Hacker News Reader

Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

Crypto miners are not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the fucked-up things that humanity does.

The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could [1]. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.

Crypto miners are just easy to hate because it's an excellent opportunity for people to point the finger at someone else without introspecting on the fact that they are no better.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

View on HN

> The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.

Yes, the feeding habits of 7 billions people produces more CO2 than a virtual casino that benefits... millions? How is that surprising, and how can you try to paint that as worse?

And even though we should do more to change dietary habits of people who can, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything else where we can until this is done. This is classic useless whataboutism.

Also, we don't get a trustless financial system out of cryptos. We get the utopia of one.

> Crypto miners are not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the fucked-up things that humanity does.

Crypto miners use as much energy as Norway. It's responsible for 78 million tons of CO2 per year, as much as 15M cars. [1]

Yearly emissions for all of humanity is at around 36B tons of CO2. So mining is 1/500th of all our emissions.

Since one drop is 0.05mL, your "ocean" is about half of a shot glass, or 5 teaspoons.

Or, the other way around, if our emissions are all of our oceans, then mining emissions are 70% of the mediterranean. So much for "not even a drop".

[1] https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/pal...

Second paragraph: “One estimate found that the energy required to process transactions on the Bitcoin network could power a home for more than 70 days”

Any interpretation of this doesn’t make any sense. I’m really not sure we can easily make energy per transaction calculations.

I don’t have a hard opinion on the energy implications of pow chains yet. part of me sees it pushing clean infrastructure into production. using produced, but previously unused, energy.

now there’s the e-waste issue… which I am NOT a happy camper about.

> Yes, the feeding habits of 7 billions people produces

Let's be clear, the "feeding habits" are completely unnecessary for 6 out of those 7 billion people and create the largest cycle of suffering this planet has ever seen by several orders of magnitude. People eat meat for their taste buds to go brr - a plant based diet is fine otherwise.

It's not "whataboutism" when the sheer scales of suffering involved are so different. Crypto barely harms anyone. The meat industry causes over 60 billion beings a year to undergo extreme suffering.

Crypto is not even on the map as an issue in comparison. Complaining about crypto as someone that is fine with meat consumption - or indeed, consumes meat - is simply absurd. But what can I say? People love to throw stones from glass houses.

> It's not "whataboutism" when the sheer scales of suffering involved are so different.

It is 100% whataboutism because those 2 issues have 0 correlations. People that benefits from crypto eat meat as much as people that don't. We can stop mining crypto and stop eating meat at the same time. One has absolutely no bearing on the other.

By your logic, then it's ok to do any fucked up thing, since we can always find something worse to complain about, which I'm sure you can see why, is a completely stupid logic.

So is it safe to assume you are a vegan who grows all their own food to minimise your impact on CO2 emissions, while you participate in the "trustless financial system"?

Otherwise you are a hypocrite.

Personally I will not participate in the "trustless financial system" AND try to eat less meat.

The suffering impact of a single cut of meat is greater than any amount of crypto I could ever mine.

I am comfortable with my emissions. Those that eat meat are certainly hypocrites if they judge them.

It is not just about what you alone can "mine", your participation is only made possible by ALL the miners burning electricity to keep the global state of the network. Without that combined wasted energy and CO2 generation there is no system for you to "benefit" from.

Anyway, you didn't tell us if you have stopped eating meat.

Yes, I quit meat once I realized the sheer scale of the environmental and suffering footprint it had.

Food chains are a natural occurrence. It's the default way and if your disagreement with that is a biological maladaptation. But if you're only vegan for health reasons, that's respectable.

There is no sufferosphere, the supposed suffering is intangible. These farm animals were born to eat, reproduce, and be eaten - they had no higher purpose, and without humans wouldn't exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, it does not mean that the natural way is a good way...

Millions of years of evolution proved that it's a good way for different animals. It's only recently that Big Carb tries to paint our ancestors as unhealthy goons. Granted that was tongue in cheek but we can see how easy it is to push experimental food on the market with margarine, spam, and other crap.

"Big Carb" is what allowed human population to grow to billions.

Okay, and you can argue we were naturally never supposed to be in the billions. You can argue if global warming wipes out our farms, we can only blame ourselves, and demographic crashes are a given, not a crysis.

I'm not particularly religious, so I don't know about "supposed to be", but I see no ethical way of significantly reducing human population quickly enough for it to matter for climate change. It is much easier to change our behavior to reduce environmental impact. Switching everyone to a carnivore diet to spite "Big Carb" is certainly not the right direction.

I'm not suggesting a change in diet at all, I'll continue to be omnivore as will my kids. This will lead to catastrophe but that's life.

There were two billion humans on the planet before "big carb". People used to eat things like butter without fear of cholesterol and they didn't even suffer the heart attacks that avoiding cholesterol was supposed to prevent.

Humans have been getting most of their calories from grains essentially since we invented agriculture, thousands of years before the population reached even one billion.

What's "Big Carb"? Even everything you've derided as "experimental food" is mainly fats and proteins, not carbohydrates?

I gave an example of experimental foods being pushed as cheap substitutes for the real thing, and how quickly society accepted them. I'm postulating that's what's happening with the trend of veganism.

Rainforests are also a natural occurrence and burning them down to create more bovines is decidedly non-natural.

Definitely agree. There's sustainable animal husbandry, and unsustainable. But eating meat doesn't inexorably lead to cutting down rainforests, Brazilian farmers will also happily cut them down to plant GM-free soya, which attracts a premium in the US and European markets over the bulk of soya farmed in the US.

The problem is far vaguer and harder to solve than "eat less meat."

I can't even properly frame it beyond "something something globalisation, something something no easy route to monetise leaving the Amazon standing as a carbon sink".

I used to think that. But if you look closer at the life of current industry-farmed livestock, that is _not_ a life to be enjoyed. Sure, you can get proper happy beef. Say [1]. But then, you're looking at about $35 per pound.

[1]: https://www.coop.ch/en/food/meat-fish/packaged-fresh-meat/be...

Ah yeah sure, people running warehouses full of GPUs and reviving local coal power plants for their energy supply are doing less harm than than someone eating too much beef.

Unlike meat consumption, mining doesn't map neatly onto the entire population. It's a rich few that can even buy this much compute power.

Bitcoin is 137 TW/h/yr

Etherium is 112 TW/h/yr

(thanks for pointing out me messing up units)

Those are both mid sized countries by now.

How does crypto mining come even close? Sorry, which beings am I immersing in extreme pain and suffering by running hashes on my GPU?

Environmentally, Bitcoin and Ethereum's combined production of greenhouse gasses - ~50M tons CO2 - does not come anywhere close to the over 6 billion tons of CO2 of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by meat production.

Again, orders of magnitude more environmental damage, alongside the greatest cycle of sheer pain and suffering this planet has ever seen, and we don't even get something out of it. How can people point fingers at crypto miners while engaging in this far more harmful behavior?

It's a really terrible comparison and nothing but a cheap tu quoque.

Crypto contributes nothing but a speculative asset to society.

Meat production, while derailed into unsustainability, has a lot more utility and is also a lot harder to unwind from current culture. Try running a survey on which of the two people would rather forego, and your 100M to 6B ratio will look rather stupid.

One shitty behavior doesn't excuse another.

> Meat production [...] has a lot more utility

We will have to agree to disagree that stimulating the taste buds has more utility than providing a trustless financial system.

I've used bitcoin as a currency in 2011, and now people keep telling me I shouldn't have because all I got for 2-million USD equivalent BTC then was a video game.

What's the point of a currency that doesn't scale and that everyone is too afraid to spend because of volatility.

Speculative asset, that's all you'll ever have there.

That comment belays a misunderstanding of the crypto sphere as a whole. If you don't want to partake in the speculative nature of the asset, you can simply transact with a stablecoin.

So, A cryptobro that eats soylent paste?

Didn't have that one on my bingo card...

ha! Made me laugh, this was me 10 years ago

I'd say we get more out of meat, having delicious stuff to eat is awesome.

The one system is providing sustenance for billions of people, the other is used by tens of thousands of people. As is always forgotten to mention when this argument is made.

But this is an even worse argument than usual - the people speculating with crypto constructs are very often also part of the groups who consume a whole lot of meat...

"tens of thousands of people"

You are off by 3 orders of magnitude. Bitcoin alone validates 7 million transactions monthly. If there were only 50k users, an average user would be sending 140 transactions per month.

What about trading and wash sales? Would not that make the average very high? I have no numbers so I can't say more, but 140 transactions per month per user doesn't sound that high considering the above.

Much of that trading will happen off-chain using local accounts on some exchange and thus not contribute to the transaction count. Only the deposits and withdrawals require on-chain transactions.

The average centralized financial processor can process that many transactions in about 10 seconds, with the option of reversal,

You are not making a great case here.

"in about 10 seconds"

Patently false. For example an "average" processor like Western Union processes only 25 million transactions monthly.

"with the option of reversal"

Which is the whole problem. Bitcoin is irreversible, by design. That's crucial.

Oh for the love of Christ. Unless you go fully Jainist, and eat only what you grow, after painstakingly removing insect pests and placing them elsewhere gently, nothing you eat is pain/suffering free.

Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds.

Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust).

How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp?

Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?"

Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?

I read somewhere that the death ratio of meat vs vegan diet is about 1 cow vs 30 mice, not sure if it was a reliable figure.

That sounds incorrect since around 3/4 of the agriculture production is used to feed lifestock

In your country. In my country, we don't advertise beef as "grass fed" as a market segmentation tactic, because all our beef is grass fed, that's the only way we feed stock raised for beef.

Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now.

My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle?

It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies.

So what changed?

No, it is the worldwide use. In my country it is around 80% for lifestock and 10% for human food.

Averages are terrible across widely disparate data points.

It is not a average, it is the total global use of farming. Just because a few countries does better does not mean that it is okay. And that does not also change the fact that the 1 cow vs. 30 mice sounds like nonsense. And that if everyone ate less meat we would need less space for farming.

At least Ethereum’s energy usage will drop by 99.99% shortly.

It's been vaporware forever, I'll believe it when I see it.

And I still wouldn't like it. Proof of Stake is even more directly aimed at making the rich richer, whereas Proof of Work only did it with a few extra steps. But at least they'd no longer be burning the planet.

Some of the most dedicated software engineers I’ve ever met have been working on it (transition to PoS) intensely for 2 years now and I heard from their own mouths (physically, in person) week before last just how excited they are it’s wrapping up.

None of this work has happened in the dark. The regular cross-team meetings, constant stream of commits on GitHub, etc. are in the open for all to see.

Next phase will be sharding and splitting out data availability from consensus strictly speaking, exciting times!

At best it will be another hard fork. The miners need to vote on the change to PoS, and why would they? It would render their mining equipment worthless.

It's the other way around. The miners can't do anything to prevent the switch since most major Ethereum users (aka Infrastructure providers) are clearly in favour and are already participating in the POS chain (which is currently running in parallel and without transactions).

When they update they miners are simply cut off.

Furthermore, Ethereum contains a self destruct mechanism that requires a hard fork. Unless miners can coordinate a competing POW fork (and convince rich people that the bad PR and profits for them are worth it) they won't be able to do anything.

Isn't ETC quite clear precedent for that?

It obviously wouldn't be as large and probably suffer from everyone on real ETH selling off their duplicated assets, but it'll surely be a thing, a last ditch effort to keep mining rigs profitable before everyone moves on to the next best coin?

Sure it could happen (and probably will in some form).

However unless it captures a siginficant fraction of ETH value it won't be worth much and in turn won't be attractive to miners.

Right now ETH makes up 95+ percent of all GPU miner revenue and there aren't a lot of (successful) new POW coins these days.

I think the (GPU mining) market simply collapsing has a high likelihood.

When do they expect PoS will be live at the latest? Before the fall or next year?

It's not unreasonable to think of POS as vaporware since it was first announced as coming in 2017.

However this time around they have working implementations in all relevant clients which are being stress tested and debugged since a few months.

So far there have been quite a few bugs but nothing fundamental.

I'd say it's not unrealistic to expect the switch happening this summer according to the unofficial time line. There are a few billion dollars staked already and those funds as are locked until it happens.

I fully agree with your other point.

The technology isn't the difficult part though. Will miners replace PoW with PoS? What will they do with all the GPUs and cheap access to electricity they've invested millions or billions in? The social aspects transition will be immensely more difficult than the technological aspects.

But I do hope that, somehow, all those miners will just... accept the move to PoS and turn off their mining farms. I just don't see it as extremely likely.

As I wrote in another comment, the miners are not really in control once there is an alternative solution.

They can continue using POW (if they manage to coordinate an independent self-destruct mechanism override) however they cannot force the actual users (private individuals and infrastructure providers) to do so.

If miners don't manage to capture a significant fraction of ETH value in their hypothetical ETHPOW chain it won't be worth their effort. Buying a GPU for mining now caries a significant business risk and prices are already declining.

PS: There are billions of dollars already staked in the (currently empty) POS chain.

Well, we'll see I guess. I certainly hope you're right. But PoS has been "right around the corner" for the last half decade at least, so I'll believe it when I see it.

I do wonder what miners would do with all their hardware and infrastructure tho. Presumably they'll all just move to another cryptocurrency and nothing really changed, etherium got a little cleaner while bitcoin or whatever got a little dirtier.

A sensible approach :)

Let's hope that POW turns out to be a very brief (in the great scheme of things) peak of human creativity / stupidity.

TW/h doesn't really make sense. I suspect you meant TWh/year.

It's not TW/h/yr but TWh/yr.

For reference, 120 TWh/yr is only twice the production of the Baihetan dam https://web.archive.org/web/20160302215312/http://english.cw...

Most people don't picture that an entire "mid sized" country could run off only 2 hydro dams.

Our overconsumption of meat is idiotic, yes. Not sure what that has to do with the merits of crypto, sounds like whataboutism.

>Our overconsumption of meat is idiotic, yes.

And tasty.

Great whataboutism. Or evangelical veganism, whatever your poison, really.

how is it trustless?

instead of policy being decided by elected representatives it's now decided by a few rando developers on github and mining pool cabals

hardly an improvement

>The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could [1]. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.

I'm pretty sure the humans that developed those trustless financial systems made dietary choices that you would disapprove of. What am I even talking about? They are probably gods in your eyes and therefore allowed to break your arbitrary rules.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com