Bitcoin Emits Less Than 2% of World’s Military-Industrial Carbon Emissions | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Emits Less Than 2% of World’s Military-Industrial Carbon Emissions

bitcoinmagazine.com

19 pointsdanboarder24 comments

People are always spreading FUD like this about the military industrial complex but you have to keep in mind, it emits less than 2% of all the carbon in the known universe. So it's actually pretty green when you look at it like that.

Also, I get a lot of shit for driving a Hummer but it really has way less emissions than the Maersk shipping fleet, so checkmate libtards.

Bitcoin alone emits the equivalent of almost 2% of the aggregate greenhouse emissions from the military and defense worldwide? Holy shit!

How this guy think he is able to spin this in any kind of "positive" fashion is beyond me.

He just made the math and proved how completely crazy bitcoin is from an energy consumption POV and somehow tries to flip the story

Great and lwta abolish schools, libraries and public streets while we're at it. The whole crypto debate is completely ignorant that the monetary economy is the lifeblood of all our societal contracts. If the winner-take-all world of crypto wins all we get is a dystopian nightmare.

Have you thought about how abolishing national currencies would remove the need for a military industrial complex?

No, because at the currency level, the pandemic has proven that the government ability to inject cash in the economy when needed through stimulus checks or temporary unemployed benefits is absolutely essential.

At the industrial level, I am not sure of the impact of crypto. You'll still need steel to build bridges wether you pay using gold, oil, paper or crypto.

At the military level: "bitcoin" does not sound like a very goos shield vs an AK-47 (nor is euro, usd or any currecny but none pretend to be)

Have you?

Currency is just an abstraction layer over "stuff". Land, buildings, cars, food, whatever.

If some other country has a bigger, meaner military and can roll over you and take your stuff, it doesn't really matter how many virtual coins you have. Your coins are only worth what they can buy, and buying something is meaningless if you can't defend it.

The military and by extension the military industry aren't going away unless we end up in a truly magical post-scarcity society where nobody has a reason to take stuff from anybody else, because they can get anything they desire materialized out of thin air for free. Which would also eliminate the purpose of having currencies.

Would it? My understanding is that (vastly oversimplified) both currencies and war are driven by scarcity, and that using a digital currency would not fix scarcity as a concept.

Yeah the 'less than' in the headline is wilfully misleading.

Correct, well the author makes clear it's a click-bait title but clarifies the idea being that in comparing bitcoin to USD he includes the government backing the USD, ultimately the US armed forces and current military industrial complex backing it's use. Interesting rhetorical exercise but not sure it's making the point he was hoping for.

Yeah, I don't think that headline is as positive as its writer thinks it is. To parrot other commenters, "holy cow, bitcoin is emitting almost 2% of what the world's militaries crank out? And not even an F-35 to show for it?"

I'm not sure that spinning that as a positive is a good idea. It's objectively a massive amount.

Perhaps the idea is to reduce the size of the worlds military industrial complex by more than 2%, and boom, you have Bitcoin offset. Is reducing the military carbon footprint delusional? (I'll answer that, it probably is :/ ).

The argument I've seen is that worldwide adoption of BTC will somehow end armies and therefore be a net improvement worldwide. How? Not sure.

I've heard similar arguments. One aspect brought up was that crypto money is "impossible to steal".

I argued that the old pipe wrench is so effective that after a practical example the threat of the old pipe wrench is enough to break any cryptography whose key is known by a pipe-wrenchable individual.

At that point, the individual needs his/her own pipe wrench.

And it is usually a good idea to aggregate with trusted others to pool resources and get a bigger, stronger pipe wrench.

Which is the military.

I did not get a response other than that my reasoning is flawed and oversimplifies the issue. Which, tbh, it definitely does

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

You have to be utterly delusional to make this comparison as a positive in the first place.

Alternative title: Bitcoin emits almost 2% of the CO2 emitted by the entire world's military industrial complex.

All things are trivial when you compare them to the size of the entire military industrial complex. This comparison is absolutely meaningless. The simple fact is that bitcoin consumes something like an entire nuclear powerplant of power continuously, and this has a non-trivial environmental impact. The real problem with bitcoin is that it entirely removes the safety net provided by regulated currency. It's good for nothing except drug deals and speculation.

Uhhh… I wonder what that number is, normalized by number of BTC transactions that take place today, and scaled by the total number of financial payment transactions.