Please, no more climate change articles. Everyone has already made up their minds. There's very little that can be said to someone with differing views on the matter without acrimony.
Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
261–270 of 436 posts
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patently false. I do a lot of contracting work for miners, they specifically tune their operations to the power cost of an area and in variable rate loads will switch off miners during peak costs. $/kWh is a big concern for actual mining operations, maybe not for people with one or two rigs in their basement.
> I do a lot of contracting work for miners Selection bias. I don't doubt that the miners who are investing god knows how much is necessary to _require a contractor_ will have scaled enough to need to concern themselves with cost of electricity, but the _majority_ of miners are not going to be those people, surely?
Requiring a contractor isn't a big ask. All it takes is not knowing someone who has networking chops. I work regularly with around 10 mining operations, 8 of them explicitly relocated to get on hydro because of how inexpensive it is. These guys care deeply about getting the most kWh for their money, because they still have to deal with turning a profit, and anyone who doesn't understand that has not actually dealt with real Bitcoin mining operations.
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#263> 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…
The article is undermined by its arbitrary focus on crypto. The premise is that crypto mining drives consumption for power, and power production results in "health and climate damage". Are we going to police consumers of power now? Will we invest our time and energy in determining the "good" and "bad" consumers of power. Or are we going to invest our time and resources in building out a sustainable, clean, and efficient power production infrastructure to replace the ancient one we have?
Ctrl+f 'nuclear': 1/1 found.
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And that consumption does not go away with BTC
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still has usage as a potential store of value and a means of cheap global transfers. My mother in law use it monthly to transfer money to her home (third world) country, which is crazy easy and cheap compared to traditional means.
I can rent a moving truck to get groceries, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. There might be narrow use cases, but that doesn't mean it's the best realistic way to solve every problem, and it doesn't mean it's worth the cost.
Who is claiming that Bitcoin is the right tool for every job, besides hype artists?
And how do we judge whether the market price is "worth" the use cases or not? Isn't that exactly what the market is doing in pricing the asset?
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patently false. I do a lot of contracting work for miners, they specifically tune their operations to the power cost of an area and in variable rate loads will switch off miners during peak costs. $/kWh is a big concern for actual mining operations, maybe not for people with one or two rigs in their basement.
For some reason I imagine that you are not managing e.g. Chinese mining operations. Everyone will look for cheapest power, but that on its own does not make it renewable. Plus, regardless of your source, as long as you haven't built your own plant, the grid has to cover for the loss. If there isn't an abundance of renewable energy on the grid, then the operation wasn't neutral at all.
You're correct, I'm dealing with exclusively American operations or American operations run by foreign entities. Most have relocated to explicitly get onto hydro. YMMV, but that's been my experience.
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most of this electricity comes from the cheapest source of power, which is hydro. This has become almost a religious belief amongst cryptocurrency acolytes, but it's simply not true. -- Edit: please see my comment¹ and piplikoc's comment² below for more detail on this. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342411 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342366
Do you deny that hydro is cheap or do you claim that miners choose to use power in more expensive locations?
> or do you claim that miners choose to use power in more expensive locations?
Both scenarios are very plausible, because if everyone within the market was perfectly efficient in choosing to use the cheapest power sources available, and if hydro was clearly the cheapest way to generate power, then it wouldn't just be being used for Bitcoin, it would be being used for every single portable, power-intensive task in general. We wouldn't be having a conversation about the environment in nearly any manufacturing field.
Given that this isn't happening, given that some things in the world still use coal power, and given that people are still worried about the environmnetal impacts of energy use in general, even though hydro exists -- the obvious conclusion is one of the following:
A) hydro isn't universally the cheapest power source.
B) there are other factors that determine where people will set up operations (taxes, living situation and preferred environment, costs beyond power generation, market saturation to the point that its still profitable to use expensive sources of power).
C) there are still environmental impacts of using a ton of power, even if it came from hydro, and hydro power doesn't just have zero environmental impact.
But obviously something is going on here, because bitcoin isn't special. If hydro power was the savior of power generation, then every single factory in the world would already be using it. But they're not, and it's reasonable to assume that the same market constraints and environmental situations also apply to bitcoin mining.
The fact that we are having an energy debate at all about any industry implies that something about the energy market, it's pricing, and its environmental impacts is more complicated than you're making it sound.
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#268The article is paywalled. So people upvoting this, are you just upvoting for the abstract and headline alone?
Yes, they are astroturfing and socially manipulating false narratives as per usual with this site towards Bitcoin sentiment. There's no true discourse, as you'll notice anything said freely or positively about Bitcoin instantly is downvoted away. Oh yay, but let's pedantically talk for months on end about the beauty of ReactJS and Node bullshit. YAY.
And obviously the key take away from this statement I've made is that things get downvoted here for simply being in disagreement with folks who have the weight to downvote. They are not being downvoted due to in any way being against rules.
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#269It is year 2021 and people still think Bitcoin is boiling the oceans. Bitcoin is the greenest think on this planet. Economic empowerment it brings to individual together with energy extraction innovations is just beyond imagination of most people in this forum.
Ah yes, the greenest "think" on the planet, consuming 130TWh of energy per year and rising.
Do you even think what you write? We don't need Bitcoin, global energy usage rises without Bitcoin as well.
But sure, go live in your little bubble where Bitcoin is the currency that solves all of society's problems, will forever rise in value and save the planet!
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're going to question the validity of an assertion please provide more than just a counterassertion.
Good point, thanks - I'm using CCAF's 3rd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study as the source for my assertion: https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternati... Their research indicates that a minority of mining is done using renewable resources: > The survey findings estimate that on average 39% of proof-of-work mining is powered by renewable energy, primarily hydroelectric energy. It also specificall…
The article seems to use the country average emissions per kWh for the US and China (it's hard to tell because the first reference is a 404, the other is 400+ pages, the final one is definitely country average numbers).
A cursory Google search says the percentage of renewable energy in the US and China is ~11% and ~23% respectively. The disparity between that and an average of 39% for crypto mining specifically does not seem to be factored in.