Buying a Tesla car in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its lifetime • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by gruez » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

spacedcowboy wrote: post #64

lbrindze wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sl…

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

The chips are made with recent-ish nodes, so the silicon/fab capacity could theoretically be used to make CPUs.

edit: looks like at least one bitcoin ASIC maker is using TSMC 7nm, the same process used to make AMD CPUs.

[1] https://blog.bitmain.com/en/bitmain-announces-next-generatio...

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

#72

Post by BluSyn » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

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.

PoW isn't going anywhere. CO2 tax would just push more mining to renewable, which 80% of it already is. This is all FUD.

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

#73

Post by Macha » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

hggh wrote: post #4

And what about the CO2 impact of using traditional banking (air conditioning, heating, commuting...)

Bitcoin is 0.5% of global energy usage. https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons

Is it 1/200 of global financial activity?

Coindesk indicates that bitcoin had 25 million transactions versus Visa having 50 billion transactions. So that is 1/2000 [https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...]

If Visa had a similar energy efficiency to bitcoin, the energy use of Visa alone would be larger than the current global energy use.

This rules out unaccounted dependencies hiding a larger energy use than reported for the financial sector that would put bitcoin on a more even footing, even when you count things like "the US military" or "extracting oil to fuel cars" as an energy cost solely existing for the financial sector.

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

#74

Post by gruez » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #56

mensetmanusman wrote: post #21

Are there any good papers on the BTC network robustness in the event of war. It is well known that major military powers have the ability to cut essentially every ocean-floor optical fiber bundle handling the backbone of the internet at a moment’s notice. If this happens, how would the bitcoin network respond without active connections to other mining nodes? E.g. would the Chinese miners automatically (algorithmicall…

This was actually one of the reasons Bitcoin Core devs were opposed to raising the block limit. Bitcoin requires very little bandwidth (around 1.5mb/10minutes). You can actually get the Bitcoin blockchain from Satellite for free: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ However, as I understand it, it only allows receiving and not transmitting data.

>However, as I understand it, it only allows receiving and not transmitting data.

what about something like shortwave radio? You probably can't have everyone transmitting at the same time, but a few stations around to world can broadcast/relay transactions across pockets of connectivity.

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

#75

Post by BluSyn » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

This is all FUD. Miners largely use renewable power that is excess, not expensive dirty power plants.

Here's a good breakdown of the counter argument: https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587

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

#76

Post by mgh2 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

BluSyn wrote: post #75

This is all FUD. Miners largely use renewable power that is excess, not expensive dirty power plants. Here's a good breakdown of the counter argument: https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587

The author seems to have a conflict of interest, do you have additional analysis or proof (ex: peer reviewed papers)?

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

#77

Post by guenthert » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

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…

GDP is a very questionable metric. Burn down your house, buy a new one and you have contributed a great deal to the GDP of your nation. If a cat. 5 hurricane makes landfall and destroys thousands of homes which have to be rebuilt, the GDP increases. That way a little bit of global warming raises the GDP (of industrial nations).

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

#78

Post by throwawayboise » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:49 PM UTC

BluSyn wrote: post #75

This is all FUD. Miners largely use renewable power that is excess, not expensive dirty power plants. Here's a good breakdown of the counter argument: https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587

Electric power is fungible. Any renewable power used for Bitcoin is power that cannot be used to offset carbon emissions.

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

#79

Post by away_throw » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

EveYoung wrote: post #65

neatwithatwist wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is where to source alternatives. It is significantly harder to find products from alternative sources. For some products, the only solution is DIY.

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

#80

Post by cwkoss » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

Lol, that the author isn't accounting for Bitcoins being used more than once makes this comparison one of the most laughable "bitcoin is too energy inefficient" arguments I've seen yet.

This is basically like saying, "If you only account for the first passenger on the bus, busses are way less efficient than everyone driving their own sportscar!".