Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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The worst part is that according to Cambridge some 40% of that is coal power [1]. Frequently the dirtiest coal power in the world, between Xinjiang (no longer, probably...) and Kazakhstan. Coal power causes excess mortality of anywhere between 25 and 278 deaths per TWh generated depending on how you're counting it and (most importantly) where it's generated. [2,3,4]

Bitcoin's addiction to dirty coal killed between 1500 and 15000 people last year.

To process 4 transactions per second.

In a few years Bitcoin mining will kill way more people than the number of political dissidents it could hope to save through the magic of decentralization.

[edit] Energy is not free people. Not even renewables. Making electronics isn't free. E-waste isn't free. This isn't WoW.

[1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

[3] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

[4] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

You really think that China banning bitcoin means they no longer use those dirty coal power plants? For a country that has such a huge demand for power that it's had blackouts and struggled to keep businesses powered even AFTER they banned all bitcoin mining[1]? Maybe that might even have to do with why they banned it in the first place?

It sucks that bitcoin uses so much power, but these countries using fossil fuels would still use them with or without bitcoin mining. We need to keep the pressure up to get these countries (and our own) to convert to 100% green renewable sources.

Right now China has only promised to reduce its fossil fuel to 20% of its total energy use by 2060, which is still 38 years away and way too late. In fact they're planning to keep INCREASING fossil fuel use up through 2030!

"China is targeting a clean energy goal of reducing fossil fuel use to below 20% by 2060, according to an official plan published by state media."

"The cabinet document, released on Sunday, follows a pledge by President Xi Jinping to wean the world’s biggest polluter off coal, with a target of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality 30 years later."

There's no bitcoin mining in the country now to use it as a scapegoat either.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/business/economy/china-el...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/25/china-to-cut-f...

> You really think that China banning bitcoin means they no longer use those dirty coal power plants?

No, but banning the miners meant they didn't have to build a whole pile more.

"Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point" - they have the moral high-ground on this issue.

> Right now China has only promised to reduce its fossil fuel to 20% of its total energy use by 2060.

Sure. And it would have been a smaller reduction had they not kicked out the miners. This waste is purely additive.

> No, but banning the miners meant they didn't have to build a whole pile more.

I wasn't arguing that it was a bad thing that China banned bitcoin mining, just that banning it didn't reduce fossil fuels at all (maybe slowed down how fast they expanded in the future, sure). And they're still planning to build 43 new ones[1] in addition to what they already have.

So now what? Can't ban bitcoin mining in China twice. How are we going to get them to reduce emissions now?

> "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point" - they have the moral high-ground on this issue.

You are neither the worst person I know, nor did you make a great point, nor am I heartbroken. Thanks for the snarky reference to a Clickhole article[2] that's just a slight sidestep from an ad hominem attack.

I also don't know who you mean by "they" or what moral high ground you're referring to. I already said it's shitty bitcoin used this much energy this year, and also what percentage was generated by fossil fuels. But it's not the only reason the world is still using so much fossil fuels, and energy demands around the world have been increasing rapidly even if you take out all of bitcoin's usage. Most of that is driven by economic growth in Asian countries[3], not bitcoin. You want those countries to ban economic growth too? How are we going to do that? Hell, how's anyone going to get the political will to do it in the U.S.?

For the record, I'm all for degrowth worldwide to help reduce the looming climate/biodiversity/water catastrophe, I just don't see how it's going to happen. Pretty sure we're doomed to have a major collapse forced upon us by the world in the next 20-30 years.

[1]: https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/

[2]: https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...

[3]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41433

> So now what? Can't ban bitcoin mining in China twice. How are we going to get them to reduce emissions now?

Indeed, they have a lot of work ahead of them. I will not disagree. I'm hopeful their huge push towards nuclear power will help them bridge the gap. They are one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions and all sorts of other pollution in the world.

> You are neither the worst person I know, nor did you make a great point, nor am I heartbroken. Thanks for the snarky reference to a Clickhole article[2] that's just a slight sidestep from an ad hominem attack.

I sincerely apologize, but that wasn't directed at you! The heartbreak was mine, and the "worst person you know" was directed at the PRC government. I was implying that while they do not have a particularly stellar track record in the ethics department, in this case, they made a good (TM) choice.

I suspect our positions are closer together than they are far apart.

Fair enough. Sounds like we're mostly on the same page on this issue after all, except I don't want to see bitcoin eliminated, just somehow figure out a way to significantly reduce how much electricity it's started consuming and for it to be run on 100% renewables someday (hopefully sooner than later).

I would love it to be, but it won't, I concede.

Its energy and resource consumption cap is proportional to its unit price times block reward. For the foreseeable future, as long as number go up, consumption will go up. And this is the most critical time for climate change in our lives. Any green energy we generate must go to displacing carbon-intensive processes or we'll be trading bitcoin for citrus from rafts on waterworld.

The worst part is, once we run out of block reward, there's no guarantee people will be willing to pay enough per transaction to actually secure the network to any meaningful degree, so all this resource consumption today may well be for nothing.

You really think that China banning bitcoin means they no longer use those dirty coal power plants?

You may want to examine the logical flaw behind this line of questioning.

Indeed - from my understanding those power plants, the cheap energy, was cheap and available, in excess, because they're located in areas with little development or use for the energy otherwise.

Or even on a more basic level - it's like you see someone who's left the water running in their bathtub, and the water is flowing over the sides, through the floorboards and down the stairs, and they come back with:

"You don't think we were using lots of water in this house before I decided to take a bath today?"

> In a few years Bitcoin mining will kill way more people than the number of political dissidents

How are you counting the number of political dissidents saved?

I was just being glib - but in an ideal world that number should be 0. Any political dissidents that are willing to write their entire transaction history in plaintext on a slow, small public ledger are going to end up in political prison in a hot minute. They're just waiting for automated tooling to file a report with the secret police.

Bitcoin is not the tool you should be using for that. It's just poor opsec.

Do you have any evidence that this number is nonzero?

Edit: I don't have direct evidence of saving lives (e.g. somebody bribed a guard with bitcoin in order to escape execution), but it's not hard to argue that these resistance organizations do save lives.

* https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2020/09/09/belarus-nonprofit...

* https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut...

* https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2020/07/15/russian-activists...

* https://wikileaks.org/

It has niche uses, but so would any other non-PoW crypto or a CBDC.

Assuming it killed 15000 people, that is still over 8000 transactions per person killed... Nothing is perfect.

If one person died for every 8000 transactions on the Visa network it would be nothing short of global genocide.

Credit networks ran 468 billion transactions in 2020, so that would be 60 million dead.

"Pobody's nerfect" hardly seems like the right response.

It is if you're being darkly cynical

Touché.

That's anywhere from 0.1 to 0.01 milimort per bitcoin transaction. Chilling.

Is free energy a noteworthy feature of the WoW world?

There are no externalities in the Wow economy

There are no new dirty power plants like coal or nuclear built specifically for bitcoin mining. There are definitely new renewable energy sources built for bitcoin mining. So dirty energy would be used anyway!

The rate of new renewable energy sources created because of bitcoin is higher overall than without bitcoin.

No, there have been fossil plants that were reinstated or bought for mining.

E.g. https://youtu.be/GMcgEdLUdu4

I'm sure fewer coal power plants would have been built in China before the ban if it wasn't for Bitcoin.

Source? To what extent has this been quantified? Of course there's some anecdotes that someone puts a couple of solar panels on a mining cluster, but for all the numbers I've seen around this, it's lipstick on a pig. The climate balance of the thing is horrific.

Here's one. [1]

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/bitcoin-miners-resurrect-fossil...

>like coal or nuclear

Nuclear is dirty? How?

Nuclear fuel is made by physically mining the elements that go into it then processing them in an energy intensive process.

It does of course cost far less energy to extract than it produces. It’s extraordinarily energy dense. It only takes 19,000T give or take per year to produce 20% of US energy. The US alone consumes 731,000,000T of coal per year (40,000X).

With breeder reactors we can cut that down by several hundred times - it’s just that uranium is quite abundant and very energy dense so we haven't really bothered to.

Further there’s a few billion tons in the ocean we’re working on extracting.

If we’re willing to accept extracting rare earth metals from Mongolian hellscapes like Baitou and calling wind green, it’s pretty disingenuous not to extend the same treatment to nuclear. [1] There is no free lunch.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...

Nitpick: the place is apparently the city of Baotou 包头市; pinyin: Bāotóu; Mongolian: Buɣutu qota, not Baitou; source: linked article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baotou

Fukushima

An unfortunate accident, and basically the worst case scenario for that reactor design. Not to mention there was an earthquake and a tsunami.

And the fact that the current death toll stands at 1 (likely to increase though) and Fukushima is perfectly habitable now (and has been for a while now). Almost 20000 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami. Only 1 due to the nuclear disaster.

Fukushima disaster should be a footnote in history. It’s not a valid representation of safety of nuclear power.

As a European, I’m far more concerned about the dependence on Russian natural gas (Germany completely abandoning nuclear; Nordstream 2) than I am about a reactor blowing up.

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