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Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

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Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#121

Post by jliptzin »

paulgb wrote: post #31
Me1000 wrote: post #26

My problem with these takes is that they're missing the forest through the trees. I don't believe you'll ever be able to solve climate change by shaming people based on their usage of electricity. The problem is not HOW people use electricity, it's how the electricity itself is generated. The electricity might be used to draw triangles on my screen, hash some value, keep me warm in my apartment, or make my car move;…

This would be a reasonable stance if Bitcoin were just another activity, but it’s unique in its energy profile. What other technology is designed so that energy efficiency improvements are absorbed and nullified (through the difficulty adjustment mechanism)?

Compared to other methods of money transfer I think Bitcoin does pretty well in terms of its energy usage. How much energy is used printing money and shipping it to various banks in Brinks trucks? How much is used building and operating millions of bank branches/ATMs worldwide?

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#122

Post by jcranmer »

gruez wrote: post #110
paulgb wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’d at least like to see CEOs who put it on their balance sheet put to task for it. E.g. putting it on your books should be penalized by ESG funds. Elon Musk shouldn’t get away with greenwashing it through Tesla’s (possibly overrated anyway) environmental halo. Nor should California taxpayers be subsidizing electric vehicles if the carbon benefits are neg…

>This is a great question and I don’t have all the answers, but I’d at least like to see CEOs who put it on their balance sheet put to task for it Should CEOs who put gold on their balance sheets be put to task for the environmental damage that causes? Should companies that buy conflict minerals be put to task for that as well? If so, you're just describing a pollution tax.

> Should companies that buy conflict minerals be put to task for that as well?

They very frequently are.

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#124

Post by lottin »

ur-whale wrote: post #74
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my area of Europe: Buying things at stores and shops that don't take card payments for one. Buying weed for another. Buying/selling small things in person, think garage sales, or even buying second hand cars.

Can't buy a car in many European countries with cash these days. The iron grip of the governments there is getting a lot tighter.

In which ones?

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#125

Post by wmf »

Me1000 wrote: post #81
paulgb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a reasonable stance if Bitcoin were just another activity, but it’s unique in its energy profile. What other technology is designed so that energy efficiency improvements are absorbed and nullified (through the difficulty adjustment mechanism)?

This is both a good and a fair critique of bitcoin. But I don't understand the endgame. Should the use of bitcoin be banned or just shamed? Let's assume for a moment that I live "off the grid" and run my full BTC node using my own solar power. Is that something that should be banned? Should it be shamed? I don't know where to draw the line.

The endgame should be a global carbon tax.

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#126

Post by legutierr »

dragontamer wrote: post #78
legutierr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about hydroelectric? Is it not possible to ramp up and down there?

Hydroelectric is great, but only when the geography + local water usage agrees with the construction project. For places like California which is facing a shortage of Water, Hydroelectric is a weaker option. Ex: if you run a dam in reverse for Pumped Storage, that implies sucking up the precious water from the lower-reservoir back up to the upper side. Realistically speaking, the near term future is Solar + Gas peake…

I read somewhere recently that if existing dams in West Virginia were retrofitted with hydroelectric capabilities, they could yield something close to the power requirements of New York City.

Maybe hydroelectric isn't an option for California, but in the east, there might be much more of an opportunity.

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#127

Post by BTCOG »

The USD and all the banks must really have some serious negative value if this farce is to be believed. What about automobiles? I won't go on, so tired of this phony narrative. Things cost electricity and money to create. Has anyone tried to add up the power consumption of all the banks collective offices total power consumption? Just to manage money hmmm? This is a blatant smear campaign as Bitcoin gains popularity. I'm genuinely curious to know how much power is being used for things like machine learning (tons) and AWS hosting and various other large power consumers and what "value" they have vs, anything else.

Edit: I know I said I won't go on, but I started thinking about total power consumption from Netflix and all streaming servers, the load, the bandwidth etc because I'm quite familiar with how much a datacenter full of video streaming/conversion servers can pull. All just so people can sit at home totally unproductive sapping up bandwidth and power through multiple points.

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#128

Post by viraptor »

ur-whale wrote: post #83
hannob wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's, you know, people caring about a livable planet. The "Big survival of humanity" lobby.

You're right to focus on the really important issues, it is clearly Bitcoin that's going to ruin it for us all and it should be an absolute priority on every self-righteous internet user's agenda. Oh, btw, did you heat your house today? Or did you happen to drive a car? Or did you fly in a plane prior to COVID? How much fossil fuel was burned to move your 80-ish kg from point A to point B in the air? Energy consumpti…

You can care about more than one issue or aspect of the issue at the same time. There's never one change that will fix everything.

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#129

Post by notahacker »

gruez wrote: post #116
Guvante wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has an intrinsic additional cost to acquiring that is unrelated to humans. There exist deposits that are harder to get to in the world and it isn't currently economically viable to extract them. This isn't mankind's doing it is just a truth of the world. Bitcoin adds artificial scarcity that isn't intrinsic. And unfortunately society as a whole pays for that additional scarcity by increasing the resources spent…

>Gold has an intrinsic additional cost to acquiring that is unrelated to humans. There exist deposits that are harder to get to in the world and it isn't currently economically viable to extract them. This isn't mankind's doing it is just a truth of the world. I disagree. Gold was specifically chosen to be rare and hard to counterfeit. That's why we don't use sea shells as a store of value. In that respect I don't se…

The most obvious difference is that the "mining" of BTC is necessary for its security/transaction layer. The security of the worldwide gold supply is not contingent on constantly directing more resources towards mining, and it is possible to continue to transact with gold if mining were banned altogether. Most holders of gold don't have any interest at all in mining; indeed curtailing gold mining would actually work in their favour.

(But yeah, gold hoarding is pretty wasteful in multiple ways too)

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#130

Post by dragontamer »

legutierr wrote: post #126
dragontamer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydroelectric is great, but only when the geography + local water usage agrees with the construction project. For places like California which is facing a shortage of Water, Hydroelectric is a weaker option. Ex: if you run a dam in reverse for Pumped Storage, that implies sucking up the precious water from the lower-reservoir back up to the upper side. Realistically speaking, the near term future is Solar + Gas peake…

I read somewhere recently that if existing dams in West Virginia were retrofitted with hydroelectric capabilities, they could yield something close to the power requirements of New York City. Maybe hydroelectric isn't an option for California, but in the east, there might be much more of an opportunity.

Ish. The east already has the Bath County Pumped Hydro station (aka: "the largest battery in the world")

Its not like the East needs more hydro / energy storage. They've already got GW-hrs of energy storage. That's the "problem" about geography-based solutions: the places where Hydro already makes sense are already built up 50 years ago.

Not that that makes Hydro a "bad idea" or anything. If anything, it proves how Hydro has been tested for decades and is effective. It does mean that the East can build up more Solar Panels, since there's plenty of energy storage available.

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