Square: Bitcoin Is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future | Hacker News Reader

Square: Bitcoin Is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future

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57 pointsyarapavan98 comments

Takeaways:

>"o Bitcoin mining presents an opportunity to accelerate the global energy transition to renewables by serving as a complementary technology for clean energy production and storage.

o Solar and wind are now the least expensive energy sources in the world, but are hitting deployment bottlenecks primarily because of their intermittent power supply and grid congestion.

o Bitcoin miners as a flexible load option could potentially help solve much of these intermittency and congestion problems, allowing grids to deploy substantially more renewable energy.

o By deploying more solar and wind, these generation technologies will likely fall even further down their respective cost curves, bringing them closer to zero marginal cost energy production."

PDS: What a strange, yet interesting, set of ideas!

Before reading this, I had not seen these sets of ideas juxtaposed as they were here.

Interesting!

well, there's a lie in the middle though:

"Bitcoin miners as a flexible load"

I'm just going to guess that miners will not take seriously the idea of "you just have to mine only during the day"

The return of mining is much higher than the cost of coal, so this theory can only happen when throughout the whole world the average pool return is between the cost of coal energy and the cost of solar energy

At that point, nobody will be mining anymore probably

It's a tradeoff between capex and opex. Right now, the capex costs are so high that you are more or less forced to run miners 24/7, or you never make back the capex costs.

If bitcoin miners were more opex heavy in terms of Total Lifetime Cost, it could make sense to turn them off at night. As Moore's law continues to slow down, miners slowly are becoming more opex heavy.

Overinstallation of renewable production is likely one of the lowest cost ways to hit carbon reduction goals. But costs routinely go negative already, even in the midwest, largely because of the renewable tax production credits where producers still make money even selling at a loss.

This problem will only get worse, so finding productive use cases for this capacity is great.

While I think bitcoin makes some sense, I personally think the new coin Chia could make even more sense. "Farming" (aka mining) chia is very energy lite - but it does require "plotting" which is more energy intensive. If plotters run during the inexpensive energy periods and low cost farming is the only thing that runs during the peak energy cost periods, then the network wouldn't see huge fluctuations in mining and leave more vulnerable during periods of low mining and high energy costs.

Great, the hard disk shortage a few years back was not enough, the current gpu one is not even done, and now we will not be able to buy ssd/hd anymore thanks to proof of space

How is it possible to frame those systems as green?

It's power that goes away to computation

It's hard disks that nobody uses and that sit there, eating power

All those things have not only the energy cost, but also the environmental, production costs associated, and the damage done to countless companies that can't get the hardware anymore

Small drives will probably not see much of a shortage. If you're looking for a 10+tb drive you might run into some issues in the short term.

Things are not either "green" or "not green". Something can be "more green", and just because it's not perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't go down that route instead.

The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrencies are not going away.

You can choose to be angry and resentful of that, or we can try to find ways to minimize the impact they have overall.

Hard drives use a fraction of the power that a CPU/GPU/ASIC uses, and there is just as much production energy and waste involved in those as in hard drives.

The world is not black and white.

cryptocurrencies could easily go away. They have almost no adoption and the US or EU could look at just how much power and wealth is being controlled by Russia and China, how they're used for money laundering, or how Iran and so on use them to work around sanctions and just decide to ban them. It would be trivial.

We should pass a law that all ICE vehicles must get less than 5 miles per gallon. That will make people need more gas, and it might accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles!!

What a horseshit argument. So bad that I have a very different sentiment towards Square as a company now.

Well cheap gas in the US has contributed to vehicles not improving their efficency. And I would hazard that US automobiles have caused more environmental damage in their lifetime than bitcoin has. Are you pushing for better public transport infrastructure in the USA? Or are you thinking about a new/second car to get around?

I'm pointing out that increasing demand for something "bad" is a stupid way to make it expensive. Use pigovian taxes or something else that doesn't destroy the environment.

If we want to quicken the adoption of clean electricity, then tax dirty electricity.

No issues with that, but surely tax gas by that same reasoning. My point is that fuel for vehicles is bad for the environment, we know that, yet gas in the US is very cheap and as a result there is no push for public transport which is cleaner and more efficient.

So for every post about how bad bitcoin is, it misses the point that there are older technologies, which are replaceable with cheaper, cleaner and more efficient alternatives now. But these are glossed over because bitcoin is the current target. If bitcoin dissappeared tomorrow i am sure that 90% of people who published an article about how bad it was would not switch to the next polluter. They would happily return to their status quo. Its disingenuous basically.

you don't understand how electric markets work. electricity is bid on daily, based on marginal cost of production. solar has a very low marginal cost which pushes down the cost curve. the more solar energy there is --> cheaper price to consumers. however, utilities struggle with having a lot of solar/wind generation as there is a timing mismatch between peak generation and peak demand. bitcoin can be used like a sponge to sop up excess production and allow currently stalled projects to proceed without the need for additional new load.

There is a chance that this idea is actually correct. However, in the near-term, I'm going long on popcorn as the advocates attempt to make the "making energy more expensive will actually help people of limited means who want to heat their homes" case.

Bitcoin production occurs at the margins where power is cheapest, because it uniquely does not matter where the mining takes place geographically. Many Bitcoin mines are using power that was completely unviable to use previously due to distance from grid infrastructure. I would expect it to have relatively little impact on electricity prices in general, and essentially zero impact where electricity is already expensive.

If you live at the margins, in say, Wenatchee, WA, it matters. Bitcoin mining has disrupted city infrastructure and priced out existing stakeholders.

"Wheel never stops turning, Badger."

"That only matters to the people on the rim."

This is true of any industry though. And Wenatchee, WA could easily prevent this by adding a tax or changing the local regulations around electricity consumption.

https://observers.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210203-in-ir...

This seems like an extreme case of cognitive dissonance. People who hold bitcoin (or are somehow vested in it) are trying really hard to rationalize the energy costs associated with bitcoin. But there is no way to avoid physics. Energy - no matter how it's produced- is lost as heat while mining bitcoins.

Tell me that again AFTER having actually read the paper.

I don't understand how a paper could contradict basic physics. Energy spent mining bitcoin is energy not spent doing something else. There are other ways to encourage more renewable energy production (e.g. government subsidies) that don't involve taking the resulting energy and turning it to waste heat. Even low-efficiency energy storage methods (like pumping water up a hill) are more efficient than simply turning the excess energy to heat.

Any benefit that a "buyer of last resort" entails can easily be provided by either government or derivatives markets.

Bitcoin takes away resources (energy and semiconductor manufacturing) from socially good things. It is much better when people admit that they are greedy than when they try to paint their greed as some great effort towards saving the planet. This goes for both traditional money managers and HODLers.

I'm hoping for a correction soon, as much as we might all end up unemployed, it would be a great pleasure to see these SV thought leaders cut down to size.

> Bitcoin takes away resources (energy and semiconductor manufacturing) from socially good things

The provision of high-quality money/savings/etc is a social good.

It is. But what does that have to do with bitcoin?

Bitcoin is both volatile and has increasingly expensive transaction costs making it a bad vehicle for steady savings as well as a poor currency.

Obviously millions of people disagree.

Volatility is to be expected during the monetization process.

Bitcoin transaction fees are lower than CC fees (2.5-3%) on any sizable transaction and lightning brings the fees close to zero.

Is this a joke or just a bad attempt at greenwashing?

It's an offensively transparent attempt at greenwashing from a company run by a morally vacuous bitcoin proponent and an investment company with a large position in bitcoin.

So many people here who clearly didn't bother to read much (if any) of the paper talking about how the headline is "obviously" wrong. If it feels "obviously" wrong to you, it's because of your preconceived notions and biases. How about reading the paper before making fools of yourselves?

A couple points for the extra lazy:

* Renewable power generation from wind and solar has a much higher ratio of wasted power because they have such high variability in output. Because of this, in cases where the power generally can't be cost effectively stored or supplemented (by dynamic increase of dirtier energy), wind and solar simply won't be built in favor of coal plants. Bitcoin mining can use this wasted energy, which increases the revenue that can be generated by renewable sources, thus making it more likely that areas will choose renewable over coal.

* Bitcoin mining is a fixed quantity: so the more mining done using renewable energy, the less will be done with coal power (so when SamBam mocked this paper by saying "If we double the amount of electricity used on the planet, people will need to spend more on solar panels!" He completely didn't understand the zero sum aspect of bitcoin mining).

* In fact, this has a more pronounced effect because players in the market who aren't as efficient can see their margins decrease below the point of profitablity. Since otherwise wasted electricity is cheapest, more and more bitcoin mining will be done using it, which means less and less will be done using usable electricity.

> Renewable power generation from wind and solar has a much higher ratio of wasted power because they have such high variability in output. Because of this, in cases where the power generally can't be cost effectively stored or supplemented (by dynamic increase of dirtier energy), wind and solar simply won't be built in favor of coal plants. Bitcoin mining can use this wasted energy, which increases the revenue that can be generated by renewable sources, thus making it more likely that areas will choose renewable over coal.

So you think that cities will just put up with the increasing power outages, until the miners will give up in that region? That the normal public won't form a mob asking for more power in the night, which will attract more miners, thus making the whole point moot?

That looks like a weird gamble to make

> Bitcoin mining is a fixed quantity: so the more mining done using renewable energy, the less will be done with coal power (so when SamBam mocked this paper by saying "If we double the amount of electricity used on the planet, people will need to spend more on solar panels!" He completely didn't understand the zero sum aspect of bitcoin mining).

no, bitcoin has a fixed max of coin, but we already are at the point where the only limit is how to get the hardware to mine. There is no limit on mining.

Sure, it will shift more towards cheap power. But that needs to be also continuous. So bitcoin will drive the adoption of more continuous power, because if you do not do it, cities power will be a collateral damage more and more often.

> In fact, this has a more pronounced effect because players in the market who aren't as efficient can see their margins decrease below the point of profitablity. Since otherwise wasted electricity is cheapest, more and more bitcoin mining will be done using it, which means less and less will be done using usable electricity.

All this talk about using "waste" electricity is only relevant if your system never goes above max usage, thus causing power outages. That is already not true, and it's not like the power companies allocate only the "waste" electricity to bitcoin. Nobody stops mining when the power plant is near capacity. You just generate more pressure to add more power plants that give continuous power (so: not solar).

We have "waste" electricity because the system is designed to handle peaks and other plants going down.

Mining is eating away all the safety margin on the system. the more there is, the more it will eat

> you think that cities will just put up with the increasing power outages

I have no idea how that relates to anything I have said. Nothing I'm suggesting would lead to power outages...

> There is no limit on mining.

That's patently false. The limit on bitcoin mining is the amount of money that can be earned by mining. That is currently around 7.5 btc per block. That is the limit. Miners don't mine for a loss.

> Nobody stops mining when the power plant is near capacity.

You're simply not correct. There's even people who only mine for the purpose of generating cheap heat: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.coindesk.com/mining-bitcoin...

Please do more research if you're gonna discuss this with people. Or read the damn paper the OP posted.

No one mines specifically to make heat, they get heat as a bonus from computing in cold climates, which was always true. If we're going to do that, I propose we heat our houses with seti@home or folding@home. It would be more useful.

Bitcoin stands to be one of the most useful pieces of technology since the internet. It has the potential to take the power to abuse money out of the hands of governments and central banks. The inquality caused by central banks in this world is attrocioius - a tragedy of epic proportions. Bitcoin can prevent this from happening again. But right.. maybe the search for aliens is more important.. how could I have been so short sighted.

If you have a choice between a radiator and a miner, then you do mine to make the heat. The added btc (or any other) is a bounus which perhaps helps to cover the electricity. Since the bulk of mining is done in specialized facilities then home-mining can be about heat (plus tinkering/hobby).

That's oversimplifying a little. Miners are much more expensive than radiators, so again, the heat is the bonus, you are investing in mining equipment, not a heater, and the resources for making said mining equipment are much more than what it costs to make a heater. Using old junk equipment works but won't make you much.

It's also less efficient than a normal heater, especially compared to heat pumps. The difference is only made up in mining, which is itself a super inefficient process, as we know. Less so when you use them as heaters... but they aren't great heaters.

> It's also less efficient than a normal heater,

If you're saying that "normal heaters" produce more heat for a given amount of electric usage, that is absolutely wrong. Yes heat pumps are more efficient, but those are not "normal heaters". Sounds like you're either being disingenuous or you have a misunderstanding of basic physics.

Perhaps it's not that simple, true. What I meant was that there are people who need to heat a room, but are hobby IT people. So instead of getting a radiator they put a mining rig in the room. It won't mine in any substantial amount and won't generate a massive profit, perhaps just pays for the electricity. What I'm just saying is that people do mine in a situation where heat is primary and the rest is hobby.

Also, as the sibling says, miners are just as efficient as radiators for the same amount of electricity. Heat pumps are another story, they don't generate heat from electricity but transfer it from somewhere else.

Orrrr... we build nuclear stations and be done with it

All for it!

I would add that mining Bitcoin using by products of natural gas production, which would otherwise be burned (flared) or vented directly into the atmosphere, is being put into practice already [1].

1: https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-flaring-i...

I’ve made similar arguments myself, but currently Bitcoin’s price is so high that it’s profitable to mine using energy from coal or natural gas.

A carbon tax would help to discourage this, but so would crashing the price of Bitcoin.

Currently the only way for bitcoin to be clean is to switch the underlying tech to proof of stake

https://www.change.org/StopBurncoins

Proof of stake lacks the security properties of proof of work, because casting conflicting votes is free.

If a product can't be secure without using more energy than most countries (and if that security is considered to be important), that product is garbage and shouldn't be allowed to continue.

The US dollar is only secure because of the US Military.

If a product (US Dollar) can't be secure without spending more money on defence than most countries combined, that product is garbage and shouldn't be allowed to continue.

Thats with discounting the other costs, such as the loss of human life, when the military decides it needs to invade somewhere to make sure its 'enemies' can see how big its stick is.

Unfortunately it’s not up to your personal opinion if things are “allowed to continue”.

A fair comparison with Bitcoin alternatives reveals it is net more efficient than the things it’s replacing (petrodollar warfare, giant payment processors, etc).

Isn't issuing conflicting votes, if proven, costing people their stake?

this is just another disingenuous propaganda piece for cryptocurrency proponents to link to whenever people bring up the environmental impacts of bitcoin. Shameful.

This is trying really hard to invent benefits to mining, where there really are none apart from the obvious: more bitcoins for you, and robustness for the network.

If we go around breaking windows we could really bolster the world's window-making capacity.

I just saw another interesting whitepaper the other day from the World Sudoku Society suggesting that we tile the Mojave with solar panels to generate more Sudoku puzzles!

Why do you hate sudokoin?

I’ll take “dumb enough headlines where I won’t read the article” for $100 Alex.

I don't blame you. Here's the abstract that goes with that clickbait headline, which is as far as I could get:

> In this memo, we aim to explain how the Bitcoin network functions as a unique energy buyer that could enable society to deploy substantially more solar and wind generation capacity. This deployment, along with energy storage, aims to facilitate the transition to a cleaner and more resilient electricity grid. We believe that the energy asset owners of today can become the essential bitcoin miners of tomorrow.

It is even worse, then I thought.

didn't Square purchase $50million of bitcoin recently?

then you thought.......what?

Ugh. It's such a facile argument.

"You know the problem with electricity? People don't buy enough of it! If we double the amount of electricity used on the planet, people will need to spend more on solar panels. And more solar panels are good, right?"

> You know the problem with electricity? People don't buy enough of it!

Personally, I want humanity to climb the kardashev scale. Bitcoin reduces petrodollar seigniorage profits and turns them into subsidies on power infrastructure.

You clearly don't understand the economics of the situation. Renewable power generation from wind and solar has a much higher ratio of wasted power because they have such high variability in output. Because of this, in cases where the power generally can't be cost effectively stored or supplemented (by dynamic increase of dirtier energy), wind and solar simply won't be built in favor of coal plants. Bitcoin mining can use this wasted energy, which increases the revenue that can be generated by renewable sources, thus making it more likely that areas will choose renewable over coal.

So please don't get all disgusted when you didn't actually read through what's going on. Your biases are blinding you.

How I am reading your comment:

Higher demand will decrease prices for renewable sources, because of bitcoin mining, and such feedback eventually will lead to decrease prices in supply of renewable sources material.

I see a few false assumption, to say the least:

1. Material for renewable sources are not scares and there's production is cheap.

2. It is cheaper to mine from renewables sources then from non-renewable sources. (infrastructure cost)

3. There is no trend in replacing existing energy sources with renewables sources, without bitcoin.

You are reading my comment wrong. Those false assumptions are your own. I am not claiming that higher demand for renewables will lower prices. That may be true, but it is not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that bitcoin can use energy that would otherwise be wasted.

On your point 2, what are you saying? That it is cheaper to mind from renewable source than non renewable? I agree so not sure why you're saying otherwise. Renewable energy often produces more unusable energy than coal. You can control how much coal you put in the fire, you can't control how much sun or wind hits your panels or wind turbines. Energy that would otherwise be wasted is cheap energy. That's my point.

Fixed point 2.

I am not sure I agree with this, not much energy is wasted, grid off demand prices from renewable sources might be good options for miners, but net is still negative, simple I can't see use case where miner will be I am only making money for 2 hours a day, for only few unknown amount of days a week/month.

> not much energy is wasted

There are two situations:

1. Current solar and wind generation that wastes energy (known as "curtailment"). In Texas, about 17% of wind energy is curtailed. In California, about 25% of solar energy is curtailed. https://slate.com/business/2016/07/how-energy-waste-in-solar... https://www.caiso.com/documents/curtailmentfastfacts.pdf

2. Potential renewable energy production that doesn't happen because of cost effectiveness in areas where curtailment would be high. In places that are poorly connected to agacent energy grids, curtailment might be quite a bit higher than existing production, especially if the goal is to power a larger fraction of an area's electricity with solar and wind. It wouldn't be unreasonable to imagine renewable power production with 50% curtailment.

Another example of wasted energy is natural gas flare offs. People are starting to utilize these for bitcoin mining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkeZVcGsva8

> I can't see use case where miner will be I am only making money for 2 hours a day

Well, it wouldn't be for just 2 hours a day. 25% curtailment simply mean that only 1/4th of the day has usable excess energy. It could mean 26% excess energy for 23 hours a day, or it could mean 85% excess energy for 1 hour a day. If you have a location with 25% excess energy, you could be running on excess energy for the majority of the day. Also, power storage could help a lot. There are types of power storage that do very well for short period of time, but poorly for long periods of time. So by storing some of that energy for an hour or two, you can use that energy to mine when there is 0% excess but no extra energy is needed by the grid. Electric generation isn't as simple as people think.

And if you simply removed all the bitcoin miners, that would be the equivalent of saving 120 terawatt-hours per year. Or the equivalent of installing 20,000 large offshore wind turbines [1], for free, without any materials or construction or grid costs.

Does this proposal suggest that increasing BitCoin production could economically lead to the funding of anywhere near that many wind turbines? (Or, rather, many more, since much of that energy would be cannibalized by the mining.)

1. Average offshore wind turbine output ~6 million kWh/yr

In layman's terms:

Bitcoin's borderline-fraudulent use of energy will be able to /fix/ the energy that was spent in mining new coins, and the dirty deed can be forgotten.

Except you can't so easily forget damage to the environment!!

All this vitriol for Bitcoin and how terrible it is for the environment. Honestly it is just the latest stick people want to beat it with. Its hardly the first and it wont be the last thing that damages our environment. And it is also far from the biggest causes of pollution.

Cargo ships cause more pollution than all the cars on earth, yet we are told to drive less but the cargo ships keep coming, keep getting bigger and keep polluting. Stopping/Reducing them would mean we can't consume cheap goods so a blind eye is turned, to an easier target, Bitcoin.

If everyone who I heard complain about the inefficency of bitcoin were also protesting Mcdonalds, Shell, Texaco, Amazon etc it might actually have some merit but until then I feel free to ignore the green virtue signalling.

Are people that cannot tell CO2 and local air pollution apart the same who cannot see the difference between gambling and investment?

So you want to talk about how much energy casinos around the world waste?

All investment is gambling. Investments have different risk profiles, sure. But unless you can perfectly predict the future then the uncertainty is non-zero and it is a gamble.

But when investing how much an investment makes absolutely isn't very interesting. All that matters is opportunity cost, or how one investment compares to all of the others. You want to make the best investment for the right amount of risk - and this is going to always be a gamble because it is highly uncertain.

I'm a bleeding heart hippie but agree 100%.. and when you dig deeper, you may find that those propagating the fud around crypto are actually speculators trying to drive prices.. which makes the fake outrage even more sick.

This is a fairly common fallacy, though I'm not sure if it's formalized enough to have a name.

I have enough time and energy to criticize both mega cargo ships and Bitcoin for their unnecessary pollution.

Also, if we banned Bitcoin tomorrow, the only people who would really notice are those who have bet their shirts on a risky investment. If we banned large cargo ships tomorrow, everyone would feel it as delivery times (and possibly prices) for things increased. Personally, I'd be willing to pay those higher prices in exchange for less pollution.

Sure but I think GP’s point is that the amount of criticism & headlines Bitcoin gets for its energy use, fairly or unfairly, appears orders of magnitude more than other areas, like online gaming (or dozens of other industries).

Probably because, as you point out, there’s a lot of money and companies in those other industries. And those industries would rather not make headlines for negative environmental, or other, reasons. (Legal apparatus, lobbyists, etc etc)

Next in the news: Why proof-of-space cryptocurrencies do not waste disk space, even though you can't use it anymore.

Why can't we stop pretending it is not just an unregulated investment? It's good at that. Market it as such and stop portraying it as anything else.

You're letting you biases blind you. The headline is correct, there are a lot of merits that you aren't thinking of because your head is so far in the sand you can't even be bothered to read and educate yourself.

"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Perhaps you don't owe this article or its headline better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here.

Sunshine is free, but materials, labour, manufacturing, manufacturing and end-of-life waste, land and opportunity cost of building solar/wind energy installations are all not free.

Yes we like the bitcoins. We'd like you to know that we're not in the business of staying poor, to that effect would you like to buy a carbon green bitcoin?

We’re going to mine so many bitcoins that it’ll keep the windmills spinning all night!

Windmills do not spin all night? Not sure what's the point of this.

The point is: the article is dumb; my comment, from a certain point of view, is funny

Why do people who have no money think they have a say in how energy is spent? Historically, in the whole of time, there has never been a period where that happened. What is making people think it is different with Bitcoin?

above we set forth that information was provided as opensource recently and made available as set forth above 2 us ....ARK (the morons). somehow.

Bitcoin uses less energy to immutably log transactions than the manipulated rube goldberg system we currently use for keeping track of money balances, that should be all that matters.

Crazy idea: mine bitcoin in satellites that are aimed at the Sun 24/7. Just need to figure out a way to dissipate the heat I guess.

> Our model demonstrates that integrated bitcoin mining could transfigure intermittent power resources into baseload-capable generation stations.

What a beautifully idiotic piece of Bitcoin propaganda, brought to you by the truth distorting, greedy ass crypto investor crowd.

Is there a reason why this statement is false?

you cannot generate electricity from bitcoin

Intermittent producers becoming baseload is a contradictio in terminis. No amount of handwaving or cherry picking can change this.

Furthermore my own stand is that presence of miners remove pressure on grid operators to install storage capacity. This means miner presence does the exact opposite of that statement.

By what conceivable mechanism could bitcoin "transfigure" an "intermittent power resource" such as a solar PV panel into being baseload-capable?

If I put a bitcoin on my solar panel does it start producing at night? Will a bitcoin keep the clouds from casting shadows on my solar farm?

I think the idea is that mining Bitcoin can offset installation costs, thereby making it cheaper to install more energy storage, which would help make intermittent energy sources like solar/wind act more like a baseload provider?

I put my bitcoin on a hamster wheel. Turned into a perpetual-motion turbine. Hamster calmly got off and now sits next to it, wearing sunglasses and a little suit, monitoring his hodlings.

I think believing this (the title in particular) is even more partisan and more wrong than not participating in Bitcoin because it's "bad for the environment" which I read as "I feel I missed the boat, so I'm going to criticize".

I would rather suffer the environmental damage that Bitcoin incentivizes over having central banking control our currency (not saying it's that simple, but that is how I think about it in broad strokes). No government can print Bitcoin at will to fund military spending or generally increase social inequity, which I think printing new money usually ends up doing.

I think there are far worse things for the environment than Bitcoin. Have you seen our land and water usage?

> I would rather suffer the environmental damage that Bitcoin incentivizes over having central banking control our currency

What multiplier do you have to add to the environmental damage to get to the point where Bitcoin meaningfully supersedes central banking instead of providing a funky niche alternative to it, and how do you feel about it then?

> No government can print Bitcoin at will to fund military spending

I can think of a few state actors that could take control of 51% of the network, and one with rather capricious views on private property rights that could do so just by seizing the mining hardware already operating on its soil.

Would you rather knowingly see the biosphere of our planet pushed to a point where it cannot easily support human civilization in the form we have known it, just to temporarily uphold an ideological point like "no central control of our currency"?

OP takes a silly stance, but it would take a hell of a lot of bitcoin mining to destroy the biosphere!

On its own, sure. But we're already seeing the effects that herald that destruction: rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, etc.

The modern capitalist civilization we've built is actually extremely fragile precisely because it has optimized so carefully for the current circumstances, throwing away safety measures, buffers, and redundancies as inefficient wastes of money. So if, for instance, the droughts in California continue to worsen, we may see a huge chunk of the almond industry literally dry up and blow away. And you might not care about almonds specifically, but it's just one more warning sign that the whole system is running close to its limits, and more and more parts of it are going to start to fail if we don't show some damn responsibility and stop wasting, just as a for instance, hundreds of terawatt-hours every year on something whose sole practical purpose is to enrich a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros.

Agreed on all points, though would like to point out that capitalism merely allocates resources. We have a ton of people with sky-high standards of living, and not a lot of deployed green tech yet. Pollution is inevitable, at least for now.

Taxing externalities like carbon, microplastics, topsoil erosion is probably the most efficient way forward.

Bitcoin is really neat but probably isn’t saving a single frog or leaf anytime soon.

It’s worth noting that cryptocurrency might in principle be able to help a lot of people who are locked out of the financial system to transact and take part in the online economy. This includes many/most people in the third world. This has nothing to do with hodling though.

> hundreds of terawatt-hours every year on something whose sole practical purpose is to enrich a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros.

This describes many companies, also.

Why, yes. Yes, it does.

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