Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem
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They will still be washing up on beaches 100 years after every single person involved in their design has passed.
Whole electronics industry needs to take this stuff more seriously, we need more replaceable batteries and storage, right to repair on a global level and laws against the sort of thing Apple does with their repair pricing where the repair costs like $50-100 less than a new device.
Iphones pods pads etc etc.
Listening to music in strict Islam is considered hurtful and sin. To some people listening to music is as worthless as crypto, or maybe even worse.
Stop whining about crypto being a ponzi scheme. Instead of parroting same points over and over read what ponzi scheme actually is.
Lots of people use Apple products because they have a long life, not everyone is jumping to the latest and greatest.
You are picking ridiculous point and creating some ridiculous 'true Scotsman'
>Lots of people use Apple products because they have a long life
Like who? You and other 10 people?
Lots of people that don’t live in wealthy western countries or people that simply don’t have lots of disposable income.
Yeah, that is the target market of Apple, people without disposable income. Keep digging man, keep digging.
In this case, I would take take the word "like" to mean "such as". Your first potential interpretation instead implies that you interpreted it to mean "specifically". And the second ignores all the qualifying adjectives.
For my part, I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the dominance of products with built-in, non-replaceable rechargeable batteries in products that don't permit or are fundamentally incompatible with corded use. Because if a fundamental component that it needs in order to function happens to also be a non-replaceable wear item, then yeah, it is a disposable product. As a point of basic morality, we should not be blithely making disposable products that cannot be safely disposed of. It doesn't matter how convenient it is to us, our kids and our grandkids and our peers in less wealthy countries and their kids and grandkids are the ones who will be stuck dealing with the polluted waterways, and we have no right to force that upon them just because we think cords are annoying.
It's really not so different from the leaded gasoline that my grandparents thought was so convenient.
AirPods sell over 14 million a year, that's an astonishing amount of waste for a product with such a limited lifespan.
I'm fine with people making arguments that Bitcoin is bad for the environment, but e-waste is the least of the worries with it.
I've wanted something like this for years, a laptop that is actually repairable but isn't awful in specs or ergonomics. When they start selling in my region I'll be all over it.
If you care about these problems then vote with your wallet.
I'm way too excited about this company, it's all the changes I've been hoping for.
Governments in authoritarian countries have shut down bitcoin mining operations and arrested people.
It'd be hard because you'd have to find every single node and disconnect it from the internet, and something like 90% of Bitcoin nodes run over TOR
And you know this... how?
Did you know that 96% of statistics are made up on the spot?
Here's a source if you're curious
Also, can you provide an article showing that Bitcoin is used for "tons" (whatever percentage tons means) of illegal activity?
Bitcoin is used daily for remittance payments, which is huge since it's way cheaper than sending money through western mutual
There's also Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador which is a bitcoin only circular economy
Paxful provides a service for people to trade gift cards for Bitcoin
If you let it take over, the ensuing negativity and Weltschmerz might paralyze you.
And true, most criticism (whether justified or not) comes to nothing if there's a lack of regulating entity that could do something about it.
That said, I prefer a smartphone I can open and replace the battery of. I own one, too: Fairphone 3. I'll look forward to the day wireless earpods have replaceable battery. However, we still gotta think about updating the firmware of the chipset.
We have seen this "response" so many times that its laughable. Its like a person who owns large number of shares of Company X and everytime someone brings up the serious problems at Company X she tries to change the subject.
Bitcoin is still new and poorly understood by a significant percentage of the population and therefore hasn't become part of everyone's "lifestyle to which they've become accustomed" yet, so it's automatically viewed more harshly. The comparisons are, in fact, necessary for the appropriate judgemental context.
On the topic of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency utility, I'll point you towards another thread where I badly answered a similar question (and re-reading what I wrote I don't answer it at all), the core of the answer is that it's not simple to explain our to understand if you haven't "played" with it yourself to start the mental ball rolling as to its application and usefulness.
Discussion on the El Salvador legal tender go live: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468982
My specific, but vague, commentary is the 18th comment on the above link.
Bitcoin was created to be an alternative to the corrupt money system that brought about the Global Financial Crisis. That isn't a thing that can be easily understood in its everyday utility to the average citizen, there has to be an understanding of the overall corruption (and potential for corruption) of the current system and there almost has to be agreement about that before Bitcoin can be considered to be something useful at all - ie. If person X doesn't have a problem with the current financial system then Bitcoin is a big, complex, electricity hungry beast alternative to a system that's running just fine, and therefore totally unnecessary.
In the years since Bitcoins inception things like Ethereum have come along to add "smart contract" utility that has allowed for things like Decentralised Finance and NFTs (the current usage of NFTs, I think, is detrimental to its potential for real-world problem solving, such as "proof of ownership" and I can't think of anything other use case right now). Decentralised Finance is so new, however, that we won't know what works well and what works poorly as replacements for existing financial services for a few years - bit I think it's important to go through this process of discovery.
Or it could be that rational people look at incredibly slow and energy expensive security with no fundamentals and no applications after a decade and are skeptical.
I mean, why would someone have an axe to grind? Bitcoin stole their girl?
E.g we replace plastic bags with tote bags but a tote bag must be used over 130 times to make it better than a single use plastic bag.
With your thought we wouldn't even be able to compare the two because you're not interested in the actual reality of these issues.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/49433/two-college-roommates-and-...
If the average person uses them for 2 years they'll be a drop in the ocean to the tens or hundreds of kilos of plastic and other objects they don't recycle fully in that time.
It's not that it's polluting the environment that much, more that it's wasteful and creates a unnecessary demand in IC production when they are thrown away in perfect working order.
> Analysts estimate Apple sold between 14 million and 16 million AirPods in 2017.[38] In 2018, AirPods were Apple's most popular accessory product, with 35 million units sold.[39][40] 60 million units were sold in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPods
In 2020, another 114 million units were sold.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/
Each airpod weights about 4g. But we're counting sales. So, we're counting pairs. And we also have to factor in the plastic charging case which comes in at 38g since that's also included in the package as well. That makes for a grand total of 46g per sale.
By my count, the total weight of all airpods ever sold is about 10.350 metric tonnes (46g * 225 million units).
According to the Ocean Cleanup project, the Great Pacific Garbage Page weighs about 88.000 tonnes.
https://theoceancleanup.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch/ Also seems to be confirmed here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
So, all airpods sold between 2017 and end of 2020 make up about... 11.7% of the Great Pacific Garabage Patch.
That's not a number I'd call "negligible". I'm a bit floored and incredulous and not even all too sure of my number work to the point where I've been re-calculating for the past 20 minutes and I'm arriving at the same numbers again and again.
That's just the amount of waste that will need to be disposed of when all units have reached their end of life.
There's also the production process itself which requires resources and produces waste as well. That's not just the molding of plastics and the assembly of circuits. I'm also talking about the extraction, refining,... of natural resources just to produce the half-finished parts that arrive at the plant where the final product is assembled. There's the logistics and transports involved just to move the entire chain. Oh, and the number juggling above is also discounting packaging and wrapping. There's a massive hidden footprint there as well.
If we choose number of plastic bags consumed in American on an annual basis (100 Billion [1]) and go by the mass per bag (5.5g [2]) then just plastic bags in America is 550K tonnes/year of plastic.
Also, according to the UN the world produces as much as 50 million tonnes of electronic and electrical waste a year and they estimate 20% of it is recycled. [3]
So, ya. A penny saved is a penny earned and all. But it's still a penny.
[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_...
[2] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/plastic-bags-to-recycle-or-...
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/un-repor...
It’s about equivalent to a weeks worth of plastic Starbucks cups every morning and far less than the packaging on a average shopping trip.
I misinterpreted this statement: " On average Bitcoin generates 272 g of e-waste per transaction processed on the blockchain."
To mean the online cost of the hashing/mining, etc, not just physical e-waste.
Regardless this may be moot now, but my feelings was that comparing a consumer product (airpods) to a "bulk consumer" product like ASICs is doing an apple to oranges comparison. Airpods are manufactured in Vietnam and distributed through supply chains throughout the world -- whilst ASICs are manufactured in China and distrubted more locally (in Eurasia)?
Does it? Assuming the claim is accurate, 30700 metric tons per year. Apple sells around 200 million iPhones per year. Assuming 200 g for a phone, that's 40000 metric tons.
Edit: I was off by a factor of 10, corrected. The overall smartphone market is likely approximately 10x of Bitcoin, assuming this study is correct, 200g per device, 1.5 billion devices per year (from https://www.statista.com/statistics/263441/global-smartphone...)
Also, 1.5 billion smartphones per year is incredible. Unless there are many people who break/upgrade their phone several times per year, that means a much bigger fraction of humanity now has access to a computing device and likely also to the world's knowledge than I thought.
You get a bunch of normal people (i.e. 'peasants' if you wish) sitting around talking about how to save the environment while eating fruit grown in a faraway land and trucked to them in a refrigerated truck.
Everyone wants to say the solution is that other people should change the way they do things, not themselves.
Too many people aren't willing to accept this simple fact: the standard of living in the cushy societies of the Western middle class is completely and utterly unsustainable. And probably never will be. Avoiding environmental degradation is simply not possible without a major quality of life reduction.
But I think both collectively and individually we are unwilling to make the required sacrifices. You're right, the actions of one person don't make a significant change, but they do make some change. If everyone who said they were deeply concerned about the environment started to make the changes that are required, we'd start to make a dent. And perhaps have a larger effect than themselves.
But they won't. We're all mostly just hoping that massive change doesn't happen until after we die.
In seriousness, carbon emissions are overwhelmingly emitted from large corporations and state level actors (like the military). Which isn't to say that people shouldn't do what they can to reduce their own carbon footprint, but the world won't be saved if everyone buys local and starts biking to work.
Good quote. But, if everyone buys local and starts biking to work, why would the oil companies keep producing as much oil?
Including externalities would be an interesting path. I don't know what that would realistically look like though. Gas tax?
Just the effect of making less green options more expensive would help, but of course this would be even better if the money collected from such a tax was used to invest in green infrastructure which could balance the original pollution.
I have friends who eat vegan, eat more local foods, have cut down meat consumption, avoid travel (yes, before COVID), are reducing their plastic use to near zero, and so on. Few are taking all of that on but some are and there are many other ideas I've heard people taking on.
We keep a garden alongside getting the rest of our vegetables from a local farmer who produces far into the winter via a CSA. We have started replacing some meat consumption with egg consumption from the chickens we keep. We do other things but we definitely have more opportunities. There have been some really nice shifts in perception as our reduced consumption has reduced our stresses and lifted our wealth trajectory.
Consider: could you be hosting some social norms and exhibit some behaviors that keep you from interaction with such people?
[edit: s/eat a vegan/eat vegan/]
Hilariously opposite to the intended message. Sorry, I just found it very funny, have an upvote to make up for my shitpost reply.
I believe in leading by example rather than leading by dictate. Others seeing what's actually possible is far more encouraging of change than pointy fingers and harsh words.
May? Have you seen graphic card prices lately? Even really old cards are selling for multiples of what they were a year or so ago.
> In some cases, steady GPU mining can be safer than gaming. When mining with a GPU, the load is evenly distributed over time; therefore, there are no thermal spikes and sudden drops that could damage the GPU.
https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/can-mining-damage-my-gpu-...
Keep in mind that NiceHash is a GPU mining pool
So transactions on exchanges are less wasteful?
A deposit from wallet to exchange generates the same pollution?
Or is it "only" mined transactions? Does the transaction size matter?
reward_per_block * price = value_per_block
cost_per_hash * avg_hashes_to_find_block = cost_per_block
cost_per_hash is the cost of electricity and mining hardware . If value_per_block > cost_per_block, mining is profitable and more miners will join the network, increasing avg_hashes_to_find_block, until value_per_block == cost_per_block.
co2_emissions = avg_hashes_to_find_block * co2_per_hash.
So the emissions are a function of the price of bitcoin and the price of (electricity + mining hardware).
(This is obviously not quite apples for apples, since you'd also have to account for VISA & Co. likely employing more people than Bitcoin, on the other hand, Bitcoin also requires absurd amounts of throw-away hardware.)
Each to their own I guess.
You give me the kind opportunity to quote a favourite lyric of mine:
The do-er and the thinker: no allowance for the other
Thick as a Brick, Jethro Tull[0]
[0]: http://www.collecting-tull.com/Albums/Lyrics/ThickAsABrick.h...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
1) The Yemen number is for the whole system. The energy to send one transaction is tiny and much smaller than using the existing remittances system.
2) With a bank, it's not even clear you could send $5 to Yemen as there's a civil war going on. And if you did find a money transfer company willing to do it, it would be very expensive. With Bitcoin, as long as the person in Yemen has a phone and can get online, you can send them any amount, it will cost ~$2, and take minutes to do.
All of these "uses energy per transaction" people are being underserved by their news sources on the development of the lightning network, which is like going from a LAN with global broadcast to NATed and routed TCP/IP (Bitcoin is a global broadcast layer and lightning is a transaction bundling / routing layer/network). I mean an entire country has adopted it and we still have folks on hacker news missing the disruption for the trees!
They being...?
If it is only discarded because there is new hardware with a better calculations/energy ratio then it would be better to use a new POW algorithm, which does not benefit from single purpose ASICs.
Or are processors and memory broken beyond repair when they have been running at max speed for a few years?
> it would be better to use a new POW algorithm, which does not benefit from single purpose ASICs.
It's hard for me to imagine what that would be but that could be a lack of imagination on my part. Maybe other non-payment blockchain applications?
The other day some friends and I were musing how cool it would be if we could map some simulation algorithms to SHA-256 primitives. I thought there could be chance because I didn't actually know the mathematical operation SHA was doing. Once I found out, it didn't work out at all. Not even close. Maybe others will be more fortunate.
And for the one-off needs more mainstream CPUs already have support for some acceleration of SHA-256 [1] and that seems to be enough for them.
Verifying 1 block requires the calculation of 1 hash. The hashrate for my CPU for RandomX is ~8000hashes/s. The monero blockchain currently has 2450000 blocks. blocks / hashrate = 5 minutes to verify the whole blockchain. Is that really that bad?
I do hope that we can develop effective methods to combat climate change so that we can enjoy clean water and a roof above our heads for a bit longer. It would be a shame if our civilisation disappears without a trace, lost forever to entropy. It would be nice to leave something behind, even though our existence is probably less meaningful than we tell ourselves.
I'm not unhappy, I feel blessed for being here and now. The only thing I'm fed up with is people blatantly lying, without repercussions. Big corporations have fucked up the climate by lying and they want me, the average citizen, to feel guilty of my carbon footprint.
We don't deserve these lies.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.in/cryptocurrency/news/a-single-...
So as far whether or not that matters... do you expect that there is a substantially different number of employees need to maintain the VISA system than the Bitcoin system, on a per-transaction basis? Even if you're generous and say that VISA needs 10× the employees that Bitcoin would (were it the same size as VISA), it would still require that an employee use 100,000× the energy cost of a transaction to overcome the fact that Bitcoin transactions require 1,000,000× the energy of VISA.
I'd like to see an estimate of visa's energy usage using the same method the source you linked used to estimate bitcoin's energy usage. Take visa's revenue and multiply it by some fraction of revenue used for energy use (they used 52%). Some very rough calculations I did put it about 1000 times more energy expensive than visa's own report. That's still 1000 times better than bitcoin, using the same method, but it'd interesting to know where the discrepancy comes from, and whether that should also be considered for bitcoin's energy use.
Perhaps bitcoin or some other crypto can serve as a currency in a sense, but you'd still need financial institutions to do things like write loans and manage other assets.
It seems that Karl Marx was right when he said that "Unbridled Capitalism Will Destroy itself." - It has already destroyed itself in the eyes of a large number of people.
But clearly communism isn't the solution since it also ended up destroying itself on many occasions.
Maybe the solution is bridled (constrained) capitalism? It's interesting to think back to the gold standard and how gold acted as a constraint on capitalism. Maybe what we really need now are constraints; Bitcoin and other deflationary cryptocurrencies can provide this.
Because if not then what's the point?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc
Fix the money, fix the world.
As if Coronavirus were the "disease that eases" that will drive sustainable horse dewormer development in an emergent free miracle cure fashion and take us to an immortal civilization.
Cull the weak, accelerate evolution!
These articles keep popping up every few weeks as the promoters try to revise their messaging.
Are there any similar studies regarding the banking system?
With buildings and buildings full of offices just for banks, their IT infrastructure, plus ATMs, POS, etc.
How frequently are these systems replaced/upgraded?
How much energy are they using?
I think it would be interesting to make a comparison.
[0] (I have no sources, just based on seeing links to similar studies recently)
Bitcoins annual estimated e-waste: 307 000 metric tons Global annual estimated e-waste: 53 600 000 metric tons
307 000 / 53 600 000 * 100 = 0.57 %
I don't know if the numbers in the linked paper and the following paper can be used together as I haven't read both, but I've taken the global annual e-waste estimate from here as unfortunately the linked paper does not mention it in the abstract: https://www.itu.int/myitu/-/media/Publications/2020-Publicat...
While I do think Bitcoin in its current form is a problem and the developers should start thinking of solutions sooner than later, I think starting with Bitcoin to reduce total e-waste is misguided at best.
Note that Chia’s form of proof of space does not count since it actually consumes SSDs. CPUs are not (meaningfully) consumed by running RandomX.
(CPUs at dense process nodes do degrade slowly but their life spans are usually far longer than their useful life anywhere in the market.)
I could imagine the RandomX code execution approach being re-worked to incorporate useful scientific computation, and this being worked into the currency itself. It might be possible for people to stake money on compute units and then have the money go to the miner who solves a block in proportion to compute units performed. You'd have to put a lot of work into making this non-gameable though.
Maybe something can be done here with homomorphic encryption too, so the miners would not even know what they are computing.
A lot of interesting open cryptography and math work here.
Most industrial processes require heat beyond what a mining chip could handle... unless you fabricated special mining chips out of different semiconductor materials that can handle high heat. But that's probably too expensive for the economics to work too.
What would make some sense to me is an integrated solar PV panel / mining unit. Just deploy them in the desert and connect them. Each panel could be discrete and WiFi connected, meaning you would not have to wire them to anything at all. Just prop them up in the sun with WAPs every so often to connect them to a network.
We risk the whole world becoming paperclips type economics doomsday scenario.. least growing number of people that ascribe value to cryto agree to collectively ascribe to an alternative model for distribution of transaction security.
Do I really need to point who is the biggest e-waste generator in the world? Solve that problem first.
It's also the consumers who are using the oil, not only the oil companies, who are to blame at the end. If no one buys, no one will produce.
Sure, if it's cheap and readily available, people will use it no matter how bad it is.
That's why it's so important that the governments increase the taxes on oil, petrol and diesel.
In many places in Europe you can get to work or holiday destinations by public transport.
In Switzerland (a rich and relatively densely populated country, albeit full of mountains) there are trains and cable cars to almost everywhere, and if not a train there is most likely a bus (managed by the post office). I managed to live there quite a few years without owning a car.
In Singapore they put a hard limit on the number of cars on the road (and no exception for electric cars, to Tesla disappointment), and the available slots are sold at auctions. There is a dense public transport system, supplemented by a relatively high amount of taxi.
What’s “that problem”? It’s not clear from your post.
We always seem to go in circles with whataboutism when posts like this appear: “X is a bigger problem so let’s solve that”. We can do this for every problem — look at the data through the right lens and another problem is always bigger - and never solve anything.