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> 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, but these people never even bothered to notice. A headline talking just about the amount of energy should therefore always be a big red flag as it is intended to manipulate you.

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.

> 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.

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.

In some theoretical world that doesn't actually exist, you could use carbon capture and storage technology (which is a catalytic process, but is far from as simply as bolting on a catalytic converter to something) to mitigate the carbon from burning methane. But the electricity you'd get would be far too expensive to build a mining operation on. For what you're describing to be viable, the mining group would have to pay for 1) the technology to capture the flare gas and transport it to a generating station (all doable, but the reason the gas is being flared in the first place is because it's not cost effective to do so); 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; 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.

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.

> 1) the technology to capture the flare gas and transport it to a generating station (all doable, but the reason the gas is being flared in the first place is because it's not cost effective to do so)

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.

We can have a discussion. I agree on your response to my first point - if they put their mining rigs at the wellhead, they can avoid the transport infrastructure cost. I know there is a company in Texas that does that. But they are still burning the methane, which means they are producing CO2. They are undoubtedly reducing the greenhouse burden, since they can burn a higher fraction of the gas than the flare does, and methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

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.

Great, thanks for having the discussion in good faith.

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.

While flare is a waste product that was previously just vented, its production still scales relative to the price of oil: if it's not economically feasible to drill a certain oil reservoir, then no flare gas will be produced. If mining bitcoin by burning flare gas becomes a wide spread practice, all this would do is reduce the overall cost of drilling for oil, which would decrease the cost of petroleum products, which would increase the demand for them. So burning flare gas has consequences, too.

Outside of your one cherry-picked, non-representative example energy source, bitcoin miners are competing in the same energy market as everyone else.

> 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.

> 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.

That's a good differentiator though. As methane, the gas is a significantly stronger greenhouse gas, and leaks are a persistent problem with natural gas

You're not wrong! Ideally there would be other ways to monetize flare gas capture, but it's hard to find something economically productive that requires minimal data in or out and just requires raw compute.

> but it's hard to capture and sell that energy

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.

You don't have to capture the energy. Unless you believe bitcoin is the future of money, burning the gas to look at the pretty lights is just as productive.

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).

> 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)

I still don't understand how this reduces emissions, though. Flare gas is always burned, hence the name. That would make the whole setup neutral, not negative. Once you include the emissions used to produce the equipment, you're back into net positive carbon production.

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.

You are exactly right our energy crisis is much more complicated than x bad but detailed nuanced explanations don't get the same sort of clicks as "Buzzword literally destroys the planet!"

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.

That's totally fair.

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)_/¯

Yes, there are carbon costs.

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.

As I mentioned in the article

> 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".

> 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

When a coal mine went down in China a year ago because of flooding, the global Bitcoin hashrate visibly dropped by about a third. This is maybe the only insight we have into the energy sources used by Bitcoin, and it's not a good look.

https://decrypt.co/68591/flooded-coal-mine-highlights-chines...

That article is still mixing terms, and is not the only insight. It mentions the cambridge study check them out.

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.