Blockchains will maybe not destroy the planet
zeptonaut.com
zeptonaut.com
The whole space is divided drastically.
When I get told I should talk to a friend of a friend, because "he's also into crypto" I'm quite weary.
I like the diverse and queer part of crypto, filled with artists and technologists from different walks of life.
But I don't get along with the cryptobro faction that wants to shill their next NFT collection.
The crypto space is big and very mixed, so don't let yourself get alienated by a bunch of critics that hate on BAYC etc., because there are many people in crypto that are different.
Weirdly enough, though, I do think that's a superpower of crypto: it encourages people to recruit others to a team that's trying to achieve something. Figuring out how to co-opt that superpower for good is the hard part.
People should stop strawmanning themselves with this "it will change the world" narative. Nobody wants to hear that, even if it's true.
There should be more talk about the small things where blockchains can improve things. Otherwise people from the outside feel like they get recruited to a cult or made fun of for using "outdated tech".
One of the things I'd like to work on is silly, local, small crypto projects that will be appealing to people that don't give two craps about blockchains or crypto. I think if you can make projects like that, then you could be onto something. (I have some interesting-in-theory running club stuff, local scavenger hunts, etc.)
Carbon capture would not work as an incentive, because it can be spoofed. It's not something that you must absolutely do, you can just say that you did.
I can confidently say that it seems not-too-difficult to tweak certain assumptions about mining (e.g. have a central authority that can issue tokens in response to offline proof, like proof of capturing X amount of carbon). With that in place and assuming you now have $CARBONCOIN, you can leverage all of the existing financialization that exists within the crypto ecosystem and you have a functioning carbon capture marketplace having only implemented a fraction of it.
Like I said - I'm a noob and I'm trying to learn more to understand what the problems with stuff like would be. But I'm really interested in "what rules of crypto can you tweak to accomplish real things".
If you're proposing switching to a centralized authority to determine carbon credits, well, we already have that: carbon tax credits for out existing financial system. Carboncoin already exists.
This trustlessness is an important selling point in a world where people don't trust each other, their institutions, their governments, especially after 2008 when it was clearly demonstrated that the financial institutions we depend on are being run like criminal organizations, to this day and with zero consequences for the criminals. So here comes technology to save the day.
Crypto economies can exist because blockchain technology eliminates the double spending problem. The problem of course is that although blockchains can restrict people from spending their coin twice, they can't restrict people from committing the rest of the crimes, including scamming, social engineering, insider trading, pumping and dumping and other market manipulations. Every crime in the book, since crypto economies are not meant to be regulated. Outright replacing the blockchain with a different one also happened to Ethereum. The perpetrators range from lone social engineers to companies like a16z doing white-collar crime on an industrial scale. Trustlessness basically devolves into a bigger fish eats the smaller one system, and Ponzi schemes in which people are left holding useless crypto assets. It's all about stealing USD from bigger fools. Bonus points if you manage to convince them to never sell their cryptocurrency back, which is why crypto is being pushed as an utopia, as a solution to everything. It's the future of selling art (NFT) and hosting websites (Web 3.0), even though it is obvious that blockchain technology is not especially suitable for any of that. It can only really eliminate the double spending problem.
Unfortunately trust, and more importantly oversight will always be required. You can't avoid it as long as there are humans involved. We have to fix our institutions instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with them, most of our problems can be accounted to industries and interest groups manipulating the system to their own benefit, more usually than not by hindering regulatory effort.
The incentive behind bitcoin is always economics. Miners will use the cheapest energy possible as it will produce the most profit. The cheapest energy is the surplus green energy that solar produces during the day. It can't be used by industry and it can't be used by residential during the evening.
Bitcoin will self regulate onto the cheapest energy because of its economics and the cheapest energy is and will always be renewables.
A few people get rich from Bitcoin, the rest of society pays for it: pollution, more expensive energy, people losing their money to Ponzi schemes, insider trading, pump and dump and so on. Bitcoin takes resources away from education, health care, the environment and puts it into supercars, superyachts and supermodels. It's a future some people want for themselves, it is not a sustainable future. It's greed, it's selfishness, it's short-sightedness.
Electricity costs 22p a unit but for every unit my solar puts onto the grid I am paid only 5p. They pay me so little not because of their greed but because they can't use the energy, electricity is needed most in the evening when my solar isn't producing. At that rate the solar on my roof will never pay for itself.
Batteries and hydro storage are expensive and not that great for the environment in comparison to a miner thats small and can be anywhere there is a power source and internet connection.
If we can manage surplus energy on the grid instantaneously in a way that stores its value like we can with bitcoin we could solve the grid balancing problems renewables present. We can produce energy at 120% - 200% what is needed and burn the surplus instead of trying to store that energy.
If I put that surplus energy my solar produces into a miner I can make more money than powering the grid not because I am starving factories, cars and houses of my power but simply because my power would be wasted on the grid and would never actually power those things.
> It's greed, it's selfishness, it's short-sightedness.
Its a tool it can be used how the wielder sees fit
Bitcoin offers little back to society. A few people make a boatload of cash with it. The infamous trickle-down economic theory unfortunately doesn't work.
Banking the worlds unbanked offers little to you that doesn't mean it offers little to society think of those who have less than you.
Bitcoin's value is through the roof due to the religious fervor of holders, greedy investors shooting for the moon, and market manipulation. This is however not sustainable since the only value is cashing out at the right time, taking money from bag holders.
Bitcoin is more of an asset class than a currency, it does not offer much to the unbanked. You can't buy anything with it, you can just buy it and sell it, which is risky. People however are being scammed with Bitcoin, just look at what happened in Brazil after their regulators gave a thumbs up on cryptocurrencies: FOMO, Ponzi schemes, hundreds of thousands of victims.
Bitcoin in many parts of the world finances organized crime and terrorism, so banking the unbanked is not always a good idea either.
That can't be right.
Bitcoin and Ethereum use comparable amounts of power according to the daily rewards available (column "PoW Produced (24h)" in [1], while Ethereum's transaction rate is barely 5x greater than Bitcoin's.
Noted that my numbers for Ethereum are almost certainly not correct, but I think the point still stands that "the carbon footprint of crypto and blockchains depends hugely on which blockchain you're talking about"
But snark aside.
Hopefully in the long term PoW will eventually be abandoned altogether... aside from BTC and maybe some inconsequential stragglers. But this is a very big nuance that people refuse to address. All blockchains are evil, period. I've seen people outright dismiss the fact that eco-friendly blockchains exist, even when linked to Tezos' wiki's energy consumption explanation. [1] Their opinion is that no matter what, blockchains are a bloated solution because it's an append only database replicated across the globe. But what they fail to understand is just how much redundancy is hidden from the user in the traditional web. Just think that every website has a database, likely replicated and with multiple backups, with all the infrastructure to keep it up and serve its data, all of which is likely not optimized at all because hey, as long as it works. For each and every website!
On the other hand, blockchains are likely highly optimized for their use case (well, aside from Ethereum), with no need for backups, replicas and all that jazz as it's already built in the protocol. Consider also that traditional websites' servers have to run 24/7, even with no visitors.
Sadly, NFTs completely shut down any possibility of rational discussion, but in my opinion blockchains are breaking ground for new ways to develop websites by using decentralized, highly optimized, shared infrastructure. (Example: The Graph[2])
We'll see.
[1] https://wiki.tezosagora.org/learn/baking/tezos-energy-consum...
The problem stems from the fact that actual useful applications take time to develop, whereas just slapping an image on an NFT and investing in marketing takes no time at all. Same for cryptocurrencies. But IMO that doesn't invalidate the technology as a whole, it just speaks for humans' greed, nothing else.
And somehow, no websites will need to be run or databases spun up, in the futuristic web3 universe?
That makes no sense, almost all crypto-apps use traditional web2 technology alongside blockchain & wallet web3 stuff.
That said, I have more reservations about this concept than the Hilton.
Maybe blockchains are useful somewhere outside of crypto speculation, but blockchains that are marketed as eco-friendly and secure and decentralized deserve extra scrutiny in my mind.
I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but I do try to keep up to date with the technology. POW sucks in terms of resources, but PoS sucks in terms of centralization, and, it follows, security (the core selling points of blockchains)
(For example, one key selling point is that you can leverage all of the existing financialization tools that exist for that blockchain, even if your allocation of those tokens is centralized.)
The design introduces security problems that it then has to solve, and in doing so, reduces security in other places
No caching. No QUIC. No parallel pipelines (you need the whole blockchain locally to begin rendering), no deletion of old content. No CDNs. No edge distribution of secured media (Netflix movies, et.al.).
Everybody must (to be secure) verify all the entries of the entire blockchain as a boot-up step. At least once per load, viewers must traverse the block chain to build the latest state for a specific web page.
It gets worse if you optimize for the above actions by creating and maintaining one block chain per individual or small groups of w3 sites. Frankly, I find this idea to be completely unrealistic. One can look at existing P2P and see how seeds vanish without traditional websites (and their trackers - hey, databases!) to back them up.
Just imagine what Reddit's blockchain (size, transaction time, parsing time, growth) would look like.
The user does not have to download the blockchain. It would be the same as needing to download a database, it makes no sense. It all happens in the backend, all the client needs is a simple API call.
> If you’re in the camp of “this thing is fairly useless”, then the horrific externalities of Bitcoin mining clearly outweigh the minuscule benefits.
This group of people is obligated to latch on to incomplete information like this. Because it doesn't matter what the truth is, the goal post has to move to "this is fairly useless so the energy must be useable for some other purpose and bitcoin mining must therefore be wasting it" when that's not true either.
Where Bitcoin mining is used to reduce flare gas emissions, it is reducing the environmental impact while increasing the amount of energy used. Emissions that were happening for decades, straight up into the atmosphere, with no other economical way of stopping it until bitcoin miners came along. A headline talking just about the amount of energy, and not the source of the energy, should therefore always be a big red flag as it is intended to manipulate you.
Large mining companies tried delaying this information coming out for years, because it was beneficial to them to keep their energy sources secret.
I do think that any discussion of Bitcoin has to be evaluated through the lens of "did Bitcoin meet Satoshi's original vision of a digital replacement for cash", and I just don't think that Bitcoin has the transaction throughput to justify its cost to society. I feel like if you were to ask Satoshi if he thought 7tx/s was high enough to achieve his vision, his answer would have been an immediate "no".
Even if it uses no energy to do the actual mining, it still has used huge amounts of computing resources (CPUs, GPUs) which have a very real carbon cost to produce.
Call me a skeptic though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think your observation and sentiment would be best used in being vigilant about where Proof of Work is done and the emissions improvement it is having in those places, and rallying against certain kinds of sites.
Its almost not really about what the network does, its about how it is an economically viable emission reduction for fossil fuel sites - in the absence of anything else - as they produce this digital commodity sellable on the open market.
Just a different perspective that relies on acknowledging that it isn't going away. I can see that being a hard pivot, but I think the sentiment is very useful in making sure Proof of Work isn't used in things like more re-commissioned coal plants, or co-opted by governments in the future to gain control of the network at a financial and environmental loss.
> If there’s a way to reduce Bitcoin’s environmental impact, it’s certainly above my paygrade.
I think it's a really hard problem. I guess I'm not sure what "rallying against certain kinds of sites" means in practice - encouraging regulation? Social media campaigns against those sites? It seems like bitcoin mining has proven resilient to regulation because as soon as one place regulates the miners slip away to somewhere else. Getting ~200 countries to collectively agree on a set of regulations in such a quickly shifting landscape seems near impossible.
As for social media campaigns, it might shame some people but not others.
I don't have much of an answer for what to do here besides "hey, if I want to do a crypto project, I'm going to choose a chain that I feel like is being ethical".
My problem with that is blockchains are akin to lightbulbs in this regard. They use the same amount of energy whether you are meeting with your colleagues under the light or not. Aka, they use the same energy whether you use them or not. It is a very miniscule difference.
This bolsters the anti-blockchain/proof-of-work stance, I find it ironic that if skeptics and critics understood it to this level of detail they would wind up contributing to its improvement instead of the wishful thinking towards prohibitions
It would be more productive use of sentiment
Sorry, but this makes no sense at all. Burning gas that would have been flared to produce electricity to mine Bitcoin doesn't meaningfully reduce the environmental impact - all the carbon from the methane still ends up in the atmosphere. Furthemore, unless you think mining Bitcoin is actually useful to society, it still ends up in the atmosphere to no good purpose.
The truth is that proof of work as implemented in Bitcoin is just a bad idea. It's elegant from a game theory and mathematical point of view, but practically, a complete waste and environmental mess.
They just use a catalytic converter, it's not that complicated. There is a decent consensus on that kind of device reducing carbon and methane compared to the absence of one.
And after all that is done, you'd have electricity that cost enough you couldn't make mining pay, and it would also be true that the electricity you so generated could, given all that you've done, be sold and used for some actually useful, environmentally sound project.
The notion that flare gas somehow solves the environmental impact problem of mining is a rationalized fantasy, in other words.
That's why they don't transport it, they do it on premise. The transportation issue is why all other use cases have failed and mining does not because of the low infrastructure demands.
> 2) CCS technology for the generating plant (again, a known tech that because of cost is used only where there is a market for the CO2 byproduct;
I'm not sure exactly what this means, but the miners use their own capital for the infrastructure demands necessary, or partner with the site to invest in this. But usually because the sites don't want to take any risk to their fossil fuel operation and also don't really understand the value of the digital commodity, the miners have to prove the system themselves and make this as frictionless as possible to the site they are proposing to attach to.
Each company and site and state is different so I really think its up to you to prove 1) and 2) are in fact not happening, or not happening to your standard. Or maybe you feel the standard is levied on me. In any case how about we have a discussion about it, I believe its happening OR can be improved upon and I think your sentiment is valid and can be directed at pointing out HOW it can be improved, which unfortunately requires you to move to "lets improve proof of work" instead of "rationalized fantasy for this super bad problem for this ridiculously inefficient use case". So I understand the challenge of having that conversation, I just think you might find it interesting.
> 3) some kind of deep geological or other storage for the CO2, or they'd have to find a new market for the gas that did not result in its eventual release.
There is no storage as it is used on demand. The amount not used is still flared. The mining operation usually aspires to use as much as possible per site.
But everything else I wrote is still true. You have to have a carbon capture and storage system (CCS) on the exhaust pipe of your methane powered generator (which will not be a highly efficient combined cycle gas turbine, BTW, but a big old internal combustion engine of lower efficiency). Capturing carbon requires a whole additional set of infrastructure and inputs (the CC in CCS) (which is why there are only a couple of dozen carbon capturing gas power plants in the world), and then you end up with CO2 gas, which you must permanently sequester somehow (Storage - the S in CCS). If there is anyone doing that at the back end of a mining rig, I have never seen a reference to it.
And here's the thing - if you're going to go through the trouble of building a mini generator set up at the wellhead, and you can produce cost-advantageous electricity by doing so, you could in most cases be feeding that back into the electrical grid, so that at least something useful is done with it. Using it to solve throw-away mathematical problems is still a waste of energy.
So no rebuttal except to your last point, miners do look at selling energy back to the electrical grid due to the amount of energy they are able to produce and when it is more profitable or advantageous to sell it instead of mining it. I'm not sure if any have successfully tapped in and done it, but its often part of their sales pitch for investors and other stakeholders, the observation and capability of it. The issue is that the incumbent fossil fuels sites weren't doing that, for decades, so if this is your stance then it needs to be levied at the fossil fuel sites. The miners only may have created this capability, at their expense, so it is really impractical to say they must do that when they took all the risk and had a completely different economic reason of taking that risk. In fact, its still likely not economically viable for all times, only icing on the cake sometimes but not enough to sustain the goal of their buildout on site, which suggests that even a government subsidy on building this infrastructure (without the participation of miners at all) is untenable.
Many fossil fuel sites aren't connected to the grid at all, or not well enough. They're just barely extracting enough oil and natural gas to transport elsewhere Which has been its own problem, especially where flaring and fracking was involved, but we know that there is no political consensus on stopping that so we chisel around the edges, bitcoin mining turns out to be one of those chisels. These low infrastructure sites, now with miners, can only have an aspirational goal of becoming energy traders.
Outside of your one cherry-picked, non-representative example energy source, bitcoin miners are competing in the same energy market as everyone else.
It wasn't a defense of bitcoin mining. It was an observation of that one sector within a sector, which is on a path to becoming much more representative because it is one of the most viable for bitcoin miners too.
It lowers the energy cost for bitcoin miners well enough, it doesn't lower the exploration price for flaring sites enough, just reduces their emissions.
Another commenter pointed this out, but whether the flare gas gets burned or not is orthogonal to what is done with the energy produced thereby. Oil wells are supposed to burn flare gas, but it's hard to capture and sell that energy, so it's mostly just released as heat. I'll grant that a well that is selling this energy is more likely to quickly notice and plug a flare gas leak, but that's the only real differentiating factor in terms of emissions.
Correct. And thats where bitcoin miners have filled in a void. There is a massive amount of energy still remaining to be used this way.
Where we're disagreeing is that I think bitcoin mining is a waste of energy, even if the energy feeding into it is "free." It's not actually free, since there's a capital cost (and associated environmental impact) plus the negative market impact of artificially lowering the cost of oil. But even if the energy were completely free, it's just a more complicated way to waste this energy that would be wasted anyway. Bitcoin mining would also crowd out any economically productive use for this energy (should any be devised in the future).
There was at best 2 decades, and at worst 100 years, for other economically productive uses of the energy. So, here we are.
> I think bitcoin mining is a waste of energy
Yes, you are correct we disagree here, but one difference is that your standard is unfalsifiable. It only takes one person to say bitcoin is useful for them, and it requires you to ignore them, no matter how many of "thems" there are. I think the energy is neither wasted, I think the energy does not have another use case at these kind of sites, and I don't think it lowers the cost of oil, only reduces emissions. Chiseling around the edges of the emissions problem, not being the cure, and not inherently increasing emissions. Thats a net positive (if these kinds of sites become and remain dominant)
Are you counting the emissions saved by the same mining operation not consuming an alternative power source?
> It only takes one person to say bitcoin is useful for them, and it requires you to ignore them, no matter how many of "thems" there are.
It's more of a tragedy of the commons. I don't doubt that some individuals have found an aspect of bitcoin to be helpful to them. People are very public about how useful cryptocurrency can be for evading capital movement restrictions or conducting illegal business activity, but that doesn't automatically mean the whole ecosystem is a net positive to society. Think of nuclear or biological weapons as an analogy: possessing them is useful to state actors or individual terrorists/supervillains, but their existence sure does make the world a worse place.
https://decrypt.co/68591/flooded-coal-mine-highlights-chines...
Even my example is saying fossil fuels would be used and reduce the environmental impact of those existing fossil fuel plants
Reaching that goal is not as simple as renewable vs fossil fuel.
People constantly ignore where does the energy come from? They seem to forget or more likely just don't know that we have an energy surplus of renewable energy. Solar produced during the day can't be easily stored and used at night when its needed, and it can't be used for industrial production like steal production. So what do we do with all the surplus free green energy thats produced around the world 24 hours a day?
If only there was a way to convert that wasted energy into lets say a distributed world currency that could serve the unbanked and make it easy to transfer money around the world with smaller fees than western union.
I am glad journalists are focused on clicky headlines and not solutions to world problems like climate change and economics.
PoW is designed to become less energy efficient as the network becomes more popular.
More than anything, this post was written as a defense to myself, family, and friends about why crypto is worth digging into deeper even if there's some bad stuff that goes along with it. I wanted something I could link to and say "hey, it's a little more complicated that it seems - if you're interested, you can take a look here".
You mention some lofty things that would be nice to solve like housing, but there exists no connection between blockchain and those things, and no information on how blockchain would re-organize incentives or even if it is the right tool for the job. I fail to see the defense here.
POS might be less resource intensive, but is prone to it’s own kind of centralization (e.g., those with the largest stake make the rules ,or decide transactions as the case may be).
So the author’s argument that blockchains don’t have to be as wildly inefficient as bitcoin isn’t wrong. However, so far, that improved efficiency introduces various degrees of centralization. Centralization in a system that is effectively marketed as being secure because of its decentralized nature.
If an entity owning 48% of the hashrate increases its computing power then would Bitcoin become more or less secure?
Bitcoin is an impossible-to-dislodge behemoth that in my opinion fails to meet its original goals and has had ample chance to prove its worth, but has largely failed to do so.
Stuff like Solana is still "wasteful" in the sense that leaving a Digital Ocean droplet running in an infinite loop is wasteful, but it's on such a different order of magnitude that it certainly deserves a chance to prove its worth. It's also had much less time to do so than Bitcoin.
As mentioned above: I'm a noob at all of this and reserve for myself the right to flip-flop in the future :-)
So you directly compare a proven 13 year old blockchain moving billions of dollars to a centralized blockchain that goes offline monthly?
> I'm a noob at all of this and reserve for myself the right to flip-flop in the future :-)
Then refrain from having strong opinions like this:
> in my opinion fails to meet its original goals and has had ample chance to prove its worth, but has largely failed to do so.
[Citation needed]
I'm glad the tech community is starting to look at their environmental impact though.
While they're at it, can they please consider how many wasted resources they use on things like inefficient test automation which is usually only inefficient because they were lazy.