[floss_silicate]

But that’s just an argument against any technology that will increase electricity demand, such as EVs.

When the web was growing the electrical demands were similarly criticised:

“The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.”

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=5db...

[bertil]

No: EVs has less carbon footprint than ICE, usually several times less. Digital economy has a carbon footprint, but orders of magnitude less than the alternatives: paper for administration, casettes for music or plastic film for movies.

You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of people.

Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs.

Crypto avocates likes to say they _could_ do it with imaginary wealth, but that are very far from being able to afford it; if they could, it would break their business model. In the mean time, they are settled in the countries with the worst carbon footprint possible. They tried to hide it but you can’t really hide that amount of waste. They have distrupted the energy market of China, Kazakstan so much that thousands of people died in energy shortages. For now, all we have from those people is mountains of unrecycled electronic waste.

So, no, those two are not the same thing.

[floss_silicate]

> Finally, most of the internet is powered from warehouses that are purposely built in areas with carbon-neutral electricity. The operators are actively optimising their consumption and investing in carbon-neutral energy generation that match their needs.

This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.

Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time.

The incentive is towards cheaper renewable sources that would otherwise not be viable.

[bena]

The problem is that bitcoin is greedy.

Every 10 minutes, a new coin is minted. That coin is given to the person who solved the correct hash. The chances of being the correct hash is 1/n where n is the number of miners active.

So if I fire up a miner and I'm the only one, I get a coin every 10 minutes. Life is good. Now, if you want bitcoins as well, you can fire up your own miner. Now we'll both get a coin every 20 minutes. But I was making 6 coins an hour, now I'm making 3. My production is halved. That sucks. But. I can spin up another miner. Now I have 2 to your 1. I get a coin roughly every 15 minutes, you get a coin roughly every 30.

You see where this is going, right? More miners, more coins. And the only way to get value out of these coins is to sell each coin for more than electricity used for all of your miners.

So you're incentivized to not only use every available unit of electricity to mine, you are also incentivized to sell at exorbitant prices. Bitcoin will not switch us over to renewables. It will also use renewables if and when they become available. Bitcoin has also caused long dormant fossil fuel generators to come online again.

[bertil]

> This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.

No: both types of organisation are looking at areas with cheap electricity and free cooling, but large internet companies are looking at area with stable polical regime and low carbon footprint. Bitcoin miners _could_ value that; they certainly loudly claim that they do. In reality, they don’t. They set-up shops in countries with cheap coal like China and Kazakstan. It sounds like areas known for their corrupt officials and no rules around dumping electronic waste have some appeal.

They don’t go where electricity is carbon neutral. You know how I know that? Because I live near a lot of hydro power, Arctic cold, where all the big players have their European data centers——and there’s no crypto operation here.

Bitcoin advocates are delusional and loves confusing their claims (like they could operate a trust-less financial network) with reality. But reality is still easy to see: crypto a collection of wasteful, polluting, short-term scams.