy to ensure energy self-sufficiency has led to the development of massive hydropower capacity, the same strategy has driven public investments in the construction of large-scale coal mines. Like hydroelectric power plants, these coal power plants often generate surpluses. It should not come as a surprise then that a significant share of hashers in the region equally report using both hydropower and coal energy to power their operations.
A cursory Google search says the percentage of renewable energy in the US and China is ~11% and ~23% respectively. The disparity between that and an average of 39% for crypto mining specifically does not seem to be factored in.
> The great unanswered question faced when exploring cryptodamages is that while we can identify select geographic hotspots of production we currently do not know in the aggregate where the electricity used in cryptocurrency mining is physically produced. This is because we, like Krause and Tolaymat, do not know the physical locations of cryptocurrency miners, whether individuals, groups or aggregates in, say, a region or country. There is considerable evidence of concentration of mining operations in particular locations, typically where reliable electricity is cheaply available, though, precise data are lacking. In the US, perhaps the most well-known concentration is the Mid-Columbia Basin area in central and eastern Washington State, where cheap electricity is produced by hydropower along the Columbia River, however, mining in other US locations also occurs. There is also evidence of large mining camps in China. With time and emergent research there may be improved information about the amounts of electricity devoted to mining cryptocurrencies for particular locations or regions, but it is currently not available.
It would be interesting to see the results of their analysis if recalculated using the more granular CCAF survey data.
Selection bias. I don't doubt that the miners who are investing god knows how much is necessary to _require a contractor_ will have scaled enough to need to concern themselves with cost of electricity, but the _majority_ of miners are not going to be those people, surely?
The small mining operations run by the common person has almost no impact in the scale of the network.
Everyone will look for cheapest power, but that on its own does not make it renewable.
Plus, regardless of your source, as long as you haven't built your own plant, the grid has to cover for the loss. If there isn't an abundance of renewable energy on the grid, then the operation wasn't neutral at all.
Miners were supposed to be everyday Joe’s.
Some of that may be hydro. A lot is coal.
Even when they do use green energy, the effect of doing that is to displace other users onto dirtier forms of energy, thus creating just as much pollution anyway.
Bitcoin is not green in any way whatsoever. Bitcoin specifically wastes energy, by design. This is never green. The first principle of green energy is to use less energy, as no energy is clean.
"Surplus energy" is another lie bitcoiners like to spread about this. Sure, there might be a few occasions where bitcoin mining might use surplus energy.
In the vast majority of cases, no, they are not doing that. That is just not a thing.
Also, it is wrong to assume that consuming 1GW near a hydroplant is fine. That 1GW would have been sold to someone else, and unless the net has an abundance of renewable energy, a non-renewable plant is going to have to cover for that.
The same market effects that apply to factories, research facilities, server farms, etc... also apply to cryptocurrency mining. We can't have our cake and eat it too -- if energy isn't fungible, then not every mining rig is going to be set up using the most efficient power source in the world. Not every miner is going to have the ability to just "choose" to use cheap renewable power, and if mining is still profitable where they are using the power sources available to them, then they're still going to do it.
True, it doesn't make sense to move the power all the way around the world, but that's also not really how things like the synchronous grid of Continental Europe works, where power is traded across 24 countries on a single grid.
If your have cheap renewable energy, when you start selling, excess non-renewable capacity and more expensive plants in general powers down in nearby areas and countries.
Any power taken from a renewable plant there when power price is positive means increased non-renewable output.
Both scenarios are very plausible, because if everyone within the market was perfectly efficient in choosing to use the cheapest power sources available, and if hydro was clearly the cheapest way to generate power, then it wouldn't just be being used for Bitcoin, it would be being used for every single portable, power-intensive task in general. We wouldn't be having a conversation about the environment in nearly any manufacturing field.
Given that this isn't happening, given that some things in the world still use coal power, and given that people are still worried about the environmnetal impacts of energy use in general, even though hydro exists -- the obvious conclusion is one of the following:
A) hydro isn't universally the cheapest power source.
B) there are other factors that determine where people will set up operations (taxes, living situation and preferred environment, costs beyond power generation, market saturation to the point that its still profitable to use expensive sources of power).
C) there are still environmental impacts of using a ton of power, even if it came from hydro, and hydro power doesn't just have zero environmental impact.
But obviously something is going on here, because bitcoin isn't special. If hydro power was the savior of power generation, then every single factory in the world would already be using it. But they're not, and it's reasonable to assume that the same market constraints and environmental situations also apply to bitcoin mining.
The fact that we are having an energy debate at all about any industry implies that something about the energy market, it's pricing, and its environmental impacts is more complicated than you're making it sound.
> The CCAF’s research finds that 76% of ‘hashers’ use renewable energy to power their activities, with hydropower the number one source at 62%. Wind and solar energy meanwhile are used by 17% and 15% respectively. This would appear to be consistent with previous research which estimates that 74% of bitcoins are mined using renewable energy. However, the CCAF’s report specifies that the 76% refers to the share of hashers who use renewable energy at any point. It estimates that only 39% of hashing’s total energy consumption comes from renewables. [1]
> Bitcoin, which is mostly mined with electricity from coal.[2]
> But most bitcoin mining facilities are located in China, which is still heavily reliant on coal-based power. Though the Chinese province of Sichuan is known to attract miners due to its cheap electricity and rich hydropower resources, the level of power generation capacity fluctuates depending on the season. [3]
[1] https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#piano-inline3:~....
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor....
According to the BBC, a recent survey found that Bitcoin is powered by two-thirds fossil: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56215787
Inner Mongolia just announced it will shut down Bitcoin miners, apparently on climate grounds: https://news.bitcoin.com/chinas-inner-mongolia-plans-to-shut...
This is not actually true. And even if it were, it is irrelevant. If crypto uses green energy, it displaces other users to use more dirty energy.
The environmental cost of crypto is not that of the energy it uses, it is that of the dirtiest energy it displaces other users onto.
(Crypto also uses massive amounts of dirty energy directly. The idea that crypto uses green energy is basically a lie.)
"I bought a solar panel and AC converter to consume less from the grid. Oops, because of that now I am displacing my neighbours to use more dirty energy. How silly of me."
Seriously your argument makes no sense. How does one minor consumer of green energy displace you from doing the same?
Concrete and destruction of ecosystems and changes in water systems can all have negative impacts on the planet.
And that is the best case scenario
The most scary part of cryptocoins is the deflationary cycle that makes these crypto asset potentially displace productive investment on an economy wide scale.
This is not self correcting. This is Moloch, it's a prisoner's dilemma, a bad Nash equilibrium where the incentives are to keep the vicious cycle going as long as possible because the first to leave the cycle are disadvantaged.
This is mostly a worry if many companies do like Tesla and jump on the band wagon. They may be tempted at an economy wide scale to reduce investment in production in order to hoard cryptocoins instead. This dynamic caused the great depression in the 1930s when businesses switched to hoarding gold tied currency instead of producing.
Now I'm not sure that crypto coins without being jacked up by central banks (like gold was during the great depression) are a powerful enough force to cause the type of havoc that gold did.
Then again, the potentially stronger network/memetic effects of cryptocoins, along with the amplification factor from markets being synchronized through instant global communications nowadays might make them dangerous to the economy even without central bank involvement. We saw how much people got hypnotized during the Gamestop episode. I don't think unsophisticated investors' hoarding is enough to cause problems but it is a bit unsettling that Tesla and other companies are starting to hoard. If enough businesses follow suit, you get into scary territory (It would also be worrisome if companies widely moved to add billions in gold to their balance sheet but the lesson has been learned in the 1930s with gold).
In theory, if central banks stay stimulative enough through all this, you can maintain growth in both productive businesses and crypto. As long as these central banks don't flinch at the sight of what may look like crypto bubbles.
Someone might have a better insight to me. My concern is that the demand for energy will push up the price for everyone and it's actually those on lower incomes who will suffer the most. While the economics might eventually get there to solve the problem, could it do a lot of damage in the process?
Do you think any of those negative effects are counteracted by crypto creating a new ecosystem for the exchange of value? I'm not certain myself, but I'm curious what your thoughts are. It is slightly different than gold, in the sense that normal people (that can afford expensive graphics cards) can "earn" value—at the expense of energy consumption and thus proxying all of the destructive nature of that industry.
On one hand, it doesn't really appear that it will increase the velocity of money, given that you're now just introducing a bunch of arbitrage opportunities in the exchange markets... That might even contribute to your point, that the larger "crypto" as a whole scales, the more it will serve to suck actual value out of the global economy.
It's an interesting thing to consider.
The only reason miners mine (at least most of them) is because they get a return on their upfront energy costs by the rewarded BTC, so why would they suddenly get tired of it?
Yes we need to keep buying overvalued equities. Instill fear.
The matter of the fact is if something is worth investing in, it will get the investment regardless if btc is with us or not with us. Venture capital is still thriving today.
This is why Bitcoin is compared to a Ponzi-MLM scheme - and if the game doesn't continue then the latest adopters, who haven't sold or made any profit, are then left "holding the bag." This matching pattern is denied by pretty much every person in the army/mob of HODLers:
- Bill Gates recently said only someone as rich as Elon should be willing to risk buying Bitcoin; Elon being the richest person on the planet
- Elon Musk even recently tweeted that "Bitcoin is almost as much bs as fiat money", so even he doesn't believe it's the best or ideal final solution
- I can't find the article, however within the last few weeks, an article by a senior partner at an international investment firm wrote about his thoughts on Bitcoin, and in the first few paragraphs he highlighted how people with a counter-narrative are hiding/afraid to speak out against it [because of the mob].
Except with deflating nature of BTC, and no accurate price prediction models, people always assume their BTC will be worth mor, so they justify mining at a loss currently for future speculative value. Not to mention this exact statement has been parroted while BTC move from CPU, to GPU, and finally to ASICs. There has always been someone there saying it’ll correct, except it never has.
Also there are solutions without PoW/PoS, they use FBA instead. As soon as they take over for any actual use, the energy wasting will come to an end.
Now I think central banks can prevent this from affecting the greater economy by sufficiently stimulating investment (which would quickly push crypto coins prices up to a level where they can go down again). I think...
All of that leaves out any "authoritarian" intervention which at some point would be guaranteed if bitcoin would come close to a global risk. An yes, I know they cant shut down the network but like I said in my last post its all about the price tag. They can crash the price without attacking the network at all. Merely stating the goal to suppress it should be enough. No institution would bet against the gov so they would sell instantly.
> Its not a big problem because only a fraction of all people will get this kind of gold fever for a long period of time.
When I see Tesla, one of the largest company in the US, buying 1.5B in Bitcoins. It goes a bit beyond a normal "fever". Now if this is just an isolated incident we should be in the clear. If this is the start of a trend for businesses, I can imagine a scenario where businesses add more and more Bitcoins to their balance sheet over some years which makes the price gradually go up, after years of prices going up, businesses start believing it's an always growing asset and over-weight their portfolio with it. Banks and financial institutions get in on the fun and eventually load up too. Now it's 2029 and we have lots of organisations with political power having incentives to keep this going and they also now have arguments that it's a new fundamental technological part of the financial system and it's systemically dangerous to let it become unstable. So instead of fixing the problem, the government caves, and against expert advice, tries to stabilize and prop up cryptocoins when corrections seem imminent. In doing so they severely destabilize the rest of the economy.
I mean it's low probability, but there were experts who knew better in 1929 too and politics meant they did the wrong things anyways.
Also truly believe the Tesla bought BTC as a PR gimmick. Elon Musk for sure know that no one really want to be paid with it or buy a Tesla with it. Also very likely its directly related to the expected inflation spike. several % inflation on 1.5B is kinda a lot money and in the current market situation its hard to protect that money from inflation. Everything seems to be a bubble. BTC might actually be a good bet. It survived the bear market the mining is very very profitable now so it aint gonna die anytime soon. It should be around 1 year until the next cycle starts and BTC crashes like in 2018. if they sell before that they might perfectly avoid the turbulent time that is expected in the traditional markets.
Ok but the scenario was what if bitcoin holders convince the government to support price instead of crush it?
The Bitcoin "fever" is already starting to spread from individual speculators to large businesses, already a jump that I didn't expect.
If the fever spreads: individual speculators -> large businesses -> financial institutions -> government? This is when we could be in trouble.
I hope the Tesla purchase is a gimmick like you said. But what if it's the start of a trend? You provided the justification yourself? "Everything seems to be a bubble. BTC might actually be a good bet."
> It should be around 1 year until the next cycle starts and BTC crashes like in 2018.
Yes that would be the best scenario, but what if large institutions are on a multi year trend of adding Bitcoins to their portfolio which prevents this crash?
I can still see a non negligible probability of the fever going:
individual speculators -> large businesses -> financial institutions -> government, then, great depression II -> WWIII -> sticks and stones etc.
I can see it right now. If cryptocoins become widespread, we will start seeing articles in the press about how they are an integral part of the financial infrastructure now, an evolution of technology and the government should play a role in insuring their stability. If a consensus forms around these dangerous ideas, smarter voices could be drowned.
Deflation on its own is not a problem. Gold is deflationary too that does not cause a depression. It did once but because of the connection between gold and money (fiat). Now days if there would be a gold bubble, the central banks hold most of it and could simply dump the price by selling some. They can buy back with printed money and sell higher to crash it and repeat while unofficially "inform" the right people to short it. As long as the printed fiat still is widely accepted they can fight any deflation bubble from any asset with it. Its the whole point of central banks. They play outside of the rules of all other financial institution with the sole goal to manipulate the market into being somewhat stable. It doesn't really matter that gold would not go to zero and probably even would make a new ATH some yeas later. Busting the bubble is enough of a fix for many many years until the next bubble comes. Its still deflationary but most people dont think in decades and more.
I particularly like your use of "hypnotized", here ...
The existence of deflationary assets doesn't seem to crash the economy as predicted.
I don't care about BTC at all, but if it were to be wiped out of existence tomorrow it would prevent further damage to the environment in exactly the same way that getting rid of plastic straws stopped plastic polluting the ocean.
Not saying all bitcoin mining is this way, but a portion of it is.
Given all the smart minds and money devoted to crypto research, could humanity not benefit from other projects?
But wasting talent in finance isn’t a justification to waste talent in crypto.
Overall, Bitcoin has an overall negative impact on society and environment, none of the claims that proponents made really hold up. There are many fundamental flaws that prevent Bitcoin from functioning as a practical currency, even is energy use wasn't an issue.
is the description of almost everything in the developed world lifestyle, from animal meat to automobiles to overlarge houses.
I get all the benefits of crypto, but there are also massive downsides, the biggest being the energy/hardware usage, which has to rise constantly by design.
There are countless bigger issues that HN doesn't talk about can we add btc's env impact to it?!
red flag this article is steeped in pseudoscience.
you could spend a lifetime trying to model and predict global weather patterns _with no outside intervention_. the idea that you could even make an attempt at attaching a number to this phenomena is laughable. what are the error bars here, 10,000%?
lets pretend, for example, you tried to estimate the impact of tsunamis assuming that we think this weather event is standard deviations more likely due to BTC (this is non-obvious and probably not true, but for the sake of argument). dozens of tsunamis around the globe will kill people and decimate cities, but your estimate will be multiple orders of magnitude off in some places like fukushima - a cursory glance at wikipedia indicates a lower bound of 300 billion dollars.
this is not to say that we shouldnt be concerned about rapid global climate system changes; on the contrary! junk science like this actively harms the cause. we dont have to sensationalize, reality and truth are scary enough.
When junk science is peer-reviewed, it's even more of a problem.
No perspective on the big picture. Pollution they talk about is happening at power plants, not mining rigs. Net electric energy consumption of cryptocurrencies is less than 1% of world total.
Proposing targeted regulation policies on minor consumer classes, no mention of big problems(transport, coal plants) and big solutions (nuclear energy). Looks very biased.
This looks like a nice lobby/news propaganda scribble from a think tank working against cryptocurrencies. Not as a scientific paper.
Without going into the paper itself, why do you believe being peer-reviewed means that we cannot - and should not - look at it critically with our own brains and minds, analyze the evidence, and reach our own conclusions?
So it shouldn't be surprising that crypto mining is added to the list.
Any and all heavy users of energy are contributing to climate change in some way, and the cost/benefit analysis for some are more justifiable than others. Food production is energy-hungry, but without it, people die. Nobody would die if crypto mining ended tomorrow. Thanks to government standards, idle electronics are better now than they were, and will continue to improve in the future. Big homes with A/C is a largely American problem without anything to really address it yet, but there has been a lot of attention focused on the issue already.
In general a bad thing is bad whether there are worse things or not. Crypto mining is a big drain on energy resources with very little benefit, or with benefit to very few people, and it doesn't have to the biggest drain, or benefit the fewest number of people the least for that to be true.
0. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/keep-your-devices-wasting-energ...
1. https://www.ajc.com/news/local/are-air-conditioners-slowly-k...
2. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/25/8881364/greta-th...
3. https://phys.org/news/2017-11-impact-climate-china-substanti...
It makes no sense, in the current situation, to discuss 10000 small energy consumers and appropriate pollution tax for all of them. We need to fix the damn energy production first.
So what are you saying?
It's useful to know that BTC has major externalities because it allows us to make a rational choice. We could make different choices about all the things you listed, too. Or not! But you seem to be actually arguing for willful blindness, here.
No Im actually not. You said that. Pointing out that you can cherry pick and micro-analyze anything.
Your playground rhetoric isn't helpful.
Can you point out where in the paper the authors leap to "let's regulate" as you put it? There seems to be one small section about regulation, but it doesn't exactly advocate for it: it describes how their pricing research could be used in regulation. It describes challenges in regulating. But it responsibly avoids making moral/policy claims.
> However, the ability to locate, and re-locate, cryptomining almost anywhere (e.g., following the cheapest, under-regulated electricity source) and fund mining camps from anywhere with complete or near anonymity create significant challenges to implementing effective regulation
It's helpful for authors to point out how they think their work fits into the broader scheme of things. They correctly identify that a high cost to benefit ratio might make people interested in regulating it; they also correctly identify that practical concerns make that difficult. There is no advocacy there.
Even if there were, it wouldn't be inappropriate to say "hey, there's a downside to this; we recommend trying to fix that."
There is a large and robust literature to assess these type of damages (search for Social Cost of Carbon). The methodological challenges are discussed really well in the paper actually. Much of the damages calculated here aren't even climate but direct air pollution, for which we have robust data and damage models. Insurance companies use these type of damage models at large scale for risk assessment all the time.
The article looks fairly solid to me.
Ctrl+f 'nuclear': 1/1 found.
In fact, energy efficiency[0] is a large area of focus, especially with regard to ongoing climate change[1]. You might have noticed a shift in things like light bulbs building standards and so on. We've made progress[2], and so it is really hard for people celebrating that progress when they see a sudden boom in energy use to create wealth for a very tiny subset of people, a boom in use that threatens to undo all of our progress and then some.
0. https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-efficiency
1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/why-investing-in-rene...
2. https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sheryl-carter/ramping-energy-ef...
Then we're back to policing people's energy use. There will be little ROI in going down this path, and a huge opportunity cost.
This is all not to mention the incentives driving crypto. We have many smart minds engaging in this realm - imagine if those same minds were allocated, via a better economic system, to improving our energy production and distribution. Addressing that dilemma is real policy. Unfortunately, in the West we play whack-a-mole and end up with policies to address the effects of prior policies.
Would you expect a paper on COVID mortality also discuss heart disease and ALS? Of course not.
Power consumption and power production are simply directly related. Your clumsy attempt at an analogy here really misses the mark.
The root cause of this issue is our power production isn't clean enough, and therefore consumption drives pollution. What do you address first - the demand or the supply?
It's quite simply amazing to see so little ability to grasp anything beyond immediate consequences of a problem, particularly on a site like this.
Discussing things with people on hacker news is frustrating because people like you extend the argument to way way way past the point at hand. All of a sudden we are talking about clean energy deployment, not that BitCoin mining is using a lot of power and resources.
Do you feel the same way about causes of death?
Imagine saying "who cares Cystic Fibrosis kills x people, heart disease is worse!"
Also, other consumers like cement, fossil fuel production, and plastics HAVE been focused on. Bitcoin is new and only recently popular so we don't know much about it and it's true cost.
You're completely missing the point here: we have finite time and resources to deal with problems. We must dedicate these finite time and resources in the most efficient way to possible to achieve the most desired outcome.
If by "worse" you mean "heart disease causes more deaths and drives higher social costs" then yes there is a strong argument to be made on addressing the root causes driving heart disease with more resources and time then cystic fibrosis. But, again, your analogy is contrived-and-forced-apples-to-oranges with the topic at hand.
It's not even trying to address the bigger argument you're talking about.
Wrong. You make numerous comments in this thread asserting that the sole focus on this paper is quantifying externalities of crypto mining when that's plainly false. The paper is prescribing policy options for dealing with crypto externalities and birthing new loaded clinical terms to ascribe solely to those externalities: "cryptodamage". Read it.
"As an alternative to intervening in emergent cryptocurrency markets through prices (e.g., taxation) or outright restricting their development, there may be a role for government investment into R&D that focuses on designing mining puzzles that greatly reduce energy consumption (and thus production costs) while still allowing for secure validation of anonymous transactions. Fully vetting and encouraging such currency alternatives might retain the libertarian social benefits of the blockchain [35] while making “the last Bitcoin” irrelevant. Although there will still be private benefits captured from mining under possible low-energy design alternatives, as illustrated here there would be significant public good benefits (reduced cryptodamages) to justify such government investments into R&D. Importantly, such investments in R&D are not mutually exclusive with taxing to internalize cryptodamages, and may also come with the potential to generate spin-off benefits from blockchain technology more generally."
Papers discuss the implications and applications of their work. That discussion is not the work itself; it is meant to give a starting point for fitting the work with other research or doing new research that builds on the work. Thus, the authors "close by sharing our brief thoughts on policy implications of recognizing cryptodamages." That section mentions a wide range of policy implications—several paragraphs that you didn't bother quoting—without advocating for anything in particular beyond reducing harm.
Frankly, that leaves it sounding like what you're really bothered by is that the paper points out that there is harm, and advocates for reducing it. And if that's the real problem—that you don't like it when someone speaks up and says hey, this has quantifiable downsides—just be honest about it.
Yes but that is still propagating the unsubstantiated view that cryptocurrency mining is an important cause of societal harm worthy of mitigation/regulation. There is no comparison to other similar or bigger economic activities, no mention of the fact that the pollution happens at power plants and is under direct control of the power plant owners, not miners. It is inordinately focused on societal harms of cryptocurrency mining, it ignores the benefits beyond mining profit(which is uncertain but non-zero and hard to quantify in dollars). Limitation of the paper narrative to such a narrow topic shows bias.
It's a single paper. One piece of information that's small enough to be digested and connected with other work. And frankly, if the result had been that each $1 created 1¢ of costs, you'd be celebrating it. Your only real criticism here is that you don't like the result.
If you're so concerned about the root cause of power generation, go focus on solving that problem.
So ignore the root cause altogether, lol. And when we've banned crypto mining and accrued even worse social costs as a result, we'll rinse and repeat this process with the next ".*damage" power consumer. Totally sane!
> There is considerable evidence of concentration of mining operations in particular locations, typically where reliable electricity is cheaply available, though, precise data are lacking (e.g., [15], [6]). In the US, perhaps the most well-known concentration is the Mid-Columbia Basin area in central and eastern Washington State, where cheap electricity is produced by hydropower along the Columbia River [4], [6], however, mining in other US locations also occurs (see [11] and news references in [23], [24], and [25]).
> emissions rates per kWh will differ substantially given underlying differences in how power is produced—i.e., China relies extensively on coal power (>60% of electricity generation) while the US is more balanced (32% natural gas, 30% coal, 20% nuclear, etc.).
Saying they ignore this is just a lie. Criticize the paper, by all means, but this simply isn't a hit piece. It's careful in stating exactly what it can commit to, and it reasonably tries to explain how that fits into the bigger picture.
Could you describe what social costs we'll have by banning crypto mining?
The planet is burning, the cost of enforcement will be worth it.
Yes? Polluting power plants kill many more people than the whole bitcoin mining operation.
> Also, other consumers like cement, fossil fuel production, and plastics HAVE been focused on. Bitcoin is new and only recently popular so we don't know much about it and it's true cost.
Okay, we agree on something here. I fully support assessing Bitcoin mining and operation costs and comparing those costs to other consumer classes to get perspective. When we do this, it is easy to see bitcoin mining is a non-issue climate-wise (for now). The main issue is pollution done by Big Polluters such as naval transport and coal/gas power plants.
These bogus calls for regulation/shutdowns of minor electricity consumers just spoil the climate discussion, distract us from the real polluters.
Is this all an altruistic exercise in saving the planet?
If so, it sounds very nice. We are lucky to have the concern of such well funded saviors.
In lieu of engaging in a discussion, you've dismissed the possibility. You've provided no rationale (or evidence for that matter) for this flippant dismissal. Instead, you offer the 'conspiracy theory' pejorative. It is not a starting point for a conversation.
I'm only calling out that asking a leading question like this doesn't add to the conversation at all.
There is an incredible irony to accuse me of providing no rational when this whole thing is about somebody alluding to a conspiracy with no rational at all.
The starting point to a conversation should be "hey, there is a conspiracy here, this is why."
Asking about incentives, thinking critically about conflicts of interest doesn't add to the discussion because that might "allude to a conspiracy"?
I don't know if I agree with that. For me it makes sense to first ask "Cui bono". Establish a motive and then search for evidence to prove a hypothesis.
Posing the question is simply the beginning of the process. If you're closed minded about opening the door, my (reasonable or unreasonable, open for debate) expectation would be that you would dismiss anything within as "conspiracy theories". Hence the discussion becomes futile.
I read your reply as skipping over the possibility of a conflict of interest in research rationalizing a carbon credit trading regime.
even granting you that we have a robust model to assess damage (which on its face seems to be a wildly improbably claim) we do not have an accurate model that predicts WHAT damage will be done due to humanity's impact on weather change, so the resultant-cost benefit analysis still propagates that uncertainty forward.
> (search for Social Cost of Carbon)
i havent read it all because i just looked it up[0], but it directly contradicts your claim of our "robust data and damage models". section 5.1 "damage functions" is about how previous damage models are all incorrect.
side note: one of the paper authors is in references 30 times. idk if this is common or not, but it seems suspicious.
> The methodological challenges are discussed really well in the paper actually. Much of the damages calculated here aren't even climate but direct air pollution
wouldnt know, dont have access to anything but the abstract.
look, im not well read into the field of future predictive damage modeling. you may be right that the field has some definition, however i stand by my smell test. even ignoring everything relevent about health, damage, and climate, the start of the sentence "$1 of BTC" is enough to give pause. BTC price is up 30% in the last month and 470% in the last year. not exactly rigorous scientific measure.
[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28472/w284...
The reason is that it's hard if not impossible to accurately assess other commenters' intent, and there's a strong default on the internet to assume bad faith. We all need to consciously counteract that if we're to have substantive, thoughtful discussion.
It's true that some commenters behave abusively in ways that make assuming good faith impossible, but (a) I doubt that was the case here, and (b) the guidelines ask you not to reply in such cases, but rather to flag the comment and/or email hn@ycombinator.com.
I definitely wouldn't call it pseudo-science, as their arguments seem valid, and their methods seem to follow through at a cursory glance.
They do note some weaknesses in their research, such as not having access to the exact sources of electricity miners use, however, which might change the results.
They make no attempt at trying to predict global weather patterns. Rather the article seems to be mostly "glue" -- connecting energy usage of cryptocurrencies with previously done work trying to measure the externalities of pollution and energy usage. The research that the article builds on gets used all the time in government policy etc. Which doesn't make it correct, but deserves a little more than a knee-jerk reaction and outright dismissal because the method you came up with in thirty seconds doesn't hold up.
And given that you basically claim that actuarial science is impossible, I'd hope you bring a stronger claim than that.
As it is, this is, as the quote goes, "just your opinion, man".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta...
And yes, the U.S. military should massively downscale.
We're all focusing on Bitcoin as if killing it would stop global warming or something. There are dozens of different things we could be criticizing when it comes to pollution.
Global climate change won't be slowed or stopped by a single silver bullet. It will take reduction in many, many areas combined, and many of those are already underway, have been underway for years now.
Meanwhile, all of those savings are being offset by wasteful-by-design crypto mining that benefits extraordinarily few people. So yes, in addition to the many, many, many reports on various other major contributors to ongoing climate change, it's time to talk about crypto mining, too.
If we are to waste time talking about polluting classes, let's focus on the big ones first. Naval transport, coal power plants. These should be regulated first.
You could make Bitcoin process 1000x more transactions and the energy consumption of mining it wouldn't even change by 1%, all else being equal.
Miners are willing to waste as much energy as they get back in rewards from mining blocks, while competing with each other for their share of the rewards. The rewards are newly minted Bitcoins (and some transaction fees, which are a small part of the reward). So the higher the Bitcoin price the larger the rewards miners get and the more energy they are able to spend competing with each other while still turning a profit.
If the price is 50k, it doesn't really matter if the network is processing 1 transaction a second or 10 million, the energy consumption will be roughly the same.
Of course it's just about profit... the point is that he should be aware of its environmental impact and the hypocrisy of his investment therein.
I'm only trying to explain to you how I understand the original post, and it has nothing to do with my own opinion on the subject (which may/or may not be the same).
But other blockchain platforms are the mirror opposite. They can provide sustainable security, provided without environmental degradation, along with utility that will radically change most sectors of the economy in a similar if not even a greater degree than the internet did.
fwiw, I realize this comment doesn't help much either.
I like your comment, it cracked me up!
Not that the cumulative damages amount to the total market cap (though this could be calculated as well)
Based on US Gov't estimate the average single family home uses 11 MWh per year. [1]
And a 2018 snapshot of BTC according to the paper: price per coin: $8000 MWh per coin: 80 Damages per coin: $3,170 Damagers per MWh: $39.62
Therefore, the typical single family home produces $435 in health and environmental damage each year.... not outside the realm of possibility.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
I would rather protect the environment than someone’s ability to buy drugs online. What other legitimate purpose does btc serve right now other than illegal activities?
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335993117_Cryptodam...
Also consider more scalable cryptocurrencies running proof-of-stake.
It gives us, the ones who understand Bitcoin, more time to enter the market before it runs yet another full cycle.
I truly wish for you bashing Bitcoin to keep all your wealth allocated in assets associated with fiat currencies.
I also wish that you spend lots of time running political narratives in order to stop a decentralized piece of technology from growing.
Good luck trying to reach out the Bitcoin CEO in order to ask him to shut down his "environmentally damaging operations".
In 5 years time, however, once the US dollar has lost 50% of its purchase power, you'll be begging your employer to pay you in Bitcoin.
By that time you'll conveniently forget the narrative about energy consumption.
You'll even claim that Bitcoin is one of the most important technologies ever invented, and that you always believed in it.
Screenshot this.
Do you hear yourself?
By now I ascribe ulterior motive to those attacks, and I encourage you to also take them with a large grain of salt at the least. The establishment media seems to treat any emerging[2] technology as its opponent, and feels morally excused in posting continuous attacks.
--
[1] I half-jokingly expect a "Bitcoin deepens gender inequality" headline tomorrow
[2] or perhaps any "unregulated" technology
A proper analysis of costs/benefits would put cryptocurrencies' externalities in perspective to other comparable and bigger consumers (cryptocurrencies are a very small part).
This disproportional targeting of cryptocurrencies as the most important climate destroyer that we see in the news seems to be unwarranted. Also, somehow the fact that pollution is generated by power plants, not consumers, is not so hot topic.
When the propaganda machine spins up and the smear campaigns start, it's being considered a valid threat by the established players.
In operation, the benefits are vast.
In production, less so, but still positive.
Basically no where is to the point we can just add power draws and say they have no health impact. Energy being fungible until an grid is to the point of having excess renewable power during the day and miners being spun up and down to absorb that excess any mining will have health impacts. I think the spin up and down is important too because it means over night miners aren't causing excess capacity to be built for storage.
More generally the whole external cost of PoW is definitely a case of techno-utopianism meeting the real world and a lot of proponents wanting to put on blinkers even though this study shows that crypto-currency is currently a net social positive. Literally any indication that it has any negative outcomes elicits very strange responses.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/interactives/remittance-f...
If that were true, Western Union would obviously have less utility than Visa. But actually, WU and Visa solve totally different problems with different risks associated, so it doesn't make sense to compare them in that way.
And how do we judge whether the market price is "worth" the use cases or not? Isn't that exactly what the market is doing in pricing the asset?
The intrinsic value of Bitcoin is nowhere near the current price. When the speculators all sell and the only demand comes from people looking to actually use them, the price will drop by a lot.
But, when that happens, the speculators/grifters will simply move to another coin. That other coin will see a similar bubble, and bitcoin’s value will drop even further as people perceive it as “dead” or worthless (as maybe it should have always been perceived)
So until this shit gets under control somehow, cryptocurrency is going to remain the exclusive domain of the speculator/gambler/criminal/grifter/gullible. And of course, the world will suffer increased energy usage, pollution, and GPU shortages.
If gamblers and thieves dominate the crypto market and cannot be outcompeted by honest actors then by definition the market has decided it prefers gamblers and thieves to honest actors. If someone wants an economy with rules other than "lol Caveat Emptor" they shouldn't get into crypto.
What I think you are not considering here is that you can speculate both on the upside or the downside. Speculators are only trying to predict the future price, speculation is not the same as a "pump and dump scheme".
> When the speculators all sell and the only demand comes from people looking to actually use them, the price will drop by a lot. ... bitcoin’s value will drop even further as people perceive it as “dead” or worthless (as maybe it should have always been perceived)
Like you said yourself, if it is true that Bitcoin is overvalued then it would be a good thing for every Bitcoin user if its price dropped to the fair value. Why are you describing that situation like a bad thing here? I expect users would be happy that they can now afford more of the coin for practical use cases, and adoption in those use cases would probably go up more than anything.
Or... every reason?
Gold is a speculative asset that also has some limited tangible uses too. So does that mean gold has less reasons to decrease in price than an asset which only has tangible uses and no speculation?
BTC is a one way bet, right up to the point where people decide it isn't worth holding any more. Just like certain vintages of wine.
The fact that there is some small rate of losses doesn't significantly impact the amount of downside speculation you'd expect.
Just accept that you're willing to shit on the planet to make a few bucks, it's fine.
Clearly the market doesn't think so. Nearly every asset class is getting inflated in the past year, in the middle of a pandemic no less.
Inflation encourages money changing hands. The market has absolutely fuck all to do with it.
Your bitcoin will have gone sideways three times, jumped up and down. Could be tripled. Could be halved. Still controlled by three chinese farms who could double spend at any point should it become less valuable.
Even as a hardcore socialist, it's worrying that cryptobots have failed econ 101.
Because you're hungry and your fridge is empty?
Inflation creates artificial demand and drives consumerism, thereby arguably causing more resource usage/wastage than would otherwise be the case.
Depreciating money means that people's time horizon narrows and they're thinking more and more of the present at the expense of the future, causing all kinds of negative externalities.
Capitalism is actually supposed to make things cheaper, by virtue of competition spurring everyone on to be more efficient and economic with their inputs in order to provide cheaper and better products.
> Were those currencies to deflate, it would literally be more beneficial to not touch them.
This is such a silly, hyperbolic argument. People need to eat, they have other desires than just hoarding money, there will always be reasons to give out money and therefore there will always be reasons to provide goods and services for that money.
If you know any miners/mining farms powered by renewable energy sources, please send me a line to eren@countingcarbons.co
thank you.
I think that crypto currencies is a good thing but must move from proof of work so something which consumes less energy,
I think the fix is that you price negative carbon in the atmosphere, carbon capacity and you pay for all carbon you emit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
Its currently quite insane that cryptocurrency is using energy on the equivalent of the country Argentina and that as a gamer cannot get hold of a Geforce 30x0 series graphics card to use for playing games. source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
I think the current capitalistic economic system is modeled on infinite environmental resources / capacity and exponential debt growth which is simply not true. That system held up in the early 1800/1900s but the flaws I think are emerging in the 2000s. Ie you do not pay for external cost of polluting, but you as an individual or company may benefit short term but the rest others pay an external cost long term which is not priced.
My thoughts exactly.-
(Less energy, and is better overall / more advanced / capable ...)
What do the remaining 51% consist of? Benefits to human health?
(I am hoping they lead to intelligent debate, and - thus - improvement of existing systems ...)
Bitcoin and other proof-of-work crypto comes with a price. And the price is environmental.
Can you prove that the energy bitcoin miners use would have been put to a more environmentally friendly use if they had not existed?
The willingness and ability of nations/humanity to allow such a state should probably factor more into investment decisions than it currently does.
Not precise enough. Power usage is proportional to block reward USD value, which is proportional to BTC value. But once in 4 years number of BTC awarded for mining a block is halved.
Fortunately as the block mining reward continues to be halved approximately every four years, the incentive to mine will decrease as well (though not quite as much, because miners also receive transaction fees).
An estimated 30% of the BTC network is running on solar. It’s not perfect, but as long as the most ecologically friendly electricity is the cheapest, I feel like miners will drive straight for it at record speed.
For sure I can expand on “CH”. I’m referring to Clubhouse: https://www.joinclubhouse.com/
It’s a realtime audio app for topic-based discussions.
Everything needs the Internet, servers, etc to function. That requires electricity. BTC or cryptos aren’t the problem.
Focus on sustainability of energy production, renewables.
Another issue is that BTC siphons off the build up in green energy by wasting it - without miners setting up shop close by to turn your green energy into heat, you have to ensure you have either someone else nearby to sell (lots of real world focus on hydrogen energy storage recently as way to capture such excess) or invest in transfer capacity to clients.
Updated the original comment with a link to the freely available full text ...
And obviously the key take away from this statement I've made is that things get downvoted here for simply being in disagreement with folks who have the weight to downvote. They are not being downvoted due to in any way being against rules.
Not saying that this paper is great, but I'm honestly tired of people (who obviously invested in Bitcoin) conveniently ignoring the impact.
crypto is at least agnostic about what kind of energy you convert into it, and literally incentivizes renewables.
Central bank corruption probably even indirectly funded the stupidity that allows articles like these to be branded as "science"...to the casual observer this might seem like a stretch but it really is not. "Debase the money, debase society..."
You can simply observe the number of deaths. Even harder to measure the lost economic productivity created by price fixing.
BTC's popularity among speculators is arguably due to artificially cheap credit and economic manipulation. If you accept that you can attribute these so called "climate costs" back to central banking.
The entire premise has so many elite promotions baked in that it becomes hard to approach logically. For me the headline reads as pure nonsense. I'd hoped true believers of central planning and anthropogenic climate apocalypse would find some of these leaps a bit too far.
The comments read as a false dichotomy between bitcoin absolutists and warmists.
Cryptocurrencies can operate without the energy usage of bitcoin. Subjective value tells us that individuals will have different preferences for energy consumption. We don't have to agree that it is efficient or demand that everyone agree on a preference for efficiency as we define it. The other goalpost of the dichotomy is more like a high voltage line. Instead of electrocuting myself and opening a debate on climate change, I'd prefer to simply note that many disagree for a variety of philosophical or scientific reasons.
Dimes and quarters are perfectly fine. The $1 coin gets a certain amount of press by people touting it as a potential replacement to the bill, but it turns out the US $1 bill is remarkably cost-effective by paper currency standards, and should probably remain paper for the time being.
It's not for environmental reasons either: cash is just inconvenient when you think about it.
Try being an international. https://www.thelocal.se/20190624/the-locals-readers-how-swed...
> Bob, a United Kingdom resident but frequent visitor to Sweden, said this system is difficult for non-residents.
> “As a visitor I can't pay at places that only accept Swish because I don't have Swish. And without a Swedish bank account I can't get Swish. And without a Swedish residence, I can't get a bank account,” he explained.
> Howard Drobner, who is a frequent business traveller to Sweden, also proposed a tweak.
> “Some small vendors, like at flea markets and craft shows, only take Swish which I do not have and can not get due to the fact that I do not have a Swedish bank account or national number. I would therefore really like to have a Swish setup for frequent travellers to Sweden,” he said.
Those are people with money, doing ok but inconvenienced. There are things they can't buy.
Now imagine being homeless, or an "illegal" resident. People can't even help by giving you money any more. Friends have to buy food for you themselves instead of supporting you with cash. It gets harder and harder to obtain essentials. Human rights should transcend that, and the cashless systems falling into place in Sweden do not even attempt to be available for all persons.
No need to throw the baby away with the bathwater ...
This. A problem. "One" of the things has become "the thing" itself, as a whole ...
> It will be interesting to see what happens with the value of bitcoin as these limitations relative to the new kids on the block [...] become more obvious.
Will it? (become obvious) ... at least by the general public. That concerns me ...
> (sorry, pun intended, showing myself out the door etc.)
One handed clap :)
I can get instant, zero comission transfers with Nano, without banks. I assume there are many other cryptos like this one.
As skeptic I am about the survival of cryptos to regulators and big whales, I am actually using Nano to transfer money to people in LATAM, but as far as it becomes volatile or if it changed and had feeds, I'd just abandon it.
What's the point of bitcoin now, seriously. POW, very slow, very high transactions fees... ¿What does Bitcoin bring to the table? "Adoption" one would say, but no one is using Bitcoin to pay for anything, so the crypto enthusiasts changed the narrative to "store of value".
There are far better choices than bitcoin in and out of the crypto ecosystem for pretty much every use-case you can imagine. And the only reasons Bitcoin isn't in the ground it's because there's a lot of people invested with hope of selling for a profit.
But sure, go live in your little bubble where Bitcoin is the currency that solves all of society's problems, will forever rise in value and save the planet!