Economic estimation of Bitcoin mining’s climate damages
nature.com
nature.com
That said -- I feel that any arguments along the lines of "humanity should use less energy" are doomed to failure. More technology, a larger population, and third world nations developing into first world nations, and the world's energy usage is only going to go up. It's not a question of whether that's good or bad, it's just inevitable.
The number one goal of humanity should be to find or create clean sources of energy that give us orders of magnitude more supply than there is demand.
Then we can stop arguing about which uses of energy are legitimate and which aren't.
The number one goal of humanity should be to find or create sources of energy that give us orders of magnitude more supply than there is demand.
Unfortunately that's politically off the table so we're left squabbling over scarce energy.
Maybe it doesn't have a use for you in your life, but obviously for a lot of people it does, and not just as speculation. If it was not providing benefit to people, they wouldn't be using it.
Unilaterally declaring something "waste" because it's not of use to you personally is pretty small-minded.
And how many are using it at 3 TPS?
They aren’t mutually exclusive.
Are videogames? Books? What about theater?
I painted my office lavender last year, was the industry that made that possible a frivolous use of energy?
What about eating beef? Certainly a hamburger is as frivolous as a frappucino, right?
Or, it could be that none of the above are frivolous at all...
Bitcoin needs to waste energy for security. If humanity manages to produce twice the energy, bitcoin needs to waste so much that the economic price of the energy to attack it is similar, so likely bitcoin would have to use twice as much energy to produce the same good.
On the other hand, if humanity were to produce twice as much energy, your frappucino would still take the same amount (or less if the machines get more efficient somehow!), and would maybe even become cheaper with the cheaper cost of electricity.
Adversarial proof of work is designed to not be able to become more efficient. It is designed to only operate in energy scarcity. Without PoW, creating a fusion reactor may mean energy is effectively free for everyone. With PoW, electricity must have a high enough cost that it deters attacking bitcoin, so anyone who owns bitcoin has a vested interest in wasting electricity until it is scarce and costs money again.
The amount of cryptocoin created by mining each day is fixed. The amount of electricity used to get it determines its distribution. The more electricity you use relative to your mining peers, the more you’ll get.
The incentive in this case is to use infinite energy unlike any other use case.
Off the top of my head, the things I have seen people argue should be banned due to climate effects: - Eating meat - Plane travel - Cars - Only large 4WD's ( but not cars) - Clothes dryers - Bitcoin - AI - Computer games - Christmas lights - etc
Things are always inevitable until they aren't. The ozone depleting was "inevitable" until it wasn't. I don't find this "tragedy of the commons" style argument very convincing when you know that what you're doing is harmful.
> The number one goal of humanity should be to find or create sources of energy that give us orders of magnitude more supply than there is demand.
Agreed. That's in the future. Right now, however, there is an environmental cost to energy usage that's simply being ignored. Costs should always be balanced with what they produce. Currently, the environmental cost of bitcoin is far exceeding the benefits, and the vast majority of people participating aren't even concerned with any of the benefits of bitcoin other than trying to make a buck.
I think this is true to the extent that it affects people's day-to-day, but I disagree in that I think uses that aren't integral to people's entertainment, and well-being, are pretty on the table. Bitcoin falls into that category. We could turn off all of the bitcoin miners tomorrow, and other than news headlines, most people wouldn't even notice. That's a ripe area for cutting.
Nonsense. Almost everyone is going to agree that powering ventilators a country that's too poor to upgrade to renenwables is a better use of energy than rolling coal.
>The number one goal of humanity should be to find or create sources of energy that give us orders of magnitude more supply than there is demand.
Ironically, by calling it our number one goal, you're implying that energy used to develop sustainable energy (e.g. power rare earth metal mining machinery) is a better use of energy than any other type of energy consumption.
Ironically the fact that Bitcoin uses energy is exactly why these attacks will fail.
There is no way you are going to convince grid providers to stop serving Bitcoin miners. When miners contribute huge financial intensives to not only pay for grid improvements but for the roll out of greener energy.
Green advocates cant foot the bill for cleaner energy. But Bitcoin can.
Bitcoin will consume as much cheap energy as it can get. This leads to more consumption of energy through Bitcoin and not less.
There is a slo nothing worse for Bitcoin to not keeping it running. So the incentive is also to be were you can run it reliable.
And as usual the pure capitalistical economy is shit in regulating itself therefore laws are required (we already have tons of laws to protect people because stuff like asbestos is great as long as you don't pay for the hospital bill).
Bitcoin takes energy and increases demand for solar etc while consuming it and making it unavailable. It even eats solar panels as Bitcoin is a global market while energy is more often than not local.
It's quite depressing to see such kind of nonsense when we clearly in a position were climate change costs us more and more every year and we still talk about bullshit arguments from Bitcoin instead of talking how to cleanup our current mess.
IF Bitcoin/crypto can be an interesting side hustle AFTER we solved climate change, I don't know. But Bitcoin will not stop the droughts etc.
The difficulty adjustment is specifically designed so that blocks are found in an eta of 10min . This means that there are diminishing returns. There is a limit to how much energy can be used before it's no longer economically feasible to mine.
Whats worst is you discuss energy locality. But you failed to consider energy capture in locations where is is not feasible to transport the energy or there is no way to use the energy. eg Bitcoin mining at remote natural gas sites using methane which normally just be burnt off to CO2 reaping no financial benefits. This alone could make Bitcoin carbon negative. Not to mention landfill methane etc etc.
The idea that using less energy to foster more efficient energy is ridiculous. The only way to drive greener energy is to foster competition and intensives to innovate greener technologies. Which is exactly what Bitcoin does.
There no way a free society can dictate what people use energy for, simply because some people disagree on whats useful to them but not others. It's completely anti competitive. And anti-competitive practices will always stifle innovation.
I'm not here to change your mind. I'm simply setting the record straight. Due to the distributed nature of Bitcoin your laws are pointless. Bitcoin mining will move to more innovative locations. But beware those place will gain all of the benefits that healthy competition provides and they will end up with far superior electrical grids then locations that stifle innovation.
Bitcoin miner are not best buddies. It's a market.
Miner a has a high incentive to mine as much as possible with the cheapest energy. This is of course capped somewhere but you will creat a lot of waste in the process.
And about those other things like Natural gas: just to be very very clear: a society which wastes non renewable energy by just burning it of (with or without Bitcoin actually doesn't matter) instead of incentivising to capture and use it, is broken and needs the right incentive to do so as those things DO NOT regenerate.
Yes we would need to forbid companies to get 99% of the gas with great profits and burn the rest just because it would reduce their profits a little bit.
This is just green washing.
And anti competitive is also wrong. We already do that in our markets. We already are in regulated markets and it did not stifle innovation. It redirected it.
There is no incentive to move methane from remote locations. The volume would probably not make it physically possible to do, never mind economical. Not to mention waste more fossil fuels ie diesel. And besides you completely overlook remote locations that cant afford infrastructure do to costs and low dense population. Bitcoin would make infrastructure profitable in those cases.
Bitcoin is easy to setup one container box plus sat up-ink. Seeing as how this ensures the methane is burnt of and also provides incentive to do so. I fail to see your complaint here.
Whats even more insulting is people are using the fact bitcoins is transparent and deterministic to quantify how much energy is uses (which is less then clothes dryers by a factor of 5 BTW) . Meanwhile they are enjoying all their guilty pleasures hiding behind the fact we cant even quantify their energy use.
It's just ridicules to think xbox and video cards etc etc have value. But providing banking to the estimated 1.8 billion people without a bank account has no value.
We've seen this kinda of thing before. In short it always boils done "we don't see the value". How can a computer widget have value after all. And the precise answer is because it's tethered in the real world . You cant make something from nothing.
Ultimately it doesn't matter because you cant stop/attack it. More energy will be wasted then bitcoin uses trying to stop it and still won't succeed. I suggest you conserve your efforts (energy)
Bitcoin still changes it's value up and down.
My argument was not based in the amount of bitcoins itself. It's still valid. It's a rat race and this doesn't mean Bitcoin is 100% energy efficient.
It's as efficient as the market makes it.
The methan discussion: either it produces enough energy that you can do things with it or it doesn't matter at all
We could force them to have edge mini Datacenters there to render things or do research workload. We could also charge batteries or enforce an energy line. Tons of options and no motivation to do it because profit and easy but useless solution of Bitcoin.
And yes it's less efficient to run Bitcoin instead of just burning it. Bitcoin then still steals critical ASIC/chip production capacity.
The guilty pleasure thing is just a strawman argument. It doesn't make Bitcoin better or worse just because of others. And yes I do totally disagree on GPUs etc not having a value.
I don't mind clarifying how much better gaming is, but it is. The discussion general is valid but at least the energy consumed gives a direct value.
Bitcoin hash finding still doesn't do anything and it also still doesn't solve the trust issue: Bitcoin is not decentralized, tons of miners are under control of few people. El Salvador shows how far away normal people are of even understanding it.
The excuse of 'people without bank account ' you really believe Bitcoin solves such issues? It doesn't. People still need infra to get crypto. We see how it works in Africa with simple phones. Bitcoin is not solving a problem here.
The same dump argument of people in north Korea or Iran: you still need someone exchange your currency and dollar and euro actually do the job. Go to Iran and pay with euro. You will be able to pay with it with zero energy consumption... (I have been to Iran)
We can stop it and it will not be allowed. Why? Because no country has any incentive to allow a parallel existing financial market circumventing anonymous payment system.
You will see how it will fail when a normal user can't loose there money by just buying it on normal platforms. No one cares about Bitcoin. Go out and ask any random people it's already wasting tons of resources while having zero impact.
What I do find ironic is how we are discussing the death of Bitcoin yet again (RIP bitcoin). On a startup accelerator with at best a success rate of 10%. But please tell me how Bitcoin is dead and useless after 13 years. Also consider that bitcoin was essentially created with no startup investment and now has a valuation of 400b dollars. If Bitcoin was y combinator incubated for all intensive purposes it would be considered a success. Maybe Bitcoin can teach us a lesson here.
Now its important to understand. I'm not here to change your mind or suggest you use Bitcoin. At this point I'd actually suggest the opposite. If you want to stop bitcoin though I suggest you'd be wasting your time (energy) but by all means you can try.
Best of luck to you.
It doesn't say it's successful just because.
gwyneth paltrow is successful enough with her garbage. Plenty of MLM still exist.
I bought drugs with BTC. How much market cap are illegal drugs alone?
Unfortunately tech like stable coins, nft, BTC scratch something in man but I'm not sure if it's just too complicated for some to really understand it.
El Salvador shows us how useless it actually is if you try to use it in the real world.
Now having said that. By implicitly partaking in the market. You' d have to concede that other's have a right to partake in the market too. And the market clearly at this time thinks Bitcoin is worth 19,302.40 USD with a market cap of 369.95 billion. That's more then Meta (facebook) BTW
So clearly after 13 years. The market still thinks Bitcoins has value and that valuation has gone up not down. As much as you want to scream to the rafters about it. It's not going to change the markets valuation of Bitcoin. And that's what determines value the market.
Many of us are very analytical and looked closely at how bitcoin works wrt energy usage and decided that it's not a good technology, and sold our stacks long ago.
Personally i got out just before the peak in 2017 or 2018 whenever that was, and this was an ethical decision based on the energy usage. My first btc purchased was probably around 2014, so I made some money, but it feels dirty and I dont want any part in the scheme.
The reason I share my anecdote is to provide a counter example to what I think you imagine. I'm quite sure there are many people like me on here. HN as a whole is pretty on top of tech and areas of high growth obviously.
The great thing is even though we all respect your choice not to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin will continue to work as it was intended and there is not much you can do about it.
You are better of conserving your own energy then Bitcoins.
Having a currency get worse as a medium of exchange over time isn't about being salty over "missing the boat". I cannot imagine a usecase for Bitcoin, I can imagine a usecase for DAI or RAI.
According to Bitcoin maximalist logic I should be burning or cutting down the rainforest in 2013 to make a quick buck and then retire on my Bitcoin going up in value than actually work.
Bitcoin is nothing but waste.
Throwing tons of co2 into the atmosphere for a personal profit alone is questionable and I will always fight it. Especially because unlike the creation of goods, for which co2 might be a byproduct, you are generating no value by mining btc.
Whats even more insulting. Is people abusing Bitcoin's transparency and deterministic features to spit facts. All while they partake in their guilty pleasures. Pleasures who's energy usage we can't even begin to quantify.
And to add insult to injury their are an estimated 1.8 billion people in the world that do not have bank accounts due to things like fees and minimum balances or failed states. It's estimated there are 55 million in the US alone.
But you know what? screw those people who can self bank using Bitcoin at zero cost and zero maintenance fees. Because you simply don't see value in that.
I would agree if miners were hobbyists with a spare old PC in their basement crunching blocks, but the network is definitely overprovisioned for the amount of transactions now and you and I both know that miners are in for the money. What was born as an incentive to participate is now the sole reason to mine.
> But you know what? screw those people who can self bank using Bitcoin at zero cost and zero maintenance fees. Because you simply don't see value in that.
The cost is there, you just don't see it because CO2 is transparent.
That's the whole point, Bitcoin is a closed system and because people are inherently greedy that greed is used to benefit the greater good.
If bitcoin was over provisioned then miners would capitulate. Which actually does happen from time to time.
Also you make an assumption that miners are only providing service per transaction. This assumption is wrong. Due to how merkle tree's work bitcoin makes it expensive to add blocks to the tree but cheap to verify the whole tree. Each new block protects and verifies all previous blocks and transactions.
Yes because of you we will need to lobby and start pushing more for Bitcoin ban.
And yes of course we need cheap and lots of renewable energy but if you would actually spend your time and energy to actually read up on things like climate change you would also see that FIRST we need to compensate so much current normal energy consumption before we can start playing again with Bitcoin etc.
I really really would like to understand how smart people (assuming people on hn have a certain amount of it, I might just be wrong here) totally ignore critical and relevant topic climate change but spend so much time defending Bitcoin.
Have you not seen any drought this year? Have you not seen the pictures around the globe like from floods?
Did you not ready anything fr the IPCC?
Do you just look at money money money?
People on hn also have family and might create new humans.
What do you think will help your kids or kids from your siblings more? Bitcoin or a stable planet a?
The 'powerful forces' of which you speak are actually the further right, since Reagan, who would rip up social structures precisely so they can take by force what otherwise would be rightfully denied them.
>under a very subversive attack by powerful forces for a while now but has been intensifying lately for many reasons,
What many reasons? As I already said liquidity preference in combination with non neutral liquidity is ultimately the reason why markets aren't "free".
Mining isn't related to the volume of transactions. The reason why mining is so large right now is because it is a land grab before each drop in emissions.
If the current reward is 1 amount of bitcoin, the energy consumed will always cost around the same amount as that block reward amount bought on the market.
Because if it was cheaper to mine bitcoin than buy it, more would mine instead of buying, and if it was cheaper to buy than mine, you’d shut your miners off and buy until they became equal again.
So crashing bitcoin value directly cuts electricity consumption.
Play with the numbers here [0], just change the electricity cost by $0.01 and you'll see.
The question is, can a truly decentralized blockchain maintain its security against all adversaries without proof of work?
Both Ethereum and Bitcoin are subject to basic laws of capital... The rich were always going to benefit the most.
Independent, easy & decentralized nodes are almost all that matter.
Your statements are of low resolution.
Nature came out with a statement recently that they will only pick and choose science to publish that agrees with their worldview. Nothing published there can be trusted as Nature is no longer a true science journal.
Gonna need a source for that
Personally I consider this damning, ymmv.
If tomorrow you were to find in a reproducible experiment that people with samoans origins are not good at abstract math you would be "stigmatizing" the population and your research would be banned.
The problem with the word "stigmatize" is that it is a code word that draws a line of what may be studied and published.
It is basically a warning to steer clear of anything "controversial" because at any time it could be declared at "stigmatizing" and there would be no recourse.
You don't think that maybe we should make sure there's one person on the research team who can be like, "so, you aren't accounting for this variable, which is cultural but also probably hidden from those who don't come from the culture"?
any research that finds that X is worse at Y must be wrong somehow because we know it cannot possibly be like that - so we are not publishing it at all - no discourse is allowed on the matter
one censor decides what is "stigmatizing"
You are saying it's unreasonable to check in with a member of a culture you are about to publish something negative about.
The only thing that's important is whether the research was conducted honestly and whether the data is accurate or not.
Stigmatizing is something other people can do or not do with that information, and the people doing the stigmatizing are the ones who should be held responsible for it. Suppressing research because you're afraid someone else might misinterpret it or use it as a justification to do something wrong is not a way to make scientific progress.
Whatever truth about the world the research reveals will still be there and we will be less equipped to deal with it by hiding in ignorance out of fear.
If you've got someone who is a part of that group who participated in the research, you go ahead and publish it.
You are putting words in their mouths and then condemning them for it. You want to keep beating up a strawman, go ahead.
The lack of integrity you're displaying is the important part.
This is an open-and-shut statement that they will publish data which says what they want it to say.
Or rather, that peer review will reject papers for reasons that have nothing to do with their scientific validity.
Which is the same thing. This isn't science, anymore. Everything they publish from now on must be considered useless unless replicated elsewhere.
It says that the scientific method is enhanced by having people with knowledge about a domain involved in the research.
I am not Japanese. I'm not Finnish. I've never been to Finland or Japan. If I write an academic paper about the educational culture of these two countries, you don't think it would benefit from having a Finnish or Japanese person involved?
That's out of Bitcoin's control. One could argue that it is a way to sabotage the project -that of turning it into an speculative investment.
It's awfully convenient it's the consumer's fault not large organizations and governments not upgrading a power grid when we knew this was an issue for decades
Why do people need to mine bitcoin. One piece of creating a green power grid is lowering unnecessary uses of electricity on said power grid. Bitcoin is an easy mark for that. We can't entirely greenify the power grid to make the same level of power that we're currently using. So part of the process is trimming excess.
Given that framing, why isn't bitcoin excess?
Last time I checked, bitcoin miners have to compete for energy same as anyone else---and when energy prices rise, they move their operations to where its cheaper.
That why they're using methane gas that would have been flared by oil companies to generate electricity to mine bitcoin in the west Texas oil fields... which is net positive, because the resulting CO2 emissions are 84x less carbon-intense for the atmosphere than the flared methane would have been.
Or, there is Vespene Energy, a bitcoin mining startup helping US municipal landfill operators comply with new expensive EPA methane emissions regulations by using landfills emitted methane to generate electricity, which they then use to mine bitcoin and they share the profits with the landfill operators. The cool thing with their business model is they can simply sell the electricity to other grid customers, but the reason they often end up mining Bitcoin with the power is because the landfills are often not near cities or large areas of electricity demand.
If one takes time to research this, one would see that bitcoin miners have a strong financial incentive to find the cheapest sources of power, which are typically stranded or waste power. Bitcoin mining is improving the environment.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
According to the IEA (International Energy Agency), acriculture, fossil fuels, and waste are the top three human sources of methane emissions (the too source, wetlands, is natural). Bitcoin mining companies have business models than can significantly mitigate the fossil fuels and landfills(waste) sources of human methane emissions. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/sources-of-me...
It might in the future, but there way it runs today? No way.
Netflix is literally 50% of "Bread and Circus". Bitcoin is a threat to the most important part of the power structure.
With inflation raging and a cold European winter coming (and that's not to say that plenty in north america won't be choosing between heat and food) if I were you I would be more careful with how overtly you defend the propaganda outlets of the status quo.
To try and wave it away as frivolous or somehow unimportant denies something deeply fundamental in what we are as a species.
Bitcoin does little to nothing. It's not a threat to any power structures. It's just not. At best it's a way to move some value around that's too small scale for governments to care about.
I have no problem with the ideas of distributed ledgers. Hell I'm about as anti capitalist as any leftist, I just think Bitcoin is a stupid way to achieve the goals it has.
> if I were you I would be more careful with how overtly you defend the propaganda outlets of the status quo.
Is this a threat? I can't even understand what you are implying. That the proles will tear me apart for saying "I think Netflix is ok"?
I am honestly very jaded about any news about climate change, shifting attention consumer side after seeing all the leaks happening. Sure bitcoin is wasteful but people are paying to be wasteful and are allowed to be doing that. I'd rather sort out the renewable energy source before convincing crypto bros of anything
These other resources it is compared to do not have to protect themselves, or, if you included the resources spent doing so, would far outstrip Bitcoin.
Citation needed.
The police force just makes it easier for people to not have to carry detectors and use them for every single transaction. Aka optimistic security.
Anyway, the problem is even if you do all of that, Bitcoin miners also pay taxes that fund the military and Bitcoin miners depend on property rights, landownership, electricity infrastructure, fiat currency just like any other company. Internalising these costs makes the economy more efficient, it doesn't absolve Bitcoin of benefiting from human violence.
Proof of work cost is analogous to the police violence/detection/bill security costs you mention, so that is what we should be comparing. The cost of land ownership, security and electricity is included in the cost of POW, so including it is counting double.
You could argue the police help secure the miners from physical theft, but they also help prevent physical theft from fiat banks, so shouldn't that be equal if not in favour of bitcoin?
Funner fact: there exists one fiat currency that maintained stability despite the government in question effectively ceasing to exist.
Funnest fact: the energy invested in the maintenance of appropriate armed forces appears to have no correlation with the stability or lack thereof of a currency.
I mean, there's just no evidence that stability of fiat currency is driven by military considerations as opposed to, say, fiscal and monetary policy.
Such as?
And for a further question, would they have remained stable if other countries had not invested in their military to the point that the world in general remained peaceful?
The US gets a lot of criticism for military spending, but the fact is, the rest of the world leeched off this by enjoying the peace and prosperity that was created by having one country be such an overwhelming superpower that it discouraged wars everywhere.
Now, the US is starting to show weakness and with the Ukraine we immediately see the effects of not having a 500 pound gorilla in the room to keep everyone else in line.
I would disagree with your assessment of that for Ukraine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_arme...
Mostly the European microstates and several Caribbean and Pacific islands, but if you don't count a gendarmerie as armed forces, you could include Costa Rica and Panama--two not-tiny countries--in the list. (If you do count them, the largest is the Solomon Islands).
> And for a further question, would they have remained stable if other countries had not invested in their military to the point that the world in general remained peaceful?
That this question is being asked is I think a concession of the underlying point: fiat currencies aren't maintained by military investment, not in the same way that Bitcon is maintained by hashing power.
Furthermore, it's not at all clear that the decrease in active conflicts over the past century or so is really due to military investment. One can argue that the establishment of international communities such as the EU, or the UN charter forswearing territorial changes via war has had as much, or more, of an impact on reducing the outbreak of wars such as the War of the Pacific as American military might did.
None of these places have a currency that is widely used. They may be offshore banking havens, but people keep their money there in US dollars.
The only possible exception might be the Swiss Franc and they do have a military as well as the leverage of holding everyone's money.
Many of those small countries don't even have their own currencies. Andorra uses the Euro, Kiribati uses the Australian dollar, Panama uses the US dollar in addition to its own currency and so on. The countries are able to exist without a military because they're under the protection of a country like the US with one.
You can leverage that criticism against Bitcoin because that is exactly what it depends on.
> The Bank of England was incorporated by act of Parliament in 1694 with the immediate purpose of raising funds to allow the English government to wage war against France in the Low Countries
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bank-of-England
Bitcoin is fundamentally different origin of money and absolutely not would a society adopting it be equally prone to war. Total nonsense sorry.
The costs of the US 7th fleet in the Gulf and the entire military industrial complex behind it are what backs the global strength of the US dollar.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-...
In the absence of an army, you can have all the Bitcoin you want, and still be dirt poor because somebody else with an army can just waltz in and take your stuff.
So I find it laughable to claim that the cost of standing armies should be tallied up as an operating expense specific to fiat currencies.