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Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

franck-leroy.medium.com

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Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#61

Post by dnautics »

dnautics wrote: post #57
lxgr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, Bitcoin disincentivizes any investment in better grids and more efficient energy storage. Also, any such mining rig could have reasonably been a data center or scientific supercomputer instead.

>could have reasonably been a data center or scientific supercomputer instead. Which would have been used for what? Supercomputer centers are having difficulty selling their cpu cycles. A data center for what? Figuring out how to better serve ads?

Before you say protein folding, I was in on meetings where s major pharma company was considering decommissioning their computational data center in the bay area because it was underused and the real estate was worth too much to leave on the table

Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#62

Post by Tarsul »

neatwithatwist wrote: post #40
esotericn wrote: post #37

As far as I'm concerned, this is equivalent to the statement that "refrigerating beer causes the ozone layer to fail". There was a time that it did, and then we banned CFCs, and now it doesn't. Shouting at people about CO2 is simply never ever ever going to fix the problem. It needs to be incentivised or it won't happen.

Not to mention individuals aren't even the cause of creating most of the greenhouse gas volume behind climate change. It's massive corporations creating something like 90% of all greenhouse gasses? 100 of them create 71% ( https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=corpora... ) So when Shell and BP are on Twitter sharing ways to change your behavior to save the environment, it's like the murderer encouragin…

well, if only we hadn't have forgotten that corporations work for the people, imagine the world we could live in.

Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#63

Post by jjk166 »

The difficulty of mining bitcoin is variable, whereas for gold it is (comparatively) constant. The energy cost of creating $40,000 worth of bitcoin right now is very different from the energy cost of $40,000 worth of bitcoin having been created.

It is estimated that 190,000 Tons of gold have been produced in history, which is 53.8 years worth at current production rates. That current production rate requires 132 TWh per year, so the total cost of producing the gold in circulation should be approximately 7100 TWh.

The total power consumption of bitcoin has been approximately 370 TWh. The market cap for gold is approximately 11 times higher than bitcoin's, but that would still only be 4070 TWh when normalized. On average that's 0.37 kwh per dollar of bitcoin mined to date vs 0.64 kwh per dollar of gold mined to date.

Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#64

Post by spacedcowboy »

lbrindze wrote: post #23
lxgr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, Bitcoin disincentivizes any investment in better grids and more efficient energy storage. Also, any such mining rig could have reasonably been a data center or scientific supercomputer instead.

I think your second point here often gets missed/understated. That energy and those computers could have been helping forecast severe weather events or working to fold proteins or any other number of useful tasks that don't involve tracking a ledger of other people's wealth.

The energy perhaps. The "computers" aren't. They're just ASICs that can calculate hashes at a phenomenal rate, they're not general purpose.

And the argument about energy isn't straightforward either. Most bitcoin mining sites are set up where there is an excess of energy - when I had miners a while ago, I used a place in Newfoundland, Canada to host them, because of the local hydro dam. The water falls through the sluices or goes via the generators, it's just based on demand.

Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#65

Post by EveYoung »

neatwithatwist wrote: post #40
esotericn wrote: post #37

As far as I'm concerned, this is equivalent to the statement that "refrigerating beer causes the ozone layer to fail". There was a time that it did, and then we banned CFCs, and now it doesn't. Shouting at people about CO2 is simply never ever ever going to fix the problem. It needs to be incentivised or it won't happen.

Not to mention individuals aren't even the cause of creating most of the greenhouse gas volume behind climate change. It's massive corporations creating something like 90% of all greenhouse gasses? 100 of them create 71% ( https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=corpora... ) So when Shell and BP are on Twitter sharing ways to change your behavior to save the environment, it's like the murderer encouragin…

Unless individuals change their purchasing behaviour, big cooperations will have little incentive to do anything different. It's the same as "blaming" China for high emissions while still buying products manufactured under these conditions.

Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#66

Post by guenthert »

jjk166 wrote: post #63

The difficulty of mining bitcoin is variable, whereas for gold it is (comparatively) constant. The energy cost of creating $40,000 worth of bitcoin right now is very different from the energy cost of $40,000 worth of bitcoin having been created. It is estimated that 190,000 Tons of gold have been produced in history, which is 53.8 years worth at current production rates. That current production rate requires 132 TWh…

A good share of the gold mined is not in circulation. Besides other uses, the bond wires of every chip are made out of gold.

Bitcoin is "the gift which keeps on giving". Every transaction, not only the original "mining", incurs a substantial ecological cost.

The share of gold otoh used as financial tool is often not moved at all in transactions. E.g. a good share of it is stored in some vaults and virtually never moved. Most of Germany's gold was store in Fort Knox for more than sixty years, see https://www.ft.com/content/4edf00ee-a43c-11e7-8d56-98a09be71... .

Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#67

Post by cheeseomlit »

Tepix wrote: post #29

We need a significant worldwide CO2 emissions tax to get rid of the POW coins and replace them with something vastly more efficient. Bitcoin is unable to evolve due to lack of consensus. The only constant is change. If bitcoin is unable to change it will die.

OK then go ahead, what's your vastly more efficient solution?

Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#68

Post by aidenn0 »

bttrfl wrote: post #10
FranckLeroy wrote: post #2

This is how insanely bad Bitcoin is for the environment : If you buy a Tesla car (around 40 000 $) in Bitcoins, the impact of the mining of those bitcoins is around 80 tons of CO2. This is 4 times more than the savings of CO2 you can expect from this car (compared to a gasoline one) on its entire lifetime (around -20 tons).

It's not a problem of Bitcoin but the reality in which there is no cap on externalities. Every sane person will try to limit consumption/waste of critical resources if she knows the resource is limited. It's an easy choice to make. Do I take bath if I have just a bottle to drink while being lost on a desert? Do I keep car engine on in a garage? For our convenience, any side effects of our consumption are hidden from…

It's true that if we just put a tax on CO2, then either the price of BTC would go up, or the work factor would go down.

However, that seems to be less politically feasible than banning BTC.

Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#69

Post by guenthert »

paulmendoza wrote: post #31
bluesign wrote: post #5

- I think 80 tons of CO2 for BTC is wrong. It should be around 15-20 tons (75% of BTC is mined with renewables, I think approx 20-25% is coal) - for US, CO2 per $ GDP should be around 0.3 kg - so if BTC is 50000$ value, it is almost same CO2 then something else US produce, (it would be 50000* 0.3 = 15 tons) - if we assume those numbers correct, lets assume they are both 15 tons, it means 50% of the things US produce…

That last point is key. Bitcoins once created exist forever.

Yes and every transaction henceforth incurs an economic cost. The gift which keeps on giving.

Re: Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime

#70

Post by gruez »

neatwithatwist wrote: post #40
esotericn wrote: post #37

As far as I'm concerned, this is equivalent to the statement that "refrigerating beer causes the ozone layer to fail". There was a time that it did, and then we banned CFCs, and now it doesn't. Shouting at people about CO2 is simply never ever ever going to fix the problem. It needs to be incentivised or it won't happen.

Not to mention individuals aren't even the cause of creating most of the greenhouse gas volume behind climate change. It's massive corporations creating something like 90% of all greenhouse gasses? 100 of them create 71% ( https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=corpora... ) So when Shell and BP are on Twitter sharing ways to change your behavior to save the environment, it's like the murderer encouragin…

>It's massive corporations creating something like 90% of all greenhouse gasses? 100 of them create 71%

And why are those corporations emitting Co2? For the fun of it? Because it generates profit for them? No, it's a means to an end for them, which is producing products that ultimately go to consumers. On the flip side, if you're a consumer and 80% of your co2 emissions are indirectly generated by corporations working on your behalf, you don't get absolved for that 80%.

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