[esimov]

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. Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.

[hombre_fatal]

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.

[neolog]

> The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several million US households.

That seems like a lot, no?

[andy_ppp]

We still need to move to fossil fuel free energy with Bitcoin being a huge energy user or not. It seems like a lot but money has to be backed by something, a percentage of the total processing power on Earth makes sense.

[tappio]

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]

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]

Does this lead to the energy consumption increasing over time? I'm not too familiar with the technology.

[saalweachter]

The security of the network is proportional to the amount of work put into it.

If the network wasn't consuming absurd amounts of hardware and energy, anyone could waltz in and use a perfectly reasonable amount of hardware and energy to break it. So yes, it does need to constantly increase as fast as possible. If it ever increased less fast, someone could eventually exploit that delta.

[robjan]

If you have more hashing power you have more chance of earning a block reward to it's effectively a competition for each entity to get as much hashing power as quickly as possible. You can either make the hardware more efficient (and throw away old hardware) or increase the amount of hardware and therefore energy consumption.

[dandanua]

Sure, increased mining difficulty means you have to do more computations to find a block. Here is the graph https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty

[emteycz]

It also means there is a huge motivation to decrease energy consumption per computation.

[imtringued]

> 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.

You didn'tconsider that the things you have listed cost money. There is an incentive to reduce them to the absolute minimum because you would go broke if you leased commercial property and put 200 clothes dryers running 24/7.

Mining bitcoin is a profitable activity. You can afford to do that. The price of bitcoin dictates how profitable mining is. The higher the bitcoin price and transaction fees the higher the margins and that means you can buy more miners and thus waste more energy. There is no limit to how much energy can be wasted. Every time you think this is an insane amount of energy it can always get worse. Right now it is only at approximately 80 TWh. In 10 years it could be at 300 TWh. In 20 years it could be 1000TWh. There is no reason why this shouldn't happen.

Bitcoin doubled multiple times in the last decade. The value of a bitcoin could easily outpace the reduction in block reward.

[Thorentis]

This depends on your moral framework. A large part of moral culpability is proximity. How close are you to the issue at hand, and how easy is it for you to take/not take some action. For example, worrying about poverty in a country on the other side of the world, when there are homeless people sleeping on a bench on your street. I can't possibly convince a mega corp to stop wasting energy, but I can try and waste less myself. I can't stop people from using Bitcoin, but I can try and develop/advocate for better alternatives. When all is said and done, is it better to have shrugged and done nothing, or done what was within your power to do? "All we have to decide, is what to do with the time that is given to us".

[disruptalot]

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]

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]

> 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.

[imtringued]

Bullshit jobs are a product of low interest rates and low yield government bonds driving capital allocation elsewhere.

If CPI inflation is high that means there are not enough workers to do the most valuable work. Workers reallocate to more productive jobs and earn more money.

Interest rates usually follow CPI inflation. If interest rates are near 0% then you get lots of people starting stupid businesses. That's fine if everyone is unemployed and thus would prefer a bullshit job over a productive job but once the pandemic is over it won't be true anymore.

High interest rates force a company to be profitable enough to at least cover the interest payments. In theory the Fed should raise rates to at least 1% just to match current inflation but the economy is now full of bullshit and that bullshit is going to fail once the cheap money dries up. We can't afford to do that during a pandemic but once it is over it is necessary to cull the useless zombies.

I may or may not have conveyed this in a dramatic way but don't take this as a call to action. If you are invested in the stock market you should always make sure that you don't put too much money into dead companies regardless of how well the economy is doing. Timing crashes or whatever is futile. Your personal goals (risk tolerance aka financial security and when you want to withdraw money) are more important and should be planned well in advance.

[crumbshot]

The climate catatrosphe that looms upon us all has been caused by individuals and organisations using resources as they wish.

What we've ended up with is a planetwide tragedy of the commons - and free markets aren't going to solve this. They can only continue to exacerbate it.

[imtringued]

Carbon taxes are a market based solution and pretty much everyone agrees.

Unregulated pollution is basically like having unregulated crimes. Criminals obviously want to keep committing crimes because they benefit personally.

Imagine if you could just go and mug a random CEO and get $10k out of that and the police won't stop you. The CEO and even those who hate the CEO would agree that muggings are bad. The only one who disagrees is the criminal. Therefore regulation is actually necessary to have a well functioning free market in the first place. Heck, punishing net negative behavior is compatible with the free market. The only question is how that punishment is implemented.

Without CO2 taxes you basically have people legally dump waste into the atmosphere which is shared by everyone equally. It's pretty obvious that there is nothing free about this. You can consider the act of pollution to be a forced transaction between the polluter and every other living being on earth. It's like you are mugging a tiny fraction of a cent off of millions of people.

The obvious idea is to just do the same thing we did with garbage disposal. Just charge a fee that covers the damage. That way the polluter has to weigh the damage he does. In some cases the damage outweighs the benefits, in other cases the benefits outweigh the damage. As a society we only want the latter.

The only real problem with CO2 taxes is that every nation has to agree on them. That's what the paris agreement is for. Dismissing CO2 taxes entirely because of global competition doesn't make sense. Global competition merely puts an upper bound on how high domestic CO2 taxes can be without introducing special tariffs or other means of global enforcement.

I prefer a token amount over complete denial because at that point you can just point out that the price is too low instead of pointlessly arguing about which policy to implement or whether to implement a policy at all.

[antpls]

> From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste.

The debate is not about useless/useful, it is about : can we solve the same needs with a lot less spend energy?

> Use resources the way you wish and so will others. Free markets will decide where scarce resources work best.

That way of thinking leads us to the carbon catastrophe the entire world is trying to reverse right now.

[mtrycz2]

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.

[127]

Since nobody has made any better citation, here's one article giving a bit more depth to the issue: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/

Seems at least half of Bitcoin is currently mined directly using coal.

[saberience]

Citation please.

[solresol]

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]

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/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881601

[illustriousbear]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[ogogmad]

I don't think many people believe (even crypto advocates) that a large number of transactions are going to happen directly on the blockchain. There seem to be two possible futures for Bitcoin: Either most people will transact their BTC on an energy efficient network separate from the blockchain (like the Lightning network) or they will use BTC as a long-term store of value like gold*, and not use it to buy everyday things like coffee.

* Of course, at the moment it's not a very good store of value because of the price volatility. But advocates argue that these are just growing pains.

[vincnetas]

But if you calculated energy expenses per transaction or per customer, i think that classic banking would look very efficient compared to bitcoin.

[dosenbrot]

The only thing is, with Bitcoin we have the numbers. The classic banking system look like a few thousend banks with thousends of buildings with hundreds of thousend computers and million of emloyees. The employees again need to eat, sleep, drive around. They have money that needs to be designed, to be printed, to be distributed. All this cost ressources too, but this really hard to put in numbers.

[deschutes]

Bitcoin has the energy consumption of small nations. Banking is one of the many things that can be self contained in the energy budget of a small nation. On the other hand, bitcoin's transaction throughput would constrain my neighborhood's commerce at lunch. That is to say, traditional banks are doing a whole lot more to facilitate actual commerce.

It would seem to me that the efficiency gap is insurmountably large.

[illustriousbear]

Perhaps but bartering grain and fruit at the local market is probably more efficient than traditional banking too.

[imtringued]

The amount of value that the financial industry provides is multiple orders of magnitude greater. The market cap of bitcoin is a joke compared to gold and gold is an insignificant percentage of all financial services.

[LittlePeter]

> 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.

[JohnJamesRambo]

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]

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.

[XorNot]

This reply to that thread addresses the better comparison of power usage I've seen (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.

[disruptalot]

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.

[yunohn]

> No one's buying a burger with bitcoin.

That’s exactly the point being made, isn’t it? No one uses Bitcoin as a currency for real transactions.

[runeks]

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.

[imtringued]

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.

[sammax]

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

[pharmakom]

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.

[dpatru]

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.

[esimov]

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

[gogopuppygogo]

#truth

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

[emteycz]

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.

[preya2k]

Do you have any sources to undermine your statement that miners predominantly use waste electricity?

[emteycz]

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]

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.

[127]

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

[arisAlexis]

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

[mathiasrw]

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

[cloudhead]

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

[yunohn]

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]

Large amounts of energy used is not the same as environmental impact. There is evidence of the former, but not the latter.

[joshxyz]

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]

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]

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]

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]

>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.