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Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

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Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#171

Post by tor11 »

deeeeplearning wrote: post #145
solosoyokaze wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This scenario" being the complete disbanding of the US military? I imagine everyone would be using crypto at that point since there would be no USD.

Yay I can't wait for a trip to the grocery store to take 12 hours because every transaction takes 20 minutes. lol. This is just pure bitcoin hype, there are far better coins to use if you are actually interested in them as currency.

> trip to the grocery store

try sending money to someone in north korea. how many hours does that take?

> actually interested in them as currency

it is still a currency.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#172

Post by lottin »

fvdessen wrote: post #39
ForHackernews wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a completely bogus analogy. Even if I accepted that bitcoin was analogous to gold (hint: it's not), the government secures Ft. Knox to whatever level of security it feels appropriate, and then it's done/maintained at that level. It's not like Russia adds one more guard to their gold vault, the US has to keep pace or else if Russia has 51% more guards outside their vault, then by magic they can suddenly steal/…

A country cannot hold a significant amount of cash/gold/value without spending the appropriate amount on military defence to deter other countries from seizing the value. The armed guards at Ft. Knox is a small amount of the total expense, the aircraft carriers also participate at least in part.

The army isn't just protecting the gold. It's protecting the country and everything that's in it, including the gold of course.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#173

Post by Sholmesy »

ravenstine wrote: post #107

How does this compare to the environmental impact of the millions of people constantly surfing sites like Reddit all day? I always hear about how bad Bitcoin is in terms of energy consumption, but nobody seems to perform similar analysis on actually frivolous activities we all accept in our society.

There was a comment in a sister thread positing that Cryptocurrencies currently use 1/3rd of the entire data center energy use on the planet.

I haven't looked into this, and I don't endorse this data or the comment, but it's likely relevant to your question:

Bitcoin uses about 1/3 the energy of all datacenters in the world put together. Datacenters use about 205 TWh/year.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow...

Bitcoin uses about 75 TWh/year.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

And that's with everyone on the planet using normal money every day and just about no one using Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#174

Post by solosoyokaze »

simiones wrote: post #168
solosoyokaze wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Warmongering has next to nothing to do with currency. Quite the contrary. You'll find that many currencies were created specifically to support an army or war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_American_currency

Oh yes, ~400 years ago many things worked differently. In particular, currencies were less tied with states than they are today, leading to many kinds of financial manipulations that no longer happen, at least outside open conflict zones. If the US government wanted to go to war, was lacking money for this, and for some reason didn't want to seize the entire bitcoin network (which it could pretty easily do, make no m…

1. Seizing Bitcoin is not as trivial as you think it is.

2. Fiat is not a social problem but a technological one that crypto is well poised to take on.

3. BTC is well on its way to passing gold in aggregate value. It's safe to say, it's no longer a "toy".

4. I'm left of Chomsky but in general, a big fan.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#175

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 »

traeregan wrote: post #167
xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin uses about 1/3 the energy of all datacenters in the world put together. Datacenters use about 205 TWh/year. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow... Bitcoin uses about 75 TWh/year. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption And that's with everyone on the planet using normal money every day and just about no one using Bitcoin.

There's some overlap there too. Some of the Bitcoin is being mined in some of those datacenters.

I doubt that it's enough to care about. The hardware is specialized and the needs are different from normal servers. Bitcoin miners care almost exclusively about cheap electricity, not uptime or latency or bandwidth or interconnect.

Some Bitcoin-related stuff is running in datacenters, no doubt, but it's a rounding error compared to the rest.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#176

Post by kevingadd »

Nursie wrote: post #137
kevingadd wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Persistent storage doesn't have to be powered on all the time, though, which makes the environmental impact a known thing. Factor in the cost of building + populating the drives along with having to replace them periodically and you know the cost of that storage. In comparison, PoW's future cost can skyrocket as the network expands and the difficulty goes up. Storing the whole chain takes a bunch of space anyway, so…

It's a known quantity, sure, but IIRC hard drive manufacture was not necessarily a very "clean" process.

Right, but ultimately the same is true for manufacturing GPUs and ASICs. It's a problem you have to deal with for both PoW and this new proposed approach.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#177

Post by africanboy »

tor11 wrote: post #160
Nursie wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of times such an activity would be useful to me is zero. However calling my bank and having cash recalled from fraudulent (or even just bankrupt) merchants, that's happened. Who do I call at Bitcoin?

> The number of times such an activity would be useful to me is zero. what about sending money to someone far away? ever tried? or just living in a bubble using a single fiat to buy coffee your limited use argument is tiresome. you can not send money to anyone you want with fiat. most can not send money to you. you are not free

do you really believe that people never sent money abroad before bitcoins?

my grandgranparent sent money back home to Italy from the US in 1912...

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#178

Post by africanboy »

tor11 wrote: post #171
deeeeplearning wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yay I can't wait for a trip to the grocery store to take 12 hours because every transaction takes 20 minutes. lol. This is just pure bitcoin hype, there are far better coins to use if you are actually interested in them as currency.

> trip to the grocery store try sending money to someone in north korea. how many hours does that take? > actually interested in them as currency it is still a currency.

> try sending money to someone in north korea

North Korea leader has an army of hackers trained to steal bitcoins and uses them to launder money...

probably not the best example

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#179

Post by simiones »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #174
simiones wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, ~400 years ago many things worked differently. In particular, currencies were less tied with states than they are today, leading to many kinds of financial manipulations that no longer happen, at least outside open conflict zones. If the US government wanted to go to war, was lacking money for this, and for some reason didn't want to seize the entire bitcoin network (which it could pretty easily do, make no m…

1. Seizing Bitcoin is not as trivial as you think it is. 2. Fiat is not a social problem but a technological one that crypto is well poised to take on. 3. BTC is well on its way to passing gold in aggregate value. It's safe to say, it's no longer a "toy". 4. I'm left of Chomsky but in general, a big fan.

1. It's not trivial, but it's certainly not impossible for the US government.

2. I don't understand how fiat is a technological problem. Fiat was a solution to the problem of a fixed supply (gold-pegged) currency. Crypto is generally a step back.

3. The value of bitcoin is irrelevant to its impact on global financial systems. It can handle 7 transactions per second, while consuming more power than the Czech Republic. That people are willing to bet good money on it for now is does not mean that is should be taken seriously as an alternative to anything in the financial system.

4. Interesting, I honestly expected from your arguments that you were more in the area of a more-socially-conscious-than-average Rand Paul fan, glad to hear I was wrong.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#180

Post by xiphias2 »

lwansbrough wrote: post #130
xiphias2 wrote: post #7

Sure, let's get back to a gold based system, it's so much more environmentally friendly :)

...it is. How much energy does it take to store gold?

Much more than to store Bitcoin....gold takes much more space than a digital wallet.
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