Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
nysfocus.com
nysfocus.com
No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production.
I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere.
Seriously, what are the current best arguments against levying such a disincentive?
Moreover, if energy were priced correctly (its toll on the climate priced in) would BTC become higher in value? That is, we have a supply, increasing at a rate fixed between the arbitrage of energy and mining efficiency. If energy were to become more expensive, the growth in supply would slow. Assuming demand remains constant or continues to grow as well, the only way for price to go is up.
We 100% need massive carbon taxes right now. It's really telling how the energy industry is trying to push blame to consumers, especially cryptocurrency miners, in order to distract from the discussion of real carbon taxes to force polluters to pay for the damage they're causing.
I'm sure I'm one of the largest supporters of cryptocurrency in this thread so far, and I'm perfectly comfortable stating the obvious that mining with fossil fuels is an abomination. It's going to keep happening though until regulators get serious about reigning in the fossil fuel industry.
People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" and I think it is probably related to other questions like why have the greater financial markets become so wonky, why has the behavior of investors changed so radically (GME et al), why have politicians been unable to be effective policymakers for decades, and why many institutions, both social and political in nature, appear to have become less trustworthy in the eye of the greater public? These are some of the questions among others which I think probably provide a better understanding of what is happening than the overly simplistic 'ponzi scam' explanation that has been repeated ad nauseam since its inception.
Bitcoin is just one of many things (pretty much everything) that have been able to use energy profitably, while subsidizing the costs by externalizing them via climate change, that part isn't new. People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it (not just from a technical perspective), so it is really easy to dismiss. Singling it out in that manner seems silly.
Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts.
The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 100g of e-waste which cannot be recycled and just gets buried. E-waste has a few grams of metals, but is mostly plastic and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Plastic and FR4 cannot be recycled. What little of the e-waste can be recycled is shipped to third-world countries where poor people dig through piles of scrap and dunk it in toxic chemicals.
The only meaningful way to move forward is to reduce consumption, especially consumption which achieves nothing, like literally wiring up a power plant to compute hashes of random data instead of attaching it to the grid to do useful things.
What a disaster.
Looks like they, in turn used this reference [2].
[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
[2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X
The e-waste generated this way is not an intrinsic cost of handling a transaction, since the hardware could hypothetically be reused or recycled. It seems unwise to think of it as an irreducible cost per txn, rather than a dynamic figure that would likely improve over time (especially if the carbon externality were appropriately taxed)
If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.
Many of whom are expressing great concern over the very thing PoW hastens.
So no, it isn't either or. It's stop jeopardizing the planet in the long term so you can do whatever you're doing now. I don't care that you're doing it, and we can talk civily about the warts of the financial system so it can be tuned to meet your use case better and cone to a compromise; but PoW has the worst set of dysfunctional societal incentives I've seen in my life.
A few guys with guns can be beaten by several other guys with guns.
>plus auditors
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight...
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
The is made worse by the fact that there are alternatives to produce trustworthy ledgers that don't involve destroying the planet.
One of the issues with crypto currency is that we're replacing one elite with another.
As John Oliver says Cryptocurrency is everything you don't understand about finance combined with everything you don't understand about computers. That new, even eliter, elite is probably no more moral or ethical than the old.
It's not like cryptocurrency is more accessible. Maybe it will become so but I still have to fork out a lot of money to buy Bitcoin. It's just the fees get paid to different people.
Not entirely sure how it's better. It is different though, I'll give you that.
Comments like the above are a sad demonstration of the fact that, while Bitcoin was originally an interesting technical project... Discussion of it has now been completely taken over by shills that try to dismiss/refute/hide all of the problems with Bitcoin (or the cryptoasset du jour) to safeguard their bet
"Your argument is as invalid as..." ROTFL
Wake me up when Bitcoin moves to a PoS consensus
(Btw, I recommend whoever is reading to also steer clear of PoS coins... If you want to invest, look elsewhere)
Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency.
All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let people keep reliable records without bringing in the inflation tax or changing the rules, things like gold and bitcoin wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting. But they are interesting, because it is normally policy to block anyone who tries to store (small-time) wealth for more than a couple of years.
It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns).
It uses orders of magnitude less electricity than bitcoin because it uses distributed databases instead of ASICS, transactions are sent and received in a few seconds (near-instant), and transaction fees are less than 1 cent (just high enough to disincentivized spamming the network). Compared to Bitcoin’s $250 tx fee and Ethereum’s $30 tx fee, XLM’s tx fees are very cheap.
Finally you can buy XLM on most exchanges since it’s been around so long.
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
market cap =/= trust, especially when you consider that in the past there were outright scams that were in the top 15 (eg. IOTA).
Everything else in my comment still stands though and it certainly is a cryptocurrency.
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
lol, Dogecoin is #6 and XLM is #14. Are you saying your currency is less trusted than one with a dog on it?
On May 6, 2016, the operator of Liberty Reserve was sentenced to 20 years in US federal prison
They are pawns, if you will, to point to as jumping off points to your average Joe and say "Look! Your favorite X,Y,Z institutional guy is into Bitcoin now!" That is all.
But I do agree that it is too hard for the average person to save in the sense of "I will need to withdraw some wealth in the future". The best option out there seems to be ETFs. The dirty secret about the stock market though is that companies don't issue new stock nearly as much as one might think, and therefore the stock market is basically counter-parties playing off each other.
There are plenty of people out there with good, useful ideas and skill sets that really ought to be funded. And no, not all will generate VC like returns.
Figuring out how to link your minor excess now to your needs in the future in a way that isn't a net negative could very well be the defining problem of a generation.
Bitcoin is very very volatile and just because it went up the last x years, doesn't make it stable or trustworthy.
My money in my bank is very safe and it doesn't cost me anything.
The inflation itself is a systematic thing and should affect bitcoin equaly.
When corona came, i was looking at the stock market and was surprised how many people left it. It doesn't make much sense to distrist the stock market that much. After all alot of pension funds are existing, lots of companies or people who are self employed also have to keep their money safe. There is a lot of dependency on the share market and we are all bound to a certain degree of not being able to move it out asap.
Bitcoin can provide a way for e.g. Argentinians to get their money into other currencies when the government is actively preventing that through "standard" mechanisms. It's safe (er, safer) from that perspective.
If a government is preventing people from transferring money through standard mechanisms, it's only a matter of time until they prevent them from using crypto to do that. If the best use is circumventing the law, it isn't much of a currency at all
As someone from a country which has had its currency's value slashed to half 5 years ago, I genuinely don't see how Bitcoin is safe at all. If anything, gold or real estate are safer.
Sure, if it is somehow guaranteed that I won't wake up tomorrow seeing 1 BTC = $30 000, I could see your argument. But is that guaranteed?
I would also like to add that the swings that BTC takes are unpredictable (at least for the common people who would benefit from it being a safe storage for their wealth).
Yeah, if things are that bad, it could be viable.
Civil war is another viable scenario. However, one should also assess the situation properly if his/her country is in civil war. If things go bad and you have to escape, "safe passage for x amount of gold I have on hand" is more guaranteed than "safe passage for x BTC I promise to pay".
Not to mention, a $20 transaction fee in Argentina is devastating.
Your money is safe, your wealth is not. Taking the US as a reference, it is official government policy that if you store your wealth as money then it has a half life of 35 years.
> Bitcoin is very very volatile and just because it went up the last x years, doesn't make it stable or trustworthy.
I was sneaky in my wording - I'm a gold bug and think Bitcoin is worthless. Nevertheless, a rational person who was interested in bitcoin would probably note that whatever its bad points it is simply not subject to the sort of technical intervention that makes fiat untrustworthy.
Also, using gold as a reference, the unofficial policy half life looks more like 12 years. Using the M2, maybe 14 years.
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2014/september/wha...
The inflation rate is basically a proxy measure of wage growth [0]. The money printing hasn't going in to wages. It isn't appropriate to use the CPI to adjust wealth, because then you'd be mistaking asset price inflation for productive growth and putting money into things that don't earn real returns (ie, are grossly mismanaged).
[0] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2015/november/rela...
There are ways to do so that don't involve scenarios literally as absurd as _buying power plants_ to do random equations.
Perhaps some of that desire for a safe value store should be invested in that direction.
It's most useful for transactions or transfers that are illegal somewhere. A government can deprive a criminal of a house more easily than a password.
I suspect it was embraced by western governments because it facilitates capital flight from the developing world to the developed world - especially from China.
People aren't owed a risk-free return on thier capital and inflation is an incentive to invest. You're looking for a merged risk-free long-term store of value and medium of exchange. There's no reason to couple those two. It's actually counter-producive as they have different objectives. Money's job is to remain stable enough for as long as you hold it and cheap to transact. A long-term store of value's job is to go up.
Money is your short-term medium of exchange and lossy store of value. Which you use to buy long-term store of value. This is how capital is productively allocated while also creating a stable financial system.
The ability to adjust the money supply is crucial to reacting to shocks, to a changing population, and a changing economy. Taking away the knobs from the Fed removes their ability to create a stable monetary system in which business and individuals can operate.
If you actually look back in time you'll see under the gold standard, an attempt at this, boom/bust cycles were worse and more exaggerated. And much harder to control. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
This whole trope about the fed "stealing" 99% of money's value over the last 100 years is voodoo fringe economics. These are the people who used to hang out with megaphones at the corder of 5th and Market. Of course it went down, they told you it would, and they told you to buy something else with it.
Some governments are more trustworthy than others, and lots of people trust some governments. For example many people hold USD because they consider it a better store of value than their own country's currency.
> a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run
Somewhere like Switzerland would probably be quite trusted to run this.
Meanwhile Bitcoin is just a means to an end, getting rich quick. The fun doesn't happen because we have Bitcoin, but rather because we get rid of them for an unreasonable price.
I don’t know where you live in the world but where I live wages haven’t risen in line with the cost of food and shelter.
Leaving money in the bank is like working to buy a block of ice only to watch it melt away. To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive.
Isn't there a difference between currency in general being speculative to some degree and cryptocurrencies specifically, whose main value proposition is speculation?
What I was referring to was stocks since they have outperformed government bonds and gold the last few years. Take Amazon for instance. I don’t think the share price is equal to total assets minus total liabilities divided by number of shares. Amazon doesn’t issue dividends so why did the shareholders pay so much for the shares?
The ETs come back once all the minerals are refined and purified and neatly stacked.
FOMO, mining lotteries, and the guise of financial innovation are typical cover stories here. But all stocks and other publicly traded investments are basically making a bet that others will buy in after you do, raising the price higher. Most stock owners hope this very thing, though some stocks actually pay dividends on profits. The same is true with BTC with the added benefit of that novel mining lottery thing going for it.
> These are some of the questions among others which I think probably provide a better understanding of what is happening than the overly simplistic 'ponzi scam' explanation that has been repeated ad nauseam since its inception.
So what if the rich have too much money? That would explain a lot. It would explain why GME stock was shorted %140 of float.
It would also explain why politicians are so ineffective at regulation. If you were rich, would you want effective politicians? No. You would put your money behind the least effective politicians.
It would also explain why most institutions have become less trustworthy in the eye of the public, as big money has corrupted the system.
And finally it would explain the gold rush on BTC. Because they need new investment vehicles.
How would it explain that?
> It would also explain why politicians are so ineffective at regulation. If you were rich, would you want effective politicians? No. You would put your money behind the least effective politicians.
Just because you'd want it that way doesn't mean you did it. Motive, but where's means and method? https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-c...
> It would also explain why most institutions have become less trustworthy in the eye of the public, as big money has corrupted the system.
As opposed to in the past, where big money hadn't corrupted the system?
Pinky swear with me that you've seriously never heard of dark money. Koch brothers, Russian oligarchs. You've never ever heard of this? Really?
Stocks imply ownership of assets.
Sure, in terms of 'hoping that someone willy buy' is similar to BTC, but the valuation is completely different.
A stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation.
BTC is just a made up number. It's what people think the crowd will buy it for. Granted, this mechanism itself can be useful in some scenarios, but BTC itself isn't useful, at least not right now.
Unlike stocks which imply ownership of assets of a company, BTC is a pure hype machine, with the most hype given out by people who are already bought in.
If any product or service has ONLY people who use it hyping it up (e.g. BTC, and especially NFTs!) or only people who are NOT using it hyping it up (e.g. the myriad get-rich-quick schemes about some drop-shipping Amazon thing, real estate, or "hOw To BE aN eNTrePreNeUR" in a vague sense of the term (whatever the Gary V & friends stuff is); all those guys make money not by doing what they're telling you to do but by telling you what to do...), it's usually a bad sign.
It's not just a zero-sum game, making money off fellow investors who bet the stock will go one way when it goes the other.
I'm not sure that's the case any more. I mean we've seen billion dollar companies that just can't reach profitability.
The obvious difficulty there is determining the future earnings (and discount rate).
But that doesn't mean they don't exist - it's a rational premise of valuation.
Amazon is worth a lot because it's a giant machine with $350B in revenues - so investors can quibble over their earnings and 'how much that is worth' in future earnings - but it's based on those numbers.
BTC valuation is just whatever the crowd wants to pay.
A BTC is a magic number, and that's it.
Some times they do and some times they don't. That means it's not a fundamental property for stock valuation.
What was the rational premise of valuation behind Gamestop? There was one, but it had little or nothing to do with Gamestop's future earinings.
Sorry this is not true let me illustrate:
If there is a 9/10 chance that the profits will be $1, and a 1/10 chance that it will be $0, then we can value those profits in present terms at $0.9 (Edit: assuming no issues with cost of capital, time value of money etc. i.e. constant real dollars)
If we can reasonably calculate the profits and risk, then we can make a valuation.
GameStop was not a valuation, it was a stampede.
Also note that everything is subject to whims of speculation, fads etc. etc..
Yes, you can do that. You can argue that that's the smart way of doing it. But you don't have to and that's the point.
Elon musk tweets can manipulate the stock market almost at will. There is no profit analysis there, just the mob following Musk.
So again, future profits have nothing to do with a stock valuation. So times it does, but sometimes it doesn't. And if some times it doesn't, then it's not a fundamental property of it.
Nobody has to use anything to value a stock - including current profits. Therefore even current profits would not be 'a fundamental property'.
And of course, nobody has to use any data or logic when valuing absolutely any financial asset anywhere, ergo - the statement is completely pointless.
Again: we value stock based on it's estimated book value, future earnings and other assessments. We can argue a little bit about all of that, fine, that's why we let the market decide.
BTC is just a fantasy speculation.
Correct, so:
> A stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation.
Is incorrect. The correct sentence should be "Some times stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation."
> BTC is just a fantasy speculation.
Absolutely, jut like the stock of some companies.
It's just some weird rhetoric you're using to somehow show a parallel between BTC and Stocks.
The material issue here is that stocks can be rationally valued by determining the underlying value of the implied asset ownership - and mostly are - whereas BTC cannot.
That someone can pay $1 Trillion for a pair of shoes, a BTC, or an Amazon shares is not relevant.
Bitcoin is the opposite: what value it had (international transfers for Americans who live with one of the first world's worst banking systems) has been completely wiped out by the cost of transactions.
At the end of the day the hashes are valueless, no one has a product, or designs, or even any useful code.
1. It's a practical way to store value without the government destroying it by monetary emission.
2. People are free to speculate.
The solution to the first point is that governments should stop pulling the rug from under people's feet. Monetary emission should be predictable in the short, medium, and long term, or be tied to some real world indicator, like the cost of consumer goods. Just stop with this inflationary nonsense.
Problem 2 will be partially solved by time. Relative price changes in Bitcoin are reduced each cycle, so by the year 2030 the incentive to speculate in the short term will be much smaller. We will see it more as a long term investment. Another solution is to deregulate other markets so that we can freely speculate in them and stop putting as much attention to Bitcoin, but I don't think politicians are very eager to do that, and it could also have some negative consequences.
> 2. People are free to speculate.
So it's a store of value that's destroyable by speculation. That's, if anything, worse than the US Dollar.
You can based the entire world monetary economy on a single point of failure like this.
But the core point bb88 was making is that it can serve at most one of those two goals: “store of value” and “good for speculation” are mutually exclusive. Something can be neither, nothing can be both.
> we can freely speculate
Right, because that worked oh so well for Long Term Capital Management, or the 2008 Housing Crisis, or the Great Depression, or Dutch Tulips, or...
This libertarian, nay, Austrian, fantasy that if only we would deregulate everything, these incredible damaging boom/bust cycles and disappear and everything would be smoothed out are a discredited zombie theory that never dies.
It hasn't been attempted and I think deregulation / decentralization of the economy has good chances of getting rid of boom/bust cycles.
Without a central bank playing with credit you wouldn't have boom / bust cycles: what's more likely is that you'll find smaller players doing boom / bust cycles in different industries with far less damaging effects.
I sympathise with the libertarian ideas behind BTC, but it's also the most inefficient and power hungry way of reaching the goal. This is a political problem and we need to solve it politically, not technically.
That's literally exactly how it works right now lol.
> Freedom to speculate.
Have you seen the options market.
And price inflation, which is the relevant metric (as opposed to monetary inflation) in the context of a claim that the government destroys value, has been extremely predictable for 20 years.
This comes up again and again in bitcoin discussions. Money supply has to grow for price stability and to avoid deflation. This also applied even when there was gold convertibility.
What exactly is your issue with a growing money supply?
The primary issue is that simply sitting on a dragon's hoard of money should entitle me to a bigger share of the world's wealth, as time goes on, rather than a smaller share.
Why bigger, exactly? What is the justification?
It's basically becoming a unregulated comodity that big money institutions get to gamble with because there is just nowhere to put the money on the market right now. If bitcoin and crypto (ETH, etc.) was just a money dumping speculation comodities I wouldn't even bother thinking about it - but it's causing realworld problems (eg. hardware disruptions) and it's going to get worse and worse.
So I'm in favor of preventing institutional investors in crypto in some form, but unfortunately it's not going to happen - too many individual interests behind it at this point and nobody gives a fuck about the overall stability.
For civilisation to survive we need renewables, electric cars/trucks/busses, nuckear power olants, grid scale storage and fusion power or hydrogen.
There are only two scenarion -there things are built and our society rewards them - or in the alternative money in your bank ceases to exist, along with moth of economy
Since the global saving glut (1), the best question to ask of crazy asset valuations is not "does it reflect the fundamental value?", but "does the money have anywhere else to go?"
"People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it"
We understand it quite well thank you (and it's not new!) - far far more often than not, it's the BTC proponents who don't really grasp what it is, and it's not the 'technical aspects' that are the most salient factors.
Bitcoin creates no value.
It's 'profitable' to an individual, but not the system as a whole - and because it has negative externalizations in the form of CO2 emissions etc. - it's actually a net negative.
Making magic digital baseball cards and trading them does not help us make roads, bridges, iPhones, software, drugs, vaccines, clothing, homes - it just makes all of that a little bit harder actually.
Much like residents of Easter Island using all their resources competing to make Giant Heads. Those heads may have mad some people very powerful, they did not help them grow food, make boats.
If all BTC mining stopped right now, not a single thing would change, other than the price of electricity would be a little cheaper in some places.
BTC isn't going to 'end the world' but the energy consumption is a really negative artifact of this purely speculative activity.
There's not so much wrong with people wanting to exchange digital baseball cards if they want to do that - fine - but with the externalizes it's a problem.
Bitcoin creates a "source of truth" which has lots of value for people. For example, working at an organization where everyone wants to cooperate to deliver a product, figuring out who should own, update, and report on sources of truth takes lots of effort. But those sources of truth within organizations help people coordinate their collective efforts.
Out here in the regular world where we cannot trust each other, having a ready-made source of truth has lots of value because it lets people all over the cooperate who otherwise could not.
And of course, there are a ton of ways of having a 'source of truth'.
So BTC is not a good currency, and it's not a very good store of value either. But we knew that going into it, because it's obvious from the start. It's just a speculative instrument.
If you get paid in a regular currency, then you're good. If you don't want to hold it, than buy an ETF or real estate or whatever and you good.
Central banks have monopolized money and obliterated the concept of sound money when they began manipulating the interest rate. They allowed fractional reserve banking, where you can give out money you don't have. They created and spent trillion of dollars they didn't have to prop up markets through quantitative easing.
And now you have housing markets and stock markets in bubbles. Inflation that is inevitably coming.
Mortgage rates only ever go down to support the housing market.
http://www.fedprimerate.com/mortgage_rates_chart-graph.htm
Treasury yields only ever go down to support the stocks market.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2016/10-year-treasury-bond-rate-...
Debt to GDP ratio only ever goes up:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
Ask yourself why this is happening, and how we return to sound money.
That is not value.
You can do that with Gold.
We could do that with an arbitrary fixed currency that someone invents.
BTC 'has not value' because it can't be used for anything - as a currency it's useless, and as a store of value it's next to useless (there are better stores of value).
Your comments about 'money' don't necessarily relate:
1) Currency is not supposed to be a hard store of value. It's there to grease the economy, not for you to hold large quantities. If you want to store value there are plenty of ways to do that.
2) Inflexible currency i.e. 'hard money' makes no sense, and that's why nobody uses it.
3) You say 'inflation is coming' - well if we have such bad currency, why hasn't inflation already taken root in the last 20 years? It really has not.
Again - BTC creates zero value, there's no point to it - it can't be used as currency and it's not a better a store of value than rare comic books.
Yes, we had gold as a monetary standard for quite some time.
1) Currency is not supposed to be a hard store of value. It's there to grease the economy, not for you to hold large quantities. If you want to store value there are plenty of ways to do that.
Money is supposed to be sound. Your notion that currency should not be a hard store of value is a new one, an idea created to support fiat. From first principles, money is a store of energy (creative work, physical work), which is then utilized for efficient exchange of goods and services. Money is not a tool for "greasing the economy", this was only possible when governments confiscated gold and declared all money to be paper that they controlled. Furthermore, buying stocks/houses/gold etc. is indeed a way of escaping USD into assets. However, someone else has to be willing to take that USD. It will still exist, and whoever holds it will be losing value over time. It is a problem when your base asset becomes toxic and no one wants it.
2) Inflexible currency i.e. 'hard money' makes no sense, and that's why nobody uses it.
We used gold and other rare metals for thousands of years. It was literally the global standard for trade.
3) You say 'inflation is coming' - well if we have such bad currency, why hasn't inflation already taken root in the last 20 years? It really has not.
The USD's buying power has fallen dramatically over time. Inflation has been very visible in home prices and stock prices.
'Sources of Truth' are a commodity.
There are any number of ways to do that.
There's no reason to have a $50B source of truth.
And FYI there is no value merely in a 'source of truth' it has to be put to use in some way, and BTC has zero uses.
As long as we are having this kind of "discussion" I can see why fantasies about leaving earth and colonizing space are popular.
> People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?"
Where do I invest that cash? Equities are obviously overvalued as an asset class, and treasuries return basically zero, so people are buying up real estate and crypto instead, and using some cash on the side to gamble in the options market. But this really only exacerbates the wealth inequality problem.
Carbon offset tokens, or some token that will increase in value when cryptos global electricity usage goes up, and offsets with renewable projects. If it were funded by governments in billions of dollars it would make an impact, and everyone could participate in funding the token.
The problem must be addressed in altering the fossil/non-fossil energy mix. You are not going to control the financial incentive to mine, or kindly ask ppl to use less electricity please. Carbon taxes have been proposed but you would have to get that done globally, they are certainly working on that from a political perspective but you never know there are always resistance to a new tax.
Literal whataboutism.
Bitcoin, in part, is a marker for loss of trust in governments. Trust in their motives and/or ability to responsibly steward currencies.
It sounds like you're saying that bitcoin is like a hedge against trust in government. A sort of financial measurement of conspiracy theorism. This is a fascinating perspective, but I'm not sure who is financially exposed to that form of risk. It seems like a great vehicle for speculation ("do I think people will trust institutions more or less in the near future?") but not much else. I'm sure there's someone who stands to lose money if public faith in government erodes. but its difficult to imagine that investor
Most university loans are federally backed. All home loans are understood to be federally backed since '08 and most low income home loans are officially federally insured as well.
US Treasury bonds which make up a significant portion of pensions and corporate debt are essentially federally insured as well since it is know that the Fed will simply print the dollars needed to cover those debts.
So far higher education, home ownership, pensions, and corporate debt; and those are just the financial exposure. There is not a single financial instrument that doesn't in some way depend on these financial bases working properly other than crypto and perhaps some commodities.
I think the biggest hurdle is that it is a tragedy of the commons: the entire market needs it, not just a single country...
Or more likely they’re outcompeted by anyone who doesn’t have to pay the tax, such as miners using green energy or in a jurisdiction without the tax.
A wealth tax on proof-of-work currencies would discourage legitimate businesses (that don’t cheat on taxes) from holding them.
https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/bitcoin/tesla-up-1-billion-...
Paolo Ardoino would like a word with you.
Bottom line is: Most of the world has no carbon price, and the places that do have one (e.g. the EU ETS) there are so many loopholes that it is not very effective. It's not that it isn't worth trying to do better, but a carbon price is definitely not a short term solution.
So I'm inclined to think whoever proposes a carbon price as "the one true solution" really doesn't want a solution at all.
Nonsense. It's lobbyism. In more drastic terms, corruption. Plain and simple.
We can have this "discussion" once significant industrial nations have implemented a carbon tax. Until then, it's all just excuses. Similar to all the bunch of nonsense people come up with why they can't start working out today or save money today or go to bed right now instead of after watching the next episode of whatnot-series.
I get the concerns for the carbon issue of Bitcoin but I don't see why the solution should be governments profiting more from it.
If an alien civilization invaded earth and imposed a carbon tax, and took all of the proceeds back to their own planet, then we would still be better off.
If it were banned in the US/EU the price would crash.
Most major BTC backers have a lot of money and they can't be involved in something that is illicit.
For regular citizens, it's just not worth the risk.
That leaves quite a lot of people to play with it, but not enough to maintain the price.
Without constant headlines, Tesla's involvement, Coinbase IPO headlines etc. the price would suffer quite a lot.
It would maintain some price but not so much that people would be buying energy sources.
If there are any Governments out there who desire to fight climate change - and it seems like there are a reasonable amount - then illegalising proof-of-work coins seems like a reasonable step at least from an energy use perspective.
I think we need a carbon quota. Something grounded in the hard reality, not a tax you can bypass or finance indefinitely with a money printing machine (edit: or bitcoin :).
It doesn't work like that. The consensus algorithm targets 1 block mined every 10 minutes. If the amount of energy expended goes up (i.e. blocks are mined more frequently) then the difficulty increases to counteract it. If the rate of block production decreases, then the difficulty decreases to counteract it.
This page has more information: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
(I've used "difficulty" here in the English-language way. Confusingly, "difficulty" is kind of backwards in Bitcoin - the "difficulty" is a number that a mined block hash must be below - it gets more "difficult" to mine a block if the "difficulty" number is lower. Maybe it should be called "easiness" instead of "difficulty").
This is something that I'm not sure many people actually understand. Because in the physical world, increasing your energy input into mining will result in more output of the resource you're mining. Adding another excavator to your mine doesn't reduce the effectiveness of every other excavator in the world.
It just turns greed into security. As long as it's profitable to mine, it's practically impossible for someone to do a 51% attack.
>I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere.
Ok then lets end 2 biggest industries that pollute the planet the most. Construction and food production.
We can live in environmentally friendly uniform grey boxes and eat protein bars.
Then by all means lets ban video games which are an extreme waste of electricity polluting the atmosphere for no good reason.
You see how this reasonning can go?
US co2 generation on the grid is about 0.5kg per kwH, so would add 10c/kWh.
That means that your PS5, using 200 Watts, costs an extra 2c per hour to play -- on top of the existing 15c/hr for normal electric costs.
A single bitcoin transaction of 780kWh would cost $78 and a transatlantic flight about $300, or $1.20 to a gallon of gas.
Make the tax $2k/ton, it raises your PS5 cost from 15c/hr to 25c/hr and a bitcoin transaction to $780 and take transatlantic flights back to the cost of the 70s
That sounds fine to me. The energy used by a PS5 is insignificant.
> You see how this reasonning can go?
Yes I do, it sounds really exciting.
The money raised would be spent on carbon reduction (which gives a financial incentive to Brazil to not chop down rainforest, or pays for other forms of carbon capture), and disincentivises carbon usage. Brilliant.
True. If BTCUSD goes to $1m AND you have strict global regulation banning carbon energy, it will be a powerful incentive to harness green energy, which will be good for mankind in the long run.
The best argument against it is: it's very hard to enforce it on everybody internationally, and if one country adopts it unilaterally, then production just moves to another country (making everyone worse off - same amount of pollution, but the production is presumably less economically efficient).
The second best argument against it is "the tax shouldn't be $x/ton, it should be $0.5x, which is a more accurate reflection of the external costs".
A distant third, but very effective in practice, is "the carbon tax is good, but it shouldn't apply to Special Interest Area X, because of these social/political/historical reasons..."
These aren't completely unsolvable problems, and people do try. But if your question was genuine, I hope you now see that there are some reasonable arguments not to just do this tomorrow.
Given how much lobbying I suspect there is, 3 probably isn’t all that distant of a concern. Especially in older industries, say railroads or trucking, I understand there could be a lot of contention.
And as others mention, I think there needs to be a separation of taxation by segments of polluting activities. Would burning fuel in a combustion engine count as taxable energy production? Only power plants? What about agriculture, construction, material production?
So tax imports (including the carbon cost of shipping)
It would likely require agreement between the US and EU to shift enough of the global consumer market to actually care, but with Poland and Texas that doesn't seem likely.
Wrt your first question: The best argument against making energy more expensive is the same argument as it was 100 years ago:
If you use energy now, you build a more prosperous civilization for the future. Your grandchildren may have to deal with a warmer climate, but they will be much better able to do so than if they were more poor.
This argument stands and falls with your evaluation of the benefits of using more energy, the costs of a warmer climate and how you weigh these against each other.
The only thing necessary would be to cancel ASAP any public subsidies for fossil-powered generation of electricity (which is a measure that is overdue anyways).
IMO BTC existence is possibly good as it raises demand for cheap energy (and currently green energy is cheapest it seems), it's also good as forcing function for fiat.
As opposed to the rest of the economy, which only demands expensive energy?
It would be pretty funny though, if the world's various governments decide BTC is an existential threat to their legitimacy and institute a carbon tax to destroy it.
No. It increases demand for energy period. Increasing demand makes energy more expensive, not less.
Like, in reality miners will use whatever power is cheapest, and solar is currently the cheapest. They are also extremely* agile and can shift location/power source in a handful of days which leads me to believe that they are currently driving adoption of solar, BUT: with miners being framed as The Big Threat, we might be able to finally use that perception as a crowbar to remove incentives for energy sources that pollute and even impose heavy taxes on those sources and end up completely digging out the oil/coal industries.
Win Win Win as far as I’m concerned.
*Apparently unless you can buy an entire power plant
What we need a get rid of all the print and spend politicians. The reason for the raise of bitcoin is a direct response to the trillions and trillions of dollars just printed out of thin air.
It is insane how much grocery cost nowadays. I was at the supermarket last week and was looking at lobster, I thought it was listed for $6.99/lb for those 1 to 1.25 lb size, but when I got closed, it was $16.99/lb. It is crazy. Blue Crab at $5/each.
A handy rule of thumb, for gasoline: A gallon of gas produces 20lbs of CO2. A ton is 2000lbs. If a carbon capture technology costs X dollars per ton, it costs X cents per gallon.
Most carbon capture technologies will be in the $15 to $85 per ton range when they scale.
Therefore, a $1/gallon gasoline tax (and equivalent for coal, etc), would be enough to solve climate change.
Who cares if you’re using energy to mine Bitcoin? Or if you’re using it to play video games? Or to run the AC all day?
If it you’re internalizing the cost of any emissions, then you’ll use those resources efficiently.
What probably should happen is to make converting from any cryptocurrency to major world currencies a crime. I have no delusions that this will halt activity in this sector entirely, but it will make it reasonably difficult to make any substantial money this way without raising some serious eyebrows.
You tariff their imports and apply economic sanctions.
> What probably should happen is to make converting from any cryptocurrency to major world currencies a crime.
Why cryptocurrencies? There are plenty of things that pollute far more.
Speaking of which, can you quantify what things pollute more? At any rate, I get the feeling we are going to be talking past each other and wasting time and energy (heh) on this conversation.
We don't need a world with more Luddites trying to outlaw math. The future will be secured and cryptographically verified, and there's not anything you can do to stop it.
And so what if my post history is mostly anti-cryptocurrency. This is a position I hold to strongly, and someone needs to give the other side so these four walls aren't filled with infinite circle jerks.
Shouting into the void may feel good, but does not change hearts and minds.
And bawolff... my aim is to at least give those reading from the sidelines some things to think about. I am sure as heck unable to convince a hardcore proponent of Bitcoin to change in a 15-20 minute back and forth, not because my points are necessarily bad, but because human beings are a stubborn lot (I know I can be too!)
I think I did OK overall. I know some of my comments were reacted to negatively, but that's fine. I don't expect agreement easily.
And are you under the impression that you're the only voice that people on the sidelines are going to hear? You need to understand the counter arguments so you can adapt your own arguments to counter them. You can't defeat an enemy you don't understand.
Calm down.
> Speaking of which, can you quantify what things pollute more?
You're all over the comments trying to pin the blame for CO2 emissions on the the existence of PoW cryptocurrencies. But if you stop and think about the problem for more than 5 seconds, you'll realize that it's the CO2 emissions, not cryptocurrencies, that are the problem. They were a problem before cryptocurrencies, and would continue to be a problem even if cryptocurrencies didn't exist.
I think you'll find that many cryptocurrency fans are also green-energy fans, and would love to live in a world where all energy was 100% renewable. Like, no one here wants to burn more fossil fuels.
First, let's assume for a moment that this February 2021 CNBC source [1] is correct in that Bitcoin mining produces 36.94 megatons of CO2 per year. The original source the CNBC article cited can be found here: [3] (which currently pegs Bitcoin at 47.62 megatons/year).
According to the EPA, the US economy alone produced 6,558 megatons of CO2 [2] in 2019 (i.e. under pre-COVID emissions).
So, Bitcoin's CO2 annualized output as of February 2021 was 0.5% of the US economy's CO2 output from 2 years ago.
This works out to be:
* 5.6% of the US agricultural sector emissions, OR
* 4.3% of US commercial and residential building emissions (heating, cooling, waste), OR
* 2.4% of the US manufacturing industry, OR
* 2.2% of all US electricity generation, OR
* 1.9% of all US transportation emissions
According to this article from 2016 published in Environmental Research Letters [4], the US could save a combined 110 megatons of CO2 emissions simply by using better building insulation, since it would reduce heating/cooling energy expenditure. That's about 3x the Bitcoin CO2 emission rate I quoted above.
So, @SwimSwimHungry, I'll ask once again: why the outrage over cryptocurrencies? Can I expect you to have 3x the outrage over bad building insulation?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor...
[2] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[3] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
[4] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/03...
Also, the issue of bad building insulation does not in any manner invalidate my concern with the growing problem of Bitcoin now and in the future. Bad building insulation can also be fixed relatively easily, and the incentive for a fix would be an energy cost savings to the property owner. Bitcoin is the exact opposite of this. In order for the network to remain secure, it must burn copious amounts of energy.
That is my general outrage summarized there. And that doesn't even begin my issues pertaining to lack of user friendliness surrounding cryptocurrencies (not your keys, not your coins), how it suckers people into something they don't fully understand (people see $$$ and throw money at it without quantifying the proper risks - see the crashes from 2013 and 2017 and all the run on exchanges that left people empty handed), the absolutely awful existence of ransomware, and the constant tape painting with tethers (which by the way, we still can't get a proper audit on them and they are just about as opaque as the Fed is with regards to the Federal Reserve).
I believe I've made my points at this juncture. We may have to simply agree to disagree otherwise.
That's just your moral judgement. The people who use and make a living off of Bitcoin certainly don't see it as a waste.
> In order for the network to remain secure, it must burn copious amounts of energy.
First, this does not preclude PoW from existing in a world powered 100% renewable energy. Second, I've already outlined a way to economically penalize PoW miners for using fossil fuels here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26829269.
Please do not make the mistake of believing that your (rightful) concerns about CO2 emissions from PoW are being overlooked, and please do not make the mistake of thinking that they cannot be addressed. PoW does not require burning fossil fuels to work.
Also, to your point about greenifying Bitcoin, I just believe the assumption that bitcoin will just move over 100% to green energy sources is naive at best, and considering that is energy that isn't being used for activities I would argue as more productive (like powering homes, schools, electric cars), I just feel that it's a real opportunity loss.
I just think it's not as likely to happen. Maybe if nuclear power really starts to take off again, there might be hope, as the sheer amount of Gigawatts that such plants can produce could easily outpace other green energy technologies. Sadly we have some anti-nuclear sentiment that blocks progress in building new plants quickly.
I, uh, never said that. I don't see Bitcoin as a currency at all.
> That said, gold technically exists already to meet this in my humble opinion as a proper hedge.
No thank you. Gold-mining is way more ecologically disastrous. If Bitcoin replaces gold, the environment will be better off for it -- at least you can mine Bitcoin with nothing more than solar panels and wind farms.
> I just believe the assumption that bitcoin will just move over 100% to green energy sources is naive at best
One way or another, the world is going to need to move all its energy production to 100% renewables, or humanity is going to be in for a world of hurt. But, this is true with or without cryptocurrencies.
I stand corrected.
>No thank you. Gold-mining is way more ecologically disastrous. If Bitcoin replaces gold, the environment will be better off for it -- at least you can mine Bitcoin with nothing more than solar panels and wind farms.
Well there's just one problem. You need gold as a component in the creation of systems that mine bitcoin. Oops! So we are kinda stuck with gold mining, which we need to do, just so bitcoin can be mined, which we don't have to do. With that in mind, why not just skip to just straight up owning gold?
>One way or another, the world is going to need to move all its energy production to 100% renewables, or humanity is going to be in for a world of hurt. But, this is true with or without cryptocurrencies.
On this point, I hope you are right. We do need to get off of coal and gas as soon as we can.
Moving gold from one country to another country on your is difficult.
Storing gold properly without getting robbed is difficult.
Try moving $5million dollar worth gold and you'll realize the advantage which bitcoin brings.
If I read the price correctly that would be something like 80kg. I can't be bothered to dig deeper, but that would be just a few gold bars, I suspect. Not very hard to handle, IMO...
Very badly. Not saying your wrong, just that you're really bad at arguing.
You asked a question "Can you quantify what things pollute more?" and when the other guy gave you a list, you responded by saying it doesn't matter as the important thing is the purpose of the pollution.
Unless it just occured to you between typing the two responses that some types of pollution are the result of more useful work tha others, that is some bad faith argumentation. Asking a question you think is irrelavent just so you can later move the goal posts, is just silly.
I have no delusions of grandeur about convincing those entrenched in specific camps over to my side. Just the hope that those who are watching from the sidelines can see what I'm saying and hopefully they can take something away from it that is helpful and productive.
To the list of polluting concerns, I didn't say that it "doesn't matter", and that seems to be putting words in my mouth, if I'm being honest. In fact, to his point on building insulation, I noted that there can in fact be an incentive to correct this with a net savings, and we can encourage those around us to make such corrections wherever it is in their power to do so. Bitcoin from my view incentivizes the opposite kind of behavior. That's what I'm hopefully trying to get across.
I don't expect you to agree with my positions, but hopefully to at least understand my perspective.
• https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/climate-change/ene...
As I've tried to argue with others before: I doubt climate change and energy waste are at the top of the agenda of these people so wound up against Bitcoin's energy waste otherwise we'd see a lot more people
• switching to a vegetarian, let alone vegan, diet
• using a bike instead of car for doing groceries
• taking the train instead of a plane for holidays
• voting for radical green parties
• unplug their fucking electronics
Whether you realize it or not, you can want to not burn fossil fuels, but if there's a profit to be made doing it, believe me, enough miners will bend their morality to make a profit. You act like everyone involved in this experiment has pure intentions. I'd argue that's untrue.
And how is making points to the contrary of yours copping a hissie-fit? I'm just having a disagreement. Not everyone shares your world view.
FYI this is the worst thing one can say during a discussion. The effect, regardless of intent, is always to annoy the other.
Combined with the further-down "Here, let me Google that for you.", it seems likely that that was the intended effect. It's pretty clear that negative value to the discussion was provided by both comments, in addition to the (subjective) dismissive attitude.
The problem at hand is that CO2 emissions exist and must be curtailed. This thread comes from a certain individual's repeated refusal to separate addressing electricity generation's CO2 emissions from moralistic opinions about the downstream use of that electricity. As if Mother Nature cared about our moralizing.
But thanks anyway for the tone-policing. Really adds to the discussion.
Even if all the miners were running on entirely green energy, there's an opportunity cost. That green energy could be used to power homes and we could shut down coal power plants. I don't care that you bought 9,000 solar panels to power your mining farm, because that's 9,000 solar panels that could have been hooked up to the grid.
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade. I find cryptocurrencies interesting and would like for them to exist, but we're in a terrible position to be pissing away electricity right now. In the scheme of ways to use electricity, Bitcoin is a pretty frivolous use too. The electricity consumption is just so outsized compared to the actual physical gain (and I'm not talking about money made from speculating).
If I were the ruler of the world, I'd give it a transaction tax that was proportional to the percentage of load generation that isn't renewable. If 40% of our energy is still dirty, then there's a 40% transaction tax. If we can get that down to 5%, then there's only a 5% tax. I don't see a reason to ban them, we just need to cut power consumption and thus CO2 emissions wherever we can.
I'm calling for people to separate the problem of CO2 emissions from moral arguments about the nature of downstream electricity consumption. Mother Nature doesn't give a single flying f*ck about our moralizing; the CO2 emissions are just as bad either way.
Both are effective at fixing the emissions problem. Both are also extremely oppressive and unjust.
Wiping out humans and curtailing bitcoin are not at all equitable. One is unconscionable. The other is the right thing to do, in my opinion.
Lol.. and that will stop all crypto-world currency trading? Just like how making drugs illegal stopped all drug trade?
Disincentivized enough that nobody would bother adding it to their retirement strategy or use it out in the open. The dark web will continue to do their own thing.
And yet we've done this for other pollutants. CFC's aren't destroying the ozone layer anymore.
Yes, this is hard policy to get right. So what? We have the entire world to figure this out and we are on a timer. Any first attempt will have flaws and loopholes and need to be improved over time. But this is just an excuse for people to avoid acting.
We need to do something. A carbon tax is the least extreme solution that has any chance of functioning.
As far as the difficulty stays high enough to keep the network secure the markets don't have a reason to care.
Just look at Europe and the effect of the carbon tax there. I don't have links (sorry), but there are lots of studies "proving" that that makes for a more efficient and optimized market aligned with the desired outcome.
You can try to play a game of whack a mole by taxing and regulating individual activities hoping to reduce carbon as a second order effect, or you can just target the root problem.
There's will always be another wasteful use of carbon intensive energy so long as carbon intensive energy remains cheap.
The point of the tax is to make the carbon price correct so as to incentivize correct usage across all domains.
Because carbon emissions do the same amount damage whether it's the result of bitcoin mining or running a hospital.
Carbon taxes increase costs for everything.
Everything that produces carbon, which is exactly the point.
Should we increase the cost of say, hospitals
To the extent that they are significant polluters, yes. Trying to micromanage "good" and "bad" emissions just encourages exploiting loopholes. (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cafe-lo...)
I'm pretty sure we can all afford yet one more tax.
And if you have some specific application that you might want to be not affected you might make special tax breaks for it.
It's only possible now because clean energy ia cheaper (but still cannot compete in emergency situations), so we should invest in fission and fusion research
EDIT: I'm in favor of carbon tax BTW, we can afford it now and will incentivise investment in green tech more
Bitcoin is certainly not a scapegoat. It's a massive problem and, largely, a symptom of human greed that must be put in check.
If your are referring to the wasted hardware, then sure, but once the equipment is in place, Bitcoin mining itself does in fact have electricity as the only input.
For example would you say that smartphones are wasteful because they allow us to communicate more frequently than we could before, thus they don't strictly replace an existing consumption of energy?
That seems like a silly interpretation to me. Of course our energy demands rise as we develop and use new technologies. It's because we are doing more things with them!
Also, as I mentioned in another part of the thread, I don't think it's obvious that cryptocurrencies won't replace any existing usages of energy.
If you are saying that it doesn't have intrinsic value, then yes of course that is true, but I don't see how that makes it useless (unless you think cash is also useless)
Some possible issues with proof-of-stake though are: Does the ability to borrow money to stake (since you get it back after exiting) make it too easy to conduct an attack? And, since you can't stake if you have no coins, will it be too easy for entrenched stakers to control the supply later on?
The current increase in value and ramping up of energy use is not due to an increase in the usefulness of the coin, but instead on a renewed interest in the game of hot potato that is speculation.
The international space station isn't replacing anything, i still think its valuable.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_...
How in the world do you say this? It's made significant progress in replacing both of these things. Just because it hasn't 100% eliminated all extant currencies and banks doesn't mean it's not making meaningful progress in that direction.
The failure is governments subsidize so much energy production they effectively take the market out of the equation. Remove government incentives for cheap power at all costs and then you'll see the action of the market.
Current HN headline: "Bitcoin miners are buying power plants"
Actual headline: "A New Threat to New York’s Clean Energy Goals: Bitcoin Mining"
It's trying to imply that buying power plants is some hot new trend, but the article is about a single crazy dude in New York buying a single plant.
Which?
Surely this cannot last. This kind of outsize profit ought to be bringing online enough new mining capacity to increase the block difficulty until that margin erodes away - is it the worldwide chip shortage preventing that from happening?
The same can be said for Ethereum. The shortage of GPUs is preventing the difficulty to raise fast enough. The profit margin has been like 5-10x the electricity cost for the last few months. If you bought a RTX 3080/3090 it would have paid itself and the electricity by now.
yes, feel free to start a new fabrication line to arbitrage away the margin lol.
Edited to add: That's roughly 60 tons of CO2 emissions per BTC mined. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
The other aspect here is let's say you're a speculator and you think the price of BTC can go up another 50x or roughly $1M/BTC. Then even spending any amount less than the BTC spot price now is a bargain.
Speculation > silicon constrained mining > power & capital constrained mining
I believe the silicon constraints would instantly relax as soon as speculation falls into line based on how much hardware everyone has been stacking up on lately.
At the end of they day, the cost of energy & your ability to keep the machines operational will be the final constraint. This is the one that the long investors should anticipate. I.e. "How do I mitigate power cost in a power-cost-constrained market".
Right now at current market prices, owning an entire power plant to run your operation is folly. In a few more years when a delta of 2c/KWh is make-or-break on profitability, it makes perfect sense.
Who knew! Of course this won’t be a problem until it is.
IMO workers are beeing ripped off by finance class and recently quite hard. So I support some kind of better money.
Beside this higher land & property ownership tax and reduced work hours might help IMO.
1. Do nothing, public gets angry.
2. Make bitcoin, or its mining, illegal. However, what is the criteria? All blockchains? Should google be illegal too? Both are just a digital product that the public wants.
3. Tax CO2 production by data centers, that might have a chance it can be coordinated broadly between nations, there is enough money there to tax, and bitcoin adds some urgency.
While doubtful CO2 can be taxed globally, without coordination, big companies play governments against each other.
If a solution requires a "line" or makes no sense at the extreme, it's most likely not a solution.
It's all just accounts with balances.
[1] https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/compa...
Multiple providers are working like this in Europe at least. They partner with many local solar/hydro/wind producers. It's approximate of course they can't predict exactly the amount required in advance but in the grand scheme of things it works by supply/demand mechanics..
You could trace btc to a reward allocated to a miner on a renewable electricity contract. Then you know an equivalent amount of energy used to mine these coins was produced sustainably.
Take wind turbines: they've found that harvesting wind actually increases the temperature in an area. Do enough of this, coupled with channeling the energy into heat-producing machines, are we sure this isn't gong to contribute to global warming at scale? Not to mention the harm to avian wildlife, as the turbines kill 5 birds per year each on average.
Next you have the externalized costs of building the infrastructure. Producing the wind turbines, the power plant, and the GPUs. Is all of that really getting offset?
I'm very optimistic about the potential for cryptocurrency to change the world, but I'd like that to be for the better. And when we have emerging proof-of-stake platforms that have much less of an impact on the planet because they don't by design rely on energetically inefficient ways to secure their networks, I really don't understand how we can argue that proof-of-work cryptocurrencies have any place in the future.
That's some anti-renewable energy FUD I hadn't seen before... Yes, we're sure that won't cause global warming. Wind turbine operation doesn't produce greenhouse gases or meaningful change the Earth's albedo.
Also, I assume wind turbines cause some emissions during manufacturing. Not sure going gang busters and making a ton to power bitcoin mining would be great for the planet.
Yes, this is exactly what I'm talking about. If we're building wind turbines to replace energy usage that serves a purpose, that's wonderful! Building new infrastructure for energy production so that we can pass it to a bunch of computers that piss it away is still wasteful. Even if it's less wasteful than burning coal to power those computers.
Bitcoin and proof-of-work were revolutionary, but now that we have better cryptocurrency technology, we should be moving away from it.
Your misunderstanding seems possibly intentional. I'm very much in favour of renewable energy as an alternative to nonrenewable energy. I'm just not in favour of wasting energy for very little purpose.
Build solar/wind energy to replace fossil fuels? Great! Obviously I'm in favour of that. Built an insane amount of infrastructure for producing renewable energy so that we can piss it away? That seems incredibly wasteful!
Even if renewable energy is much better, there are still externalities to producing energy.
The authors note very clearly that isn't a global rise in temperature and would be offset by the effects of GHG reduction. Furthermore the wind farm cost is "one time". The effects of GHGs are cumulative.
See:
https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/false-claim-wind-tur...
What I'm saying is that it's still wasteful, and not cost-free if we're producing insane amounts of energy that don't need to be produced in the first place.
It is easier to argue that the bitcoin energy expenditure should be turned off. That would lower energy demand and prices and we're now in a regime where that makes running carbon-burning plants less attractive and they'd get turned off while any renewables that bitcoin is using would become available.
And if I could snap my fingers and replace all the GHGs with wind I would and I wouldn't care about your concerns. And you're trying to argue that I can't make that comparison but I absolutely am. The issues you're bringing up aren't 1% of the problem that we have with GHGs so worrying about perfect renewable energy or overall dropping demand is so much less right now than worrying about getting off GHGs. The localized 0.5C surface warming of wind in that paper just isn't worth talking about at this point.
But it isn't totally perfect! Surely you must agree?
No. I. Do. Not. Care. About. Perfection.
This is what I've been arguing the whole time. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to replace more impactful energy production with sustainable energy production. I'm saying we shouldn't be using energy on something as wasteful as proof-of-work, when we can have blockchain technology without it, because that energy production doesn't come without impact no matter how much the proof-of-work supporters and beneficiaries try to greenwash it.
The question is, how do wind turbines ensure that more energy radiates from space onto the earth? I consider this scenario highly unlikely.
There might be some positive impact by spurring more innovation in renewable research but I don't think it's possible to make such an analysis in a 2 paragraph Hacker News comment.
What you really want instead is a non-mined cryptocurrency.
So what’s the deal here? Is it the need for consistent base load electricity that caused them to choose coal?
> ...drawing power from the plant’s 106-megawatt generator now fueled by natural gas.
Please put tulip bubble in new context.
EDIT: this is to say, renewable tech production is still following a learning curve (https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth)
(This is in answer to both you and tshaddox.)
This will have to happen regardless of whether or not cryptocurrency exists.
In order for Bitcoin to every achieve any long-term viability, in my opinion, it needs to stabilize its pricing. Practically speaking, the route to do that is through a combination of supply chain pricing and credit markets.
Pricing energy in Bitcoin (which is really all this is doing) is an interesting step towards the supply chain problem. This power plant, in all likelihood, would be happy to sell the power to another bidder if the price per Joule is higher than the expected price per Bitcoin per Joule. The natural next step is to just price electricity directly in Bitcoin.
The question then becomes how viable it is to move down the chain -- pricing natural gas or coal in Bitcoin, and putting pricing pressure on the supply chain for more complex energy products (turbines, solar panels, etc.) to match this pricing. If this is feasible (and that's a big "if") then there is a chance that we start to flip the equation -- energy prices in dollars are simply too volatile and Bitcoin becomes a standard option for international settlement.
Remember, fusors are losers. I wanna see lattice fusion with metallic hydrogen cores embedded in 3D printed diamonds or I'm out.
I've got a bit of a simulation, not quite totally ready yet at http://www.ddprofusion.com/simulation/index.html that shows a bit of the physics.
It's totally new, so no prototype exists and it may not even really work, but I'm trying to raise funds right now... I'm trying to sell some stock and I've got some other things I'm doing to raise money to really give it a good try.
I've been thinking about putting together trailers that contain a 2MWe gas turbine genset, switch gear, ups and crypto mining system. These could be towed out to arbitrary locations and used to burn surplus gas supply. Remember, CO2 is much better than CH4 when dealing with greenhouse gasses. Might as well make some extra $$$ while we are converting it...
Data centers? Youtube? Facebook?
Should they and bitcoin be seen on the same level?
Perhaps computing power in general should be capped so it can only use small amounts of power.
You playing a game 4h/day is nothing compared to 1000 gpus mining 24/7. One is pennies in tax and the other would (presumably) be way more significant.
Around 5BN from the developing world will laugh at this proposal.
They will not be able to trade with you? Oh well they might trade among themselves and dont have to face competition from rich countries.
I call this win win.
Of course they can trade with the others who don't care about pollution. That doesn't mean the costs of a carbon tax don't outweigh the benefits of having economic ties with the countries that have that tax.
>That doesn't mean the costs of a carbon tax don't outweigh the benefits of having economic ties with the countries that have that tax.
The only reason the world is not at war is globalization and even that is coming to an end.
Red Dead Redemption 2 sold 34 million, the game takes well over 100 hours to complete and runs GPUs to their limits.
I think even if just half or a quarter of the players completed it that's significant next to mining and needs to be looked at with the same level as criticism.
And even if it is worth it to them to run with the carbon tax (as it would be for a gamer), the money that's being taxed can be used to offset their emission. That's the point of a carbon tax; pollute if you want BUT you pay for what you generate as pollution so that we can offset it in some other way.
Yes it's wasteful, and yes it's using a fair amount of energy at the moment. But all estimates show it's still a very small fraction of the problem.
It feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about bitcoins carbon footprint for its size.
There's lots of ways to turn energy into money besides bitcoin mining. Gotta make carbon intensive energy not worth it.
I’m glad online currencies exist as a technology but I’m not glad an energy intensive one is currently #1 when at the same time the entire tech is taken over by investors/speculators instead of users.
And if calculations about Bitcoin’s footprint are true it uses up as much energy as Argentina. An entire country. I don’t think that for the use Bitcoin gets in the developed world it justifies energy uses at that level. It’s far from a small little thing to not care about.
Compare for example with MGM's properties in Las Vegas which they claim consume 171 MW. That's not quite as much as Bitcoin, but it's still higher than 65 of the countries listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
So it's actually pretty easy to surpass the usage of "an entire country". And that to me seems like a much more useless waste than Bitcoin, which has significant uses besides entertainment
If bitcoin was a proof of stake and was the global monetary system I would have to re-think my opinions - at the moment it just seems like a cross between the worst aspects of Wall Street, the cookie clicker game, and the AI Paperclip Maximiser problem.
That's the reason it comes up a lot in those debates. Sure, cars use more energy emitting more CO2 right now, but the benefit of all the cars worldwide is in an entirely different dimension compared to Bitcoin. Most people intuitively grasp that stuff having a huge benefit for a huge lot of people must be allowed to use up more energy in absolute terms than stuff that has a very minor benefit for a very small group of people.
Which isn't an argument against killing Bitcoin for its contributions to CO2 emissions, mind you, but it seems another similar low-hanging fruit of generating a huge amount of waste to benefit a small number of people economically, while being extraordinarily simple to "just stop doing it". (As opposed to, say, fixing all building insulation in the US, which is a larger problem, and should be done, but is non-trivial to fix.)
With the added benefit that a hundred million people actively hate the existence of junk mail, so I think "we need to ban junk mail because global warming" has legs.
I do not want to hate on Bitcoin but climate change is getting out of control and there is little time left to reverse course. Last year with a global pandemic CO2 still rose by near record amounts. Bitcoin mining does have something to do with this. There is a connection. Please be open to the idea that we need to regulate the energy that Proof of Work mining cryptocurrencies use. I don't want to stop crypto. I just want us to use types that require less energy to mine.
The planet is running out of time and this is FACT offsetting lots of progress on reducing emissions. https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html
Please don't downvote because you love crypto. I do too. I just want us to do better at preventing CO2 emissions from rising because of its mining.
Berlin rent cap => market always wins, let the market rule
Mining bitcoin => let's regulate
As a libertarian (pro free market, pro private property for everything), I'm in favour of removing rent caps.
On pollution, that's a bit harder. The problem is that the environment is a resource shared by everyone and everyone should privately own a little part of it. Polluting is damaging everyone's stake in the environment and the individuals living in it should have a right to compensation.
I think the best model should be leaving it up to the communities to establish what the limits are in each community. Some can have no limits, some will have higher limits.
It will be a tradeoff between cheaper cost of living / profitability, after all.
Then we would see places with higher or lower limits according to what people wish and need.
Not to sound pedantic, but our future generations are going to come to regret this when our planet is a toasted marshmallow, because we couldn't stop being greedy.
If/when it happens, the bitcoin network collapsing is a pretty likely outcome.
(what I mean by a run on dollars is that lots of people may decide they want dollars instead of bitcoin, so the people with dollars won't have to pay as much for bitcoin, and then the people who want dollars will have to accept less for their bitcoin, and then…)
That ultimately will be the end game. I'd argue that most of the folks that bought into Bitcoin do not, in fact, share in the an-cap libertarian utopia of an economy entirely detached from the US Dollar. Folks are going to want their payday, even folks like Michael Saylor and Elon Musk.
These guys aren't HODLing for charity. They want to exit before the rest of the peanut gallery does.
Suppose I have a weapon and I want to kill you unless you give me your bitcoin. How do you stop me? You either have your own weapons to defend yourself or go to an authority for help.
So unless everyone wants to build their own personal military the end game is the same.
All of these arguments boil down to one possibility that could work. Bitcoin somehow brings about world peace, which seems unlikely.
Bitcoin as an experimental protocol is interesting, as a serious currency or asset it is an environmentally dangerous joke.
The relatively brief experiment with fiat currencies has been a disaster. We need something like gold (bitcoin) to bring government back into check and reward savers once again.
To that end, why not use actual gold as a hedge? Why reinvent the wheel with a technology that burns ridiculous levels of energy, and doesn't at least have some additional side utility, like how gold is used in electronics or jewelry?
Finally, I don’t play any video games. I don’t watch any Twitch or Tiktok. I honestly think video games as a concept are a waste of time and energy. But I don’t think they should be banned, despite their enormous cost of electricity.
Similarly, you shouldn’t advocate for a ban based on electricity use. Just regulate the use of electricity, or don’t be surprised when everything else some dipshit politician hates is banned on the same grounds.
And why bitcoin over gold? Gold can’t be sent natively over the internet. It’s expensive to store and transfer. Metal-as-currency is old and bypassed by superior monetary technology (bitcoin).
From what I gathered gold, silver and salt(why your work income is called salary) was used as currencies so empires could fine tune their supply lines and empires better. The bigger the empire and ambitions the more likely coin clipping and debasing took place.
It's a political problem, let's rise and kick the government and central banking out!
David Friedman argues in The Machinery of Freedom to use a currency backed by a set of commodities (wood, iron, etc: a set of resources to stabilise the price).
I don't understand why that's not a solution - probably because it doesn't let governments and banks to profit off people easily.
Thankfully what will happen if the price collapses is that mining will reduce.
Bitcoin has been through a cycle of a "run on dollars" before, it has never died before.
If the price collapses to $100 that's a lot of hardware that isn't running.
Nice advertising. How about: "its price has risen from $19,650 in December 2017 to more than $62,000 this week."
I chose a biased $19,650 value to make a point. Anyone who bought Bitcoin in the month of December 2017 or January 2018 paid over $10K a piece. The price was over $6K for more than one year, before it dropped shortly to $4K neighborhood. $3,729 is not a representative number.
BTW, 3 days after my comment "more than $62,000" is no longer there, either.
My understanding that one of the problems of nuclear is you cant turn it on/off quickly. So why not just mine crypto at low load times?
Does the grid have substantial fees or taxes?
Sure, it's a benefit of not using the grid, but it seems a pretty small one.
I worked at a biomass plant once where it took hours to go from cold to get the boiler fired and get steam pressure up. They cut back production when power prices were low or negative, but they had to run at a minimum capacity all the time because they couldn't just stop and start on a dime.
The governments of the world could shut it down. A drop in the bucket of their vast collective wealth could buy the majority of the network, legislation to criminalize mining and trading, and just wait until it becomes unprofitable.
There are plenty of good reasons to do it, environmental concerns being only (very good) one.
Cryptocurrency is, for the most part, a contagion. We opened Pandora's box and the genie is out of the bottle. Short of some kind of cataclysmic black swan event, I'm not sure this insanity will end anytime soon. :(
The question is if Bitcoin will ever try to switch to it. Unfortunately, it seems like they probably won't anytime soon.
I haven't figure out how to get onboard yet though. I have to do a bunch of homework to figure out what the hell means what.
I don't have 32 ETH ($70k odd USD) so I have to join a staking pool but then that means I won't be running a validator I think.
In which case this seems like simply just buying some ETH2.0 but it clearly isn't... so I have no idea honestly...
More homework required on my part.
Anyone have a good link with an overview of the moving parts AND motivations of the ETH2.0 structure?
People will follow incentives. Fix those incentives.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
Of course that's more an illustration of why continuous growth is impossible than a prediction of what will happen.
Haven't done any math either ways, but it's not like sunlight doesn't already heat up the planet.
"Cities and their expansive hardscapes are certainly to blame for the heat island effect and, since the hardscapes and solar energy-absorbing roofs are already there, solar panels may actually represent a reduction in heat absorbtion. Add to that the fact that solar panels produce renewable energy that does not contribute to climate change like conventional sources like coal. Adding to that, the soot particles in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels contribute a radiative forcing of 0.1 to 0.4 W/m2. Solar panels, on the other hand, are reducing the amount of climate change-causing emissions.
"So if you're wondering about the heat island effect before installing rooftop solar, don't. According to the numbers, the solar panels will not only produce energy, but keep your home slightly cooler, which means you'll be using less energy in the first place, which will keep us all a little cooler."
If you can get on the grid, then the power your plant produces and what you do with it are two separate things. Instead of e.g. mining crypto, you could sell the power generated. By using it instead of selling it, you're just pushing other users to use more fossil fuels.
The calculus IMO is power consumption * grid-wide average CO2 emissions. You can't just count using solar as 0 emissions, because using solar doesn't bring that average to 0. It reduces it slightly.
This is also too simplified, because it doesn't factor in transmission costs and interconnection capacity. Electricty doesn't move frictionlessly throughout the grid, and this can be seen because north american electricity prices vary wildly by region[1].
There are times when renewables have to be curtailed in some regions, so using renewable sources at that time has a marginal CO2 impact of near zero.
You would need enough demand to create a global shortage. That doesn't seem likely and would cause a short-term spike, not a long term price increase.
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
That's enough to eliminate them over time, because the plants do get old eventually. And the trend is for renewables to get even cheaper - this means any study using current prices is going to be extremely pessimistic, it's going to get even cheaper and obsolete your results.
By definition.
There can be only one bitcoin, all the others are false government shills.
Farming produced food to eat. Mining produces minerals to build things with. Factories produce goods.
Bitcoin produces... A series of bits that some people will pay money for? It seems like bitcoin is basically fine art at this point.
trust.
It's only a moral judgement that bitcoin energy use is somehow worse than say, transport, or heating, or anything else that people pay money for.
I have blind faith in the banking system (and blind faith that the gov't regulation keeps them honest), but i can trust the blockchain.
Do you trust people to always give you $60,000 in exchange for a Bitcoin?
Do you trust regulators not to tax Bitcoin or put onerous ‘anti-laundering’ conditions on its use?
>Mining produces minerals to build things with
are you forgetting the yellow stuff that we hoard in vaults and hang on our bodies, or carbon crystals that we put on our fingers?
No more of a stretch as comparing it to farming or art.
I’m not making a judgement here, just listing other activities that make money for people and which have externalities, since ‘making money for the miners’ is claimed as a good.
You be the judge.
Indeed, and that’s precisely my point. The externality problem ought to be addressed directly instead of creating a new regulatory body to decide which goods are “good” and thus allowed to have externalities and which goods are “bad” and thus are banned completely or banned from having externalities.
What does ‘directly’ mean?
> instead of creating a new regulatory body to decide which goods are “good” and thus allowed to have externalities and which goods are “bad” and thus are banned completely or banned from having externalities.
How would you apply this direct approach to muggings or cigarette companies?
Whoever is polluting ought to pay for the damage of that pollution. That’s my view. No different than pouring toxins into the river outside the factory.
> How would you apply this direct approach to muggings or cigarette companies?
Well, I don’t know if there’s a great analogy for muggings. I’m all for going after organized crime, and for local law enforcement for random unorganized robberies. For cigarette companies, well, I’m pretty on board with most or all the regulations they were hit with in the 20th century.
This is part of the design, and everyone who transacts in Bitcoin benefits from this.
Therefore the cost of those externalities should be borne by the network in the form of a transaction tax.
And don't forget. Bitcoin is not replacing these other institutions that need energy. Stop handwaving away the problem, because it's inconvenient for you to hear.
The only legitimate criticism here may be that energy prices dont account for the externalities of carbon emissions. But thats irrelevant of how the energy is actually used
I've realized that you likely have made up your mind on this and my arguments won't sway you. That's fine by me, as long as others that have read can get it.
>we should be making efforts to massively reduce consumption across the board Why? Theres no problem with the consumption of renewable energies
When you want to trample on people's freedoms just because you dont deem them "worthy" of consuming energy its no wonder that people gives you the finger.
Your responses are obviously hostile, so I'm going to bid thee adieu.
EDIT: Lest we forget, there's a thing in Libertarianism called the Non-Aggression Principle (aka NAP). If your actions are an aggression on the health and well-being of our planet and future generations, this would violate NAP.
Bitcoin violates NAP in the long run. Ergo, Bitcoin is a net negative. QED.
And, according to you, which criteria should we use to define whether some externality causes "harm" or not and whether that harm is "undue" or not?
If I decide to spend all my days playing games on my computer (which is wasteful energy-wise and probably does not contribute meaningfully to humanity's welfare), am I causing harm to others? What if I decide to cut down trees in my plot of land: am I causing harm to others? What if I decide to shower using potable water, thereby depriving other people from that drinkable water?
Is this harm "undue"? Should I be punished for this? If yes, how are you going to punish me and by how much?
Who decides this? Based on which criteria?
> Lest we forget, there's a thing in Libertarianism called the Non-Aggression Principle (aka NAP). If your actions are an aggression on the health and well-being of our planet and future generations, this would violate NAP.
1) So, me using resources I acquired/paid for as I see fit is "aggressing" someone else? Under this logic, most human activities could be seen as an aggression, in one way or another (by applying resources in X, you are witholding them from being used in Y, thus "aggressing" everyone who benefits from Y happening over X).
2) Under a Libertarian framework, how exactly do you expect to enforce any sort of anti-NAP rule or law? Hope you brought your army with you.
Your general idea requires people to agree on what is "harmful" or not and whether that harm is "undue" or not. Good luck with having people agree on that.
TL;DR: Even if we assume "bitcoin mining" to lead to externalities that cause undue harm to others (not just normal harm, but undue harm), the same applies to many (most?) other human activities... you can always frame any resource allocation as "depriving someone from resources". Under this logic, we should ban anything I don't see as useful, because reasons.
I think their point was that militaries are doing the fighting as of right now, but nobody is talking about how that's a useless waste of energy and we could "just agree" to do things more efficiently by not fighting. Because in practice "just agreeing" isn't so easy.
> And don't forget. Bitcoin is not replacing these other institutions that need energy.
I don't think that's obviously true.
Although I hope one day I read about Bitcoin miner building nuclear power plant and using it to mine bitcoin with all the spare power but selling energy into the grid when energy usage peaks and price rises above what mining can bring.
We’d need a spaceship I guess with the largest solar panels ever. Park it near the sun, mine Bitcoin, come back to earth.
Think of it this way. Say we're running a mile long race by foot, and it takes me an average of 10 minutes to run that mile. You want to bring a car onto the track that will be able to go a mile in 15 seconds, but it's going to take you 20 minutes to get the car to the starting line.
That's how latency works. It doesn't matter how fast your machines are, by the time you've sent the information to them, by the time you've told them what they need to do, everyone else has already finished with their work and moved on to the next problem.
Now, a satellite orbiting the sun has 8 mins of latency. Imagine if there was only 1 computer on earth, and 1 computer orbiting, and both "submit", it's the earth computer that's going to succeed first, if both finds a valid hash.
Suppose we keep the speed of the individual computers are the same - but now you double the amount of computers orbiting the sun. Now you are twice as likely to find a valid hash - even tho it still takes you 8 minutes to transfer the valid hash message to the earth network. In that 8 minutes, if somebody else on earth finds a valid hash, they will beat you. But they only have 1 machine, and so their chance of finding a valid hash _must_ be half.
So on average, the orbiting machines will get _some_ hashes through, because they get more tries. Some of their successful tries would just fail due to latency. At some point, there would be a tipping point where a large number of machines would be able to, due to sheer chance, always generate a correct hash! Now, of course, the latency will still be there, so the earth machines would have to rely on their luck to beat the 8 minute latency (which they will sometimes).
What that tippig point is - might be a very large number - is unknown to me of course...and if that tipping point is greater than 50% of the available hashing power, then you might as well just forge instead of doing it for real...
No, Bitcoin's network is currently set up to guarantee that a new hash is found in roughly 10 minutes. It's not about how many computers you have in relation to the earth, you need there to be few enough computers on earth and structural enough changes to Bitcoin's technology that it takes the current network on Earth more than 16 minutes to find a hash.
Adding more computers to your orbital array will not change the hash rate on Earth, the network is set up to take the computing power into account and keep the hash rate at about 10 minutes.
Go back to my footrace analogy. What you're currently trying to do is to beat me in a race by getting a progressively faster and faster car, or by introducing 2 cars into the race instead of just 1. None of that matters unless you can get your cars onto the track in less than 10 minutes, because in 10 minutes I will be done with the race and have moved on to the next hash.
You're not pitting your computer network against the earth, you're just pitting it against the latency. You need the on earth hash rate to be slower than 16 minutes, which is not how Bitcoin is currently set up.
> and if that tipping point is greater than 50% of the available hashing power, then you might as well just forge instead of doing it for real...
To be fair, a 51% attack might actually be a feasible idea for your satellite network if you have enough computers there, but it would also come with the fun side effect of making all of your coins useless and crashing the bitcoin bubble.
I suppose the other thing you could maybe do is get so many computers in orbit accepted into the network that you actually drive up the hash difficulty until all of the computers on earth can't solve the problem in 10 minutes; purely because the built-in hashing requirements of Bitcoin become so high that your network's computing power is necessary to finish the transaction in a reasonable time at all. I vaguely suspect you'd need at least close to 50% of the network to do that, but I might be wrong, I haven't done the math.
The downside of that scenario is that you've now raised the hash rate for Bitcoin to 26 minutes, because the 10 minute hash rate is going to stay the same regardless of how many computers are on the network, even if 90% of them are orbiting the sun. But to be fair again, a 26 minute hash rate only matters if you're trying to build a working currency, which pretty much nobody in Bitcoin land seems to care about at this point.
There should be an optimal distance for a given combination of solar panel + mining rig.
[1] https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternati... a Cambridge study which corroborates and reached the same conclusion as an industry [2] study https://coinshares.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-june-...
While someone going all Batman on a fossil fuel power plant would be interesting, it would probably end poorly.
Of course it is sort of likely that cheap hydroelectric is a much bigger component of the supply than gas power plants installed just to mine bitcoin.
It's a neat trick to not say anything specific and then demand people argue the specifics.
[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/introducing-cbei-a-new-...
In the meantime i think we'll see something like large barges/platforms with wind turbines floating somewhere in windy international waters - cuts the costs of permits, etc. May be some startups around it ...