Bitcoin is as costly to environment as beef production | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is as costly to environment as beef production

scitechdaily.com

22 pointsgeox13 comments

Comparing BTC to beef is the wrong comparison: we should be comparing BTC to USD. Over 95% of the USD money supply exists in digital form only; while there's no proof-of-work element to creating new USD the electricity to run all of the servers at all of the banks, Federal Reserve, Treasury department, etc is non-trivial. The physical protection of the money supply (Secret Service, FBI) also has massive cost and impact. And the ultimate environmental impact is the "full faith and credit" of the united States governement -- which translates to the US military-industrial complex and the threat of force of arms -- causes far more environmental damage.

(And yes, we do use our military to protect the USD: we killed two heads of state primarily because they wanted to price their oil in something other than USD. Had they succeeded that would have killed the petrodollar system.)

Well said fellow coin collector

tl;dr: 1 bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as 1,000 Visa transactions. Or maybe it's 10,000, can't remember.

I think you mean... tl;dr; bitcoin is less wasteful and promotes global peace.

And 1 bitcoin transaction can easily be turned into 1,000-infinite visa transactions. It's called the lightning network.

How is the Lightning Network supposed to help?

Bitcoin advocates say that the BTC network has to be slow to be secure and decentralized. If you start putting transactions on a second blockchain, don't you lose all the security/validation of the BTC blockchain?

It's a trade off. Think of the difference between paying the deposit on a house vs. buying a coffee.

Need a large transaction to settle with a high degree of security and finality, but "slowly" (i.e. ~10 minutes)? Do it on-chain.

Need a small transaction to settle instantly and cheaply, but you trade that for some security and finality? Do it on the Lightning Network.

Similar trade offs already exist in traditional finance. See inter-bank transfers and things like FedWire compared to payment networks like Visa and Mastercard.

Some of those inter-banks transfers can take days to weeks to settle with finality and can be expensive. Bitcoin can settle in ~10 minutes relatively cheaply.

Credit card payment networks charge a 1.5-3% fee on each transaction. Transactions on LN are a few sats or fractions of a sat... practically free. Automated micro-transactions are now practical with LN [1].

Also, the Lightning Network isn't a blockchain.

[1] https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/streaming-sats-why-bitc...

The point is that BTC network is for secure & decentralized final settlement. That's really the most important aspect of a sound money.

For daily transactions Lightning bundles those transactions (as long as the channel exists) into a live tally based in a single BTC transaction. The beauty is that the Lightning protocol even uses the BTC protocol to coordinate that live tally over a channel, without having to commit it to the blockchain at every update. You don't lose security much, in fact you actually end up gaining privacy.

The Proof Of Work incentive structure forces miners to always use the cheapest available source of electricity. Some of the most profitable mining farms are those using renewable energy sources like solar or hydro power. It will organically not be profitable enough to mine PoW coins on anything but renewables soon, but it would be reasonable for countries to accelerate this by banning mining on anything but renewables.

Bitcoin will lower energy cost the same way porn lowered bandwidth costs. Sometimes humans need to create economic forcing functions for ourselves.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/this-earth-day-analysts-say-b...

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33023115

Doesn’t a majority of the hash rate come from Chinese miners by hydroelectric dams? I remember there was flooding in China a year or two ago that wiped out like 50% of the hash rate. I’m always very skeptical of estimates about Bitcoin’s environmental cost. You can definitely roughly estimate the amount of power consumed. But understanding how that power is generated is much more difficult.

This is according to ‘climate damages compared to market value’.

Aren't they still talking about the negative externalities of electricity production that aren't being captured? This is a problem with regulatory capture produced by all computing.

Cryptocurrencies do electricity price arbitration over the internet. If the cost of electricity includes the cost of its externalities, the amount of energy used by a cryptocurrency that consumes electricity scales down accordingly.

Mining Bitcoin with power from a solar farm in a desert isn't producing emissions like mining Bitcoin in upstate New York using a revived coal plant for power that doesn't have to cover the costs of the emissions it's producing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com