Comment by ephbit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ephbit | Hacker News Reader

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Bitcoin currently uses ~ 131 TWh electricty per year. [1]

The world used ~ 176000 TWh of energy in 2021, now it's likely more. [2]

Now let's say all the Bitcoin mining equipment (ASICS, ..) require another 50 % of the continuous electricity consumption of mining to be produced (random guess, no source), that'd be another: 65.5 TWh/a

So according to this, Bitcoin uses less than: 196.5 / 176000 = 0.11 % of total worldwide energy consumption.

According to this graph [3] the energy sector makes up 73 % of global greenhouse gas emissions. The three sectors beneath "energy" there being: a industry (coal/oil/gas), b transport (gasoline/diesel) and c buildings (heating oil/gas). All of these three mostly use fossil fuels as their energy inputs: coal, oil, gas, whereas bitcoin uses an electricity mix which has a non-negligible proportion of renewables in them.

So Bitcoin's climate footprint should be significantly smaller than 0.08 % of global emissions. That's less than 1/1200.

Now compare that to any of the stupid consumerism behavior we have in the rich parts of the world, where someone buys 100s of kgs of useless plastic crap each year, buys a stupidly over motorized pile of metal to drive around the block and show off, boosting their ego blowing exhaust into their fellow citizens' lungs and has a weekly barbecue session at their AC cooled suburban 1000s of sqft home.

These uses of energy add up to 100s more emissions than Bitcoin.

Sure, not everyone thinks Bitcoin is useful.

But do I think all these stupid plastic collectors figures and all other plastic crap is useful? Hell no. And do I think that a Hummer or Landrover Defender or your standard US pickup truck is a useful/reasonable vehicle? Hell no.

While Bitcoin makes just a tiny dent in global emissions, this other useless stuff makes not a tiny but a huge dent in emissions.

You can criticise Bitcoin all you want for this and that, but if you're honestly trying to make a point and suggest where emissions can be reduced to help the climate and you then point to Bitcoin .. then you're obviously either falling for anti Bitcoin narratives or your thinking doesn't work all that well.

[1] https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

0.11% or even 0.08% of total worldwide energy consumption is a fucking shit ton of energy. You could also compare it to the sun's energy output to make the percentage even smaller looking, but the energy size is still huge.

The metric to compare bitcoin to is energy per transaction compared with EXISTING forms of digital finance with which it is competing.

The argument that "bitcoin may be bad energy-wise but are other things are too, so therefore don't worry about" it is a bad one. It's like saying, "sure child abuse is bad, but war causes way more suffering and there are still wars so no need to do anything about child abuse, at least until all war everywhere stops first. Oh and if you do try and stop child abuse while war exists then you are a hypocrite.". Bad premise, bad logic.

> 0.11% or even 0.08% of total worldwide energy consumption is a fucking shit ton of energy.

Completely irrelevant. Because other uses of energy (that me and lots of other people consider wasted or even harmful) are orders of magnitude larger and thus harmful than Bitcoin's.

Either you accept that not every person on the planet agrees upon which uses of energy are useful to them individually. Or you're basically saying "my opinion on which energy uses are legit and which aren't is the only one that matters", at which point we can stop discussing altogether because I don't really care about "discussing" with people who have this standpoint.

> Either you accept that not every person on the planet agrees upon which uses of energy are useful to them individually. Or you're basically saying "my opinion on which energy uses are legit and which aren't is the only one that matter"

Those are the only two options? How about the one where I agree with you that there are other massively wasteful energy activities out there but that fact is not an argument for tolerating them or allowing for more. Bitcoin is crazy wasteful compared with other financial tools which can do the same thing. You seem to be saying that because some people can drive giant trucks when really all they need is a small car or better yet take public transport, that you should be able (and without any criticism) be able to burn a mountain of energy to get a transfer added to a public ledger. You are both being wasteful and its not ok!

> How about the one where I agree with you that there are other massively wasteful energy activities out there but that fact is not an argument for tolerating them or allowing for more.

If you care so much about having less harm done to the ecosphere then why are you currently debating about "tiny slice of greenhouse gases" (Bitcoin) that other people arguably find very useful, instead of focusing on the "bigger portion of the emissions pie" (perpetual consumption of unnecessary new stuff in the post-modern consumerist society)?

I have a hard time believing you care more about the environment than about trying to blow the supposed evilness of Bitcoin out of proportion.

> Bitcoin is crazy wasteful compared with other financial tools which can do the same thing.

Good, which are these?

The one financial tool that somewhat comes close is gold, and because the latter implies orders of magnitude slower transfers than Bitcoin and because it's harder to secure and comes with a few more downsides on top it's still far from "same thing".

> If you care so much about having less harm done to the ecosphere then why are you currently debating about "tiny slice of greenhouse gases" (Bitcoin) that other people arguably find very useful, instead of focusing on the "bigger portion of the emissions pie" (perpetual consumption of unnecessary new stuff in the post-modern consumerist society)?

It's not either/or, it is possible to care about both (calling on the previous analogy, you can be against both child abuse AND war). Also, sometimes the way to solve a big problem is too deal with all the little ones that make it up; for example, trillions of watt-hours so people can be conveniently paid when they put ransomware a hospital's computer system.

Would you agree that it somewhat makes sense (and is usually efficient) to correlate one's effort in solving some specific problem in some way to the severity of this problem relative to other problems (assuming all these problems are solvable)?

If this were the case, it would have been fitting for you to have written quite a few (maybe a few hundred) texts, discussing the problem "carbon/ecological footprint of exaggerated consumerism" if for the sake of simplicity we take length of text as a measure of effort invested in solving a problem.

Yes, it is possible to solve several problems in parallel. But putting a (hugely) disproportionate amount of effort into different problems when we're dealing with a set of problems of which some are arguably existential due to their order of magnitude, while others are absolutely not existential due to their order of magnitude .. well, doing that doesn't appear to make much sense (to me) and it makes me question whether the goal of solving the existential problems is really a shared goal.

> The metric to compare bitcoin to is energy per transaction compared with EXISTING forms of digital finance with which it is competing.

False. Bitcoin might have originally been envisioned as "p2p electronic cash" but that's not really what its use/goal is anymore. Even though throughput and cost of transactions is not irrelevant to Bitcoin at this point, it is definitely far down in the list of priorities. The much more important aspects are now security and suitability/reliability as a store-of-value.

> It's like saying, "sure child abuse is bad, but war causes way more suffering and there are still wars so no need to do anything about child abuse, at least until all war everywhere stops first. ..

Wow, that's really just an astonishingly bad comparison.

What would you estimate? What proportion of people in the world would support the statement "child abuse is bad"? 99 %? 99.9 %? 99.999 %? Probably significantly more than 99 %, I'd guess. Why? Because the statement is kind of philosophically fundamentally true. The word "abuse" practically implies "bad". You'd sure have to search a long time to maybe maybe find a single person who'd say "child abuse is not bad" and who'd even be okay with "child abuse" having happened to them individually. And you'll have an even harder time trying to find people who'll publicly go on record stating "child abuse is a useful tool for society".

And you compare that to a technology where many people argue that it'll be a useful tool and society will benefit from it and they can even give arguments for that?

That's just ridiculous.

Now, of all people in the world, how many of those that know Bitcoin will support the statement "Bitcoin is bad"? Maybe 50 % or 70 % or it might even be 90 % (from perpetual campaigning against)? Whatever the number is, you'll find hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on the other side who'd be willing to publicly say "Bitcoin is useful" and give reasons you could then try to debate. You think you'll find even one person on the planet who's going to state "child abuse is useful and thus I'm going to make sure I'll have some for my children"?

Your comparison is so far off, it's completely meaningless.

A better comparison would be ... quite obviously ... gold.

You could say: "Gold isn't useful enough to legitimize the harm that's done through its mining even though many people like it. It is just a small dent in the carbon footprint worldwide but still. Compare that to steel production which is much more important for keeping society running but it also produces orders of magnitude more emissions and environmental destruction than making gold bars."

Now that'd be a somewhat legit comparison I'd be willing to discuss, but your comparison to child abuse, that's just absurd.

Ok, I'll go along. Mining gold just to have it in a vault as a store of value is also wasteful energy use (along with the other environmental damage gold mining entails). Now what? Again, the argument that 'other things are bad or worse, so this bad thing is ok' is bad one.

Maybe try this another way, if bitcoin used 1% of worldwide energy would that be too much? Where's the line where you would admit that its been crossed and bitcoin energy use is out of proportion to its utility? 5%? 50%?

> Again, the argument that 'other things are bad or worse, so this bad thing is ok' is bad one.

There is no consensus for "Bitcoin is bad use of energy" as you're implying.

Energy/electricity use isn't inherently bad. All the different uses of energy cannot be classified in a binary way as either good or bad. But they can be sorted along a spectrum according to their usefulness. Their subjective usefulness to individual people which can then be summed up to some total.

Energy is limited so people/states/businesses prioritize some uses of energy over others in order to optimize their goals. When other people's energy use appears wasteful to you, you're free to point it out and even try to convince them, you might even try to sue them because their use case expels toxic chemicals that you'd rather not inhale. But just calling their use case bad "because it uses energy" sure won't convince them. Because practically everything humans do consumes energy.

At what exact percentage of total energy use the acceptable consumption of Bitcoin lies, no single person can/should decide. As with all purposes it should and will be decided by people collectively (through politics, consumption decisions, cultural discourse, ..) be it 1 % (which I'd say is ok, were Bitcoin to continue functioning for the next 100 years) or 5 % (which I'd personally deem too high for Bitcoin and thus wasteful).

If you understood the damage to mankind caused by fiat currencies, then you would see that at 5%, it would be well worth the price.

Anything appears wasteful if you don't appreciate the reward it provides.

Ultimately the market will decide. The bitcoin network pays for the energy it uses, just as the gamer community pays for the energy it uses. If bitcoin isn't worth it's energy use, then it will use less energy as people won't be willing to pay the transaction fees and the miners will be paid less.

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