https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_bitco...
There is an argument to be made that Bitcoin could end up producing more carbon emissions if it already produces this much with a much lower transaction capacity than most banking systems. However, systems like the Lightning Network <https://wiki2.org/en/Lightning_Network> build on top of Bitcoin by settling transactions before they ever reach the blockchain, slashing fees and bundling possibly hundreds or thousands of transactions into one, so the number of payments that actually occur could be much greater than it seems.
According to The Atlantic, the US military alone counts for 5.5% of global carbon emissions.
The world will likely move onto using rollups on other chains like Ethereum instead, which scale better, and pays gas to validators to get included into the blocks.
Seems like the Bitcoin community is looking into rollups on Bitcoin, but it'll be impossible to get trustless Bitcoin on them, even with BitVM, without a hardfork.
Okay, the banks might cause more carbon emission than blockchains. But, the banking system serves the whole world, providing services for 8 billion people. But Blockchain is still a niche thing.
You might say, no, Bitcoin is not niche, Blockchain is used by a lot of people! Then, you are wrong again. The media is talking about Blockchain all the time, but it is indeed a niche thing. No one is using, say Bitcoin, to buy real physical stuff, cryptocurrency is not taking part in the people's real life.
So, my point is, if Blockchain is adopted by the world and replace the banking systems, it will definitely emit much much much more carbon, I am saying orders of magnitudes more.
“There are no solutions, only trade offs - Thomas Sowell”
The same goes for gold. If only used for jewelry and industrial applications we wouldn’t need to strip mine so much of it.
There’s nothing anyone can do about it. As long as someone somewhere in the world keeps mining it will continue to exist.
It would take the equivalent of a world war effort to, maybe, get enough people to stop mining, that a 51% attack could be successfully carried out. At which point the community would just fork and continue on.
The only realistic option is to outcompete it. Build something better, where even the most greedy bad actors want in on the new thing, not because it’s better for the environment, but because it’s better for them (and happens to also be better for the environment).
What people can do though, is try to get gas-powered leaf blowers banned in your neighborhood, and expand from there.
Instead, people typically dismiss the small change they could bring into reality, and take the easier route, like talking about how big change is needed, and change nothing.
At some point you’re fighting human nature.
Or gold mining?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/features/video-games-are-fi...
Compare this to the linked wiki article:
> A 2022 non-peer-reviewed commentary published in Joule estimated that bitcoin mining resulted in annual carbon emission of 65 Mt CO2, representing 0.2% of global emissions, which is comparable to the level of emissions of Greece.
So, bitcoin mining results in CO2 emissions comparable to twice that of the entire video game and movie industries combined.
There are about 400 million current and last-gen consoles that have been sold, all-time. I'd wager most of them spend 95% or more of their time unused.
Steam shows about 20-30 million players online at any given point. Let's pretend this represents 50% of the PC gaming population (a vast underestimate of Steam's market share in the US and EU, not sure about other markets like China). What fraction of those are gaming PCs? Gaming laptops? Laptops with integrated graphics that really aren't meant for gaming?
Let's say that your typical PC gamer uses 300W when playing video games. That's probably on the low end for a gaming PC, but an overestimate for any laptop. 300W * 24 * 365 * 60 million is about 160 billion kWh. That translates to, um, 33000 tons of CO2? So like 3 orders of magnitude smaller?
I'm not even going to bother with the mobile game population because the power draw on those is like single-digit watts so even if there are 100x more players, the numbers are around the same order of magnitude.
Even if my estimates of number of PC gamers at any moment and the wattage of the typical device are both off by 10x, that's still way smaller than the estimate of how carbon-intensive it is to make games.
Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.
Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it. The mining provides no value, it is not a good usage of the compute power. Evening finding ET would be better than what it’s currently doing. That power could be used for all kinds of things, versus solving a block of data with trial and error.
Gold mining completely destroys large tracts of land, poisons enormous water supplies and leaves huge areas completely uninhabitable for basically ever.
Gold mining has polluted 40% of US rivers and 50% of lakes.
If Bitcoin could replace gold’s store of value use case and environmental footprint, it would be a massive win for the environment.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/gold-rush-rot-lasting-environmental...
Most use of gold is speculative as a store of value, some is decorative, and a little bit is actually used to build products.
> Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it.
Of course, for transactions. But people don't want to use national currencies as a store of value. For good reasons.
If we could replace gold with bitcoin as the store of value, it'd be a net positive.
Bitcoins energy input is used to protect the monetary energy it contains from being stolen, by anyone. The value in the monetary units of fiat currencies is continuously being stolen through supply inflation which dilutes the same value across more units, halving the value every decade. This is what always happens when money is proof-of-work for most, but not for a select few who can create it effortlessly (the banking system).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
What is money if it's not proof of work?
Sam Altman should go to Saudis and plug GPUs directly as petroleum gets out of the ground, and then transfer the trained bits to any country he likes. Blockchain mining was a favorite for Icelanders who have in excess geothermal energy.
Energy is expensive or not cheap, only on places in the world in which it is not abundant. Factories of robots (see Jeff Bezos), or computers mining numbers, or computers training statistics can be located anywhere we like.
Also BTC is a blockchain, which support less than 1.000.000 tps, so not very useful.
As soon as we want to put identities on a blockchain, thousands of identities per person or even millions, legal agreements hundreds and thousands per person every day, property transactions in the magnitude of a grain of sand, millions of property transactions per person every day, then 2 transactions per second on the whole blockchain does not cut it.
Icelander here, our main power generation is from hydroelectric not geothermal, it's a common misconception.
Also most of the mining here has moved on to easier places like Sweden and Norway. And for cooling / humidity reasons not solely electrical prices.
It was also just foreign owned companies most Icelandic folk don't like it here (I think it makes good use of our remoteness and shit latency however)
Geothermal always seemed to me, it's a pretty difficult source of energy to extract for factories n stuff. Like, a factory can melt steel, but no one wants the ground he stands on to melt as well.
Hydroelectric is a much easier source to work with. Humans have used rivers as a source of energy for thousands of years.
Hows that help carbon emissions?
Just moving bits around seems like a lot easier, efficient and cheaper than moving physical stuff around.
Edit: bad calculation fix
Yes, better off without it, but it really makes no difference whatsoever...