311–320 of 436 posts
It's hard to digest a title. It gives the impression of talking in percentages, where $1 == 100%, and of those, 49% are environmental damages which cause health problems. What do the remaining 51% consist of? Benefits to human health?
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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...
> Bitcoin miners don't put their operations in the middle of nowhere and then ask someone to build hydro plants...
So now the demand follows the supply?
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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 effici…
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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?
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That's exactly how I understood the parent: Musk goes after anything that brings profits, and doesn't care about climate. Neither acceleration or deceleration.
Then why specifically make the claim that he profits from acceleration?
I'm only trying to explain to you how I understand the original post, and it has nothing to do with my own opinion on the subject (which may/or may not be the same).
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Bitcoiners use the cheapest energy they can find in place where they can cheaply install hash power. Some of that may be hydro. A lot is coal. Even when they do use green energy, the effect of doing that is to displace other users onto dirtier forms of energy, thus creating just as much pollution anyway. Bitcoin is not green in any way whatsoever. Bitcoin specifically wastes energy, by design. This is never green. Th…
There's no one to displace. That's why the energy is cheap. Supply and demand.
"Surplus energy" is another lie bitcoiners like to spread about this. Sure, there might be a few occasions where bitcoin mining might use surplus energy.
In the vast majority of cases, no, they are not doing that. That is just not a thing.
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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 effici…
A proper analysis of costs/benefits would put cryptocurrencies' externalities in perspective to other comparable and bigger consumers (cryptocurrencies are a very small part).
This disproportional targeting of cryptocurrencies as the most important climate destroyer that we see in the news seems to be unwarranted. Also, somehow the fact that pollution is generated by power plants, not consumers, is not so hot topic.
While this is sad, this is a self correcting problem. Miners and other people using bitcoins are going to get tired at some point of the loss from buying all this energy to keep their bitcoin assets going. The most scary part of cryptocoins is the deflationary cycle that makes these crypto asset potentially displace productive investment on an economy wide scale. This is not self correcting. This is Moloch, it's a pr…
I particularly like your use of "hypnotized", here ...