You should educate yourself. Energy consumption is an old myth and cryptocurrency pushes a lot of innovations in this field. There is a great documentary on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc.
Energy is a zero sum game. Every watt you use for crypto mining is a watt not used for something more productive.
Every watt of renewable power generated to power a crypto miner, is a watt not being used to reduce the use of non-renewables in the wider energy grid.
I don’t care if your crypto gear is hooked up to a dedicated hydro plant, I care that the hydroplant is not connected to the wider grid and shutting down gas fired power stations.
Only from the view of the universe, not from the view of humans. It cost less energy to drill for oil than the energy you get out of the gasoline. It takes less energy to create a solar panel than what you can get out of it. It takes less energy to labor at the factory for an hour than the energy you get from the 150KwH of power you can buy for your house from that hour of motion you performed at the factory.
If I use some electricity to run PoW on an electronic litecoin transaction from me to my friend in Kenya, that's a hell of a lot lower energy than building and operating a Western Union in Kenya isn't it?
> If I use some electricity to run PoW on an electronic litecoin transaction from me to my friend in Kenya, that's a hell of a lot lower energy than building and operating a Western Union in Kenya isn't it?
On an aggregated pre transaction basis we know this isn’t true. Crypto is not more energy efficient than existing financial infrastructure. Additionally you’re comparing a small part of a financial transactions (I.e. and database update) to a complete end-to-end transaction, including turning those digital funds into spendable cash.
Unless you friend in Kenya is also capable of spending that crypto, without turning it into fiat, then example is meaningless, because your ignoring all the infrastructure need to do that fiat conversion.
Additionally Kenya has digital banking infrastructure. Send a SEPA payment instead, no need to Western Union.
>including turning those digital funds into spendable cash.
Crypto can be spendable cash. You can buy a coffee or a bar of gold with it, even bullets. Sounds like it can be used as a currency to me. It only takes a willing counterparty.
> Crypto is not more energy efficient than existing financial infrastructure.
That depends on the place and circumstance. I concede that Kenya was a poor example and I should have used someplace like Central African Republic instead.
>Additionally Kenya has digital banking infrastructure. Send a SEPA payment instead, no need to Western Union.
Assuming you are one of the one third of Kenyans who have a bank account. And assuming the one sending the money has a bank account. Both of which involve documentation and KYC, something not necessary in most crypto transactions.
>because your ignoring all the infrastructure need to do that fiat conversion
Not really, crypto to fiat can be done informally. There's several people in my city who buy and sell it and all they need is a cellphone and local currency.
It's only from the perspective of someone that thinks like a loser, always trying to find something wrong, that you can find zero uses where using crypto is more energy efficient than other financial options. And not all cryptos use the same energy or transaction cost as others.
For an example of transaction efficiency, I can buy a bar of gold from some established bullion vendors in litecoin much cheaper than with a visa card due to lower transaction risks for the merchant and lower transaction fees. If you can't wait multiple days for an ACH transaction and have to buy precious metals online, crypto is actually the cheapest way in the US.
> Crypto can be spendable cash. You can buy a coffee or a bar of gold with it, even bullets. Sounds like it can be used as a currency to me. It only takes a willing counterparty.
All true, but the same also applies to chickens, screwdrivers, oranges, dogs, cats etc. Just because you can barter with something doesn’t make it a currency.
Currencies are better identified by their fungibility (which crypto has), their value stability (which crypto currently doesn’t), and their wide acceptance for use in everyday transaction (also not true of crypto in the vast majority of the world).
> It's only from the perspective of someone that thinks like a loser, always trying to find something wrong, that you can find zero uses where using crypto is more energy efficient than other financial options. And not all cryptos use the same energy or transaction cost as others.
I’ll remind you of the guidelines, as you’ve clearly forgotten them.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Ad hominem attacks undermine your arguments and suggest that you don’t actually have very strong argument, instead you’re forced to attack the character of the person your discussing with, due to an inability to attack their argument. Try harder.
I used be a fan of crypto, did plenty of trading, bought plenty of pizza etc with it. When to meetups, evangelised crypto to friends and family. Back then it looked realistic that crypto could be a genuine currency, and the concept of DAG was incredibly.
Unfortunately crypto has descended into little more than get rich quick schemes that take advantage of naïve investors, or produce profit by externalising all of the negative consequences of crypto mining (such as CO2 emissions). Forcing the rest of us to bear that long term cost, for a grifters short term profit.
I admit there are coins out there that potential address these issues, and still possibly have a future as a genuinely useful currency. One not manipulated by a small number of extremely large coin holders. But unfortunately that doesn’t change the damage caused by other coins.
> For an example of transaction efficiency, I can buy a bar of gold from some established bullion vendors in litecoin much cheaper than with a visa card due to lower transaction risks for the merchant and lower transaction fees. If you can't wait multiple days for an ACH transaction and have to buy precious metals online, crypto is actually the cheapest way in the US.
This is just an example of how slow and backwards the US financial system is. Most other countries have far quicker and cheaper payment rails. Here in the U.K. I can send an instant Faster Payment for free from my bank account, and the money moves faster than the app UI (I get a push notification from the receiving bank, before the UI in my banks app has had time to display the confirmation). The whole of Europe has similar payment systems that also work cross border.
The money moves so fast that when trading crypto the slowest part of buying or selling was always the confirmations. The fiat part was instant.
>Ad hominem attacks undermine your arguments and suggest that you don’t actually have very strong argument, instead you’re forced to attack the character of the person your discussing with, due to an inability to attack their argument. Try harder.
I did attack your arguments, including many other points and I never called you a loser. Quit being so defensive. I said those who continually look for ways to make something not work, rather than finding the ways they do, think like losers. And I back that 100%! The only of the two of us who had made an ad hominem against the other is you, by saying I have an "inability to attack their (your) argument." Thanks hypocrite!
>Unfortunately crypto has descended into little more than get rich quick schemes that take advantage of naïve investors, or produce profit by externalising all of the negative consequences of crypto mining (such as CO2 emissions). Forcing the rest of us to bear that long term cost, for a grifters short term profit.
I'm not a fan of stable coins, but how many people you reckon are buying DAI or USDT with the idea of striking it rich? I hear this sad sad false diatribe over and over, completely ignoring that crypto-currencies are currencies and not investment, with people getting mad that crypto is not an investment that is going to provide returns for naive "investors." And then they go on to attack crypto for not living up to being an investment!
>I used be a fan of crypto, did plenty of trading, bought plenty of pizza etc with it. When to meetups, evangelised crypto to friends and family. Back then it looked realistic that crypto could be a genuine currency, and the concept of DAG was incredibly.
So you were a dogmatist for, and then apparently now a dogmatist against. Try being a neutral pragmatist that doesn't believe crypto is an investment utility but rather one possible financial engine that allows electronic transactions without KYC or centralized authority.
You are completely ignoring the fact that even if connected to the grid all power grids are structured to meet peak demand, and that there will always exist periods of excess power which, until bitcoin, had to go to ground.
Bitcoin makes use of energy that would otherwise be unused.
We don’t operate renewable grids in most of the world, and for most of the world renewable energy supply isn’t great enough to supply the dips without fossil supplements.
All that means is that in almost all scenarios bitcoin mining will be directly causing an increase usage of non-renewable energy. There are of course certain times and places where this doesn’t hold true and there’s a genuine surplus of renewable power that can’t be stored. But that’s an exception not the rule. Try and tell me with a straight face that the majority of power consumed by crypto is surplus renewable energy.
Clearly he thinks that investments in renewables are a good thing, since those would also "reduce the use of non-renewables in the wider energy grid". So I'm puzzled why you'd think what you just wrote.
"Every watt of renewable power generated to power a crypto miner," IS investment in renewable energy.. which he would rather was not invested in renewable energy. I don't see any other way to interpret that, unless you think that paying monies for renewables is somehow not 'investing' in renewables.
So he is turning down real investment in renewables in the hopes that other more agreeable investment materializes out of thin air.. meanwhile his plan crashes the price of renewable energy endangering those industries and shrinking the market.. allowing established fossil fuel industries a bigger share. genius.
It is a bit annoying that you assume that people critical of cryptocurrencies and specifically Bitcoin's environmental footprint are uneducated about the issues. It is not a myth. BTC's environmental footprint is preposterous. It's estimated that the network currently runs at 165 TWh/a, or around 19 GW, which means that one transaction uses around 5 GJ or 1500 kWh, and produces 800 kg of CO2, and 250 g of electronic waste.
For keeping track of a ledger that one dude in a basement with an Excel spreadsheet could keep track of, more or less.
> For keeping track of a ledger that one dude in a basement with an Excel spreadsheet could keep track of, more or less.
No, for protecting against the untrustworthiness of that one guy in his basement. You may disagree with the value of that function, but that's what cryptocurrency provides.
To underline how preposterous the whole PoW is - BTC is mined by hardware that consumes 2000-3000W each, all the while vast majority of these machines never mine a single block
Technically half true, they share the processing load of guessing the next valid block, and then share the profit when the one piece of hardware finally guessed it.
Those were the bad old days. There are pools now, like the old Seti@Home program. If your mining pool wins you get the percentage of the reward relative to the hashes you tried.
You can try to go it alone but your chances of finding the block reward are incomprehensibly low.
> Measuring energy use per transactions makes no sense
I am well aware of the difference between average and marginal energy use. This would be particularly relevant if the blocks were not full, but mined anyway, so that any additional transaction could've been included "for free". However, more often than not, that's not the case, but the mempool is non-empty, and the constraint (of max transactions per block) is binding. [1]
Thus, one can not trivially argue that the marginal cost of a transaction is zero.
Next, yes, my figures (165 TWh/a = 19 GW) from Digiconomist [2]) are at the upper end of the estimates, but other figures (eg Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index) estimate 100 TWh/a, with reasonable bounds of 36 to 376 TWh/a, so 12 to 28 GW, so are largely in alignment, modulo a factor of 2. (Note that your source is also within a factor of 3 of those estimates, pegging BTC at 0.2% of global electricity consumption.)
At any rate, the average cost is just preposterous, even if off by a factor of 3.
> Measuring energy use per transactions makes no sense, as mining energy consumption is not related to the number of transactions processed.
Sure, measure energy use per amount of money transferred. That's not going to be very nice either.
> Also a huge portion of the energy used by bitcoin would otherwise be wasted.
Oh, come on. Now you're just trolling. It would have been used for something else that most likely wouldn't be waste, like in factories or in hospitals and such.
Give me a break. Power consumption numbers are completely meaningless in this argument. Power usage does not correlate directly to CO2 emissions. Crypto can and does run on renewables. If we were serious about fixing climate change we'd stop all air traffic tomorrow. In reality, the climate issue is just a convenient political bludgeon.
> If we were serious about fixing climate change we'd stop all air traffic tomorrow.
The fashion industry alone has more climate impact than air traffic and maritime traffic together. Aviation contributes around 1% of air pollution (though 5% of greenhouse effect, due to high altitudes).
But all of those (transport, fashion) provide utility. BTC usurps nearly 1% of world electricity without providing commensurate discernible utility.
I'm sure people who don't fly or follow fashion feel the same way about the perceived utility.
I for one think not having to pay 20% for a remmitance for someone who is trying to help their famiy in another country has huge utility, maybe others disagree.
Its not complicated. It is not necessary for crypto PoW to be powered by CO2 emitting fuels. It can be powered with renewables. Therefore the power usage of Bitcoin can't be used to infer its environmental impact. You need to know how much of that usage was on the back of fossil fuels.
Energy is fungible. Unless those renewable-generated watts were unable to be used for other things, then all marginal use of energy uses emitting sources, since we are not yet at 100% green energy. There are a few exceptions where mining is done on grids that are at 100% green energy, but this is not the norm.
Sure in theory. In reality not all energy is fungible because not all power generating systems in the world are connected. If I stand up a geo-thermal farm to run my crypto mining operation that power would not have been available to the grid anyway because the economic incentive to build the power station was crypto, not selling it to the grid.
> It is not necessary for crypto PoW to be powered by CO2 emitting fuels. It can be powered with renewables.
That's completely irrelevant for the correlation. Renewables are theta-bound by fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are theta-bound by renewables. Only at zero emissions for a source this would stop being true. This is first semester math.
If base load were to drop due to crypto miners being turned off, the energy with highest marginal cost would be turned off, which means fossil fuels, not renewables.
The fungibility argument doesn't work when you consider that not all power generation in the world is connected to the same grid. There are crypto operations that use their own renewable power infrastructure. That energy never would have made it to the grid because there was no incentive for it to be put there (otherwise it would already have been there). The incentive is to use it for crypto not your mom's blender.
Oh, the old "EDuCaTE UrsElf" argument? I'm sorry, but Bitcoin's energy use doesn't even pass the smell test. If you're consuming ~1% of global power generation while providing only ~2% of world's narrow money, that's not very optimistic. The fact that its deflationary nature makes it unappealing for actual cash transactions should make it even worse should you go for transaction volume comparisons.
Every watt of renewable power generated to power a crypto miner, is a watt not being used to reduce the use of non-renewables in the wider energy grid.
I don’t care if your crypto gear is hooked up to a dedicated hydro plant, I care that the hydroplant is not connected to the wider grid and shutting down gas fired power stations.