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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

#301

Post by pseudo0 »

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.

Making the study about bitcoin in particular seems like a clickbaity way of getting attention, when the core issue seems to be dirty power generation. Bitcoin makes up a tiny fraction of non-essential American power usage, so focusing on it in particular just seems like jumping on the "Bitcoin is terrible for the environment" bandwagon. Articles on this topic seem to pop up every couple weeks on HN lately, and they generally aren't novel or interesting.

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

#302

Post by kryogen1c »

Certhas wrote: post #186
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…

> There is a large and robust literature to assess these type of damages

even granting you that we have a robust model to assess damage (which on its face seems to be a wildly improbably claim) we do not have an accurate model that predicts WHAT damage will be done due to humanity's impact on weather change, so the resultant-cost benefit analysis still propagates that uncertainty forward.

> (search for Social Cost of Carbon)

i havent read it all because i just looked it up[0], but it directly contradicts your claim of our "robust data and damage models". section 5.1 "damage functions" is about how previous damage models are all incorrect.

side note: one of the paper authors is in references 30 times. idk if this is common or not, but it seems suspicious.

> 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

wouldnt know, dont have access to anything but the abstract.

look, im not well read into the field of future predictive damage modeling. you may be right that the field has some definition, however i stand by my smell test. even ignoring everything relevent about health, damage, and climate, the start of the sentence "$1 of BTC" is enough to give pause. BTC price is up 30% in the last month and 470% in the last year. not exactly rigorous scientific measure.

[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28472/w284...

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

#303

Post by karpour »

douglaswlance wrote: post #298
karpour wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people finally realize the massive impact on the environment that Bitcoin has? You can say "f** it, I don't care", but you can't deny just how much energy the Bitcoin network uses (or wastes, imho) Bitcoin and other proof-of-work crypto comes with a price. And the price is environmental.

Not all usage of energy is equivalent. It requires energy to run carbon scrubbers, yet we would probably agree that carbon scrubbers are worth the energy costs for environmental benefits. Can you prove that the energy bitcoin miners use would have been put to a more environmentally friendly use if they had not existed?

The energy used by bitcoin would simply have been not-used. Massive numbers of e-waste would've been avoided as well. Of course, if it wasn't Bitcoin, another cryptocurrency would use as much energy as Sweden right now.

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

#304

Post by random5634 »

gitrog wrote: post #83
random5634 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think this “scientific” study qualifies as a contributor to intelligent discourse think again.

Pray tell, which part is it that you find fault with?

It assumes the value of Bitcoin is in the mining of new coins. The network also has value as a ledger to record transfers of Bitcoin (billions per day) which contributes to the value of the network

The analysis can be generalized to say anything that uses 0.05 electricity creates these large harms. Perhaps true, but it’s not going to be unique to Bitcoin

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

#305

Post by karpour »

gowld wrote: post #254
karpour wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you realize the scale of it. Bitcoin is primarily used for speculation, the value is only based on more and more people buying in, and the energy usage is overwhelming. We are in dire need of reducing overall energy usage, but Bitcoin works against this in a huge way. And even if the energy comes from "sustainable sources", solar cells still need to be manufactured, the hardware that does nothing but mi…

> overall negative impact on society and environment is the description of almost everything in the developed world lifestyle, from animal meat to automobiles to overlarge houses.

Oh, so then it's ok to have a "currency" where one transaction uses 650kWh, 12000000 times more than a credit card transaction.

I get all the benefits of crypto, but there are also massive downsides, the biggest being the energy/hardware usage, which has to rise constantly by design.

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

#306

Post by karpour »

nyolfen wrote: post #295
karpour wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great whataboutism, 10/10

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9

The funny thing is, posting a link to this site without a comment is by all means also a Thought-terminating cliché!

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

#307

Post by karpour »

naraga wrote: post #281
karpour wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Energy consumption != carbon footprint

Oh, I forgot that bitcoin mining hardware just magically appears and never ends up on a landfill, power plants don't need to be built and maintained, and of course Bitcoin is probably 100% powered by renewables, right?

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

#308

Post by danShumway »

capableweb wrote: post #255
h4kor wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we built hydro plants and disrupted the local ecosystems to run bitcoin miners?

No, organizations built hydro plants for whatever reason in places where supply ended up higher than demand, driving down the prices. With that move, Bitcoin miners saw the opportunity and placed themselves within that ecosystem. Bitcoin miners don't put their operations in the middle of nowhere and then ask someone to build hydro plants...

> without those miners, the energy supply wouldn't have increased in the first place.

> So we built hydro plants [...] to run bitcoin miners?

> No, organizations built hydro plants for whatever reason in places where supply ended up higher than demand

So... by that logic, it seems that Bitcoin didn't increase the energy supply then.

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

#309

Post by jf22 »

trident5000 wrote: post #229
jf22 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are you saying, that because other things are also bad we can't have a discussion how bad one thing is?

Im saying you were being sarcastic thereby making the claim that those things are not harmful, and they are. Im not sure whats confusing here.

I was not being sarcastic. Those things are harmful.

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

#310

Post by crumbshot »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #270
crumbshot wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you're right, they do note this as a limitation of their study due to insufficient data:

> The great unanswered question faced when exploring cryptodamages is that while we can identify select geographic hotspots of production we currently do not know in the aggregate where the electricity used in cryptocurrency mining is physically produced. This is because we, like Krause and Tolaymat, do not know the physical locations of cryptocurrency miners, whether individuals, groups or aggregates in, say, a region or country. There is considerable evidence of concentration of mining operations in particular locations, typically where reliable electricity is cheaply available, though, precise data are lacking. In the US, perhaps the most well-known concentration is the Mid-Columbia Basin area in central and eastern Washington State, where cheap electricity is produced by hydropower along the Columbia River, however, mining in other US locations also occurs. There is also evidence of large mining camps in China. With time and emergent research there may be improved information about the amounts of electricity devoted to mining cryptocurrencies for particular locations or regions, but it is currently not available.

It would be interesting to see the results of their analysis if recalculated using the more granular CCAF survey data.

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