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I cannot recommend enough for everyone who has a minimal sensibility towards the climate impact to read this thread: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/13508699

by esimov 6y ago

I cannot recommend enough for everyone who has a minimal sensibility towards the climate impact to read this thread: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064 https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064. Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.

gogopuppygogo 6y ago
#truth It’s also a good time to explore the tether bubble: https://link.medium.com/Wsf1ZmBT7cb https://link.medium.com/Wsf1ZmBT7cb
emteycz 6y ago
This thread does not answer the predominant usage of waste electricity by Bitcoin miners. Can't take it seriously without any mention of that. Bitcoin is mined where it makes profit, and you can't make any profit without using waste electricity. Today's mining hardware is smart enough to turn off when the powerplant signals there is too much demand and no waste (thus increased prices), and turn back on when convenient.
- gjs278 6y ago
  you just wasted electricity posting
- preya2k 6y ago
  Do you have any sources to undermine your statement that miners predominantly use waste electricity?
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Simply look at prices and rewards. You literally can't have any profit without using waste electricity. The price of ordinary industrial electricity anywhere in the world is at least double of what you can mine with the latest Bitcoin mining hardware (which is expensive to begin with). BTW, what if the demand for Bitcoin mining hardware accelerated our technological or economical development of semiconductors? I think that's good, and the electricity is small price for that.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      In theory Bitcoin has some psychological benefits. It is literally Keynesian gold digging. You are putting people to work (workers employed at power stations and workers at semiconductor companies) and thus stimulate the economy. A lot of the bitcoin money originally came from central banks or at least was pushed to Bitcoin by the central banks. The only problem is that Bitcoin mining is not a domestic industry. Not every country benefits equally.
gjs278 6y ago
nobody cares. I hope bitcoin really does end the earth so I don’t have to live with people like you. but unfortunately, it will not.
esimov 6y ago
No strictly related to Bitcoin, but to the cryptoworld in general: https://memoakten.medium.com/the-unreasonable-ecological-cost-of-cryptoart-2221d3eb2053 https://memoakten.medium.com/the-unreasonable-ecological-cos...
cloudhead 6y ago
This guy has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about unfortunately. There is no evidence of any environmental impact.
- yunohn 6y ago
  What do you mean by “no evidence”? Could you expand your argument further, or are you just dismissing the reality of large amounts of energy being used to run Bitcoin?
  - cloudhead 6y ago
    Large amounts of energy used is not the same as environmental impact. There is evidence of the former, but not the latter.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are. If your concern is about avoidable energy waste, you'd need to have a bizarrely weird misunderstanding of the scales here to pick Bitcoin as your hill to die on. It's like when people complain about how much water you waste by leaving the tap on while you brush your teeth while my dad has the water rights to waste 10,000,000L/year of creek water because he owns a single cow. People have such little understanding of the relative scale of everything, so they laser-focus on whatever inconsequential, concrete morsel that sounds good to them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tappio 6y ago
  None of the things you listed are on the same scale if that 621KWh is true. What you should say is: "crusading against people who leave their a/c on for 2 months when they are away, people who drive 2500 miles for fun every day, people who run their clothes drier for a month non-stop even though it's empty". Regardless, I would be sceptical about that 621 KWh. Does not sound realistic...
  - dandanua 6y ago
    It's in the design. Higher price -> more miners -> increased mining difficulty (due to design goal – 1 block per 10 min) -> more energy waste. Bitcoin was a fun prototype idea, but humans made it just evil. As usual, though.
    - tappio 6y ago
      Does this lead to the energy consumption increasing over time? I'm not too familiar with the technology.
illustriousbear 6y ago
Nevermind traditional banks with their towering office buildings full of air conditioning/appliances, employees commuting to work, remote branches, sophisticated vaults and online infrastructure. I can never take the bitcoin climate change hysteria seriously. I wonder why the people who write these articles aren't calling out traditional banks? hmm.
- tappio 6y ago
  Traditional banks pay their electricity bill, so they naturally need to account for that. On the other hand, bitcoin network pays for that collectively. No single entity pays the bill. If a single entity had to pay for 621KWh for every transaction, I don't think that bitcoin could exists. That is the main difference here: multiple parties are doing small contribution to the energy consumption, instead of a single entity. That is the reason why bitcoin networks ecological footprint is huge compared to traditional banking per transaction.
  - illustriousbear 6y ago
    Traditional banks are not accountable for all the electricity their services consume. One example alone is considering all the clients, pos and other systems that operate. Banks are also a very different model with different overheads compared to Bitcoin. I'd argue that banking infrastructure is quite wasteful with their physical skyscrapers and vaults. Executives at banks would argue otherwise. Bitcoin aims to disrupt financial services to some extent. A significant electricity cost shouldn't be a surprise. Does that mean it should be outlawed? I think not. If we banned every costly disruptive idea that emerged, we wouldn't get anywhere.
    - tappio 6y ago
      Oh yes. I agree, there is probably ton of waste in the entire banking sector. I just wanted to clarify why each transaction most likely costs more in blockchain compared to one transaction in the traditional network. I wonder how much energy we would consume if bitcoin would replace the whole banking sector? Back-of-an-envelope calculation: If it would be powering billion transactions per day, it would need 400 nuclear power plants to provide required energy. I don't know if we should ban bitcoin or not. I don't have any strong sentiment towards it. But if the numbers here are right, I don't think it is a viable main stream currency.
XorNot 6y ago
This reply to that thread addresses the better comparison of power usage I've seen (https://twitter.com/ipvkyte/status/1350922562935681024 https://twitter.com/ipvkyte/status/1350922562935681024): (in response to a single BTC transaction consuming 621 kwh) A Tesla gets 4.1 miles per KWh. So one transaction costs 2,546 miles. Seattle to Boston is 3k miles. Paying for a burger with bitcoin has the same environmental cost as driving that burger to you from the other coast.
- runeks 6y ago
  Bitcoin mining on a block secures not just this block's transactions, but the transactions in all previous blocks as well. For each block that is added to the blockchain more transactions are secured by the following blocks. Consequently, these "power usage per transaction"-figures are misleading.
  - sammax 6y ago
    Not really. You could interpret it as older transactions are massively more expensive than newer ones and every transaction we make will have perpetual upkeep costs for as long as we keep running Bitcoin, but the overall result isn't changed by that, the average cost per transaction is the same
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Although you are correct I feel like you skipped over an important detail that is crucial to your argument. The power consumption does not depend on the block size. Securing blocks has a cost that is independent of the block size. Bitcoin Cash is a good example. I also find it interesting that Bitcoin Cash is not as prone to deflation which means that in theory you could actually use it as money. It never caught on so it is effectively dead though. It's best to forget about it.
- disruptalot 6y ago
  This is not how it works at all. A bitcoin block can have 0 transactions and still need the same energy to produce. a) Sending payments is not the only purpose of the network, it's issuance, it's security, it's to make the ledger immutable. b) No one's buying a burger with bitcoin. Bitcoin's production is a monetary base. Using the same block space you can have an infinite number of economic transactions happen with the same power consumption (block) on multiple layers, each with a degrading level of security. Of course you don't need the full force of the bitcoin network for a coffee or burger.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
disruptalot 6y ago
This thread is nothing new. This exact sentiment has been repeated over and over for the last 10 years. From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste. The reality is that you live in world where people have different understandings and values than you may have. So advocating against Bitcoin is no different than advocating against air travel. You see no issue in the huge amounts of energy consumption for "seeing the world" and "business travel" but maybe I do. Use resources the way you wish and so will others. Free markets will decide where scarce resources work best.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  The last sentence is the entire problem. It ignores the externalities of whatever it is you’re doing. Which in turn (amongst other things) makes the claim of efficient distribution questionable. Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.
  - atweiden 6y ago
    > Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems. Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels and animal products are two far larger, far more pressing issues than Bitcoin's carbon footprint. I would additionally rank “bullshit jobs” far above Bitcoin's carbon footprint in a ranking of things causing widespread social ills. If Bitcoin became global reserve currency, all things would decrease in absolute price, disincentivizing consumerism. As the pace of technological innovation increases, and vendor competition increases along with it, absolute prices in BTC terms will go down even assuming everyone already transacts in BTC exclusively. Higher amount of available products/services, same amount of money, equals lower absolute prices. Assuming 1% annual "growth", that's 1% you gain. This isn't outside the bounds of inflation policies today, and keep in mind those inflation targets skim off the top after haircutting GDP growth — a 1% inflation in an economy expanding by 2% equals the central bank skims the 2% growth plus expands by 1%. In a Bitcoin world, that would be 3% gains for simply holding onto your coins. As such a deflationary global currency could cause a global economic slowdown, which might be completely necessary to save the planet's natural ecosystems.
mtrycz2 6y ago
That thread is assuming that BTC runs on fossil, non-renewable energy, which was mostly correct ten to five years ago, but will be mostly wrong onwards. BTC runs mostly on surplus hydroelectric power. This may change based on what's locally available and the local cost of oil gas and coal, but when renewables will become cheaper than fossil (which will never be soon enough) it will not make any sense to mine on fossils.
- saberience 6y ago
  Citation please.
  - solresol 6y ago
    I can't offer a citation, but I can observe that electricity prices in wholesale markets regularly go negative during times when renewables are operating at peak output. Since people overprovision solar to have enough power at non-peak times, during peak generation times, there's too much energy. This doesn't happen with fossil fuels, since the plant operator will of course reduce output as far as possible by reducing fuel consumption. So it seems entirely reasonable that the bulk of bitcoin mining in the future is going to be done at times when the electricity price is exceptionally low (or negative), and mostly be powered by renewables. It's an economically rational thing to do and as a bonus it will provide some grid stability.
    - vaduz 6y ago
      As long as the profit from operating the mining during high prices is higher than the cost of electricity at high demand times, it is economically rational to continue mining and grow demand to use the "excess" capacity that is provided in the grid. In China it in particular it is seen as an easy way to convert coal to money, as one of the other commenters already linked [1] (which is also economically responsible, given the looming deadlines due to international agreements, but also disastrous to the climate at large). Also, not to put too fine a point at it, neither Chinese nor US bitcoin miner server farms (mines?) have been found to be using particularly clean energy sources [0]. [0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881601
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
Or just move over to Ethereum which is actually moving forward on proof of stake, which solves this problem in an elegant way. It also has major plans for scaling, which Bitcoin has ignorantly refused to budge on.
- pharmakom 6y ago
  Proof of Work is a simple algorithm that has worked for over 10 years. Proof of Stake is incredibly complex and might be broken in implementation or from a game theory perspective. It also might be a huge improvement over PoW... it’s just too early to say.
pharmakom 6y ago
People computing the joules/tx of Bitcoin are missing that PoW scales such that the amount of a transaction has nothing to do with the amount of mining work that validates it. I hope that initiatives like Lightning Network can help it scale further though.
arisAlexis 6y ago
and favor Proof of Stake and other more modern implementations of the blockchain that accomplish both technological innovation and climate preservation
LittlePeter 6y ago
> Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin. I would advocate for renewable energy. It's not like miners demand electricity to be from fossil fuels. The electricity gets paid for, how you use it is up to you. If Bitcoin would run 100% on solar power I guess then it would be fine? Or maybe you're unhappy with Bitcoin because of its goal and not the means it gets there? That would be different discussion. It feels like people want to argue against Bitcoin, don't have credible arguments, and bring out the climate card. Climate is going to shit, but not because of Bitcoin.
space_rock 6y ago
Let's have a discussion... And then blocks replies Otherwise people would point out the errors in that thread
127 6y ago
At least start to advocate forking it off to something less environmentally destructive.
joshxyz 6y ago
Thats just lame and missing the entire point of bitcoin lol. I dont even know where to start, the fact that you're really criticizing bitcoin when you got factories cars and plastics around you, or the fact that the energy isnt wasted but spent to secure and preserve its speculated market value. Sure, we could just use fiat (paper money), it's eco-friendly, right? But good luck in dealing with inflation lol. Simple math for all: your 1 USD today is 0.99x tomorrow, while 1 BTC will always = 1 BTC.
- libertine 6y ago
  I don't know much about the subject, and I'm one of those that misses the entire point of bitcoin itself and other mined cryptos... but if 1 BTC = 1 BTC, why is it being always indexed to USD? I doesn't seem to make sense to say 1BTC = 1BTC, when people reference it's value to regular currency.
  - joshxyz 6y ago
    By 1 BTC = 1 BTC I mean humans can print USD, which inherently decreases the buying power of all existing USD. Can't do that with BTC.
    - libertine 6y ago
      I understand that, but my doubt still hasn't been cleared - if BTC is referenced to USD, then if you print more USD then doesn't it also decrease the buying power of all existing BTC?
- imtringued 6y ago
  >But good luck in dealing with inflation lol. 2% inflation is necessary to keep economies fair and productive. Without inflation you basically get hoarders that do nothing productive with their wealth. Deflation increases wealth inequality and is far worse for the average person.
mathiasrw 6y ago
The power consumption is a reflection of man's greed - not what is needed to operate bitcoin.
dpatru 6y ago
Before you criticize bitcoin you should understand the problem it is solving. Bitcoin is a technological solution to a government-created problem: the creation of money from nothing because politicians and government leaders want to spend more than they can collect in taxes. Other solutions to this problem include owning gold and stocks, both of which are also costly, but in ways that are harder to quantify. If you want to avoid the waste caused by government money printing, lobby your government to stop confiscating wealth by allowing gold-backed money and reducing taxes.

by esimov 6y ago

gogopuppygogo 6y ago

#truth It’s also a good time to explore the tether bubble: https://link.medium.com/Wsf1ZmBT7cb https://link.medium.com/Wsf1ZmBT7cb

emteycz 6y ago

This thread does not answer the predominant usage of waste electricity by Bitcoin miners. Can't take it seriously without any mention of that. Bitcoin is mined where it makes profit, and you can't make any profit without using waste electricity. Today's mining hardware is smart enough to turn off when the powerplant signals there is too much demand and no waste (thus increased prices), and turn back on when convenient.

gjs278 6y ago
you just wasted electricity posting
preya2k 6y ago
Do you have any sources to undermine your statement that miners predominantly use waste electricity?
- emteycz 6y ago
  Simply look at prices and rewards. You literally can't have any profit without using waste electricity. The price of ordinary industrial electricity anywhere in the world is at least double of what you can mine with the latest Bitcoin mining hardware (which is expensive to begin with). BTW, what if the demand for Bitcoin mining hardware accelerated our technological or economical development of semiconductors? I think that's good, and the electricity is small price for that.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    In theory Bitcoin has some psychological benefits. It is literally Keynesian gold digging. You are putting people to work (workers employed at power stations and workers at semiconductor companies) and thus stimulate the economy. A lot of the bitcoin money originally came from central banks or at least was pushed to Bitcoin by the central banks. The only problem is that Bitcoin mining is not a domestic industry. Not every country benefits equally.

gjs278 6y ago

nobody cares. I hope bitcoin really does end the earth so I don’t have to live with people like you. but unfortunately, it will not.

esimov 6y ago

No strictly related to Bitcoin, but to the cryptoworld in general: https://memoakten.medium.com/the-unreasonable-ecological-cost-of-cryptoart-2221d3eb2053 https://memoakten.medium.com/the-unreasonable-ecological-cos...

cloudhead 6y ago

This guy has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about unfortunately. There is no evidence of any environmental impact.

yunohn 6y ago
What do you mean by “no evidence”? Could you expand your argument further, or are you just dismissing the reality of large amounts of energy being used to run Bitcoin?
- cloudhead 6y ago
  Large amounts of energy used is not the same as environmental impact. There is evidence of the former, but not the latter.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are. If your concern is about avoidable energy waste, you'd need to have a bizarrely weird misunderstanding of the scales here to pick Bitcoin as your hill to die on. It's like when people complain about how much water you waste by leaving the tap on while you brush your teeth while my dad has the water rights to waste 10,000,000L/year of creek water because he owns a single cow. People have such little understanding of the relative scale of everything, so they laser-focus on whatever inconsequential, concrete morsel that sounds good to them.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tappio 6y ago
None of the things you listed are on the same scale if that 621KWh is true. What you should say is: "crusading against people who leave their a/c on for 2 months when they are away, people who drive 2500 miles for fun every day, people who run their clothes drier for a month non-stop even though it's empty". Regardless, I would be sceptical about that 621 KWh. Does not sound realistic...
- dandanua 6y ago
  It's in the design. Higher price -> more miners -> increased mining difficulty (due to design goal – 1 block per 10 min) -> more energy waste. Bitcoin was a fun prototype idea, but humans made it just evil. As usual, though.
  - tappio 6y ago
    Does this lead to the energy consumption increasing over time? I'm not too familiar with the technology.

illustriousbear 6y ago

Nevermind traditional banks with their towering office buildings full of air conditioning/appliances, employees commuting to work, remote branches, sophisticated vaults and online infrastructure. I can never take the bitcoin climate change hysteria seriously. I wonder why the people who write these articles aren't calling out traditional banks? hmm.

tappio 6y ago
Traditional banks pay their electricity bill, so they naturally need to account for that. On the other hand, bitcoin network pays for that collectively. No single entity pays the bill. If a single entity had to pay for 621KWh for every transaction, I don't think that bitcoin could exists. That is the main difference here: multiple parties are doing small contribution to the energy consumption, instead of a single entity. That is the reason why bitcoin networks ecological footprint is huge compared to traditional banking per transaction.
- illustriousbear 6y ago
  Traditional banks are not accountable for all the electricity their services consume. One example alone is considering all the clients, pos and other systems that operate. Banks are also a very different model with different overheads compared to Bitcoin. I'd argue that banking infrastructure is quite wasteful with their physical skyscrapers and vaults. Executives at banks would argue otherwise. Bitcoin aims to disrupt financial services to some extent. A significant electricity cost shouldn't be a surprise. Does that mean it should be outlawed? I think not. If we banned every costly disruptive idea that emerged, we wouldn't get anywhere.
  - tappio 6y ago
    Oh yes. I agree, there is probably ton of waste in the entire banking sector. I just wanted to clarify why each transaction most likely costs more in blockchain compared to one transaction in the traditional network. I wonder how much energy we would consume if bitcoin would replace the whole banking sector? Back-of-an-envelope calculation: If it would be powering billion transactions per day, it would need 400 nuclear power plants to provide required energy. I don't know if we should ban bitcoin or not. I don't have any strong sentiment towards it. But if the numbers here are right, I don't think it is a viable main stream currency.

XorNot 6y ago

This reply to that thread addresses the better comparison of power usage I've seen (https://twitter.com/ipvkyte/status/1350922562935681024 https://twitter.com/ipvkyte/status/1350922562935681024): (in response to a single BTC transaction consuming 621 kwh) A Tesla gets 4.1 miles per KWh. So one transaction costs 2,546 miles. Seattle to Boston is 3k miles. Paying for a burger with bitcoin has the same environmental cost as driving that burger to you from the other coast.

runeks 6y ago
Bitcoin mining on a block secures not just this block's transactions, but the transactions in all previous blocks as well. For each block that is added to the blockchain more transactions are secured by the following blocks. Consequently, these "power usage per transaction"-figures are misleading.
- sammax 6y ago
  Not really. You could interpret it as older transactions are massively more expensive than newer ones and every transaction we make will have perpetual upkeep costs for as long as we keep running Bitcoin, but the overall result isn't changed by that, the average cost per transaction is the same
- imtringued 6y ago
  Although you are correct I feel like you skipped over an important detail that is crucial to your argument. The power consumption does not depend on the block size. Securing blocks has a cost that is independent of the block size. Bitcoin Cash is a good example. I also find it interesting that Bitcoin Cash is not as prone to deflation which means that in theory you could actually use it as money. It never caught on so it is effectively dead though. It's best to forget about it.
disruptalot 6y ago
This is not how it works at all. A bitcoin block can have 0 transactions and still need the same energy to produce. a) Sending payments is not the only purpose of the network, it's issuance, it's security, it's to make the ledger immutable. b) No one's buying a burger with bitcoin. Bitcoin's production is a monetary base. Using the same block space you can have an infinite number of economic transactions happen with the same power consumption (block) on multiple layers, each with a degrading level of security. Of course you don't need the full force of the bitcoin network for a coffee or burger.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

disruptalot 6y ago

This thread is nothing new. This exact sentiment has been repeated over and over for the last 10 years. From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste. The reality is that you live in world where people have different understandings and values than you may have. So advocating against Bitcoin is no different than advocating against air travel. You see no issue in the huge amounts of energy consumption for "seeing the world" and "business travel" but maybe I do. Use resources the way you wish and so will others. Free markets will decide where scarce resources work best.

meheleventyone 6y ago
The last sentence is the entire problem. It ignores the externalities of whatever it is you’re doing. Which in turn (amongst other things) makes the claim of efficient distribution questionable. Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.
- atweiden 6y ago
  > Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems. Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels and animal products are two far larger, far more pressing issues than Bitcoin's carbon footprint. I would additionally rank “bullshit jobs” far above Bitcoin's carbon footprint in a ranking of things causing widespread social ills. If Bitcoin became global reserve currency, all things would decrease in absolute price, disincentivizing consumerism. As the pace of technological innovation increases, and vendor competition increases along with it, absolute prices in BTC terms will go down even assuming everyone already transacts in BTC exclusively. Higher amount of available products/services, same amount of money, equals lower absolute prices. Assuming 1% annual "growth", that's 1% you gain. This isn't outside the bounds of inflation policies today, and keep in mind those inflation targets skim off the top after haircutting GDP growth — a 1% inflation in an economy expanding by 2% equals the central bank skims the 2% growth plus expands by 1%. In a Bitcoin world, that would be 3% gains for simply holding onto your coins. As such a deflationary global currency could cause a global economic slowdown, which might be completely necessary to save the planet's natural ecosystems.

mtrycz2 6y ago

That thread is assuming that BTC runs on fossil, non-renewable energy, which was mostly correct ten to five years ago, but will be mostly wrong onwards. BTC runs mostly on surplus hydroelectric power. This may change based on what's locally available and the local cost of oil gas and coal, but when renewables will become cheaper than fossil (which will never be soon enough) it will not make any sense to mine on fossils.

saberience 6y ago
Citation please.
- solresol 6y ago
  I can't offer a citation, but I can observe that electricity prices in wholesale markets regularly go negative during times when renewables are operating at peak output. Since people overprovision solar to have enough power at non-peak times, during peak generation times, there's too much energy. This doesn't happen with fossil fuels, since the plant operator will of course reduce output as far as possible by reducing fuel consumption. So it seems entirely reasonable that the bulk of bitcoin mining in the future is going to be done at times when the electricity price is exceptionally low (or negative), and mostly be powered by renewables. It's an economically rational thing to do and as a bonus it will provide some grid stability.
  - vaduz 6y ago
    As long as the profit from operating the mining during high prices is higher than the cost of electricity at high demand times, it is economically rational to continue mining and grow demand to use the "excess" capacity that is provided in the grid. In China it in particular it is seen as an easy way to convert coal to money, as one of the other commenters already linked [1] (which is also economically responsible, given the looming deadlines due to international agreements, but also disastrous to the climate at large). Also, not to put too fine a point at it, neither Chinese nor US bitcoin miner server farms (mines?) have been found to be using particularly clean energy sources [0]. [0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881601

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

Or just move over to Ethereum which is actually moving forward on proof of stake, which solves this problem in an elegant way. It also has major plans for scaling, which Bitcoin has ignorantly refused to budge on.

pharmakom 6y ago
Proof of Work is a simple algorithm that has worked for over 10 years. Proof of Stake is incredibly complex and might be broken in implementation or from a game theory perspective. It also might be a huge improvement over PoW... it’s just too early to say.

pharmakom 6y ago

People computing the joules/tx of Bitcoin are missing that PoW scales such that the amount of a transaction has nothing to do with the amount of mining work that validates it. I hope that initiatives like Lightning Network can help it scale further though.

arisAlexis 6y ago

and favor Proof of Stake and other more modern implementations of the blockchain that accomplish both technological innovation and climate preservation

LittlePeter 6y ago

> Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin. I would advocate for renewable energy. It's not like miners demand electricity to be from fossil fuels. The electricity gets paid for, how you use it is up to you. If Bitcoin would run 100% on solar power I guess then it would be fine? Or maybe you're unhappy with Bitcoin because of its goal and not the means it gets there? That would be different discussion. It feels like people want to argue against Bitcoin, don't have credible arguments, and bring out the climate card. Climate is going to shit, but not because of Bitcoin.

space_rock 6y ago

Let's have a discussion... And then blocks replies Otherwise people would point out the errors in that thread

127 6y ago

At least start to advocate forking it off to something less environmentally destructive.

joshxyz 6y ago

Thats just lame and missing the entire point of bitcoin lol. I dont even know where to start, the fact that you're really criticizing bitcoin when you got factories cars and plastics around you, or the fact that the energy isnt wasted but spent to secure and preserve its speculated market value. Sure, we could just use fiat (paper money), it's eco-friendly, right? But good luck in dealing with inflation lol. Simple math for all: your 1 USD today is 0.99x tomorrow, while 1 BTC will always = 1 BTC.

libertine 6y ago
I don't know much about the subject, and I'm one of those that misses the entire point of bitcoin itself and other mined cryptos... but if 1 BTC = 1 BTC, why is it being always indexed to USD? I doesn't seem to make sense to say 1BTC = 1BTC, when people reference it's value to regular currency.
- joshxyz 6y ago
  By 1 BTC = 1 BTC I mean humans can print USD, which inherently decreases the buying power of all existing USD. Can't do that with BTC.
  - libertine 6y ago
    I understand that, but my doubt still hasn't been cleared - if BTC is referenced to USD, then if you print more USD then doesn't it also decrease the buying power of all existing BTC?
imtringued 6y ago
>But good luck in dealing with inflation lol. 2% inflation is necessary to keep economies fair and productive. Without inflation you basically get hoarders that do nothing productive with their wealth. Deflation increases wealth inequality and is far worse for the average person.

mathiasrw 6y ago

The power consumption is a reflection of man's greed - not what is needed to operate bitcoin.

dpatru 6y ago

Before you criticize bitcoin you should understand the problem it is solving. Bitcoin is a technological solution to a government-created problem: the creation of money from nothing because politicians and government leaders want to spend more than they can collect in taxes. Other solutions to this problem include owning gold and stocks, both of which are also costly, but in ways that are harder to quantify. If you want to avoid the waste caused by government money printing, lobby your government to stop confiscating wealth by allowing gold-backed money and reducing taxes.