Hacker News Reader

Comment by co_dh | Hacker News Reader

Is this the reason of global warming?

The Russian energy grid doesn't really have a reputation for being carbon neutral...

Don't they have more nuclear poweplants than most places in the west?

Might be more, but it's still a minority of their grid. Wikipedia has a graph for 2016: 18.1% nuclear, 47.9% natural gas, and 15.7% coal.[0]

"Energy Matters" says that EU energy production was 26% nuclear in 2015, but only 12% for consumption[1], so I'm not sure how to look at that comparison. Either way, that's probably mostly France (~80%[2]). US around 8-9%[1].

TL;DR: Yes, most western countries probably have less nuclear, but it's a low bar.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Russia#M...

[1] http://euanmearns.com/primary-energy-in-the-european-union-a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#M...

Russian nuclear is ~17% (compare US at 19%). Overall it is slightly less CO2-intensive than the US, as it uses less coal. They have almost as much hydroelectric power as the entire US renewable sector.

They have a sizeable nuclear electricity production, and in energy use overall they are behind USA, but still worse than many other places:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?end=2018...

Cryptocurrency is not even 1% of global energy consumption. The environment is being destroyed by China, western nations, fossil fuels. If anything cryptocurrency is just a very small drop in their bucket.

1% of global energy usage is an insanely high number for something like this. 1% is absolutely not a drop in a bucket.

Something completely useless like bitcoin, absolutely. I wouldn't mind even more energy being poured into Monero though.

Monero is almost solely use for crime. Most exchanges won't touch it, and that's a good thing because it would pour fuel on top of the existing cryptocurrency-enabled ransomware trash fires, if it was actually usable.

So? If some criminal usage is the price we must pay for real privacy, so be it. Total warrantless surveillance is the greater crime.

If we were talking about petty crime, I may agree with you, but cryptocurrencies enable ransomware, which frequently shuts down critical services like hospitals and schools. Ransomware attackers have also leaked personal medical records from hospitals, and student's private records from schools.

Surveillance is an issue, but for the most part, it's not warrantless in our current system. Cryptocurrencies, excluding things like Monero and Zcash actually make it considerably easier to do warrantless surveillance.

If I'm forced to choose between some instances of illegal warrantless surveillance, and the complete inability to trace financial crimes, I'll take the instances of illegal surveillance, with the hope we'll try to fix those issues.

As much as you living in a steel reinforced concrete house.

There are those that day global warming is caused by politicians talking crap about global warming. My theory is global warming is caused by the people that vote for the politicians that talk crap about global warming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com