Bitcoin gave a shuttered coal plant a second life
grist.org
grist.org
This seems abjectly horrible from an environmental perspective.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/reliance-...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Yes the price of assets are decided in a free market. So what point are you making exactly? Clearly in every other aspect, bitcoin is superior. In fact, bitcoin is one of the only assets that can be traded in the most free market environments possible, next to cash.
> Transacting via custodian has literally never once gotten in my way. Has it for you?
Yes it has. And it has for hundreds of millions people around the world. I come from a country that's under heavy sanctions, banks will refuse to bank you or will shutdown your account for no apparent reason. You're marked as a risky client anywhere you go that touches money and have to put up with extra checks.
Whoever you bank with has never had outages? They've never kept funds on hold pending checks? You haven't had to chase up a every department because your wire transfer didn't arrive? The list goes on. If not then good for you, but you're in the absolute tiny minority.
Most people on earth DO have a mobile device, which grants them permissionless and censorship resistant access to the bitcoin network. This access allows for an escape hatch against abusive regimes who debase their country's fiat currency.
Commodities don't have a fixed supply, they are not transportable, you can't actually own them. You can't verify them. You can't transact them easily.
Real and economically useful, bitcoin or commodities. which is which?
Commodities are the ones that can be both real and economically useful, to answer your question.
It's raining right now where I am. The roof of my house is keeping me dry. Can a bitcoin do the same?
Bitcoin existing doesn't stop people from speculatively investing in real estate, so I don't think people will just start speculating on coffee beans or something similar if Bitcoin goes away.
If/once the environmental cost is priced in, all will be fine.
Once that is done, nobody would use this coal plant for mining bitcoins anyway, because it will be too expensive.
There are many ways to waste electricity. Bitcoin is a big one, but so is electric heating of uninsulated houses (still very common in the US): https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39293
=> All this will be solved by pricing in the environmental cost.
This is like seeing someone else light a cigarette on a plane, and deciding it’s harmless for you to smoke because someone else is already smoking.
(Edit: changed metaphor to match original)
Mind your own uses of energy and leave the market to decide what is really valuable.
Obviously not.
Different sources of energy have different externalities, and different uses have different impacts.
> Mind your own uses of energy and leave the market to decide what is really valuable.
The market is made up of people, who make decisions by communicating with one another.
Tellinge people not to discuss what is valuable and what the externalities is a sign you don’t have faith in the market.
Why have you read emotions into this?
> Discuss away but it's not working.
What goal do you imagine it isn’t working at?
Proof of work is a grey goo in the nanotechnology way, it gets more and more energy intensive the more efficient technology gets. It also increases the budget for power and electronics the more expensive the token gets. This leads to the runaway power consumption you see now.
Renewables are green relative to coal, but they’re not zero footprint. To build a windmill with limited lifespan you need to mine rare earth metals in open air hellscapes in Mongolia [1]. You need to produce mountains of fiberglass. There’s no way to recycle fiberglass so once these fall apart you get your ores back, but have to bury the windmills [2].
Similarly for photovoltaics. The PV cells currently in use are made with cadmium and tellurium, heavy metals which again can’t really be recycled and end up buried in pits where they leech out into the environment. [3]
Bitcoin also generates 100g of ewaste per transaction which cannot be recycled meaningfully. The old ASIC miners can’t event be reused because they’re special purpose. So they’re shipped to poor countries where poor people dump toxic chemicals over it with inadequate safety gear to obtain what little metallics they can, and once again bury the rest. [4]
The only way forward is to reduce consumption by investing in efficient technology, not promote it with actively anti-efficient technology.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
[3] https://grist.org/energy/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-wh...
[4] https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/toxic-e-waste-dumped-in-poor-nat...
You could argue that energy spent on entertainment is a waste, but it's been done since the dawn of civilization (the wasting of energy for entertainment - dance, art, fireworks, etc. etc.). As far as I know there's no way to entertain yourself without spending any more marginal energy compared to alternatives.
Presumably you, the reader, are reading this, on a computer that uses energy. Such energy could be said to have been "wasted", since reading the text I'm typing now isn't inherently productive.
>there are ways to do so that do not incur the same costs.
What are the other ways to make censorship resistant financial transactions globally?
One of these products/services is orders of magnitude more valuable than the other.
A.k.a gambling, a.k.a entertainment. It's essentially the same. Especially people that play a lot with altcoins and constantly buy and sell, it's basically a hobby for them, a game where the score is an amount of money.
With Netflix, their electricity consumption roughly scales with their customer base. Netflix isn't going to double their electricity consumption, unless they double the amount of customers they have. Netflix is incentivized to consume the amount of electricity they need to serve their customers, and no more.
Bitcoin, however, has a completely different set of incentives. Since Bitcoin effectively converts electricity to money, Bitcoin miners will attempt to consume as much electricity as possible, to maximize their mining output. In addition, any efficiencies made doesn't really reduce the environmental impact, as any electricity saved can just be pumped into mining more Bitcoin.
even if every single cycle was powered by renewable energy, in a world with any remaining fossil fuel power it is displacing more worthwhile loads and so directly causing emissions.
I used to think it was just a stupid idea but it's now far far beyond that.
let's see how long before someone posts a defence by comparing it to the power use of banks (!?!).
I have not felt this defeated in a long ducking time.
I know that it's against HN to say that people didn't read the article, but it's relevant, as it's clickbait: the power plant is converted to natural gas, which is still debatable/controversial, but it's not burning coal, as all other commenters wrote.
The sad part is actually that the article is interesting, and a lot of work went into it, and then the ,,main editor'' probably gave it a clickbait title. I have seen this myself when my girlfriend was interviewed for a magazine.
> There’s just one problem: If it weren’t for Bitcoin, there would almost certainly be no reason to run the power plant in Dresden at all. Without the revenue from mining, Greenidge would have no reason to spew hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from the plant’s stacks, discharge hundreds of billions of gallons of hot water into a nearby trout stream, or pipe in and burn billions of cubic feet of fracked natural gas.
if someone wants to mine bitcoin on an island with their own solar or tidal capacity, ok, I guess, but that's not the case anywhere afaik.
And there's a lot of non-useful energy usage that is happening because fossil fuel energy is too cheap. Like heating pools and outdoor hot tubs or heating or cooling houses instead of properly insulating them.
I'd say that harsh tax on fossil fuels could do way more to limit carbon footprint and accelerate movement toward renewables than any one measure such as banning bitcoin mining.
Inform the market of the true cost and let it find the best solution.
it needs to be banned (and other similar things) until the grid is ~100% greenhouse emission free.
But you don't want miners to disappear. You want them to use the money they got from financial markets to build their own renewable energy generation capacity vastly exceeding what people now build for ordinary use.
Same way they bought coal power plant they'd build a solar or wind farm and sell energy to the grid when price of energy is higher than mining reward.
Jokes aside, I think the current ETA is Q3. I've got it marked in my calendar as "graphics card availability day."
One of the things about the current boom in cryptocurrency prices is that the underlying technology is irrelevant for most speculators, as long as the ledger is secure. So yes, there's a technical solution for this, but Bitcoin is still popular.