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Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

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Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

#181

Post by rkachowski »

newsclues wrote: post #162
rkachowski wrote: post #132

I don't understand where all these "cryptocurrency vs the environment" posts are coming from recently. The core problem is energy use, no? Things using electricity - of which bitcoin is a huge one - are powered by environmentally damaging supplies. I don't care about BTC at all, but if it were to be wiped out of existence tomorrow it would prevent further damage to the environment in exactly the same way that getting…

There is the resource cost of crypto but also an opportunity cost. Given all the smart minds and money devoted to crypto research, could humanity not benefit from other projects?

That's a valid point, but that's an argument for "crypto is an expensive distraction from more worthy goals" rather than the original "computers used for a certain purpose are dangerous to the environment"

Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

#182

Post by jtkgkgnyn »

jf22 wrote: post #148
trident5000 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make up some fear mongering "study" about almost every energy using topic. AI and video rendering for instance which is often for some marginal purpose. Or heating pools, idle electronics, big homes with AC, leisure travel, all the useless crap bought and manufactured in China with dirty coal, etc.

Right, and all those things are harmful to the planet.

Human life in general is harmful to the planet.

So what are you saying?

Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

#183

Post by freeone3000 »

HPsquared wrote: post #17

Worth noting the figures are comparing the value created in a year (2018) by mining, compared to the damage done by said year's worth of mining. Not that the cumulative damages amount to the total market cap (though this could be calculated as well)

So in that sense, Bitcoin generated a net gain of $0.40 of planetary wealth for every dollar mined. Obviously, we should put as many resources into cryptocurrency as possible - we'll finally raise the money to eliminate climate change!

Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

#184

Post by maxerickson »

nathias wrote: post #170

Has the author compared how much USD and CNY monetary systems are responsible for as a point of comparison?

The equivalent of bitcoin happens on small servers all over the place. Bitcoin doesn't replace the need for civil defense, it doesn't replace the need for contracts (if anything it makes them more important), it doesn't replace the need for a legal system, etc., etc., etc.

Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

#185

Post by FDSGSG »

konjin wrote: post #115
maxharris wrote: post #97

What is the energy cost of the entire USD-based financial system? At a minimum we need to total up what the US Mint, the Federal Reserve, Visa, Mastercard, Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and thousands of other companies and government entities do. It is obvious that amount of energy used to keep the USD going absolutely dwarfs Bitcoin.

Smaller than the energy required to run Ireland, unlike bitcoin. An algorithm designed to be wasteful in energy wasting energy is not something we should be shocked at.

The US military certainly consumes more energy than Ireland.

Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

#186

Post by Certhas »

kryogen1c wrote: post #100

> responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages red flag this article is steeped in pseudoscience. you could spend a lifetime trying to model and predict global weather patterns _with no outside intervention_. the idea that you could even make an attempt at attaching a number to this phenomena is laughable. what are the error bars here, 10,000%? lets pretend, for example, you tried to estimate the impact of tsu…

You clearly haven't actually looked at how the damages are modelled have you? You just in your head inveneted a naive way in which to estimate damages and then argued that that doesn't work.

There is a large and robust literature to assess these type of damages (search for Social Cost of Carbon). The methodological challenges are discussed really well in the paper actually. Much of the damages calculated here aren't even climate but direct air pollution, for which we have robust data and damage models. Insurance companies use these type of damage models at large scale for risk assessment all the time.

The article looks fairly solid to me.

Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

#187

Post by capableweb »

h4kor wrote: post #28
eigenvalue wrote: post #6

This is about the furthest thing from “science”. Just sensationalist propaganda. It’s so far from being even remotely plausible. Maybe 1 BTC is responsible for $0.49 of “damage” if you could ever actually quantify it. Most of this electricity comes from the cheapest source of power, which is hydro.

Without BTC miners using this cheap power, it could be used to replace coal and gas plants.

No, without those miners, the energy supply wouldn't have increased in the first place. In the energy market, demand drives supply, not the other way around. It's very uncommon to spend money on converting energy supply from coal/gas to other sources, as it doesn't make sense in terms of money for the companies. Instead they focus on creating new supply with renewables.

Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

#188

Post by dexen »

Every day we see a renewed attack on Bitcoin from the establishment media. Almost every day it is couched in the SV-friendly terms[1], even if - as pointed out by others here - the merit of the attack is thin.

By now I ascribe ulterior motive to those attacks, and I encourage you to also take them with a large grain of salt at the least. The establishment media seems to treat any emerging[2] technology as its opponent, and feels morally excused in posting continuous attacks.

--

[1] I half-jokingly expect a "Bitcoin deepens gender inequality" headline tomorrow

[2] or perhaps any "unregulated" technology

Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US

#189

Post by acd »

System engineer here: An Issue I have with the whole economic system is that external cost to the environment is not priced correctly.

I think that crypto currencies is a good thing but must move from proof of work so something which consumes less energy,

I think the fix is that you price negative carbon in the atmosphere, carbon capacity and you pay for all carbon you emit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

Its currently quite insane that cryptocurrency is using energy on the equivalent of the country Argentina and that as a gamer cannot get hold of a Geforce 30x0 series graphics card to use for playing games. source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952

I think the current capitalistic economic system is modeled on infinite environmental resources / capacity and exponential debt growth which is simply not true. That system held up in the early 1800/1900s but the flaws I think are emerging in the 2000s. Ie you do not pay for external cost of polluting, but you as an individual or company may benefit short term but the rest others pay an external cost long term which is not priced.

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