Imagine the day we have to explain to the next generation that they live in a climate hellscape because the world decided to burn fossil fuels to collect digital beanie babies, instead of saving the world.
I say ban mining, the sooner the better.
I say ban mining, the sooner the better.
I find the emotion quite surprising.. I don't see the same amount toward other forms of pollution. Consumerism is also a bit absurd these days and global trade is a large producer of CO2 too.
Now I find the crypto world a bit absurd and surely if they could kill the energy requirements then good.. but climate change is certainly not a consequence of btc miners.
Take your favorite evil mega-corporation: If you can offer them a way to perform the same task using half the energy, they'd immediately jump at the opportunity.
Bitcoin miners, on the other hand, would just... mine twice as fast, consuming exactly the same energy as before.
is it a waste if the result was useful? Why do you get to decide, rather tha whoever was paying for the electricity?
Because this waste has externalities and I'd argue that in a democracy, people should have a say in that.
I agree that in a democracy we all have a say in what we allow or not, but let's stop with this constant narrative that killing cryptocurrencies would significantly help with stopping climate change, it would barely make a difference, there are much more important things to focus on if that's really your goal.
But I feel like addressing it as a problem now rather than a few years down the road might be a good idea. Socially and politically normalizing the idea of intentionally wasting energy in exchange for financial gain seems like the wrong signal.
That's true of basically any industry.
not every issue can be democratically decided. I am a proponent of market forces - price into energy all externalities, and let those who find the cost worth the result decide.
> Bitcoin miners, on the other hand, would just... mine twice as fast, consuming exactly the same energy as before.
Both situations are the same, in your first example the mega-corp would just use the increased efficiency to produce more and sell more of whatever they sell, as long as there was demand for it.
Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system. While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy, for much more trivial reasons.
Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.
Absolutely.
It's very useful for facilitating money laundering (e.g. Tesla cars), drug dealing, child exploitation material etc.
1. It has not succeeded in becoming a valid currency as it is a technology attempting to solve a social problem.
2. It is held as digital gold with rapidly changing value
3. It is literally nonsensical as a future currency system due to the limits of mining as it couldnt possibly keep up with daily money use unless you had way more mining activity that would cause it to cost far more than existing systems to do transactions
Here is the thing: All of the things you mentioned have a path to efficiency, Bitcoin itself does not. Eth, maybe! BTC, no. Here is the other thing: At a global scale, m Bitcoin would use more energy than everything you just described combined globaly. It's a climate-bankrupt technology solution looking for a problem it is not equipped to solve. Crypto in some form may work, but this will never work.
Pretty sure you're orders of magnitude wrong about that.
Also there are very specific, actionable and already growing things on the roadmap to sustainability:
- Green energy/proper carbon taxing of energy production
- Lowering of block reward to stabilize the transaction fee and find the proper price, with relation to how many miners we really need vs how much people are willing to pay for transactions.
- L2 solutions making bitcoin a payment network and not only a store of value. Like Lightning network which works today, as we speak, is stable, and is still only going to get better and better because it's very early in the lifecycle of that technology.
> Bitcoin is considered by nearly zero of anyone of any actual note to be important to our future finance system.
How can you even be honest with yourself with that line, when it nowadays rarely goes 3 weeks between each consecutive All-Time-High? What is your theory behind that?
That's why miners use very efficient ASICS instead of whatever computer they can find that draws the most power regardless of output.
You seriously want to equate all these numerous example of entertainment, joy and satisfaction with some useless crypto "currency" that literally doesn't do anything and could be replaced by hundreds of other crypto currencies? Seriously?
You are very disconnected from reality of millions of people. Can you not try to see that? Can you not respect their opinion and their values? Do you just consider your opinion of Bitcoin the valid and truthful one?
How exactly is that different from someone who hates porn and calls it "useless time waster that doesn't do anything"?
No it's just a value judgement. We all have to be able to make them.
- Premise: Bitcoin is not important or useful
- Conclusion: It's a massive waste of energy
To give another example:
- Premise: Most activity on the internet is just people making themselves feel better about the nightmare of consciousness
- Conclusion: It's a massive waste of energy
Sounds like, not useful to all the people in the world minus the people to whome it's useful.
There are much faster, more reliable ways to store value or send / receive money.
Bitcoin’s two main use cases are investment and also making payments to drug traffickers or hitmans.
You can have a very small (in relative numbers) community deciding for the rest of the world that dedicating all our energy to making them rich is the future and so far we don’t seem to be able to say “no”.
Proof of Work has been a horrible poisoned gift to the world.
Current policies and regulations seem to have a hard time addressing this problem.
What about Bitcoin makes it more intentional than any other industry? The product is proof of work, not energy wasted. That's why miners keep making their machines more efficient at producing proof of work instead of simply building larger power supplies and electric heaters.
There's also nothing in Bitcoin that makes it favor fossil fuels over green energy.
You are mistaken, Sir. We are legion.
Bitcoin doesn't. We can ban bitcoin tomorrow, and not a single person will be seriously inconvenienced, other than speculators.
Sure, let's also ban all motor racing, tourism, recreational shopping, etc. It's a big waste of resources and it'll only inconvenience the people that care about those things, but they can still live their lives so it's fine.
That's why miners use highly specialized and efficient machines and not just any random computer that draws a lot of power.
Your phone is highly specialized and efficient. Coin mining is a noise parade and heat monstrosity that grows up to the limit of how much power it can draw at affordable rates.
I have run billion dollar datacenters. They are dwarfed by small mining operations in their heat production and power consumption.
Undervolting chips to increase efficiency is quite common, for example.
And my phone is not very specialized at all, when compared to a mining ASIC.
Miners make money by generating hashes. The more computing power the more hashing power you have. The value of expected rewards determines how much you will be willing to spend on the mining operation. Let’s say you have a gain of 10% efficiency, meaning you spend 10% less on your expenses while winning the same number of rewards. So what is your incentive? Is it to stay like this and be happy that you saved some energy? Of course not, you will spend these extra 10% to gain more rewards. And now your competition also has to up their game.
By design, the higher Bitcoin price is, the more energy is worth spending on Proof of Work. More efficient hardware doesn’t change that fact. It’s by design not sustainable.
If a factory increases efficiency by 10% it will simply produce more of whatever it makes as long as there's demand for it. And then other factories have to up their game.
Also the higher the price of the product the factory produces, the more it is worth spending extra resources producing it.
And of course this isn't limited to factories, it's true for businesses in general.
What is special about mining is that energy is just about the only resource it uses, so it's more obvious, while a factory might be bottle-necked by other resources like floor space and a software company might be bottle-necked by how many programmers it can hire/manage. Miners are similarly limited by how much mining hardware they have or are capable of managing.
All the climate savings that Tesla advertises themselves as having achieved over the lifetime of the company, Bitcoin cancels out in a month.
Bitcoin is currently closing in on having the carbon emissions of the Gulf War oil fires at their peak.
Absolutely. But I just want to remind the group that not all crypto relies on mining! And not all crypto is about chasing fads like NFTs. I believe the world (some parts more than others) will need a decentralized means of exchange in the future. I personally am betting on Nano, but others are also promising.