Cherry-picking a detail and making that the title instead is the primary form of editorializing, so please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Titles are by far the biggest influence on threads, so this matters a lot. Changing the title this way made a flamewar much more likely.
This is about the furthest thing from “science”. Just sensationalist propaganda. It’s so far from being even remotely plausible. Maybe 1 BTC is responsible for $0.49 of “damage” if you could ever actually quantify it. Most of this electricity comes from the cheapest source of power, which is hydro.
There are different articles which claim different things. I think the first article is the best.
> The CCAF’s research finds that 76% of ‘hashers’ use renewable energy to power their activities, with hydropower the number one source at 62%. Wind and solar energy meanwhile are used by 17% and 15% respectively. This would appear to be consistent with previous research which estimates that 74% of bitcoins are mined using renewable energy. However, the CCAF’s report specifies that the 76% refers to the share of hashers who use renewable energy at any point. It estimates that only 39% of hashing’s total energy consumption comes from renewables. [1]
> Bitcoin, which is mostly mined with electricity from coal.[2]
> But most bitcoin mining facilities are located in China, which is still heavily reliant on coal-based power. Though the Chinese province of Sichuan is known to attract miners due to its cheap electricity and rich hydropower resources, the level of power generation capacity fluctuates depending on the season. [3]
Cheap is not necessarily renewable, but is often just a cheaper country which in turn tend to be more lenient.
Also, it is wrong to assume that consuming 1GW near a hydroplant is fine. That 1GW would have been sold to someone else, and unless the net has an abundance of renewable energy, a non-renewable plant is going to have to cover for that.
Which might be a good reason why not every single Bitcoin miner is using hydro. If the expected payoff of mining is big enough to outweigh the increased prices of GPUs and nonrenewable energy, then I might choose not to move my setup to be next to a dam.
The same market effects that apply to factories, research facilities, server farms, etc... also apply to cryptocurrency mining. We can't have our cake and eat it too -- if energy isn't fungible, then not every mining rig is going to be set up using the most efficient power source in the world. Not every miner is going to have the ability to just "choose" to use cheap renewable power, and if mining is still profitable where they are using the power sources available to them, then they're still going to do it.
It's better and cheaper to use locally, but unless you find a plant that is unable to sell capacity, you're taking it from something else.
True, it doesn't make sense to move the power all the way around the world, but that's also not really how things like the synchronous grid of Continental Europe works, where power is traded across 24 countries on a single grid.
If your have cheap renewable energy, when you start selling, excess non-renewable capacity and more expensive plants in general powers down in nearby areas and countries.
Any power taken from a renewable plant there when power price is positive means increased non-renewable output.
> or do you claim that miners choose to use power in more expensive locations?
Both scenarios are very plausible, because if everyone within the market was perfectly efficient in choosing to use the cheapest power sources available, and if hydro was clearly the cheapest way to generate power, then it wouldn't just be being used for Bitcoin, it would be being used for every single portable, power-intensive task in general. We wouldn't be having a conversation about the environment in nearly any manufacturing field.
Given that this isn't happening, given that some things in the world still use coal power, and given that people are still worried about the environmnetal impacts of energy use in general, even though hydro exists -- the obvious conclusion is one of the following:
A) hydro isn't universally the cheapest power source.
B) there are other factors that determine where people will set up operations (taxes, living situation and preferred environment, costs beyond power generation, market saturation to the point that its still profitable to use expensive sources of power).
C) there are still environmental impacts of using a ton of power, even if it came from hydro, and hydro power doesn't just have zero environmental impact.
But obviously something is going on here, because bitcoin isn't special. If hydro power was the savior of power generation, then every single factory in the world would already be using it. But they're not, and it's reasonable to assume that the same market constraints and environmental situations also apply to bitcoin mining.
The fact that we are having an energy debate at all about any industry implies that something about the energy market, it's pricing, and its environmental impacts is more complicated than you're making it sound.
Not true. We have actively sought the cheapest electricity sources for our rigs. I guess it depends on the scale you're operating at, but you're not going to be too profitable plugging into your apartment wall socket here in Central London @ 20p/kWh!
This is not true. Miners are sophisticated business enterprises that select mining farm locations carefully based on access to cheap power and natural cooling. People signing their gaming rig into the network aren't a factor.
> This is not true. Miners are sophisticated business enterprises that select mining farm locations carefully based on access to cheap power and natural cooling.
Patently false. I do a lot of contracting work for miners, they specifically tune their operations to the power cost of an area and in variable rate loads will switch off miners during peak costs. $/kWh is a big concern for actual mining operations, maybe not for people with one or two rigs in their basement.
For some reason I imagine that you are not managing e.g. Chinese mining operations.
Everyone will look for cheapest power, but that on its own does not make it renewable.
Plus, regardless of your source, as long as you haven't built your own plant, the grid has to cover for the loss. If there isn't an abundance of renewable energy on the grid, then the operation wasn't neutral at all.
You're correct, I'm dealing with exclusively American operations or American operations run by foreign entities. Most have relocated to explicitly get onto hydro. YMMV, but that's been my experience.
Selection bias. I don't doubt that the miners who are investing god knows how much is necessary to _require a contractor_ will have scaled enough to need to concern themselves with cost of electricity, but the _majority_ of miners are not going to be those people, surely?
Requiring a contractor isn't a big ask. All it takes is not knowing someone who has networking chops. I work regularly with around 10 mining operations, 8 of them explicitly relocated to get on hydro because of how inexpensive it is. These guys care deeply about getting the most kWh for their money, because they still have to deal with turning a profit, and anyone who doesn't understand that has not actually dealt with real Bitcoin mining operations.
Maybe in the beginning but today miners make lots of choices about where to build/expand their operations based on energy costs, government policies, energy source and more.
Bitcoiners use the cheapest energy they can find in place where they can cheaply install hash power.
Some of that may be hydro. A lot is coal.
Even when they do use green energy, the effect of doing that is to displace other users onto dirtier forms of energy, thus creating just as much pollution anyway.
Bitcoin is not green in any way whatsoever. Bitcoin specifically wastes energy, by design. This is never green. The first principle of green energy is to use less energy, as no energy is clean.
This is just not true in the vast majority of cases.
"Surplus energy" is another lie bitcoiners like to spread about this. Sure, there might be a few occasions where bitcoin mining might use surplus energy.
In the vast majority of cases, no, they are not doing that. That is just not a thing.
Your counter is just as flawed as you have no way to verify any miners are using renewables. Power transmission is a thing (California does it) and if we weren’t using the power to mine BTC it could be used to power other things. Again, people are only arguing for BTC on this site because it’s hacker news, nothing else.
You can of course believe whatever seems easy to you, but you do realize that I linked to a published study that says miners are using renewables far more than the US does on average, don't you?
Their research indicates that a minority of mining is done using renewable resources:
> The survey findings estimate that on average 39% of proof-of-work mining is powered by renewable
energy, primarily hydroelectric energy.
It also specifically addresses this popular claim of mining being powered mostly by renewables:
> China’s oversupply of hydroelectric
energy during the rainy season has often been used as evidence in claims that a vast majority of mining
is powered by environment-friendly power sources. While it is true that the Chinese government’s strategy to ensure energy self-sufficiency has led to the development of massive hydropower capacity, the same strategy has driven public investments in the construction of large-scale coal mines. Like hydroelectric power plants, these coal power plants often generate surpluses. It should not come as a surprise then
that a significant share of hashers in the region equally report using both hydropower and coal energy to power their operations.
The article seems to use the country average emissions per kWh for the US and China (it's hard to tell because the first reference is a 404, the other is 400+ pages, the final one is definitely country average numbers).
A cursory Google search says the percentage of renewable energy in the US and China is ~11% and ~23% respectively. The disparity between that and an average of 39% for crypto mining specifically does not seem to be factored in.
I think you're right, they do note this as a limitation of their study due to insufficient data:
> The great unanswered question faced when exploring cryptodamages is that while we can identify select geographic hotspots of production we currently do not know in the aggregate where the electricity used in cryptocurrency mining is physically produced. This
is because we, like Krause and Tolaymat, do not know the
physical locations of cryptocurrency miners, whether individuals, groups or aggregates in, say, a region or country. There is considerable evidence of concentration of mining operations in particular locations, typically where reliable electricity is cheaply available, though, precise data are lacking. In the US, perhaps the most well-known concentration is the Mid-Columbia Basin area in
central and eastern Washington State, where cheap electricity is produced by hydropower along the Columbia River, however, mining in other US locations also occurs. There is also evidence of large
mining camps in China. With time and emergent research there may be improved information about the amounts of electricity devoted to mining cryptocurrencies for particular locations or regions, but it is currently not available.
It would be interesting to see the results of their analysis if recalculated using the more granular CCAF survey data.
That's not how it works. If I claim the moon is made of cheese and someone says he doesn't believe me, the onus is on me to prove it is, not on them that it isn't.
No, without those miners, the energy supply wouldn't have increased in the first place. In the energy market, demand drives supply, not the other way around. It's very uncommon to spend money on converting energy supply from coal/gas to other sources, as it doesn't make sense in terms of money for the companies. Instead they focus on creating new supply with renewables.
No, organizations built hydro plants for whatever reason in places where supply ended up higher than demand, driving down the prices. With that move, Bitcoin miners saw the opportunity and placed themselves within that ecosystem.
Bitcoin miners don't put their operations in the middle of nowhere and then ask someone to build hydro plants...
That’s not true at all. There is a huge amount of stranded power. Electricity is not fungible across large distances. Otherwise people in Texas wouldn’t be paying $9,000 per mwh during the storm— power certainly didn’t cost that much in other states then.
Texas is a pretty disingenuous and cherry picked example considering they deliberately siloed themselves off from the other two major power grids of the country. Energy within a power grid is fairly fungible.
That was a political decision. Having your own grid means that you also have your own power frequency regulation, and importing power from a different network is not as simple as connecting wires - you need to connect them using DC instead of AC. These transfer points (interchanges) are sized just for temporary power import or export, you cannot use them to power the whole Texas grid. You can see more details about the interconnects here: https://www.eia.gov/realtime_grid/#/status
lol yes it is, texas is huge btw, but also has no interconnects with the rest of the grid, hence the price rise at a time of zero supply and high demand
My initial reaction was skepticism. So the numbers I found were 121 TWhs consumed by Bitcoin annually. Hydro power produces 4200 TWhs annually of a total electricity production of 25,000 TWhs. Assuming all Bitcoin mining is powered by hydro, a 97% untilization for hydro doesn't seem far-fetched.
So what do you propose we do? Do we create the energy police and tell people what you can and cannot do with energy? Do we stop people from mindlessly browsing the internet?
This argument really annoys me because, bitcoin has a purpose, I can buy things with bitcoin, just take a walk in Huaqiangbei and see how many shops accept bitcoin, talk to the people who's governments failed their national currency and they will agree the energy we spend on bitcoin helps them.
Until btc is replaced with a POS crypto currency like cardano[1] the energy we spend on btc is worth it for the people using it.
Not fully necessarily given how local energy is. There's only so many things you can do in cheap-energy places, especially without much bigger and less potentially temporary investments.
Ugh this is such a tired argument. Energy used to watch TV could be used for something else instead. What is this mystical “something else” which couldn’t be powered because Bitcoin was using up all the electricity, and what good fortune would it have brought us?
Yes this discussion has happened hundreds of times on HN at this point.
> "Bitcoin uses too much energy[1]"
> "It's only using surplus energy which would go to waste anyway[2][3]"
> "But it still has an environmental impact [4]"
I guess I'm just tired of seeing the same things repeated on every single thread about Bitcoin. When I saw a lazy comment like OPs, I overreacted, sorry.
Your articles don't support your stance. I work with people who handle surplus electricity with mobile mining operations -- they're few and far between.
The use of bitcoin, a speculative good, as a sink for electricity creates less pressure for grids to manage electricity production (especially as the acceptable spot price trends towards the commercial price of electricity). It also ignores the innovative ideas that are geographically bound like storing potential energy by pumping water into dams.
The idea that bitcoin only uses surplus energy is disprovable just by looking at the regularity of block completion. If it were dependent on an irregular source like surplus electricity, you wouldn't see that.
Yes there is a lot of power being used to mine crypto, I mine but it is done on a system that I would normally have running 24/7 regardless of mining. Yes large mining specific "server" or "ASIC" farms use alot of energy but so does every other serverfarm. Maybe we should be talking about the energy cost of watching Pr0n, or TikTok videos both of whic IMHO provide far less benifit to society.
Did you read the article, or just the abstract? Do you have any specific points to refute or insights to add? Or is your comment not constructive and just sensationalist propaganda? And I ask this as someone who would benefit from BTC going up relative to USD.
They clearly didn't, since the study acknowledged that issue:
> If “flocks” of independent crypto-miners are endogenously sorting into locations with cheap electricity, then our estimates here could be an over- or under-estimate of the social damages.
Even if this were true, hydro also has an environmental cost, doubly so if the demand from crypto is causing hydro to be constructed in places where it cannot be used for other purposes (which is often a linked claim).
Why is such as a man-made change necessarily net negative impact on the planet? It may have both negative and positive impacts. Maybe the new dam allows other species to migrate in and increase diversity. It is complicated, depends on circumstances etc.
> If crypto uses green energy, it displaces other users to use more dirty energy.
"I bought a solar panel and AC converter to consume less from the grid. Oops, because of that now I am displacing my neighbours to use more dirty energy. How silly of me."
Seriously your argument makes no sense. How does one minor consumer of green energy displace you from doing the same?
Bitcoin mining facilities do not install their own solar panels. They use energy from the grid, that would otherwise go to other users if bitcoin miners did not destroy it.
It assumes the value of Bitcoin is in the mining of new coins. The network also has value as a ledger to record transfers of Bitcoin (billions per day) which contributes to the value of the network
The analysis can be generalized to say anything that uses 0.05 electricity creates these large harms. Perhaps true, but it’s not going to be unique to Bitcoin
This. This bad argument about value of cryptocurrencies being mining, lack of perspective and policy proposals in the paper are the most obvious signs of bias.
For every dollar spent building a train station there are $50 dollars of health and climate damages.
This ignores the USE of the train station, and just focuses on energy costs to build it.
This study is only focused on mining new coins. Heads up, some of the (wildly inflated) value of bitcoin is tied to (arguable) uses and the ability of the blockchain to operate as a non-repudiation public ledger that allows global transfer of value with strong guarantees totally independent of any other central party.
Some quick math.
1 bitcoin is lets say worth $50,000. Let's assume $10K in electricity to mine this. So for every $1 in bitcoin, you need 20 cents of electricity.
Reduced to it's simplest, the claim here is that for every 20 cents of electricity, there is another 50 cents of health impacts.
Fair enough, but if you believe this, then a lot of other things have huge damages.
And neither is highlighting bitcoin, especially by focusing ONLY on the mining aspect of it. The use of the network is also part of the bitcoin story. If instead of using new bitcoins mined they did transaction value per day (ie, $20B+) the math would be totally different.
If you applied this same damage model to something people had fondness for (ie, driving an electric car) you'd realize we should be working as HARD as we can to kill EV cars dead, because there is a MASSIVE unaccounted for cost to charging them (using this model).
Reality though is bitcoin chases low cost power, and that is currently often actually green (hydro, excess solar during day when their is curtailment and negative pricing etc). I can't imagine the economics making sense to mine using coal power.
Because the transactional ledger of bitcoin is what is driving electricity use, and another statement might be, for every $1 transacted on the bitcoin ledger, 0.0005 dollars in health damage is caused. (it's roughly a factor of 1000 more volume then new mining, and over time new mining is going to get smaller and smaller)
The question is valid - it would be interesting to see the comparison. To get some perspective as to how big of a problem cryptocurrency consumption really is.
This isn't whataboutism, it's a valid question considering BTC is touted as a replacement for the financial system and ostensibly performs a similar function with an alternative infrastructure. If the premise is that we should stop BTC mining and processing simply because it costs $X dollars (code pun intended) per transaction, then the price of alternatives is germane to the discussion.
While this is sad, this is a self correcting problem. Miners and other people using bitcoins are going to get tired at some point of the loss from buying all this energy to keep their bitcoin assets going.
The most scary part of cryptocoins is the deflationary cycle that makes these crypto asset potentially displace productive investment on an economy wide scale.
This is not self correcting. This is Moloch, it's a prisoner's dilemma, a bad Nash equilibrium where the incentives are to keep the vicious cycle going as long as possible because the first to leave the cycle are disadvantaged.
This is mostly a worry if many companies do like Tesla and jump on the band wagon. They may be tempted at an economy wide scale to reduce investment in production in order to hoard cryptocoins instead. This dynamic caused the great depression in the 1930s when businesses switched to hoarding gold tied currency instead of producing.
Now I'm not sure that crypto coins without being jacked up by central banks (like gold was during the great depression) are a powerful enough force to cause the type of havoc that gold did.
Then again, the potentially stronger network/memetic effects of cryptocoins, along with the amplification factor from markets being synchronized through instant global communications nowadays might make them dangerous to the economy even without central bank involvement. We saw how much people got hypnotized during the Gamestop episode. I don't think unsophisticated investors' hoarding is enough to cause problems but it is a bit unsettling that Tesla and other companies are starting to hoard. If enough businesses follow suit, you get into scary territory (It would also be worrisome if companies widely moved to add billions in gold to their balance sheet but the lesson has been learned in the 1930s with gold).
In theory, if central banks stay stimulative enough through all this, you can maintain growth in both productive businesses and crypto. As long as these central banks don't flinch at the sight of what may look like crypto bubbles.
> Miners and other people using bitcoins are going to get tired at some point of the loss from buying all this energy to keep their bitcoin assets going
Someone might have a better insight to me. My concern is that the demand for energy will push up the price for everyone and it's actually those on lower incomes who will suffer the most. While the economics might eventually get there to solve the problem, could it do a lot of damage in the process?
We all suffer because it pollutes the environment ridiculous amounts for something that is still of dubious worth to society (we already have plenty currencies). The amount of power needed goes asymptotically to infinity as bit coins are mined. It will have to eventually fix itself because of that as other have argued, but before then it's going to do a lot of unnecessary damage to the environment.
"... a bad Nash equilibrium where the incentives are to keep the vicious cycle going as long as possible because the first to leave the cycle are disadvantaged."
This is why Bitcoin is compared to a Ponzi-MLM scheme - and if the game doesn't continue then the latest adopters, who haven't sold or made any profit, are then left "holding the bag." This matching pattern is denied by pretty much every person in the army/mob of HODLers:
- Bill Gates recently said only someone as rich as Elon should be willing to risk buying Bitcoin; Elon being the richest person on the planet
- Elon Musk even recently tweeted that "Bitcoin is almost as much bs as fiat money", so even he doesn't believe it's the best or ideal final solution
- I can't find the article, however within the last few weeks, an article by a senior partner at an international investment firm wrote about his thoughts on Bitcoin, and in the first few paragraphs he highlighted how people with a counter-narrative are hiding/afraid to speak out against it [because of the mob].
> Miners and other people using bitcoins are going to get tired at some point of the loss from buying all this energy to keep their bitcoin assets going
The only reason miners mine (at least most of them) is because they get a return on their upfront energy costs by the rewarded BTC, so why would they suddenly get tired of it?
"displace productive investment on an economy wide scale"
Yes we need to keep buying overvalued equities. Instill fear.
The matter of the fact is if something is worth investing in, it will get the investment regardless if btc is with us or not with us. Venture capital is still thriving today.
Disclaimer: I'm fairly uneducated on cryptocurrency and failed miserably at economics, so these are just musings.
Do you think any of those negative effects are counteracted by crypto creating a new ecosystem for the exchange of value? I'm not certain myself, but I'm curious what your thoughts are. It is slightly different than gold, in the sense that normal people (that can afford expensive graphics cards) can "earn" value—at the expense of energy consumption and thus proxying all of the destructive nature of that industry.
On one hand, it doesn't really appear that it will increase the velocity of money, given that you're now just introducing a bunch of arbitrage opportunities in the exchange markets... That might even contribute to your point, that the larger "crypto" as a whole scales, the more it will serve to suck actual value out of the global economy.
> While this is sad, this is a self correcting problem. Miners and other people using bitcoins are going to get tired at some point of the loss from buying all this energy to keep their bitcoin assets going.
Except with deflating nature of BTC, and no accurate price prediction models, people always assume their BTC will be worth mor, so they justify mining at a loss currently for future speculative value. Not to mention this exact statement has been parroted while BTC move from CPU, to GPU, and finally to ASICs. There has always been someone there saying it’ll correct, except it never has.
Don't worry it IS defensively self correcting no matter who joins and for what reason. To keep it going forever it would need endless quadratic grows which is not possible.
Also there are solutions without PoW/PoS, they use FBA instead. As soon as they take over for any actual use, the energy wasting will come to an end.
If it would have anywhere near a direct effect on our daily life that alone would have such a negative effect on the price that it would instantly crash.
The price and more so the ever increasing price is the only thing that keeps it alive and it directly correlates with the price expectation people have. There is no way enough people would think the price goes up if negative effects would become so real.
What if the effects of cryptocoins are expected to affect other assets more negatively (people reduce buying from businesses because they want to hoard tokens instead so all assets but cryptocoins lose value while tokens are gaining). Then cryptocoins increasingly seems like the only asset worth buying. This is what makes this a bad Nash equilibrium and vicious circle.
Now I think central banks can prevent this from affecting the greater economy by sufficiently stimulating investment (which would quickly push crypto coins prices up to a level where they can go down again). I think...
There where hugely popular deflationary assets in the past. Gold and Silver would also only go up in value over time if people would see it as more profitable than anything else. But reality kicks in at some point. PMs still goes up in value making new ATH every few year but they cant outperform stock. The people who still bet everything on gold or other PMs are the same who do so with bitcoin. They are attached to it. Its not a big problem because only a fraction of all people will get this kind of gold fever for a long period of time. The rest will move money to other assets and even short it.
All of that leaves out any "authoritarian" intervention which at some point would be guaranteed if bitcoin would come close to a global risk. An yes, I know they cant shut down the network but like I said in my last post its all about the price tag. They can crash the price without attacking the network at all. Merely stating the goal to suppress it should be enough. No institution would bet against the gov so they would sell instantly.
While I won't argue with most of that and in reality it's the most likely scenario.
> Its not a big problem because only a fraction of all people will get this kind of gold fever for a long period of time.
When I see Tesla, one of the largest company in the US, buying 1.5B in Bitcoins. It goes a bit beyond a normal "fever". Now if this is just an isolated incident we should be in the clear. If this is the start of a trend for businesses, I can imagine a scenario where businesses add more and more Bitcoins to their balance sheet over some years which makes the price gradually go up, after years of prices going up, businesses start believing it's an always growing asset and over-weight their portfolio with it. Banks and financial institutions get in on the fun and eventually load up too. Now it's 2029 and we have lots of organisations with political power having incentives to keep this going and they also now have arguments that it's a new fundamental technological part of the financial system and it's systemically dangerous to let it become unstable. So instead of fixing the problem, the government caves, and against expert advice, tries to stabilize and prop up cryptocoins when corrections seem imminent. In doing so they severely destabilize the rest of the economy.
I mean it's low probability, but there were experts who knew better in 1929 too and politics meant they did the wrong things anyways.
Far more likely is that these businesses like Tesla would be the very first to dump and probably make good profit on it. They have zero incentives to keep it running if they are informed in advance that the goal is to crush the price.
I have no doubt that most banks and large business will know when its time to get out. the gov has no intention to damage them and they are a the key part in crushing the price. They only have to get the large holders to sell an not buy anymore the small ones dont matter much anyway.
Also truly believe the Tesla bought BTC as a PR gimmick. Elon Musk for sure know that no one really want to be paid with it or buy a Tesla with it. Also very likely its directly related to the expected inflation spike.
several % inflation on 1.5B is kinda a lot money and in the current market situation its hard to protect that money from inflation. Everything seems to be a bubble. BTC might actually be a good bet. It survived the bear market the mining is very very profitable now so it aint gonna die anytime soon. It should be around 1 year until the next cycle starts and BTC crashes like in 2018. if they sell before that they might perfectly avoid the turbulent time that is expected in the traditional markets.
>if they are informed in advance that the goal is to crush the price.
Ok but the scenario was what if bitcoin holders convince the government to support price instead of crush it?
The Bitcoin "fever" is already starting to spread from individual speculators to large businesses, already a jump that I didn't expect.
If the fever spreads: individual speculators -> large businesses -> financial institutions -> government? This is when we could be in trouble.
I hope the Tesla purchase is a gimmick like you said. But what if it's the start of a trend? You provided the justification yourself? "Everything seems to be a bubble. BTC might actually be a good bet."
> It should be around 1 year until the next cycle starts and BTC crashes like in 2018.
Yes that would be the best scenario, but what if large institutions are on a multi year trend of adding Bitcoins to their portfolio which prevents this crash?
I can still see a non negligible probability of the fever going:
individual speculators -> large businesses -> financial institutions -> government, then, great depression II -> WWIII -> sticks and stones etc.
The governments sole purpose is to benefit the people (yes I know that far from reality)
But which gov would endorse the use of BTC knowing that it harms the people, removes their own power and if we go back to sticks and stones would even removed the gov itself. At some point self preservation would kick in. Before we go to WWWIII an bomb each other because of buttcoin, someone would bomb the mining farms ryt? If the gov wont do it I'm sure we find some environmental terrorist.
I mean this is not unprecedented (tying the economy to gold caused the great depression). A surprisingly large amount of people, even sometimes otherwise smart ones, can't seem to wrap their head around the fact that having a widespread deflationary token can destabilize the whole economy. Their blindness to this fact will be amplified if they own a lot of such tokens and stand to lose in the short term if the deflationary cycle is broken. Plus there is a prisoner's dilemma of standing to lose more if you sell too early before the peak which causes people to hodl further. What if these people are large corporations and leaders of large financial institutions that have a lot of political influence? The misguided token stabilizers often also seem to be democratically backed by the population that tends to equate tokens losing value to increasing cost of living instead of to market adjustments necessary for people to have jobs.
I can see it right now. If cryptocoins become widespread, we will start seeing articles in the press about how they are an integral part of the financial infrastructure now, an evolution of technology and the government should play a role in insuring their stability. If a consensus forms around these dangerous ideas, smarter voices could be drowned.
Well they could become an integral part, so nothing wrong with that. However it would not be bitcoin. The projects who actually work with financial institutions have one thing in common, they dont use PoW.
You can read it every day, most powerful people talk bad about bitcoin and some even endorse other cryptos.
Deflation on its own is not a problem. Gold is deflationary too that does not cause a depression. It did once but because of the connection between gold and money (fiat). Now days if there would be a gold bubble, the central banks hold most of it and could simply dump the price by selling some. They can buy back with printed money and sell higher to crash it and repeat while unofficially "inform" the right people to short it. As long as the printed fiat still is widely accepted they can fight any deflation bubble from any asset with it. Its the whole point of central banks. They play outside of the rules of all other financial institution with the sole goal to manipulate the market into being somewhat stable.
It doesn't really matter that gold would not go to zero and probably even would make a new ATH some yeas later. Busting the bubble is enough of a fix for many many years until the next bubble comes.
Its still deflationary but most people dont think in decades and more.
I don't understand where all these "cryptocurrency vs the environment" posts are coming from recently. The core problem is energy use, no? Things using electricity - of which bitcoin is a huge one - are powered by environmentally damaging supplies.
I don't care about BTC at all, but if it were to be wiped out of existence tomorrow it would prevent further damage to the environment in exactly the same way that getting rid of plastic straws stopped plastic polluting the ocean.
I don't think you realize the scale of it. Bitcoin is primarily used for speculation, the value is only based on more and more people buying in, and the energy usage is overwhelming. We are in dire need of reducing overall energy usage, but Bitcoin works against this in a huge way.
And even if the energy comes from "sustainable sources", solar cells still need to be manufactured, the hardware that does nothing but mine and ends up as e-waste needs to be produced. The environmental impact doesn't end with energy usage.
Overall, Bitcoin has an overall negative impact on society and environment, none of the claims that proponents made really hold up. There are many fundamental flaws that prevent Bitcoin from functioning as a practical currency, even is energy use wasn't an issue.
Oh, so then it's ok to have a "currency" where one transaction uses 650kWh, 12000000 times more than a credit card transaction.
I get all the benefits of crypto, but there are also massive downsides, the biggest being the energy/hardware usage, which has to rise constantly by design.
I'd be excited about a widely adopted cryptocurrency that doesn't gobble up insane amounts of energy and needs an ever increasing amount of computing power to keep it from collapsing, but right now Bitcoin is using almost as much energy as Sweden, which isn't great.
I agree, and sadly they're unlikely to change. However, Ethereum has about as much usage (though lower market cap), has proof-of-stake running with 100K nodes and $5 billion staked, and plans to migrate the rest of the network and eliminate mining within a year or so.
Huh? It would reduce a statistically significant amount of wasted energy. About as much as Ireland uses every year. Seems like a good goal to pursue, unless you’re a nihilist I guess
It would change economical pressures to push for things like building necessary transfer capacity, meanwhile you have BTC miners rescuing coal mine and coal power plant with new power purchase contract.
Talent invested in the crypto space pales in comparison to what we waste in finance. Our greatest minds are more likely to be arbitraging pork belly futures (PrIcE dIsCoVeRy!) than working on crypto.
That's a valid point, but that's an argument for "crypto is an expensive distraction from more worthy goals" rather than the original "computers used for a certain purpose are dangerous to the environment"
> responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages
red flag this article is steeped in pseudoscience.
you could spend a lifetime trying to model and predict global weather patterns _with no outside intervention_. the idea that you could even make an attempt at attaching a number to this phenomena is laughable. what are the error bars here, 10,000%?
lets pretend, for example, you tried to estimate the impact of tsunamis assuming that we think this weather event is standard deviations more likely due to BTC (this is non-obvious and probably not true, but for the sake of argument). dozens of tsunamis around the globe will kill people and decimate cities, but your estimate will be multiple orders of magnitude off in some places like fukushima - a cursory glance at wikipedia indicates a lower bound of 300 billion dollars.
this is not to say that we shouldnt be concerned about rapid global climate system changes; on the contrary! junk science like this actively harms the cause. we dont have to sensationalize, reality and truth are scary enough.
You clearly haven't actually looked at how the damages are modelled have you? You just in your head inveneted a naive way in which to estimate damages and then argued that that doesn't work.
There is a large and robust literature to assess these type of damages (search for Social Cost of Carbon). The methodological challenges are discussed really well in the paper actually. Much of the damages calculated here aren't even climate but direct air pollution, for which we have robust data and damage models. Insurance companies use these type of damage models at large scale for risk assessment all the time.
Please omit personal swipes from your HN comments, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Your comment would be just fine without the first paragraph.
Unfortunately I am to late to edit my post. I understand the intent here, but these threads are full of what are, in the end, drastic accusations of scientific misconduct (or raging incompetence) against the authors, made with confidence from a place of proud ignorance. I believe it is important to point out when arguments are not made in good faith. Responding to them as if they were honest attempts at debate is problematic in the sense of a false balance.
That's actually against the site guidelines, which ask you to "Assume good faith."
The reason is that it's hard if not impossible to accurately assess other commenters' intent, and there's a strong default on the internet to assume bad faith. We all need to consciously counteract that if we're to have substantive, thoughtful discussion.
It's true that some commenters behave abusively in ways that make assuming good faith impossible, but (a) I doubt that was the case here, and (b) the guidelines ask you not to reply in such cases, but rather to flag the comment and/or email hn@ycombinator.com.
The article is undermined by its arbitrary focus on crypto. The premise is that crypto mining drives consumption for power, and power production results in "health and climate damage". Are we going to police consumers of power now? Will we invest our time and energy in determining the "good" and "bad" consumers of power. Or are we going to invest our time and resources in building out a sustainable, clean, and efficient power production infrastructure to replace the ancient one we have?
If you're not just reacting to the focus on crypto mining, but actually interested in the answer to your question, then the answer is yes.
In fact, energy efficiency[0] is a large area of focus, especially with regard to ongoing climate change[1]. You might have noticed a shift in things like light bulbs building standards and so on. We've made progress[2], and so it is really hard for people celebrating that progress when they see a sudden boom in energy use to create wealth for a very tiny subset of people, a boom in use that threatens to undo all of our progress and then some.
>a boom in use that threatens to undo all of our progress and then some
Then we're back to policing people's energy use. There will be little ROI in going down this path, and a huge opportunity cost.
This is all not to mention the incentives driving crypto. We have many smart minds engaging in this realm - imagine if those same minds were allocated, via a better economic system, to improving our energy production and distribution. Addressing that dilemma is real policy. Unfortunately, in the West we play whack-a-mole and end up with policies to address the effects of prior policies.
The paper has no perspective on electric energy consumption of other activities, there are many more with similar or bigger consumption (ad industry, MIC, etc.) and still advocates regulating specifically cryptocurrencies. The window of opportunity, attention span and resource for effective regulating economic activity is limited. We should focus on the (few!) important polluting classes such as transport and power production, not hundreds of minor consumer classes such as cryptocurrencies or aluminum producers. Focusing on minor issue, cherry-picking contorted arguments and advocating targeted policy is not how respectable scientific paper should look like.
>We should focus on the important polluters, not minor consumers
Do you feel the same way about causes of death?
Imagine saying "who cares Cystic Fibrosis kills x people, heart disease is worse!"
Also, other consumers like cement, fossil fuel production, and plastics HAVE been focused on. Bitcoin is new and only recently popular so we don't know much about it and it's true cost.
Yes? Polluting power plants kill many more people than the whole bitcoin mining operation.
> Also, other consumers like cement, fossil fuel production, and plastics HAVE been focused on. Bitcoin is new and only recently popular so we don't know much about it and it's true cost.
Okay, we agree on something here. I fully support assessing Bitcoin mining and operation costs and comparing those costs to other consumer classes to get perspective. When we do this, it is easy to see bitcoin mining is a non-issue climate-wise (for now). The main issue is pollution done by Big Polluters such as naval transport and coal/gas power plants.
These bogus calls for regulation/shutdowns of minor electricity consumers just spoil the climate discussion, distract us from the real polluters.
>Imagine saying "who cares Cystic Fibrosis kills x people, heart disease is worse!"
You're completely missing the point here: we have finite time and resources to deal with problems. We must dedicate these finite time and resources in the most efficient way to possible to achieve the most desired outcome.
If by "worse" you mean "heart disease causes more deaths and drives higher social costs" then yes there is a strong argument to be made on addressing the root causes driving heart disease with more resources and time then cystic fibrosis. But, again, your analogy is contrived-and-forced-apples-to-oranges with the topic at hand.
>This paper is just saying there are reasonably estimable costs. That's all!
Wrong. You make numerous comments in this thread asserting that the sole focus on this paper is quantifying externalities of crypto mining when that's plainly false. The paper is prescribing policy options for dealing with crypto externalities and birthing new loaded clinical terms to ascribe solely to those externalities: "cryptodamage". Read it.
"As an alternative to intervening in emergent cryptocurrency markets through prices (e.g., taxation) or outright restricting their development, there may be a role for government investment into R&D that
focuses on designing mining puzzles that greatly reduce energy consumption (and thus production costs) while still allowing for secure
validation of anonymous transactions. Fully vetting and encouraging
such currency alternatives might retain the libertarian social benefits of
the blockchain [35] while making “the last Bitcoin” irrelevant. Although there will still be private benefits captured from mining under
possible low-energy design alternatives, as illustrated here there would
be significant public good benefits (reduced cryptodamages) to justify
such government investments into R&D. Importantly, such investments
in R&D are not mutually exclusive with taxing to internalize cryptodamages, and may also come with the potential to generate spin-off
benefits from blockchain technology more generally."
Papers discuss the implications and applications of their work. That discussion is not the work itself; it is meant to give a starting point for fitting the work with other research or doing new research that builds on the work. Thus, the authors "close by sharing our brief thoughts on policy implications of recognizing cryptodamages." That section mentions a wide range of policy implications—several paragraphs that you didn't bother quoting—without advocating for anything in particular beyond reducing harm.
Frankly, that leaves it sounding like what you're really bothered by is that the paper points out that there is harm, and advocates for reducing it. And if that's the real problem—that you don't like it when someone speaks up and says hey, this has quantifiable downsides—just be honest about it.
> That section mentions a wide range of policy implications—several paragraphs that you didn't bother quoting—without advocating for anything in particular beyond reducing harm.
Yes but that is still propagating the unsubstantiated view that cryptocurrency mining is an important cause of societal harm worthy of mitigation/regulation. There is no comparison to other similar or bigger economic activities, no mention of the fact that the pollution happens at power plants and is under direct control of the power plant owners, not miners. It is inordinately focused on societal harms of cryptocurrency mining, it ignores the benefits beyond mining profit(which is uncertain but non-zero and hard to quantify in dollars). Limitation of the paper narrative to such a narrow topic shows bias.
Not doing what you'd personally prefer isn't a bias. Tackling a problem at several levels is perfectly legitimate; it's just that a paper about clean power generation would be a totally different paper.
It's a single paper. One piece of information that's small enough to be digested and connected with other work. And frankly, if the result had been that each $1 created 1¢ of costs, you'd be celebrating it. Your only real criticism here is that you don't like the result.
If you're so concerned about the root cause of power generation, go focus on solving that problem.
>If you're so concerned about the root cause of power generation, go focus on solving that problem.
So ignore the root cause altogether, lol. And when we've banned crypto mining and accrued even worse social costs as a result, we'll rinse and repeat this process with the next ".*damage" power consumer. Totally sane!
The irony of this whole chain is that the paper itself actually acknowledges this other variable (that y'all are pretending is the only variable) directly:
> There is considerable evidence of concentration of mining operations in particular locations, typically where reliable electricity is cheaply available, though, precise data are lacking (e.g., [15], [6]). In the US, perhaps the most well-known concentration is the Mid-Columbia Basin area in central and eastern Washington State, where cheap electricity is produced by hydropower along the Columbia River [4], [6], however, mining in other US locations also occurs (see [11] and news references in [23], [24], and [25]).
> emissions rates per kWh will differ substantially given underlying differences in how power is produced—i.e., China relies extensively on coal power (>60% of electricity generation) while the US is more balanced (32% natural gas, 30% coal, 20% nuclear, etc.).
Saying they ignore this is just a lie. Criticize the paper, by all means, but this simply isn't a hit piece. It's careful in stating exactly what it can commit to, and it reasonably tries to explain how that fits into the bigger picture.
Banning anything that's already widespread implies making a part of the population into criminals. With that comes the costs of enforcement and of government's authority (which is finite). Consider too that crypto is, often, a response by many to perceived policy for fiat.
>Would you expect a paper on COVID mortality also discuss heart disease and ALS? Of course not.
Power consumption and power production are simply directly related. Your clumsy attempt at an analogy here really misses the mark.
The root cause of this issue is our power production isn't clean enough, and therefore consumption drives pollution. What do you address first - the demand or the supply?
It's quite simply amazing to see so little ability to grasp anything beyond immediate consequences of a problem, particularly on a site like this.
Perhaps you are extending the discussion far past the point I was trying to make in a single sentence.
Discussing things with people on hacker news is frustrating because people like you extend the argument to way way way past the point at hand. All of a sudden we are talking about clean energy deployment, not that BitCoin mining is using a lot of power and resources.
This is right. It is useful to know how much electricity production costs in health and environmental output. It is useful to know how much of bitcoins value is the electricity cost. We can put a value on environmental harm caused by total electricity usage.
But, using these and suggesting that we can accurately measure the cost of cryptocurrency now and in the future compared to how the money/value would otherwise be spent is a distortion. The same reasoning can be used to make anything that stores value or does not have an obvious output look disproportionately harmful. It could be useful to compare cryptocurrencies with themselves. I am a little interested to see how they factored cryptocurrency's optimization to use the cheapest electricity possible. It disproportionately favors storing value from electricity that would otherwise be wasted.
Yes, reducing energy waste is an important way to tackle the environmental externalities of energy production. For example, in cold countries one of the major efforts for helping with climate change is to encourage buildings to use better insulation, to waste less heat during winter.
In lieu of engaging in a discussion, you've dismissed the possibility. You've provided no rationale (or evidence for that matter) for this flippant dismissal. Instead, you offer the 'conspiracy theory' pejorative. It is not a starting point for a conversation.
I have not dismissed the possibility there is a conspiracy.
I'm only calling out that asking a leading question like this doesn't add to the conversation at all.
There is an incredible irony to accuse me of providing no rational when this whole thing is about somebody alluding to a conspiracy with no rational at all.
The starting point to a conversation should be "hey, there is a conspiracy here, this is why."
>Are there parties that benefit disproportionately by establishing a cost for carbon and the definition thereof?
Asking about incentives, thinking critically about conflicts of interest doesn't add to the discussion because that might "allude to a conspiracy"?
I don't know if I agree with that. For me it makes sense to first ask "Cui bono". Establish a motive and then search for evidence to prove a hypothesis.
Posing the question is simply the beginning of the process. If you're closed minded about opening the door, my (reasonable or unreasonable, open for debate) expectation would be that you would dismiss anything within as "conspiracy theories". Hence the discussion becomes futile.
I read your reply as skipping over the possibility of a conflict of interest in research rationalizing a carbon credit trading regime.
Saving the planet is hardly altruistic, after all you are living on that planet yourself. So in essence it's at least partially driven from a position of self-preservation, which is by its nature egoistic.
> There is a large and robust literature to assess these type of damages
even granting you that we have a robust model to assess damage (which on its face seems to be a wildly improbably claim) we do not have an accurate model that predicts WHAT damage will be done due to humanity's impact on weather change, so the resultant-cost benefit analysis still propagates that uncertainty forward.
> (search for Social Cost of Carbon)
i havent read it all because i just looked it up[0], but it directly contradicts your claim of our "robust data and damage models". section 5.1 "damage functions" is about how previous damage models are all incorrect.
side note: one of the paper authors is in references 30 times. idk if this is common or not, but it seems suspicious.
> The methodological challenges are discussed really well in the paper actually. Much of the damages calculated here aren't even climate but direct air pollution
wouldnt know, dont have access to anything but the abstract.
look, im not well read into the field of future predictive damage modeling. you may be right that the field has some definition, however i stand by my smell test. even ignoring everything relevent about health, damage, and climate, the start of the sentence "$1 of BTC" is enough to give pause. BTC price is up 30% in the last month and 470% in the last year. not exactly rigorous scientific measure.
Bitcoin mining effort is proportional to the cost per bitcoin times the number of bitcoins awarded per block. Since the number per block is constant over each four-year period, it makes sense to talk about the cost per $1 of BTC.
This is not just some article, it's a peer-reviewed study from the University of Arizona. Surely it has fault, but honestly I don't think a "cursory glance at wikipedia" provides a compelling counterargument
Bad arguments. Estimating social benefit of cryptocurrencies by the dollar cost of mining operations is obviously incorrect.
No perspective on the big picture. Pollution they talk about is happening at power plants, not mining rigs. Net electric energy consumption of cryptocurrencies is less than 1% of world total.
Proposing targeted regulation policies on minor consumer classes, no mention of big problems(transport, coal plants) and big solutions (nuclear energy). Looks very biased.
This looks like a nice lobby/news propaganda scribble from a think tank working against cryptocurrencies. Not as a scientific paper.
Perhaps it disagrees with their personal worldview, because it would make their Bitcoin investment a questionable move for the world. There's a lot of justification going on around people's bitcoin investments; you can't say a negative thing about it right now without being dogpiled.
> This is not just some article, it's a peer-reviewed study from the University of Arizona
Without going into the paper itself, why do you believe being peer-reviewed means that we cannot - and should not - look at it critically with our own brains and minds, analyze the evidence, and reach our own conclusions?
I would argue that most people actually cannot, at least not without spending weeks reading up on the topic first. Needless to say that the same goes for almost every other scientific article out there, except for the ones that might be in one's own field.
They make no attempt at trying to predict global weather patterns. Rather the article seems to be mostly "glue" -- connecting energy usage of cryptocurrencies with previously done work trying to measure the externalities of pollution and energy usage. The research that the article builds on gets used all the time in government policy etc. Which doesn't make it correct, but deserves a little more than a knee-jerk reaction and outright dismissal because the method you came up with in thirty seconds doesn't hold up.
This doesn't engage with the report at all. You call it pseudoscience without any supporting evidence. You speculate about error bars without grounding in fact, and the only counterargument you bring is a weak hand waving that it must be a hard problem, with a gratuitous citation from Wikipedia.
And given that you basically claim that actuarial science is impossible, I'd hope you bring a stronger claim than that.
As it is, this is, as the quote goes, "just your opinion, man".
Hyper competitive market forces in the west have created the wrong incentives for everyone, especially institutions. When there is a demand to weaponize or politicize science then we naturally get stuff like this.
You could make up some fear mongering "study" about almost every energy using topic. AI and video rendering for instance which is often for some marginal purpose. Or heating pools, idle electronics, big homes with AC, leisure travel, all the useless crap bought and manufactured in China with dirty coal, etc.
Are you saying we shouldn't understand the consequences of what we do?
It's useful to know that BTC has major externalities because it allows us to make a rational choice. We could make different choices about all the things you listed, too. Or not! But you seem to be actually arguing for willful blindness, here.
You are misunderstanding the point. Of course, cryptocurrencies have externalities and it is good to quantify them. In that respect, the paper could be useful. The objection is, this paper makes no attempt to analyze and show cryptocurrencies are worth attention any more than other 1000 consumer classes. It just states "crypto has externalities", does not weight them properly in perspective and advocates for "more research" and "lets regulate". That is irresponsible. Regulation should happen at the biggest most important polluters such as transport and coal plants.
It's a single paper. It responsibly limits itself to a manageable conclusion and responsibly points out where there are still open questions.
Can you point out where in the paper the authors leap to "let's regulate" as you put it? There seems to be one small section about regulation, but it doesn't exactly advocate for it: it describes how their pricing research could be used in regulation. It describes challenges in regulating. But it responsibly avoids making moral/policy claims.
The whole paper shows implicit interest in taxing/regulating cryptocurrency mining instead of unbiased dispassionate scientific analysis. You can see this explicitly in the last section, starting with
> However, the ability to locate, and re-locate, cryptomining almost anywhere (e.g., following the cheapest, under-regulated electricity source) and fund mining camps from anywhere with complete or near anonymity create significant challenges to implementing effective regulation
Do you think a discussion of policy implications should somehow ignore relevant policy considerations?
It's helpful for authors to point out how they think their work fits into the broader scheme of things. They correctly identify that a high cost to benefit ratio might make people interested in regulating it; they also correctly identify that practical concerns make that difficult. There is no advocacy there.
Even if there were, it wouldn't be inappropriate to say "hey, there's a downside to this; we recommend trying to fix that."
It was a question. You seemed to be implying that any such study would be "fear-mongering" (your words). That suggests that you think the studies wouldn't be useful and that we shouldn't do them.
Making the study about bitcoin in particular seems like a clickbaity way of getting attention, when the core issue seems to be dirty power generation. Bitcoin makes up a tiny fraction of non-essential American power usage, so focusing on it in particular just seems like jumping on the "Bitcoin is terrible for the environment" bandwagon. Articles on this topic seem to pop up every couple weeks on HN lately, and they generally aren't novel or interesting.
You mentioned five things, all of which are frequently focused on as contributors to global climate change. Well, I'm not sure I've seen "AI and video rendering" mentioned in that context, but I'm also not sure that they use more power than crypto mining. But definitely I've seen articles addressing idle electronics[0], big homes with AC[1], leisure travel[2], and "all the useless crap bought and manufactured in China with dirty coal"[3].
So it shouldn't be surprising that crypto mining is added to the list.
Any and all heavy users of energy are contributing to climate change in some way, and the cost/benefit analysis for some are more justifiable than others. Food production is energy-hungry, but without it, people die. Nobody would die if crypto mining ended tomorrow. Thanks to government standards, idle electronics are better now than they were, and will continue to improve in the future. Big homes with A/C is a largely American problem without anything to really address it yet, but there has been a lot of attention focused on the issue already.
In general a bad thing is bad whether there are worse things or not. Crypto mining is a big drain on energy resources with very little benefit, or with benefit to very few people, and it doesn't have to the biggest drain, or benefit the fewest number of people the least for that to be true.
By endlessly arguing about regulating minor consumer/production classes the attention span and opportunities for effective change diminish. The regulation should happen for the big polluters first, i.e. coal plants, transport ships. When that is done and the problem is largely fixed, you can spend your time arguing about cryptocurrency taxation, why not.
It makes no sense, in the current situation, to discuss 10000 small energy consumers and appropriate pollution tax for all of them. We need to fix the damn energy production first.
They take the average emission per kWh generated in the country, combine that with existing research of the social cost of carbon done by the EPA (which includes damages done through climate change), as well as the change in mortality rate caused by these emissions. Then they combine this by the electricity requirements of bitcoin mining, and they have their results. (in very global terms, there's a lot more work done in the results).
I definitely wouldn't call it pseudo-science, as their arguments seem valid, and their methods seem to follow through at a cursory glance.
They do note some weaknesses in their research, such as not having access to the exact sources of electricity miners use, however, which might change the results.
What is the energy cost of the entire USD-based financial system? At a minimum we need to total up what the US Mint, the Federal Reserve, Visa, Mastercard, Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and thousands of other companies and government entities do. It is obvious that amount of energy used to keep the USD going absolutely dwarfs Bitcoin.
That is a completely useless comparison. If anything, compare energy usage per transaction. If you would hypothetically scale up the transaction volume of the Bitcoin network to the entire USD financial system, you'd quickly find out that it would use more energy than was ever produced on this planet.
Bitcoin's energy usage is not related to the number of transactions in any significant way, it's strictly a defense measure to prevent a nation state from tampering with the ledger.
I've read the whitepaper and follow technical developments occasionaly, I know how it works on a high-level.
You could make Bitcoin process 1000x more transactions and the energy consumption of mining it wouldn't even change by 1%, all else being equal.
Miners are willing to waste as much energy as they get back in rewards from mining blocks, while competing with each other for their share of the rewards. The rewards are newly minted Bitcoins (and some transaction fees, which are a small part of the reward). So the higher the Bitcoin price the larger the rewards miners get and the more energy they are able to spend competing with each other while still turning a profit.
If the price is 50k, it doesn't really matter if the network is processing 1 transaction a second or 10 million, the energy consumption will be roughly the same.
Smaller than the energy required to run Ireland, unlike bitcoin. An algorithm designed to be wasteful in energy wasting energy is not something we should be shocked at.
Hmm, a cursory glance on the topic made me think it's certainly possible, but not a guarantee. According to this[0] Wikipedia article, the DoD used less than Denmark, which is smaller than Ireland, but that data is outdated...
Is it your contention that the sole purpose of the US military is to back the value of a dollar? Because if that is the case, and you are still unable to see why people think you're silly, then there is little hope for you.
So what do you think would happen if the US military disappeared tomorrow leaving China and Russia as the two big guys? World War 3 for years? How much would change if bitcoin disappeared tomorrow? Probably a stock market dip.
I'm not sure you know what that word means. Pointing out a factual inaccuracy in the parent comment isn't "whataboutism". US military isn't a different issue, it's an integral part of the USD-based financial system.
Isn't this entire discussion the definition of whataboutism?
We're all focusing on Bitcoin as if killing it would stop global warming or something. There are dozens of different things we could be criticizing when it comes to pollution.
And we do! For many years! Just not on this thread.
Global climate change won't be slowed or stopped by a single silver bullet. It will take reduction in many, many areas combined, and many of those are already underway, have been underway for years now.
Meanwhile, all of those savings are being offset by wasteful-by-design crypto mining that benefits extraordinarily few people. So yes, in addition to the many, many, many reports on various other major contributors to ongoing climate change, it's time to talk about crypto mining, too.
And what was the effect of those many years on global yearly CO2 production? Did it decrease?
If we are to waste time talking about polluting classes, let's focus on the big ones first. Naval transport, coal power plants. These should be regulated first.
You have to include the energy used to power the US military, among other things too. The value of the Dollar is inextricably tied to the threat of force. Bitcoin, on the other hand, offers trust through proof of work, not violence.
The issue is that the US dollar is actually achieving something. Bitcoin is just causing people to froth at the mouth and burn up huge amounts of energy while polluting the environment heavily. When it pops lots of people are going to be left hurting because they bought into bitcoin fever.
You should look at what plenty of ETFs do with their time. Pollute, pillage, waste, oh and profit. The "wasting" of electricity is a valid concern, but when apples-to-apples, it's nothing out of the ordinary.
To keep the USD (among others) going we need trust, which is in part "created" by armed forces defending the nation/gov minting it. They dissipate a fair amount of energy.
And I'm especially angry at hypocrites like Elon Musk who are profiting from climate change and then proceeds invest those profits in bitcoin that accelerates climate change.
But then none of his enterprises have been explicitly exploitative, unlike many billionaires, and he’s pushed the car industry into moving away from combustion engines, so personally I give him a pass
If you were sitting on billions and wanted to accelerate climate change then investing in BTC is probably the most inefficient way to do that. I doubt that idea ever even crossed his mind. It’s just about the profit.
That's exactly how I understood the parent: Musk goes after anything that brings profits, and doesn't care about climate. Neither acceleration or deceleration.
Bitcoins adoption leads to climate change acceleration. Therefore, profiting from bitcoins means profiting, indirectly, from acceleration.
I'm only trying to explain to you how I understand the original post, and it has nothing to do with my own opinion on the subject (which may/or may not be the same).
I'm not saying Elon's a supervillain, more of a wasted talent (so far). The non-solutions he presents to non-problems are weird to say the least. Hand on heart, do we really need space tourism and luxury cars affordable by wealthy middle-aged men? How does this contribute to a better society?
Returning to the point at hand, both EV's and blockchain are non-solutions to difficult (and valid) problems. In my view, centralized money and climate change can only be only effectively solved at the origin and not the consumer level.
The solutions offered are annoyingly superficial, like taking away our drinking straws and fake internet money that has no use other than to make more centralized money.
Bitcoin is not sustainable even for providing for it's own security let alone from an environmental perspective. Bitcoin also gives the world very little in exchange for these massive externalized costs. It will eventually fail and the ethical loop-jumping that proponents espouse will become clear.
But other blockchain platforms are the mirror opposite. They can provide sustainable security, provided without environmental degradation, along with utility that will radically change most sectors of the economy in a similar if not even a greater degree than the internet did.
So in that sense, Bitcoin generated a net gain of $0.40 of planetary wealth for every dollar mined. Obviously, we should put as many resources into cryptocurrency as possible - we'll finally raise the money to eliminate climate change!
And this does not even include the horror future scenario in which rogue states burn their oil (which they cannot sell on the global market due to CO2 taxes and other regulations) to directly power miners...
It’s hilarious to see the coin bros attack this article. The point here isn’t the number, it’s the scale of waste, which is astronomical.
I would rather protect the environment than someone’s ability to buy drugs online. What other legitimate purpose does btc serve right now other than illegal activities?
You were misinformed. BTC isn't darknet. It isn't anonymous and isn't a safe haven for illegal activities. It is used as store of value and for speculations, like stocks or metals.
"Cryptocurrency mining uses significant amounts of energy as part of the proof-of-work time-stamping scheme to add new blocks to the chain. Expanding upon previously calculated energy use patterns for mining four prominent cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero), we estimate the per coin economic damages of air pollution emissions and associated human mortality and climate impacts of mining these cryptocurrencies in the US and China. Results indicate that in 2018, each $1 of Bitcoin value created was responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in the US and $0.37 in China. The similar value in China relative to the US occurs despite the extremely large disparity between the value of a statistical life estimate for the US relative to that of China. Further, with each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefits, absent perpetual price increases. For example, in December 2018, our results illustrate a case (for Bitcoin) where the health and climate change 'cryptodamages' roughly match each $1 of coin value created. We close with discussion of policy implications."
What is wrong with search for some comparisons and perspective? Everything has externalities, let's compare them to see how big of an elephant this really is.
Nothing's wrong with it. But the fact that this paper looks at a specific different piece of the puzzle doesn't make it bad. You're just asking for an entirely different piece of research, and criticizing this even though it's a step toward being able to make that comparison.
The US spends a lot of $ on waging war, $ that could have been spend on Healthcare, or funding initiatives that help combat climate change. I'm saying Healthcare and climate are hardly a priority for the US, so why is BTC the bad guy here?
Bitcoin takes away the power of central banks to fund wars willy nilly. All the corrupt forces that suck at the teat of free money will coalesce around the protection of this debasement racket and so we get these "think of the kids needing energy" articles...
50%? You don't mean 8%? Or 9%? Most recent five-year periods have seen inflation in the 8-9% range[0], but somehow we're going to spike to 50% in the next five years?
Every day we see a renewed attack on Bitcoin from the establishment media. Almost every day it is couched in the SV-friendly terms[1], even if - as pointed out by others here - the merit of the attack is thin.
By now I ascribe ulterior motive to those attacks, and I encourage you to also take them with a large grain of salt at the least. The establishment media seems to treat any emerging[2] technology as its opponent, and feels morally excused in posting continuous attacks.
--
[1] I half-jokingly expect a "Bitcoin deepens gender inequality" headline tomorrow
The question of benefits and costs of cryptocurrencies is interesting, so I read the paper. Unfortunately, poor readability, strange assumptions such as the dollar value of social benefits of cryptocurrencies (confusing with dollar value of mining) and strange desiderata such as dollar value of mining being higher than dollar value of costs. Clear bias towards regulating and policy targeting of cryptocurrencies. There is no mention of the fact that pollution is produced by power plants and directly controllable by their owners, not cryptocurrency miners. No mention of the fact cryptocurrencies are less than 1% of total world electric energy consumption.
A proper analysis of costs/benefits would put cryptocurrencies' externalities in perspective to other comparable and bigger consumers (cryptocurrencies are a very small part).
This disproportional targeting of cryptocurrencies as the most important climate destroyer that we see in the news seems to be unwarranted. Also, somehow the fact that pollution is generated by power plants, not consumers, is not so hot topic.
If anything, this is a good sign that if you haven't, it's worth learning more about Bitcoin, familiarizing yourself with how to acquire and use it, and consider a long-term strategy around holding some.
When the propaganda machine spins up and the smear campaigns start, it's being considered a valid threat by the established players.
I just don’t see how this is true. Are similar assertions going to be made when we switch to electric cars as a significant percentage of the population? It’s at about 2-3% IIRC and increasing this by several orders of magnitude will have a similar impact on electricity usage.
Doesn’t this speak mostly to the US not cleaning up their grid? Obviously the huge amount of wasted energy going into Bitcoin is insane, but it wouldn’t cause health issues if it was all nuclear, wind, solar, etc.
The US is actually a tiny portion of the hash rate in the BTC network. China makes up 70%+ of the hash rate of the network and they use a lot of coal power, ~62% of their power generation is handled by coal power.
Basically no where is to the point we can just add power draws and say they have no health impact. Energy being fungible until an grid is to the point of having excess renewable power during the day and miners being spun up and down to absorb that excess any mining will have health impacts. I think the spin up and down is important too because it means over night miners aren't causing excess capacity to be built for storage.
Does this factor in home heating as well? If your house uses electric heat, the power used by a mining rig would pretty much 1:1 offset the power used by an electric heater. There's even people who build miners specifically to serve as space heaters
https://medium.com/swlh/heating-my-home-with-crypto-mining-1...
PoW is wasteful as hell, but I am always skeptical of these calculations. It seems like an awfully long chain of causality to quantify. The error bars have to be huge.
Look at it this way we know that PoW is wasteful as hell and because of that causes external issues on a huge scale. If we don't try to work out what those issues are and how big their impact is how would we ever deal with them? Putting our heads in the sand won't make them go away and the link details their methodology and results if you wish to quibble with them. Particularly as it addresses estimate accuracy directly.
More generally the whole external cost of PoW is definitely a case of techno-utopianism meeting the real world and a lot of proponents wanting to put on blinkers even though this study shows that crypto-currency is currently a net social positive. Literally any indication that it has any negative outcomes elicits very strange responses.
Nothing special - that’s the problem. I consider a good HN post one where I learn something from the post and the discussion underneath it. Crypto posts for me at least typically don’t bring me learning from either. Discussions tend to all be along pretty similar patterns - either you’re pro or against. If pro, you talk about decentralization and money transfer in developing countries, if con about energy usage and criminal activity. Not that interesting
BTC has surged which leads to a general interest in the topic. People looking for clicks try and figure out new ways to talk about the subject using whichever lens suits their agenda/objective and their audiences interests/convictions.
Massive. Just as an example, a Bitcoin transaction uses 12.000.000 times as much energy as a VISA transaction.
I'm honestly getting tired of this argument. Just think about how much energy a Bitcoin transaction uses. Then scale that up to the entire U.S. worth of transactions. Go figure.
Absolutely not. Bitcoin’s value increases because it’s a speculative asset and there’s almost zero reasons for it to go down since it’s not really tied to anything tangible.
Simply take a moment to see how that argument works with other kinds of assets and you will see how it doesn't make any sense.
Gold is a speculative asset that also has some limited tangible uses too. So does that mean gold has less reasons to decrease in price than an asset which only has tangible uses and no speculation?
Try it for certain vintages of fine wine. The same as Bitcoin. Over time the quantity available for sale decreases due to loss. People lose their keys and the coins get lost. People drink the wine. Both naturally reduces supply driving up the price of the remainder.
BTC is a one way bet, right up to the point where people decide it isn't worth holding any more. Just like certain vintages of wine.
Sure, the fair value might slowly climb over time due to losses, but that has nothing to do with the fact that it's the target of a lot of speculation.
The fact that there is some small rate of losses doesn't significantly impact the amount of downside speculation you'd expect.
Still has usage as a potential store of value and a means of cheap global transfers. My mother in law use it monthly to transfer money to her home (third world) country, which is crazy easy and cheap compared to traditional means.
Any legitimate use of cryptocurrency will never materialize as long as people are gambling with them.
The intrinsic value of Bitcoin is nowhere near the current price. When the speculators all sell and the only demand comes from people looking to actually use them, the price will drop by a lot.
But, when that happens, the speculators/grifters will simply move to another coin. That other coin will see a similar bubble, and bitcoin’s value will drop even further as people perceive it as “dead” or worthless (as maybe it should have always been perceived)
So until this shit gets under control somehow, cryptocurrency is going to remain the exclusive domain of the speculator/gambler/criminal/grifter/gullible. And of course, the world will suffer increased energy usage, pollution, and GPU shortages.
Increased amounts of speculation actually in theory should decrease volatility and bring the price to the fair value more quickly.
What I think you are not considering here is that you can speculate both on the upside or the downside. Speculators are only trying to predict the future price, speculation is not the same as a "pump and dump scheme".
> When the speculators all sell and the only demand comes from people looking to actually use them, the price will drop by a lot. ... bitcoin’s value will drop even further as people perceive it as “dead” or worthless (as maybe it should have always been perceived)
Like you said yourself, if it is true that Bitcoin is overvalued then it would be a good thing for every Bitcoin user if its price dropped to the fair value. Why are you describing that situation like a bad thing here? I expect users would be happy that they can now afford more of the coin for practical use cases, and adoption in those use cases would probably go up more than anything.
Cryptocurrencies and their markets are anarcho-capitalist by design and intent. The entire premise of crypto is that only the free market determines legitimacy through profit and market share.
If gamblers and thieves dominate the crypto market and cannot be outcompeted by honest actors then by definition the market has decided it prefers gamblers and thieves to honest actors. If someone wants an economy with rules other than "lol Caveat Emptor" they shouldn't get into crypto.
I can rent a moving truck to get groceries, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. There might be narrow use cases, but that doesn't mean it's the best realistic way to solve every problem, and it doesn't mean it's worth the cost.
I hear what you're saying, but it's not nearly as "narrow" as you suggest. Remittances from the United States total hundreds of billions of US dollars each year [1]. Even with what I feel are bloated fees associated with Bitcoin, it is vastly cheaper than other services like Western Union.
The concern here is power use vs. utility relative to other options, not price. By cost I meant the cost under discussion: environmental and health. How much energy do remittance services use to move an equivalent amount of money? What about the cost to health and the environment?
The utility isn't solely measured by the amount of money a financial service can move, or the amount of transactions it can process.
If that were true, Western Union would obviously have less utility than Visa. But actually, WU and Visa solve totally different problems with different risks associated, so it doesn't make sense to compare them in that way.
Please stop those myths - cheap global transfers is not something that needs cryptocurrencies for it to happen, this can and will work within the current rails.
Cryptobots really believe this? Even as a European citizen, I have faith that the US Dollar will stay the US dollar, and keep value. The Euro will keep being the Euro. Hell, even the Yuan will stay the Yuan.
Just accept that you're willing to shit on the planet to make a few bucks, it's fine.
That's... called printing money. Inflation is a necessary evil and infinitely more preferable to the alternative that is bitcoin, which gives you no reason to ever use it. Why would you use it at 10k when it's going to be a 20k next month ?
Inflation encourages money changing hands. The market has absolutely fuck all to do with it.
Your $100 today will still be usable in 20 years. Sure, it'll have lost you a bit of purchasing power, but it'll still be backed by an actual nation, have its value recognized everywhere in the world.
Your bitcoin will have gone sideways three times, jumped up and down. Could be tripled. Could be halved. Still controlled by three chinese farms who could double spend at any point should it become less valuable.
As European citizen I don't really trust the Euros or Dollars. Just think about the loss in value If you own money. Even if the official 2% inflation, its still 2% lost of value. And now with Corona they printing billions of Euros and the inlfation will stay at 2% ... sure.
The whole point of inflation is that your money is actually used to do things. Were those currencies to deflate, it would literally be more beneficial to not touch them. Ever. Investments would grind down to a halt, and why would you do groceries now when you could get more if you waited for next week ?
Even as a hardcore socialist, it's worrying that cryptobots have failed econ 101.
GP shows more understanding than you do. Inflation means savings in cash decrease in time, that's why you don't keep big savings in cash or standard bank account but you invest. Besides stocks, maybe gold, maybe cryptocurrencies.
> why would you do groceries now when you could get more if you waited for next week ?
Because you're hungry and your fridge is empty?
Inflation creates artificial demand and drives consumerism, thereby arguably causing more resource usage/wastage than would otherwise be the case.
Depreciating money means that people's time horizon narrows and they're thinking more and more of the present at the expense of the future, causing all kinds of negative externalities.
Capitalism is actually supposed to make things cheaper, by virtue of competition spurring everyone on to be more efficient and economic with their inputs in order to provide cheaper and better products.
> Were those currencies to deflate, it would literally be more beneficial to not touch them.
This is such a silly, hyperbolic argument. People need to eat, they have other desires than just hoarding money, there will always be reasons to give out money and therefore there will always be reasons to provide goods and services for that money.
How's mining BTC compared to energy spent on heating? I heard about using the heat excess from mining to heat houses. Could one say this is ecological? For sure better than an electrical heater which doesn't do any other work than throwing the energy into air.
We have been interested in miners or mining farms which are fully powered by renewable energy. Canada and Sichuan is taking the lead and they have a lot of hydro power.
If you know any miners/mining farms powered by renewable energy sources, please send me a line to eren@countingcarbons.co
Its currently quite insane that cryptocurrency is using energy on the equivalent of the country Argentina and that as a gamer cannot get hold of a Geforce 30x0 series graphics card to use for playing games.
source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
I think the current capitalistic economic system is modeled on infinite environmental resources / capacity and exponential debt growth which is simply not true. That system held up in the early 1800/1900s but the flaws I think are emerging in the 2000s. Ie you do not pay for external cost of polluting, but you as an individual or company may benefit short term but the rest others pay an external cost long term which is not priced.
It's hard to digest a title. It gives the impression of talking in percentages, where $1 == 100%, and of those, 49% are environmental damages which cause health problems.
What do the remaining 51% consist of? Benefits to human health?
The definition they are using is the dollar value of the mined bitcoins. For each $1 of bitcoin that is mined in the USA, the mining process causes $0.49 in health and environmental damages.
Attack on bitcoin != attack on crypto. Gridcoin suffers much less from this problem since the computations are actually useful and would likely be done anyway.
Because people finally realize the massive impact on the environment that Bitcoin has?
You can say "f** it, I don't care", but you can't deny just how much energy the Bitcoin network uses (or wastes, imho)
Bitcoin and other proof-of-work crypto comes with a price. And the price is environmental.
Not all usage of energy is equivalent. It requires energy to run carbon scrubbers, yet we would probably agree that carbon scrubbers are worth the energy costs for environmental benefits.
Can you prove that the energy bitcoin miners use would have been put to a more environmentally friendly use if they had not existed?
The energy used by bitcoin would simply have been not-used. Massive numbers of e-waste would've been avoided as well.
Of course, if it wasn't Bitcoin, another cryptocurrency would use as much energy as Sweden right now.
I’m noticing some very interesting attacks on blockchain technology lately. I’m willing to bet the calculations are derived from the probability theories we so dearly represent as near certainties.
I'm curious to see how Proof of Stake on Etherium will affect the PoW for BTC, and how this would affect the damage that crypto does to the environment.
The difficulty is that the increasing dollar value of Bitcoin incentivises more mining activity (even though no additional coins will be produced as a result), so energy use is almost directly correlated with the price, at least in the medium term.
Fortunately as the block mining reward continues to be halved approximately every four years, the incentive to mine will decrease as well (though not quite as much, because miners also receive transaction fees).
Not precise enough. Power usage is proportional to block reward USD value, which is proportional to BTC value. But once in 4 years number of BTC awarded for mining a block is halved.
The equivalent of bitcoin happens on small servers all over the place. Bitcoin doesn't replace the need for civil defense, it doesn't replace the need for contracts (if anything it makes them more important), it doesn't replace the need for a legal system, etc., etc., etc.
There was an excellent discussion about this last night in CH. The takeaway was that because solar is now the cheapest source of electricity, miners are flocking to it.
An estimated 30% of the BTC network is running on solar.
It’s not perfect, but as long as the most ecologically friendly electricity is the cheapest, I feel like miners will drive straight for it at record speed.
They do - by comparison, existing financial systems use much less energy, which is why a popular "argument" is to claim that you should count military expenditures into it (which honestly makes no sense unless you believe in some weird axioms...)
Another issue is that BTC siphons off the build up in green energy by wasting it - without miners setting up shop close by to turn your green energy into heat, you have to ensure you have either someone else nearby to sell (lots of real world focus on hydrogen energy storage recently as way to capture such excess) or invest in transfer capacity to clients.
Please, no more climate change articles. Everyone has already made up their minds. There's very little that can be said to someone with differing views on the matter without acrimony.
Yes, they are astroturfing and socially manipulating false narratives as per usual with this site towards Bitcoin sentiment. There's no true discourse, as you'll notice anything said freely or positively about Bitcoin instantly is downvoted away. Oh yay, but let's pedantically talk for months on end about the beauty of ReactJS and Node bullshit. YAY.
And obviously the key take away from this statement I've made is that things get downvoted here for simply being in disagreement with folks who have the weight to downvote. They are not being downvoted due to in any way being against rules.
the petrodollar system is built on US military hegemony, with that military being the largest fossil fuel consuming entity in the largest fossil fuel consuming nation -- "the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world"[1], towards the end of making sure people buy oil with dollars. in a very real sense the value of the dollar is maintained by the fact that people have to buy oil with it.
crypto is at least agnostic about what kind of energy you convert into it, and literally incentivizes renewables.
And social media datacenters that are ruining democracy, causing thousands of suicides per year, using far more power, and causing plenty of mental illnesses/depression.
Even if true, I think it's worth it. It shouldn't be used for everything. But having a currency that respects how you want it to be spent is a fantastic thing.
So if Bitcoin uses 7-8% of the power of the global banking sector, how many people are being murdered by folks holding US dollars!? What an absolute joke. Who's funding these quack pseudoscientists, that's what needs to be determined.
If $1 in BTC is responsible for ~$0.50 (I don't buy this claim)...imagine how much damage central banks cause by debasing currencies to fight endless wars, funding corruption through a class of useless cantillonaires, exacerbating inequality, etc....
Central bank corruption probably even indirectly funded the stupidity that allows articles like these to be branded as "science"...to the casual observer this might seem like a stretch but it really is not. "Debase the money, debase society..."
The military industrial complex, petrodollar system and endless wars seem more quantifiable than any "climate damages" measured in a dollar cost.
You can simply observe the number of deaths. Even harder to measure the lost economic productivity created by price fixing.
BTC's popularity among speculators is arguably due to artificially cheap credit and economic manipulation. If you accept that you can attribute these so called "climate costs" back to central banking.
The entire premise has so many elite promotions baked in that it becomes hard to approach logically. For me the headline reads as pure nonsense. I'd hoped true believers of central planning and anthropogenic climate apocalypse would find some of these leaps a bit too far.
The comments read as a false dichotomy between bitcoin absolutists and warmists.
Cryptocurrencies can operate without the energy usage of bitcoin. Subjective value tells us that individuals will have different preferences for energy consumption. We don't have to agree that it is efficient or demand that everyone agree on a preference for efficiency as we define it. The other goalpost of the dichotomy is more like a high voltage line. Instead of electrocuting myself and opening a debate on climate change, I'd prefer to simply note that many disagree for a variety of philosophical or scientific reasons.
And look at us being downvoted into oblivion. CensoredNews. I fail to see how the comment sections here are at all real when it's blatantly apparent it's constantly manipulated and censored. You can't leave honest commentary on HackerNews unless it agrees with the HackerNews Zeitgeist.
I expect many of the people here are one or two-hops downstream of the corrupt cantillon class whether they realize it or not (who makes risk-free stock-buybacks possible? Central banks). Not surprised by their response to the potential decentralization of the monetary system using BTC...
And every cent coin created in US and some other developed countries costs more than 1 cent and promotes harmful mining operations for copper and other metals. Also copper is harmful for environment. We should stop making money altogether. /s
We should, in fact, stop making the penny, and devise plans to retire the nickel as well.
Dimes and quarters are perfectly fine. The $1 coin gets a certain amount of press by people touting it as a potential replacement to the bill, but it turns out the US $1 bill is remarkably cost-effective by paper currency standards, and should probably remain paper for the time being.
You say this sarcastically, but it's spot on! Look at Sweden: nearly completely cash-less and we sure don't do our grocery shopping with bitcoin either!
It's not for environmental reasons either: cash is just inconvenient when you think about it.
> Bob, a United Kingdom resident but frequent visitor to Sweden, said this system is difficult for non-residents.
> “As a visitor I can't pay at places that only accept Swish because I don't have Swish. And without a Swedish bank account I can't get Swish. And without a Swedish residence, I can't get a bank account,” he explained.
> Howard Drobner, who is a frequent business traveller to Sweden, also proposed a tweak.
> “Some small vendors, like at flea markets and craft shows, only take Swish which I do not have and can not get due to the fact that I do not have a Swedish bank account or national number. I would therefore really like to have a Swish setup for frequent travellers to Sweden,” he said.
Those are people with money, doing ok but inconvenienced. There are things they can't buy.
Now imagine being homeless, or an "illegal" resident. People can't even help by giving you money any more. Friends have to buy food for you themselves instead of supporting you with cash. It gets harder and harder to obtain essentials. Human rights should transcend that, and the cashless systems falling into place in Sweden do not even attempt to be available for all persons.
Third generation cryptos like Cardano/Ada, Polkadot and others using proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work to generate new blocks are orders of magnitude less energy demanding and more efficient in terms of transaction speed and costs than bitcoin and ethereum. Bitcoin has, unfortunately, become synonymous with cryptocurrency in many people's minds. It will be interesting to see what happens with the value of bitcoin as these limitations relative to the new kids on the block (sorry, pun intended, showing myself out the door etc.) become more obvious.
> Bitcoin has, unfortunately, become synonymous with cryptocurrency in many people's minds.
This. A problem. "One" of the things has become "the thing" itself, as a whole ...
> It will be interesting to see what happens with the value of bitcoin as these limitations relative to the new kids on the block [...] become more obvious.
Will it? (become obvious)
... at least by the general public. That concerns me ...
> (sorry, pun intended, showing myself out the door etc.)
It is year 2021 and people still think Bitcoin is boiling the oceans. Bitcoin is the greenest think on this planet. Economic empowerment it brings to individual together with energy extraction innovations is just beyond imagination of most people in this forum.
There are literally thousands of alternatives to Bitcoin, who bring the same "economic empowerment".
I can get instant, zero comission transfers with Nano, without banks. I assume there are many other cryptos like this one.
As skeptic I am about the survival of cryptos to regulators and big whales, I am actually using Nano to transfer money to people in LATAM, but as far as it becomes volatile or if it changed and had feeds, I'd just abandon it.
What's the point of bitcoin now, seriously. POW, very slow, very high transactions fees... ¿What does Bitcoin bring to the table? "Adoption" one would say, but no one is using Bitcoin to pay for anything, so the crypto enthusiasts changed the narrative to "store of value".
There are far better choices than bitcoin in and out of the crypto ecosystem for pretty much every use-case you can imagine. And the only reasons Bitcoin isn't in the ground it's because there's a lot of people invested with hope of selling for a profit.
Ah yes, the greenest "think" on the planet, consuming 130TWh of energy per year and rising.
Do you even think what you write? We don't need Bitcoin, global energy usage rises without Bitcoin as well.
But sure, go live in your little bubble where Bitcoin is the currency that solves all of society's problems, will forever rise in value and save the planet!
Oh, I forgot that bitcoin mining hardware just magically appears and never ends up on a landfill, power plants don't need to be built and maintained, and of course Bitcoin is probably 100% powered by renewables, right?
Definitely not 100% but getting there. Current estimates are 40-70%
Also, thanks to the nature of mining, you can setup operation close to source (not destroying land by energy transport) of energy.
Like these guys employ energy that would be otherwise wasted https://gam.ai/our-mission.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cherry-picking a detail and making that the title instead is the primary form of editorializing, so please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Titles are by far the biggest influence on threads, so this matters a lot. Changing the title this way made a flamewar much more likely.