Can someone get busy wrapping endangered species as NFT's and direct the funds accordingly'
Can't help but wonder how much habitat is destroyed by the generation of a token.
Can't help but wonder how much habitat is destroyed by the generation of a token.
https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a...
Suraurwanda, meaning “visit Rwanda” in honor of the growing tourism sector in Rwanda, was born into Mafunzo’s group on Nov. 30, 2018. His mother is Taraja, and because Mafunzo is the only adult male of the group, we do not need genetic testing to prove he is the father.
That's slightly less than the average US household consumes in a year.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-hot-effect-earth-climate/
It is also insanely cheap (like $1... and even that is just "held" in the account and can be released later) to "mint" a new coin and thus is practically perfect for NFTs.
It's seen as sort of a joke in the crypto world by those who are only trying to make a buck (price of XLM, used for paying transaction fees, is relatively stable compared to others) but I think it's one of the few cryptos out there that has a chance of making a real difference in the world long term.
Here's a current visualization of how many participants there are: https://stellarbeat.io/
Ethereum is what all the articles about costly NFTs are written about. The proof of stake (low energy consumption) chain is already live and the proof of work chain will is scheduled to be shut down in 2 years. Faster if the miners try to revolt
The energy is spent to secure the network regardless of how many transactions are processed (in practice, transaction volume is pretty much fixed in terms of "bytes of transactions")
Just trying to get your position straight here.
> Just trying to get your position straight here.
What else might we think you were doing?
Can you be more specific about the existing regulated activities you're talking about? I don't get your point but I might just be missing something here. AFAIK, the reasons for existing regulations on "activities or devices" are not related to electrical usage..
When generating energy (either with fossil fuels or renewables) energy is often wasted because there is no immediate consumer or way to store it.
What you say _can_ be true, for example additional consumers of energy on the national grid, during times of high demand, will likely result in more energy production. It is not true as a rule though.
Bitcoin (and all other Proof-of-Work cryptos, which is basically all the major ones) only consume tons of power because the incentive to mine creates an arms race where whoever has the most hashing power makes the most money.
Bitcoin could be run on a single computer mining on a 10 year old CPU, but then it would be highly centralized, and decentralization is touted as one of the greatest features of Bitcoin. But with the incentive to run your own miner(s), and make it/them as powerful as you can to get the largest piece of the block reward pie, it ends up being a massive energy sink.
That's why people are pushing for the change to Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum. By taking away the incentive to waste tons of power on mining, it drastically reduces the carbon footprint of it.
> You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.
What? I'm not sure what models you're referring to
In reality, bushmeat consumption, logging, farming, and mining are the main drivers or gorilla population losses.
Blockchain energy usage is not really proportional to transaction volume, they're only connected in very indirect ways (more usage -> more adoption -> higher price? -> reward for mining a block increases in value -> miners can pay for more energy while still turning a profit)
The quickest migration is basically to upgrade both clients to talk to each other, and for the old client, instead of choosing blocks with the highest hashpower, choose blocks whose hashes are chosen by the beacon chain. Details here: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/B1mUf6DXO
The next step is a more integrated system, described here: https://ethresear.ch/t/executable-beacon-chain/8271
There aren't always easy solutions and you can't hand wave aside a massive problem because 'our best people are on it'
Using a VISA card (for instance to make the same contribution to wild-life preservation) would use a fraction of the energy that's used to sustain cryptocurrencies, sure, but that's not a fair comparison. Using VISA requires a working settlement layer (because VISA transactions are reversable), banks, bank employees, bank buildings, international transfer support, international settlement layer, people handling those settlements, regulation, regulation enforcement etc. If you include all that then the energy usage of Bitcoin doesn't look all that bad.
Yes, Bitcoin has advantages, but low energy consumption is not one of them.
For what it is, it consumes ENORMOUS amounts of energy.
It's as if everyone would be a banker in Ukraine and every building would be a bank.
Seems excessive.
The energy usage is only used for mining, it's not even used to secure and ensure its reliability on exchanges whose energy consumption is actually counted against the mining energy. The energy consumption will grow simply because Bitcoin is going up, not because Bitcoin is processing more transactions or providing value in any form. Yes bigger banks need more energy but they can also provide more services thanks to their increased size.
Bitcoin doesn't even compete with Banks because Banks offer loans, consolidate small deposits into large capital reserves, etc. Bitcoin doesn't compete with stocks because Bitcoin ownership doesn't represent an ownership stake in the Bitcoin industry or any other industry. Bitcoin doesn't compete with payment providers because it is too slow and expensive. Bitcoin doesn't compete against cryptocurrency exchanges. Ethereum with its uniswap protocol may do so but that's not Bitcoin. Ethereum provides more value for less energy consumption than bitcoin. The only thing Bitcoin really competes against is gold because of the proof of ownership. You own your Bitcoin in your wallet the same way you own your car or house (after paying your mortgage or car loan off of course).
Bonus:
Why did I compare Bitcoin to a piece of paper? Because the people working in finance are part of the finance system. In Bitcoin only the miners are part of the system. So ultimately you just have a fancy piece of paper on which you cannot write lies on. With the finance system it is closer to bodyguards guarding the paper and making sure nobody can write on it. Again, people are part of the system. It's not just the paper that is important.
Since bitcoin zealots have moved to pretending that it's a "store of value", you can compare Bitcoin to the energy used to secure the gold in the world. Hint: it's much more worse.
There is some accuracy to that. Would raise the stakes and the resources involved in funding a war. The last 70-80 years of US hegemony have been based off of the market tolerance for US debt and slowly being paid their money back, in US dollartoken. And before then, US hegemony was not a thing.
So there is nothing to say that the market won't find a way to have fractional speculation on bitcoin/crypto asset backed securities, and there is nothing to say that a governing body won't find a way to sustain itself and gain compliance with its peers through it. But there is also not a history of US hegemony supporting it either. Not a panacea because the world was much more of a tinderbox before US debt based hegemony.
If we imagine the ideal future 100 years from now, with a more balanced world order and economic justice for all, then we have to experiment with radically different systems at some point in between. Not saying that bitcoin is the solution or even a good one, but I think it's important to experiment with new ideas, and not just technologies but systems like UBI too.
Of course, getting climate change under control is a much more pressing issue, so bitcoin is untenable, but I don't think it's as frivolous as a lot people make it out to be. It's a valuable experiment, and there's a lot to learn from its failure and success. My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.
Sure, but I think for any effect a bitcoin-like system has any chance to have on the US's ability to wage war, it will have the same effect on the US government's ability to fund massive social programs. That is, bitcoin is going in the opposite direction from what is needed for achieving the world we hope for.
> My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.
While I agree with you that this is how things are looking, and it is also the most important long-term goal, I personally don't believe that we have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate failure if we don't focus on drastically reducing consumption in the short term. To me bitcoin has proved exactly how chasing free economic growth will always drink up any electricity we can produce.
US military has been estimated between the world's largest polluter and as much as 140 countries.
That Dollar, that "Freedom" isn't free, and it's the world paying the bill.
[Note: American here. Ashamed about our imperialist impact ]
https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter...
my conclusion so far is that a lot of things use as much power as entire countries, but this unit of measure is a higher standard created specifically for bitcoin, and I'm waiting to see otherwise.
Neither of those systems have an energy usage that is directly proportional to transaction count, _especially_ Bitcoin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina - 44 Million people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine - 41 M (handwaving around bits that got invaded etc)
So is the global population of the banking industry comparable to 41 M ?
UK employees: 1.1M US Employees: 8.3M
So I went round a few houses and there is a lack of solid stats. But I think I can go with a decent indicator.
The USA has about 7.5 % of GDP (1.5tn) in Finance Services, and 6.3M employees (2018). Now translate that up to the global GDP of 87TRN, and say the global finance sector is as large globally as in USA (generous assumption) and that give 7.5 % of 87TRN - 6.5TRN. At 4.2M employees per Trillion that gives us 27 M global employees.
Now there can be lots of hand waving, but if bitcoin uses same amount of electricity as Argentina, and Argentina has around 1.5 many people as the global finance sector, then bitcoins electrical use does seem very excessive.
https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united... -> 6.3 M employees, 1.5 Tn (USA), 7.5% of GDP
Bibliography:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/298370/uk-financial-sect....
https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag50.htm
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030515/what-percent...
https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united... -> 6.3 M employees, 1.5 Tn (USA), 7.5% of GDP
The energy one technical component uses versus the energy that all the people that use another technology uses.
Bitcoin also have support systems around it, hardware production lines, and a lot of people who use it that you don't include in your comparison.
This was my first attempt at it - and it seems bitcoin loses badly - the current bitcoin energy use is easily comparable or greater than the energy use of the people, buildings etc of the global finance industry.
And bitcoin still cannot buy me a latte at starbucks.
So it's a weird speculative / money controls avoidance thing that happens to subsidise dubious global activity to the tune of Argentina's electrical usage.
It has always seemed BS - it still seems BS. And speculators have grown rich not on a technology that will replace currency but on massive migration of dubious activity (Chinese currency outflows). That Tesla was paid for by Chinese billionaires securing their gains.
:-(
Edit: so dissing bitcoin and Tesla is probably a bad idea on HN.
But to be fair I am not dissing Tesla - it's a genuine company making genuine product. It just seems to be marketing towards a ... marketing archetype that got lucky with their Crypto.
You see, to make cash from Chinese money laundering, one would previously have had to be a lawyer in the City or a real estate agent selling central London flats. But we democratised access to this flood of grey market cash via Bitcoin.
Maybe I would feel differently with a couple of coins in a wallet somewhere. But from a regulatory point of view, it's still taking cash from the poorest globally.
But energy consumption behavior of all people who are deployed in the global finance industry ≠ energy consumption of the median of Argentinan/Ukrankian people. I think you can agree that most people who work in finance are generally in at least low middle-class to super wealthy. If you compare the mobility/consumption index of such a class to median income level of countries where wealth is generally much lower, the equation changes drastically in favor of computers doing the job without having the urge to fly to fiji over the WE, up to 4x between poor and lower middle-class already [1]
...for a small village of maybe 1000 people? At the current transaction rate, they could barely handle that. And of course they don't handle disputes, loans, insurance, tech support, legal compliance, KYC and AML, or any other part of a financial system (you're even forgetting that someone needs to design and print the physical cards).
Bitcoin in particular does nothing more than verifying a handful of transactions per second (5? 7?) while consuming more electrical energy than all of the world's regular transaction processing hardware combined, perhaps with the exception of ATMs - which amounts to hundreds of millions of transactions per second, all over the world, in a truly decentralized system.