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Comment by cunidev | Hacker News Reader

As usual, without mentioning the insane ecological impact of the "creation" of such "natural" tokens. Bitcoin is no more natural than, say, an extremely power-intensive industrial process used to create a particular crystal.

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Bitcoin is rapidly turning into a net carbon negative industry because of using bitcoin miners to prevent methane release into the atmosphere. It is literally the single best solution to make prevention of methane emissions in landfills and trapped oil wells profitable.

No it isn't. It's using hard coal in Kazakhstan, amongst other power sources. This is wishful thinking.

It’s such horrible logic. So the way to make fossil fuels green is to make them even more valuable? Ok, sure, let’s place the value so high that burning or using them in any non-sustainable/recyclable/fully contained way is infinitely costly.

There are a number of retorts to this comment where you posted it elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33066160

Note that most of those retorts aren't backed by any sort of sources, and that the one comment that does refers to Alex de Vries, who is basically the single source of energy FUD for the past 7 or so years. Alex de Vries also works for the Dutch central bank, and has built his entire career identity around headlines such as: "Bitcoin transactions use more than [INSERT COUNTRY NAME HERE] yearly energy", which is a much a bogus comparison if I ever saw one.

If the Bitcoin camp is to be suspect of bias, so is the other side.

We can put aside bias, the reality is that the mining industry is greenwashing mining based on hypothetical scenarios and a few renewable mining sites that are overshadowed by the massive miners. E.g. the Riot Blockchain ~300MW site in Texas IIRC is natural gas (I can't find the source, but they would certainly proudly tell investors if it were renewable). The 105MW Marathon site in Montana is coal. I think the Greenridge natural gas plant in NY has (had?) a 107MW capacity.

This is mining sites that we know about, because they are public companies in the US. I doubt that the stealthy, privately-owned miners in Kazakhstan are using cleaner sources.

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