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Comment by once_inc | Hacker News Reader

How is specialized mining hardware an environmental disaster? In what way is the bitcoin mining industry more harmful to the environment than a steel smelter, an aluminum factory, or wash dryers? How is it an environmental disaster if most of the hash rate is from green energy and it is also actively suppressing methane release?

I've noticed a trend on HN where people say mining is bad for the environment, but can often poorly articulate the details. This, in my opinion, means they are just rehashing the same disinformation in articles that all point to the same sources (cambridge or digiconomist).

Quotes like "Bitcoin mining uses more energy than [country X]", "That green energy could be used for other things", and "It provides no intrinsic value" have all be waylaid years ago, but keep getting brought back up.

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- fossil fuels are used for Bitcoin mining - Bitcoin mining needs a stable source of energy to run 24/7, something you won't get from eg a single wind mill - building and maintaining renewable energy sources still has an environmental impact, the energy would be better used by something else than Bitcoin - making chips and PCBs is an environmental disaster, the fact we are making so much useless ASICs is horrible

Some industries are more polluting than others, but we should be doing everything in our power to reduce the pollution. Bitcoin (POW) is intentionally wasteful.

I don't argue that Bitcoin mining uses fossil fuels. In fact, I'd still be a Bitcoin proponent if its Proof of Work uses solely fossil fuels, because the benefits of having separation between money and state is a solution for many of the problems we face today.

I'd also like to point out that:

1. Most of the energy generated today is lost because it is unused. This is called "rejected energy". Having the option to not let so much energy get rejected is an efficiency gain for us, and should be prioritised before we shut down manufacturing and services because of energy use/emissions.

2. Mining is done at the knife's edge of margin cost. Lots of miners buy energy from suppliers at severely discounted prices (due to lack of demand) and scale up and down depending on the supply of energy. The days that you need to keep your miner online and hashing for 24/7 have passed us by years ago. These days, even an S9 miner can still be profitable if you have near-free electricity at your disposal.

3. Bitcoin mining enables the construction of renewable power plants in locations that are currently unaffordable to build.

1. Rejected energy is not surplus energy, but instead energy lost through inefficiencies in its production or use. How does bitcoin use this energy?

2. No argument there, energy price is one of the main costs in a mining op.

3. This seems like a minor win. What happens to these plants when the miner moves to a new region? They’ll become unprofitable again and shutdown. Which means waste again.

Bitcoin mining also enables keeping coal plants online that would otherwise be totally shut down.

I'm not sure how separation of money and state works. If you have taxes, they're not really all that separate. If you don't have taxes, you can't have much of a state, can you?

Most crypto types seem to want very low or zero taxes, it's unclear how social programs and large scale infrastructure is going to work.

> How is specialized mining hardware an environmental disaster?

The harsh judgement that it is an environmental disaster rests on these points:

1. The network does a little bookkeeping work, but around 1 billion times less efficient than necessary, just to achieve the defining characteristic of crypto, "trustlessness" or the lack of a central authority.

2. The incentive system is such that by design and ineluctably around one third or so of mining rewards will be wasted on electricity and electro waste.

Other industries work hard to minimise their energy waste, and often impressively successfully, by the way. Bitcoin mining cannot.

(Note: Bitcoin could become 99% more energy efficient overnight (plus minus two weeks), of course, if all the mining pools banded together and took 99% of their hash power offline. After the next difficulty adjustment, BTC would be exactly the same, but waste 99% less energy. If only this coordination problem could be solved, maybe with some kind of ... central authority?)

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