[Uehreka]

Right now very few people are actually using Bitcoin for everyday transactions, and yet still the carbon footprint rivals many large countries. If this became the world’s primary currency (as many crypto fans seem to want) it would increase our total carbon footprint by multiple orders of magnitude.

I do not see many people in the crypto community approaching this with the deadly seriousness it deserves. Most conversations seem to devolve into:

- wishcasting about how energy is produced: “There are a whole bunch of miners in South America running on hydro!” This ignores that we are decades away at least from a solarpunk world where energy isn’t a zero-sum game, the hydro energy being used by miners just means the people in nearby cities have to resort to fossil fuels.

- wishcasting about Proof-of-Stake: “We could just switch to this and the carbon problems go away!” I admit it would be great if this happened, but No large coins use it, and I’ll believe Ethereum when I see it. Proof-of-Stake also has downsides that some crypto people won’t accept, so by their own admission it’s not credibly considered an option (certainly not for Bitcoin).

- wishcasting about carbon offsets: “We can buy our way out!” The recent California wildfires have burned through a lot of the trees planted as “carbon offsets”, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere. Offsets were a neat idea, but they don’t seem to have panned out well, and I have yet to hear a credible case that carbon capture can ramp up fast enough to match crypto’s growing carbon footprint.

- whataboutism: “You ride planes don’t you? Those have huge carbon footprints!” I have yet to hear a compelling argument that a Planes+Bitcoin world would have a smaller carbon footprint than the current Planes+Mastercard world. And no one is talking about Bitcoin making planes go away.

I’d love to hear a clear and credulous case for how we get out of this problem, but I have yet to hear one from the crypto community. If the crypto community won’t take this seriously and propose real solutions, people from outside the crypto community will come up with solutions that will involve banning crypto.

[arebop]

If the cost of electricity rose 100% now, the kwh used to mine bitcoin would drop correspondingly.

IOW, Bitcoin isn't a scheme to destroy the world by exhausting energy or destroying the planet, it's just a bunch of people who want distributed consensus and they're willing to pay for it and you can't fathom why. You don't complain about aluminum fiends or anybody else spending money and potentially exploiting carbon externalities, ask yourself why not.

If you care about the environment so much then impose pollution controls rather than singling out one particular use you don't understand.

[Uehreka]

I mean yeah, I’d love to propose a worldwide carbon tax and solve the root problem here! But that seems unlikely to happen on a short timescale, and without it we’ll see coal plants that were driven out of business by solar’s cheapness re-open now that there’s all this extra demand for energy (and solar isn’t keeping pace).

And don’t tell me what I don’t complain about ;) I’m plenty concerned with other sources of carbon emissions too.

As for the rest: I feel like another bad trope I see in these debates is the “you just don’t get it. Enjoy your irrelevance” thing. If crypto is misunderstood, then explain it. If there’s something people like me aren’t getting, help us get it. The burden of proof is on crypto-boosters to demonstrate why this is worth it and what the actual endgame here is.

[ericb]

Except exponential scarcity is built in, we're not near the end yet, and the scarcity is causing exponential growth in energy expenditure, carbon release, and heat. Bitcoin would be the perfect scheme to destroy the world.

[ephbit]

Scarcity is built in, yes .. but block reward halving is built in as well.

Now if there were a time to come, when lightning network allowed wide adoption of bitcoin as an actual payment system ... and the speculation on ever rising price were obsolete, because the price was more or less stable ... then the limited mining rewards would put a stop to exponential growth in energy expenditure.

Where do I get it wrong? (Serious question)

[ericb]

The supply dictates the price. Thought experiment:

Imagine any item with a certain amount of demand. Now cut the supply of that good in half. What happens to the price?

If the supply gets cut in half, then cut in half again, and again, what happens? If we accept that the mining reward is the "supply" then we can see that it should cause continual increases.

As for the already-emitted supply, you can essentially ignore it because of self-interest. Seeing the effect of diminishing supply and unlike miners, not needing immediate funds to buy new mining hardware to stay competitive, for currency hodlers, HODLing is the rational strategy. So holders aren't really part of the supply equation, hence the "store of value" narrative.

So you've got a dwindling supply flow, that causes higher prices, which, because of built in competition, guarantees that the blocks will go to whoever is willing to expend the most energy to get them, which is a ceiling only provided by the current price, which is ever driven higher by the increasing exponential scarcity of the halving block rewards.

Essentially, this scheme ends with the heat death of our planet, and unlike climate change, green energy might not be able to make a dent in time.

The halvening stops in 2140, if I remember right. Humans intuitively don't understand exponential growth well, but if the same path continues, the energy growth (halvening = price doubling)

1 = Today = ARGENTINA's energy usage

2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048

In 40 years, 2048 times that. And it just goes up from there. Now, if you're thinking, that's more than the world produces, you're right. But what happens if it is even half, or 1/10th as bad? Still nothing that leaves us a habitable planet, because the heat and carbon from mining will drive climate change past the brink.

[ephbit]

> Imagine any item with a certain amount of demand. Now cut the supply of that good in half. What happens to the price?

IMO the assumption/premise here doesn't describe the situation ("bitcoin" or more broadly "currency") in a precise enough way to make this a useful thought experiment.

Ordinary people don't really demand money per se. They work or sell goods/services and get paid money for that and they spend money to get other goods/services in return. There's no demand for money itself, it's just a means of exchange and value storage. Now of course, everyone would like to have a little more of this "item", but that's not what demand is, really. Or would you also say there is demand for USD and if the FED doesn't meet this demand by issuing more USD then the price for USD increases? I'd say that's just deflation due to the supply of goods having increased (in a growing economy) in comparison to the currency.

> So you've got a dwindling supply flow, that causes higher prices, ...

Yep, prices are going to rise ... but as with most things in the observable world there'll likely be some kind of dynamic equilibrium. Let the price rise to 1M and combine that with the fact that even HODLers won't live forever (to wait for even higher prices) and you'll see many of them buy actual goods/services with their btc ... and what does that mean? Yep, there you have your supply and circulation of btc. People have real life needs and can't just wait for deflation to enable them to buy two new fridges in a year instead of one right now when the old one went silent. Let the price rise to 10M and you'll see even more HODLers become buyers .. yes, there are some greedy HODLers out there (who probably prefer dreaming about what they can buy in the future over buying something now), but still, they will spend some and thus slow down the theoretically exponential price curve.

So no, I'm absolutely convinced that the price won't develop exponentially over the long term. Exponential price increase equates exponentially increased incentive to spend .. which is essentially direct negative feedback which leads to some sort of equilibrium. And I strongly doubt that this simple mechanism is the only negative feedback mechanism for the price of bitcoin.

Yes, bitcoin as a currency would have a deflationary nature. Which should mean that it nudges people to postpone purchases a little bit into the future rather than spend as quickly as possible .. which to me sounds much more like reasonable economic behaviour (from a sustainability point of view) in light of the current planetary environmental situation, compared to a monetary system that incentivises putting money back into the economy as quickly as possible.

Ultimately, many aspects of society will probably function as a negative feedback loop for the price of bitcoin, since bitcoin isn't the only use for energy. It competes with other uses that are much closer to what people actually really need and can't do without. Like riding a train or using an electrical stove. People aren't going to stop riding trains because they could use the energy to mine bitcoin instead.

No, the exponential scheme would IMO only apply in some very limited economic model where all these real world negative feedback effects were left out.

Clearly, the outcome you describe (consuming 1/10 of the world's energy supply) is inacceptable. But since this outcome is based upon assumptions that (IMO) don't adequately reflect reality, it's not valuable for assessing whether bitcoin might be useful enough to legitimize its energy consumption.

[lhorie]

Forgive me if this is a dumb comment, but my understanding is that bitcoin's footprint is largely due to mining, correct? But bitcoin itself is considered an asset (in the US, at least). So in theory, it's possible to just trade bitcoins off-chain (either on another blockchain or just using boring centralized tech) without necessarily incurring a corresponding increase in mining-related costs, right?

IIRC Polkadot staking has a 28 day minimum unstaking cool-off period, yet one can stake/unstake instantaneously in Kraken, so I'm led to believe that off-chain transactions must already happen to at least some extent.

Am I missing something?

[cesarb]

> So in theory, it's possible to just trade bitcoins off-chain (either on another blockchain or just using boring centralized tech) without necessarily incurring a corresponding increase in mining-related costs, right?

The mining-related costs are mostly unrelated to whether the bitcoins are traded on-chain or off-chain. The mining-related costs are more directly related to the price of bitcoin, or rather, how much a miner can earn with the block rewards and transaction fees. By trading bitcoin, even off-chain, you increase the demand for bitcoin, and therefore indirectly increase its price; the only difference is that by trading off-chain, the miners don't receive the transaction fees (which are currently less than 2% of the block rewards).

[Uehreka]

But if you’re trading bitcoins “off-chain”, doesn’t that mean you’re negating the point of a blockchain-based currency?

[lhorie]

Yes, but for my purposes as a layperson using a currency, I'm choosing to trust a system that is opaque to me anyways (be it a bank/exchange/other financial institution vs a validator pool). One could argue, for example, that anti-fraud mechanisms in off-chain systems don't have a on-chain counterpart, despite being a desirable feature, so IMHO, if the argument goes that crypto can't do things on-chain that regular currencies can, it seems most feasible to just treat them as digital assets to be tradeable over existing centralized systems, no?