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Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

It's not a stupid idea. It's the invention of digital scarcity. It is supposed to be real world costly.

High energy use in itself is not the issue, it's CO2 emissions. Energy can be locally abundant, renewable, yet remote, hard to transport to civilization. That would be an idealistic example of sustainable mining. Bitcoin mining isn't fully at that level of sustainability yet, but it's a solvable problem.

Bitcoin isn't for rich people. It's for all people. It's highly popular in deeply inflationary regimes, amidst refugees and particular immigrants. The fastest growth in Bitcoin addresses for years has come from the African continent.

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> Bitcoin mining isn't fully at that level of sustainability yet, but it's a solvable problem.

No it's not.

These sorts of arguments fundamentally misunderstand the Sisyphean design of Bitcoin's proof-of-work algorithm: difficulty is scaled to absorb any changes in hash power, and expending hash power is rewarded with a chance of minting coins and/or collecting fees.

Bitcoin could be made sustainable and clean today, with no extra infrastructure, no optimised hardware, no new solar panel breakthrough, etc.: miners simply have to turn off their equipment, then difficulty will adjust downwards, and Bitcoin would become efficient enough to run off a solar-powered RaspberryPi.

That won't happen; and for exactly the same reason miners won't stop burning cheap fossil fuels as well as diverting as much renewable power as they can away from useful projects like electrified transport, desalination, aluminium smelting, HVAC, etc.

Difficulty cannot scale downwards to the level you describe because then it ceases to be Bitcoin. It's supposed to be extremely difficult, this is what secures digital scarcity.

It doesn't help to speak in simplistic absolutes. Miners can definitely become more green and rapidly so. The massive move from China to the US that took place over the last few months likely has dramatically changed the energy mix to mine Bitcoin, for the better. There's also a Bitcoin mining council to promote best practices in renewable mining. There can be additional incentive structures (CO2 tax) to further discourage dirty mining.

> There can be additional incentive structures (CO2 tax) to further discourage dirty mining.

Bitcoin interprets carbon tax as damage and routes around it

Everything everyone else said plus e-waste. My lord, Bitcoin produces as much e-waste as the entirety of the Netherlands to scribble a few bytes into a ledger once every 10 minutes lol. 97% of all mining devices will never successfully mine a single block. Each transaction produces as much e-waste as throwing out an iPad. That's on top of the power demand. You cannot make that sustainable. It's grey goo.

We're going to need to figure out how to recycle e-waste at massive scale irregardless of bitcoin.

Silicon brains are the spice of civilization. The only limit on who much e-waste we produce is how fast we can churn them out.

Cool and when we do we can revisit Bitcoin.

That's not how progress in anything, whether it's increasing complexity in evolution of life or the advance of civilization, has ever worked.

We do new things, and figure out how to manage the fallout for the successful things after the fact.

Also when we realize things are bad, we stop.

Not when the thing we're doing has a positive feedback loop. We continue until we overextend, collapse, and then start over. Humans are intelligent, so we usually try to do things differently after the collapse. Sometimes, individuals are smart enough to see the collapse coming and build an ark to ride out the chaos.

There is clearly is no strong consensus that bitcoin is bad, since it's worth over a trillion dollars. In fact, people are jumping into bitcoin because they believe the existing financial system is bad and on the verge of collapse.

We'll see.

> There is clearly is no strong consensus that bitcoin is bad, since it's worth over a trillion dollars. In fact, people are jumping into bitcoin because they believe the existing financial system is bad and on the verge of collapse.

Price is not consensus of goodness, and it's not value. You wouldn't believe what the market cap of heroin is. Market cap is the most recent trade price multiplied by supply. The price is overwhelmingly determined by USDT trading, not USD trading. According to Google Trends fewer people care now than in much of recent memory.

And further, they're quite mistaken about the impending doom. Just as the man with the megaphone yelling about the rapture has been wrong for decades too.

I guess what I'm saying is, it's time for an e-waste tax and a carbon tax.

[edit] You know, when the Cuyahoga River caught fire, the official response wasn't "well folks we should probably just keep dumping stuff into the river until we find a new process, nothing to worry about, just wear these brominated swim trunks when you go for a dip to avoid burns" -- it was to create the EPA and tell companies to immediately cease and desist until they found a better way forward.

The thing is, the discussion really isn't about Bitcoin's footprint. As a society, we don't care at all about high energy usage, CO2 output or waste.

We've ignored the issue for decades and fully embraced ACs, huge cars, big TVs, high-end gaming PCs, cheap products from China, air travel and the excessive eating of meat.

Even in these times of peak awareness, the typical consumer continues to add more electrical devices to their homes, install jacuzzis in their garden and get ever bigger cars.

Nobody is outraged about any of this behavior. We deserve these toys and justify them.

Bitcoin simply stands out as an easy scapegoat. It's not that people actually care about sustainability, they simply see something they don't understand or need, hence let's ban it. Compare it to the outrage regarding very large trucks, and people calling for a ban.

The trouble is, there's only a few of such trucks, so it does nothing. It would be much more fruitful to ban or heavily tax big TVs, as there's many more of them. And just like that, nobody's interested in sustainability anymore. Not when it personally hurts. So it's all optics, not outcomes.

I see no value in high-end gaming PCs and think they should be banned. They have no meaningful societal value to justify their energy use. You see no value in Bitcoin and think it should be banned.

Neither of us has the moral high ground. We're all a bunch of hypocrites that hand pick whatever we consider of personal value, and to disregard anything else that others may consider of value.

The dollar is highly popular in inflationary regimes, crypto is a popular thing to write about, and a few use it but the main defacto backup currency almost always becomes the dollar. (For instance in Venezuala)

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