Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

What I don't get is, why people are talking about environmental impact per transaction. Transactions or not, the computers are churning constantly to solve the useless function that would produce the hash with the most 0s in it. It really doesn't have anything to do with transactions(the fees are only a fraction of the profits). The energy impact would be precisely correlated to the fiat price since the miners will be paying for the energy and equipment in fiat.

Transactions or not, the higher the price, the dirtier the proof of work blockchain is. Just look at the most recent block: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/00000000000000000002865...

reward: 6.25BTC

fees for transactions: 0.5BTC

total revenue: 6.75BTC, that is ~ $350K at the moment.

Each block is mined every 10min on average, so it is 2.1M per hour. So the total energy consumption is limited to $2.1M per hour or $1.5B per month at this price. It would be $150M if the price was $5k instead and $30B if the price goes to $1M per BTC. When that happens, 1 transaction will amount to the energy consumption of an American family for 1 year or more. At $1M per BTC, $360,000,000,000 worth of energy would be wasted per year on calculating a hash of a block that is functionally exactly the same with the same amount of transaction as the one calculated for $360, $3.6 or $0.03.

I'm sure I'm missing something like investors betting on price increases, infrastructure elasticity etc. but the correlation must be roughly like that.

And as such, the best thing that Tesla can do for the environment is to sell all of its PoW coins and continue to talk-down the price.

They, and we, can also petition Governments to ban the exchange of PoW coins for fiat. PoW coins serve no purpose and represent a egregious waste of our civilization's advanced manufactured goods and electricity. Taking crypto down a notch might also make ransomware attacks less likely.

If it was about the environment and not looking for a scape goat, then ban or simply tax the dirty energy sources.

It makes no difference to the environment if you burn coal to feed Bitcoin or a factory.

Higher taxes on dirty energy would make a huge difference to which power sources would be used by Bitcoin however as Bitcoin feeds on cheap energy, but why limit ourselves to Bitcoin anyway; it doesn't burn the coal.

Fossil energy sources is a necessary evil, the pollution we create results in cars, computers, food etc. You can't simply say that from now on you'll shut down the coal energy, that would be catastrophic.

Instead, the governments are incentivising the cleaner sources over the other. At least the governments that have a mandate to do that.

The problem with the energy spent on Bitcoin is that it produces a gambling marketplace and nothing else(okay, also some ransomware and illicit trade tools too but these are minuscule). Do we really need to have huge global gambling marketplace at the cost of the destruction of the environment? At the same destruction we could he better food, electronics cars etc. The same gambling marketplace infrastructure could be run for just a few kWh.

It's not a fundamental thing it's just that looking at the per-transaction energy cost really puts things in perspective. And 500kWh is hard to comprehend so I like to put it in perspective by comparing it to locomotives. An F40PH, which is a very common American passenger locomotive as seen on Caltrain, Amtrak, Metra and the MBTA puts out about 2.4MW at full blast. So, just under 5 transactions per hour, per locomotive. It's staggering.

Expressing the energy consumption in electric vehicle mileage makes the numbers more tangible. 500kWh is ~3000 kilometers of range for a mid-sized EV, or enough to move a family across the whole continent. Just to shift BTC from one pocket to another.

What's intangible about a locomotive? It's a big engine the size of a house growling up a storm.

BTC has pivoted away from the Bitcoin whitepaper in mid 2017, decided to constrain its transactional troughput and went the "store of value" route. It can handle some 4 transactions per second.

An unconstrained version of bitcoin can handle hundreds, and with technological improvements thousands and then tens of thousands of transactions per second. I can already do this on a Raspberry Pi [0] (in controlled conditions).

Bitcoin's footprint is sadly big, but still smaller than that of the banking industry. I foresee a future where most of the mining is done with renewables, as this is what will make the most sense.

[0] https://read.cash/@mtrycz/how-my-rpi4-handles-scalenets-256m...

As I said, the number of transactions is irrelevant up until the block reward gets minuscule or completely ends. That is statistically not expected to happen before a few decades.

I know about the banking industry argument but the banking industry is not only about transactions and they also catch up with technology, removing staff closing down offices and branches. In fact, those related to transactions are already almost gone, the rest is about things where BTC is irrelevant anyway, things like compliance anti-fraud etc. If anything, the crypto exchanges assumed many of the banking infrastructure.

Blockchain vs a centralised database is not even a competition when it comes to efficiency, no matter how much you want o twist the argument the fundamentals are rock solid.

What blockchain solves is the trust issue but only for storing the value and not for using it. The problem is, we as humans rarely transact with people who we don't trust. Even with the ransomware and drug trade use cases of the crypto coins, the transaction depends on the trust that the seller will deliver the goods.

The only possible use case is when the society ceases to function. When that happens, BTC would be very useful but when that happens the economy would be fraction of what is now because everything beyond transactions will still need trust so that the labour can integrate vertically and do high value production.

If bitcoin had the same market cap (currently 40 trillion) as all of the cash in the world the price would be higher and the ecological footprint would be significantly worse.

There was a comment that was deleted as I was writing a reply. Just not to waste it, here it is:

the comment: "Correct me if I'm wrong but in absolute numbers Bitcoin seems to be responsible for more CO2 emissions than the whole financial industry. [1] And it's hardly in use. Indeed it seems convincing that Bitcoin together with Bitcoin Cash can be tuned to have reasonably low energy usage per transaction, e.g. by doing lots of transactions off-chain. But it's not the default, it's an option that is not really being taken advantage of. It's unfair to compare systems that are not optimized with systems that are optimized. On the other hand Bitcoin is now more than 10 years old and there was already a reasonable amount of time to optimize it. That said, I think some of the initially advertised noble goals (more stable currency, democratized access to financial tooling) are thrown away for quick profits. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952"

my reply:

On chain, off-chain doesn't matter because it's not the transactions that the miners are after.

The Bitcoin blockchain can probably be mined even on a fitness tracker, it's not that the calculation itself requiring gargantuous amount of energy. It can even be mined by hand.

The problem is, it is a competition by design which economically dictates that there's money to be made up until the price of mining matches the reward of a mined block. This is also dynamically adjusted to match the mining availability through increasing or decreasing the difficulty(which is, the adjustment of number of 0s that are needed in the hash for a block to be valid).

The current situation is by design and BTC will work fine with any amount of energy thrown at it. It will work exactly the same, on-chain, off chain, mined by a single server, mined by the complete use of humanity's energy, the energy collected by a Dyson Sphere. If will work exactly the same, only the number of zeros on the hash of a block will change.

You're completely right. I think the second order effects are negligible at this scale.

It’s like arguing that a running engine in a stopped car doesn’t have an environmental effect, it only counts when the car moves.

You are technically correct, but it’s inseparable from a transaction. The all-around point is bitcoin as a whole is wasteful.

isn't it the case that multiple miners (or pools) compete for the same block and only 1 wins, the rest just waste work?

That's exactly the case but on average the total mined coins must be distributed proportionally to the miners workload since the possibility to strike a block is correlated with the hash-rate which is correlated with energy consumption. They also do pooling to ease the distribution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com