Sell Bitcoin, Save Lives: Some Bitcoin Simulators | Hacker News Reader

Sell Bitcoin, Save Lives: Some Bitcoin Simulators

sellbitcoinsavelives.org

17 pointstodsacerdoti24 comments

Bitcoin kills hundreds of thousands of people annually? Makes me wonder about the industries that use orders of magnitudes more energy. The production of phones must kill millions. Cars must kill tens of millions.

Trying to kill energy consuming industries is probably a lost cause. As much as I'd love for a completely green world I suspect the only real solution will be advancements in clean and renewable energy such as nuclear and fusion.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could short Bitcoin and have it reverse the environmental consequences?

People have talked about Bitcoin as a "battery", where you can use it to absorb excess electricity and then use the Bitcoin you earn to pay for the electricity elsewhere, but that's super dumb because then the energy is being used twice.

Etherium might be a better match for that one, since you could use "gas" to do computations at times when "gas" is cheap.

(Except even when "gas" is cheap it's expensive compared to, say, renting machines at AWS or Azure to get computations done.)

Ethereum gas is just a measurement of blockspace demand on a specific difficulty epoch, has nothing to do with real gas or energy

Not all energy is equal. Consider gas flaring in remote areas, which companies like UpstreamDataInc are tackling. Transporting the energy is impractical. Normally it costs a company to flare gas, but is a necessity because the methane that would otherwise be emitted into the environment is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

Using excess methane power bitcoin miners puts an economic incentive on flaring gas and reducing the amount going into the atmosphere.

Crypto exchanges and VCs make most of their money by moving people off of Bitcoin to altcoins. Sadly this industry will live for a long time as long as people believe they can find the ,,next Bitcoin''.

Is the tldr argument that if we bring down the price of Bitcoin less miners will be motivated to mine and thus release less carbon?

That is not possible as it will always find an equilibrium of miners that find it less worthwhile vs the supply. Less miners means less supply means higher price means more miners etc..

You'd have to kill bitcoin completely somehow by the price going so low that it will never recover due to people believing it can never recover. If nobody believes it will ever be a higher price than it is now than nobody would ever buy any.

It passed that point of no return a long time ago.

Another nonsensical environmentalist take on bitcoin.

You don't think that burning tons of energy -- which might go to other things -- on effectively casino tokens, is not putting the environment at unnecessary risk?

Could you explain what part of this was nonsensical? It seemed pretty sensible to me.

A guy just burnt himself alive on the steps of the Supreme Court on earth day to protest the government not doing enough to stop Climate Change and you probably did not hear about it, so I do not expect people to see sensible things since the truth is constantly hidden from them.

I think they need to build a stronger case for their CO2 to death conversion rate. It looks like they just want us to accept that a thousand tonnes of CO2 emissions causes one death.

Unscientific, sensationalist, and pretty much wrong.

It’s just not a great argument, and doesn't consider the opposition argument - the human rights benefits (for people fleeing war zones, in predatory monetary regimes, etc.) are worth the electricity usage – because people/the market are valuing it that way.

Dryers are unnecessary - we could airdry all of our clothes, but we value the convenience it brings. The value that bitcoin brings in terms of human rights is much greater than the convenience of dryers, yet we hear nothing about "banning dryers" or "dryers killing people".

> but we value the convenience it brings

Think about that for a second, you just said your "convenience" is transferable for some minimal amount of human lives. That this psychopathic "market" thinks that is fine?

No, the market does not have all the truth. How many people know the amount of suffering the cause when they use their dryer or buy bitcoin? Do you really think that most stop to think about this because it is included in the manual of every dryer sold in the world?

The "amount of human lives cost" is also not a real thing, because we have an incomplete picture of elasticity for market substitutes for energy demand (which is nearly all goods, because they all require energy)

Point is - using your dryer does not actually cause human suffering. This is a simply a utilitarian argument with an incomplete picture, the structure of which is often utilized to promote atrocities like communism, genocide, etc.

Your dryer does actually cause some real portion of attributable human suffering. It's easy to armchair discuss this, but have a look at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w

The climate argument against crypto is FUD. The entire crypto mining industry contributes less than 0.5% to global pollution. You can do more by getting rid of your refrigerator.

This argument is incredibly tired and inaccurate. The majority of Bitcoin mining happens on renewable power and actually HELPS the renewables industry by making renewables more profitable by buying off-peak and surplus energy.

Additionally, the OP conflates power consumption with emissions.

Home mining of Eth is significantly more harmful because cities are still majority powered by coal and gas. If you want to get mad about cryptocurrency power usage, focus your attention there.

Good Harvard Business Review article: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

> actually HELPS the environment by making renewables more profitable by buying off-peak and surplus energy

I've heard this argument before, and it's intriguing. But I would imagine that storing that energy into batteries, or diverting it to where it might be needed but isn't available, would be a better use of surplus energy. Bitcoin might be competing with that, and that might be bad.

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Also, the ASICs used to mine BTC take energy to produce. And what do you do with them once they're obsolete?

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Or let's say you've got a factory producing goods. Then wouldn't it make sense to ramp up production during off-peak hours? At least it would be producing actual goods instead of casino tokens.

This argument is what people would like to see happening because it makes sense in their heads, but in the reality it turned out that the opposite is true and that cryptocurrency miners are putting coal plants back to use in order to grab cheap energy to mine[0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

I'm not convinced. Is there data you can share that backs up your claims?

This ignores the positive case that bitcoin saves lives, and thus seems like a dishonest argument.

Would it save more lives than it would end, if it were to replace fiat currency? I have no doubt that the answer is overwhelmingly "yes." The fiat system grossly distorts all economic activity.

A few examples. The fiat system is what allows the US government to pursue endless wars and to generally expand without bound. The fiat system that is allowing the uber wealthy to acquire all real estate in the US and turn us into a nation of renters. The fiat system causes stocks (and all other assets, in fact) to be a store of wealth instead of an investment, totally distorting stock valuations and thus breaking the stock market as a measurement of the future earnings of companies. The fiat system makes it impossible to store wealth without being a speculator.

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