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Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

Don't ever let any Bitcoin or NFT shills get away with lying to you that their cryptocurrencies and CryptoKitties and Digital Pet Rocks run on renewable energy.

And never let any of those get-rich-quick pyramid scheme shills get away without forcing them to openly admit that even though they're burning coal, wasting electricity, destroying the environment, causing climate change, cancer, and heart disease, they simply don't give a flying fuck about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Kazakhstan#Electrici...

>In 2013, the country produced 93.76 billion kWH - 70 billion kWh (81%) from coal, 8 from gas and 8 from hydro. The country has 71 power stations, including 5 hydro power plants located on the Irtysh river, which translates to total installed generating capacity of 19.6 GW. 75 percent of electricity generated is consumed by industry, 11 percent by households, 2 percent by transportation.[25]

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I wonder how much coal China burned to fabricate all the computers necessary for you to post this and for everyone else to read it.

Looks like you're being downvoted by all of the people that refuse to own up to their own hypocrisy over this issue. You're exactly correct, of course. China manufactures the vast majority of this equipment, and China runs on coal.

It's not hypocrisy.

We need computers for a lot of solid, real life uses.

We don't need cryptocurrencies for almost anything being peddled. They're supposed to be decentralized, but you can't really use them that way in 99% of situations. They're supposed to be currencies and instead they're vehicles for speculation. Etc.

I think their slogan should be: "You don't really need cryptocurrencies for that".

PoW crypocurrencies are global communications systems that offer nonrepudiation, instant settlement, and finality; a subset additionally offer privacy. It's valuable to people who need those guarantees. There are speculators in every market.

What crypto currency offers privacy?

Monero

> There are speculators in every market.

For crypto speculation is <<the market>>.

I'll be the first to admit that bitcoin failed to achieve everything it was supposed to. However, criticizing cryptocurrency as a whole over energy usage of all things is hypocrisy. It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. The world is being destroyed, but not by this.

0.55% of energy consumption[0] is not a trivial amount of energy.

0: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

Yeah, but in the grand scheme of things it's nothing. A nuisance at best. If people really are worried about climate change, they need to stop trading with China, regulate big oil, invest in public infrastructure and transportation, heavily incentivize development and usage of clean energy sources, etc. Bitcoin is just a convenient distraction from the real problems. Regulating it will contribute virtually nothing to this cause.

At this point in time, there is no reason to care about this. Maybe we start caring if some insane development happens and BTC suddenly starts representing 10-20% of our energy consumption. Until then, there are bigger problems to worry about.

Indeed. If folks weren't just virtue signaling about climate change, then we could get on with tiling a third of the State of New Mexico with solar panels to power the North American hemisphere.

We already have the technology and the land area.

If that energy were produced by solar, then it would require 332 km^2 of 290W 60-cell solar panels which is roughly the size of downtown Austin, TX.

The ability to tile a land area the size of a smaller American city with relatively bad solar panels to power half a percent of the world's energy usage is pretty amazing.

It's cliche at this point, but: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

I'm guessing since there are no hypocrites in crypto you are all using non-fiat "coins" to pay your bills and buy groceries, right?

You could have made the same argument about the Internet itself 20 years ago (i.e., a speculative new technology that provides little evident utility while costing a lot in terms of energy usage). What about Amazon's 2-hr delivery? Do you really need a gas-guzzling vans delivering at all hours when the USPS will come to your door daily anyway? What about ride share? How many millions of people opted to ride alone in a gas-guzzling car vs taking a bus or the train?

Energy usage is highly correlated with economic development, trying to curtail energy usage is akin to economic suicide. What you should be advocating for is clean energy production, not consumption. You're headed down a precarious slope if you start policing how and on what people can use energy.

Amazon is a net positive for energy in car dependent places. It's more energy efficient to drop something off than for someone to drive to the store to buy it. You can get significant economies of scale and those apply to energy usage.

Beyond that, we can and will eventually force Amazon to use EVs if they don't by themselves to save money, which is possible.

I'm all for strongly inducing people to use trains, buses, ebikes, and the like.

We can advocate for clean energy, and we should. But advocating against zero-sum energy usage is perfectly fine and completely consistent with good economic policy.

The internet never used all that much energy. The computers were there anyways, and when it was in its speculative stage it was piggy-backing off the telephone network for most of the actual transmission. It was never even close to a power hog until it became very evident how useful it was.

There are quite a few carbon neutral chains that people do launch on. Most businesses do require energy but they try to offset it. People are trying to shift away from mining for the largest NFT blockchain though, ethereum.

This is just one and I'm sure there are more to come because if the practice is unsustainable a large part of the community would not support it in the long term. https://medium.com/celoorg/a-carbon-negative-blockchain-its-...

> Don't ever let any Bitcoin or NFT shills get away with lying to you that their cryptocurrencies and CryptoKitties and Digital Pet Rocks run on renewable energy.

Cryptokitties run on Ethereum and Ethereum is already partially using PoS. Now from day one people have said "PoW does not work" and yet PoW, so far, is still working. People are now saying "PoS does not work" and yet, so far, PoS is working.

The cryptocurrencies haters better come up with something else than the "energy" argument against cryptocurrencies because the shift to PoS is coming and it's coming fast.

If PoS comes, it'll be something to stop criticizing Ethereum over. It'll still be useful to criticize cryptocurrencies in general. See Bitcoin, Monero, etc.

> If PoS comes

Like they said, it's already here. The only thing that's left is to end PoW which will happen within the next ~5 months.

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