The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

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40 pointsFlatcircle59 comments

Don't get me wrong, Bitcoin is an ecological nightmare and I think it should be shunned accordingly. But the "fun-fact" that it consumes more energy than solar produces is false.

"Power generation from solar PV is estimated to have increased by 22% in 2019, to 720 TWh" [1]

"Bitcoin miners are expected to consume roughly 130 Terawatt-hours of energy (TWh)" [2]

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv [2] https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocur...

> Bitcoin is an ecological nightmare

Compared with other forms of currency, how does it stack up?

Food for thought: 65% of bitcoin mining occurs in China [1], China is still building nuclear reactors [2], there are millions of tonnes of uranium reserves on the planet [3].

Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about our inability to generate clean energy while ignoring our ability to generate clean energy.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

On the other hand, if we were not doing Bitcoin, we could use that nuclear power for something else, like replacing coal plants...

We have so much uranium that we can do Bitcoin AND everything else.

Is that actually happening? Is it on track to happen?

The same people who lament the energy usage of PoW have also been stirring up FUD against nuclear. I said that the outrage about Bitcoin is a proxy for lamenting the lack of clean energy while also ignoring or resisting our current, proven ability to generate clean energy.

Are you sealioning?

I question your observation.

Currently, POW "currencies" burn real coal, divert energy from production applications like metal smelting, monopolize cheap renewables on-site (like Niagara falls) due to the way the markets reward BTC, which, in my opinion, is ridiculous. 60k for a slice of Ponzi pie?

Cognitive dissonance due to vested interests.

DO YOU OWN POW CRYPTO-"CURRENCIES"? - put that in your full disclaimer, please. It colors your output.

We have the uranium. Do we have the nuclear plants? No? Not yet? Then today, we can't burn all that electricity mining Bitcoin without it requiring burning more coal.

We don't exclusively burn coal to secure bitcoin and China uses a combination of power generation technologies to power its electrical grid. To imply that it's all coal is just wrong.

Yes, shut down the coal plants today, but you'll be cancelling more than Bitcoin PoW. So what are you really mad about? Bitcoin or Coal?

For goodness sakes, if these activists win at cancelling Bitcoin, all they've accomplished is extending the lifetime of coal-fired power generation. Yay?

I am not saying to shut down coal plants today, and I deny you the right to put words in my mouth.

What I am doing is pushing back on your original argument, which was that China has nuclear plants and we have lots of uranium, so it's fine to waste enormous amounts of energy mining Bitcoin.

My position is this: Today we have nuclear plants and coal plants, and we waste energy mining Bitcoin. It is a strictly better world where we have the same number of nuclear plants and fewer coal plants, and use the exact same amount of energy minus the amount that we spend on Bitcoin.

I strongly suspect that the incremental energy load of mining Bitcoin is coming from coal plants, not nuclear plants. (If anyone has hard data, I would welcome it.) If my suspicion is correct, then claiming that China has nuclear plants is irrelevant, since they aren't producing the electricity that's being spent mining Bitcoin.

I think we should shut down Netflix because it is a huge waste of energy that could be better repurposed elsewhere. Who are you to say Netflix is more useful than Bitcoin?

It's completely useless to assign loads to specific power generation schemes in countries that operate off of grids. Unless you're an aluminum smelter.

BTC is quickly becoming a scapegoat for actual issues.

We are producing tons of useless plastic crap thrown out almost imidietely at the purchase. Roughly half of food get throw away. But thats not an issue. Same case for cities not fiendly towards mass transit force huge polution and waste of petrol etc etc.

But only if BTC were dead the global warming would stop and there would be no crime.

This is a logical fallacy. One needs to get-rid-of ALL "proof of work" crypto-"currencies"

AND

get-rid-of single-use plastics, half of food waste etc.

There is no singular silver bullet that will tackle our environmental problems including the climate emergency.

I realize that there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on this particular topic and I'll flat-out state that this is a conflict of interest.

I did not say that. Only that BTC is being used as a distraction from actual issues. As a vector for apathy to not do anything with global warming.

To counter the whataboutisms abounding in the comments thread here, I will start a comment tree differently.

How does the bitcoin community solve this problem? Is migrating to a proof-of-stake system viable in the long term? Would doing so affect the value of bitcoin as an asset? Would it improve it's value as anything else?

No, PoS is an insecure trick that reinvents TradFi power structures. PoS bitcoin has been tried, and it is worth very little (like other PoS coins). Bitcoiners dont consider energy usage a actually a problem, infact, it is one of its greatest strengths!

PoS is not the path forward. Reducing energy is not the path forward. Clean energy generation is the only way forward.

1 megawatt can give you X satoshis of imaginary bla bla.

1 megawatt can smelt a lot of metal that can build bridges and electric vehicle parts, for example.

Whereas energy production is finite. Whereas BTC and it's ilk steal from the mouths of babes. Whereas BTC and it's ilk currently cause real externalities, in the real physical communal world we share.

I don't know anything about proof-of-stake but Chia by the inventor of bittorrent (Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time by using extra commodity hard drive space instead of special-purpose CPU cycles: https://www.chia.net/

Their mainnet has been out for a month and people are able to mine ("farm") using low-energy hardware. There are people that are farming petabytes of storage with a single Raspberry Pi. I myself am using an old crappy laptop with some unused hard drives I had around the house.

They don't see it as a problem and have no intention of solving it.

The climate emergency?

This looks like a duplicate to me

How are non-proof of work algorithms doing?

Avalanche is running and the Ethereum 2.0 merge is coming.

Any century now.

Just as useless as Bitcoin, but at least not eating a country worth of TWh.

Chia (by bittorrent inventor Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time and is specifically billed as a scalable, energy-efficient alternative with the same Nakamoto guarantees as Bitcoin. Their mainnet has been out for a month and the network is growing like 35% week over week.

https://chia.net/

Interesting, and its contract language is LISP-like!

https://chialisp.com/

yeah! And possibly more importantly, after looking at Solidity contracts and seeing how much they were hacked, they severely limited the stateful side effects of ChiaLISP transactions. Apparently their thinking was so that these programs could be better audited by enterprise users that way, making Chia a more attractive blockchain to target.

Hold on a second. Was Chia named after you?

Haha no, just a fun coincidence.

limiting energy use, for bitcoin or not, is a dead end. We should be incentivizing clean energy and penalizing dirty one. Carbon taxes/quotas would be a great start.

I wonder how much energy is used by just the cafeterias combined in all of the federal reserve's many offices.

That. Then, add all the energy consumed by the 24/7 monitoring and safeguarding of every single one of those facilities, and for good measure add to each cost line the energy cost of the whole chain of processes that selects, sets up and maintains enough of both humans and machines to accomplish that task at scale.

Our comments and questions along these lines don't seem to be too popular. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up in the industry I'm in with my own locally unique thoughts and conclusions. It's very tiring.

Crypto only provides a small fraction of the functionality of the federal reserve or banks or credit card companies, so it isn't fair to compare energy consumption. (I know coiners basically don't want monetary policy so the fed has negative value to them but many people disagree.)

That's a fair point, but a similar point could be made about the efficiency and energy density of solar vs. coal. Definitely about wind vs. coal. So I'd say based on that the entire original point is mastabatory at best.

Everyone competing to find hashes that start with a large number of zeros to secure a currency is significantly less of an ecological disaster than maintaining a standing army (or military alliances with someone who does) like fiat currencies use.

Bitcoin can't function without the same standing armies

What a curious opinion. Care to elaborate?

Guess where Coinbase settled, and why it's not in an absolutely lawless place. Guess where Kraken settled, and why it's not in Somalia.

The very same exchanges that make cryptocurrencies have their "value" (because, had these not been here, BTC would most likely still be under the $100 bar) rely on said army to be in a safe spot.

Crypto relies on functioning nation-state infrastructure (internet/electrical) just like anything else

Crypto millionaires are really not smart

This is not the place to attack people. Please don't.

This was so much not an attack.

They're the dumbest of money.

Just wait for the next crash, it's gonna be rough for the ones who don't know how to sell. (Which is the majority.)

I wasn't even thinking about the market or trading aspect.

This strikes me as hysterical. Bitcoin miners tend to co-locate with the cheapest sources of electricity, which tend to be places where electricity is abundant and hard to export. Like hydro power, geothermal, and flare gas at refineries.

To assume they're using the same mix of power generating processes as average, or as everyone else, doesn't make any sense. They aren't. They're effectively finding a financial means of exporting cheap electricity that is more efficient than literally exporting it via high-tension wires or turning it into products (like aluminum, as Iceland does) on-site.

Could it be better? Hell yes. And I wish proof-of-stake and all the other ideas well.

Yes. Bitcoin is actually the most efficient driver of greener energy production and transmission. It aligns the interest state actors have in developing such a costly infrastructure (aiming at recouping costs strategically, politically, socially and even financially over the long term) with the interest private entities have in getting access to cheap energy now (aiming at profiting from it over a much shorter timespan).

Hahaha not this again. More ignorance and misinterpretation of how and why energy is used. It doesn’t matter how much energy is used! What matters is how it is made, and there is no better financial incentive than renewably mined bitcoin.

Eventually humanity should build acoustic Dyson spheres around nocoiners to convert their void screams into network hashrate.

I do not understand the argument, i have read it a lot in the last weeks. Does bitcoin not just incentivise the currently cheapest energy source? Which is still not renewable for most markets afaik.

Eventually all markets will converge on renewable energy being the cheapest. It can be no other way — no consumable fuel will always beat consumable fuel in the long run. Bitcoin accelerates this transition process by providing something of value.

Yes, in the long run you are right. In the timeframe that matters, Bitcoin IS an ecological disaster. I don't understand why people ignore that just because they like the idea of crypto - which I do, too.

edit: well, actually of course I understand. But wouldn't it be honest to say "I care less about the environment than I care about my wealth" instead of claiming that Bitcoin will incentivise green energy?

Every use of power is incentivized to use the cheapest energy source. So the only way to solve CO2 climate effects is to make renewables be the cheapest.

Solar is getting cheaper following a learning curve, where every billion dollars spent makes it a few percent cheaper. It’s possible that an increase in power demand will get us to fully renewable energy faster. Solar competes well with coal for new capacity, but not for existing capacity. So growth in demand may cause a faster transition.

Renewable energy created during low usage times are the cheapest since otherwise its going to waste. Lots of dams china, hence lots of miners in china.

>doesn’t matter how much energy is used

For machines that turn coal into waste heat for no benefit, I think it does.

It’s cool that you think there is no benefit. Bitcoin is an optional system that nobody is forced to use. I find a very large benefit and so do millions of others. Enjoy watching the depreciating fiat!

Luckily Bitcoin cannot depreciate.

If times get rough Bitfinex can just print a few billion USDT.

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