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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#171

Post by graiz »

yuliyp wrote: post #45
graiz wrote: post #24

Is it possible for people to source or certify sustainable Bitcoin? Since there is a transaction chain, can you choose to buy or boycott “dirty coins”?

It's still on the same power grid. The renewable energy would have been used one way or another. It's still contributing to the burning of fossil fuels on the grid.

There are times of day that solar and wind farms produce more energy than the grid can use. This excess energy has no marginal value to the grid. You can also have off-grid solar bitcoin farms that don't need interconnectivity.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#172

Post by pcthrowaway »

lamontcg wrote: post #163
pcthrowaway wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I'm getting downvoted, here's a study on it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... Your misunderstanding seems possibly intentional. I'm very much in favour of renewable energy as an alternative to nonrenewable energy. I'm just not in favour of wasting energy for very little purpose. Build solar/wind energy to replace fossil fuels? Great! Obviously I'm in favour of that. Built an insan…

That study says that if you replaced 100% of the power generation of the United States with wind farms concentrated in the middle 1/3rd of the country that it would create localized 0.50C rise in SURFACE temperatures at the wind farms and 0.24C rise in SURFACE temperatures across the whole USA. The authors note very clearly that isn't a global rise in temperature and would be offset by the effects of GHG reduction. F…

But you're comparing this with nonrenewable energy! I'll state for the third time that I'm in favour of replacing non-renewable energy with renewable energy.

What I'm saying is that it's still wasteful, and not cost-free if we're producing insane amounts of energy that don't need to be produced in the first place.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#173

Post by jude- »

abduhl wrote: post #152
jude- wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you handwaving away my concerns? Calm down. > Speaking of which, can you quantify what things pollute more? You're all over the comments trying to pin the blame for CO2 emissions on the the existence of PoW cryptocurrencies. But if you stop and think about the problem for more than 5 seconds, you'll realize that it's the CO2 emissions , not cryptocurrencies, that are the problem. They were a problem before…

You didn’t answer their question. Can you quantify what things pollute more?

Here, let me Google that for you.

First, let's assume for a moment that this February 2021 CNBC source [1] is correct in that Bitcoin mining produces 36.94 megatons of CO2 per year. The original source the CNBC article cited can be found here: [3] (which currently pegs Bitcoin at 47.62 megatons/year).

According to the EPA, the US economy alone produced 6,558 megatons of CO2 [2] in 2019 (i.e. under pre-COVID emissions).

So, Bitcoin's CO2 annualized output as of February 2021 was 0.5% of the US economy's CO2 output from 2 years ago.

This works out to be:

* 5.6% of the US agricultural sector emissions, OR

* 4.3% of US commercial and residential building emissions (heating, cooling, waste), OR

* 2.4% of the US manufacturing industry, OR

* 2.2% of all US electricity generation, OR

* 1.9% of all US transportation emissions

According to this article from 2016 published in Environmental Research Letters [4], the US could save a combined 110 megatons of CO2 emissions simply by using better building insulation, since it would reduce heating/cooling energy expenditure. That's about 3x the Bitcoin CO2 emission rate I quoted above.

So, @SwimSwimHungry, I'll ask once again: why the outrage over cryptocurrencies? Can I expect you to have 3x the outrage over bad building insulation?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

[3] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[4] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/03...

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#174

Post by lend000 »

fergie wrote: post #162
baron816 wrote: post #88

Easy solution: tax carbon emissions. Who cares if you’re using energy to mine Bitcoin? Or if you’re using it to play video games? Or to run the AC all day? If it you’re internalizing the cost of any emissions, then you’ll use those resources efficiently.

Why tax carbon emissions rather than directly taxing the manufacture of bitcoin? Carbon taxes increase costs for everything. Should we increase the cost of say, hospitals because some people _really_ want to mine bitcoin?

Who is to say what is a valid use of energy? How much energy goes into watching television? The pollution tax should be levied such that it provides the government enough to "undo" the pollution.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#175

Post by caf »

ayngg wrote: post #159
bransonf wrote: post #94

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…

To me it seems like Bitcoin (and other pow cryptocurrencies) are almost like the climate change scapegoat for a number of social and economic issues that have seemingly come to a head recently to facilitate their rise. People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" and I think it is…

I don't think the criticism is exactly wrong, but it's more like Bitcoin mining is the reductio ad absurdum exposing the waste of resources that goes into gold mining (yes, there's some industrial uses, but that is a rounding error compared to the quantities that are dug up, purified, cast into bars, shipped around the world and buried back underground in vaults).

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#176

Post by admax88q »

fergie wrote: post #162
baron816 wrote: post #88

Easy solution: tax carbon emissions. Who cares if you’re using energy to mine Bitcoin? Or if you’re using it to play video games? Or to run the AC all day? If it you’re internalizing the cost of any emissions, then you’ll use those resources efficiently.

Why tax carbon emissions rather than directly taxing the manufacture of bitcoin? Carbon taxes increase costs for everything. Should we increase the cost of say, hospitals because some people _really_ want to mine bitcoin?

Because Bitcoin is not the sole cause of climate change, carbon is.

You can try to play a game of whack a mole by taxing and regulating individual activities hoping to reduce carbon as a second order effect, or you can just target the root problem.

There's will always be another wasteful use of carbon intensive energy so long as carbon intensive energy remains cheap.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#177

Post by fighterpilot »

fergie wrote: post #162
baron816 wrote: post #88

Easy solution: tax carbon emissions. Who cares if you’re using energy to mine Bitcoin? Or if you’re using it to play video games? Or to run the AC all day? If it you’re internalizing the cost of any emissions, then you’ll use those resources efficiently.

Why tax carbon emissions rather than directly taxing the manufacture of bitcoin? Carbon taxes increase costs for everything. Should we increase the cost of say, hospitals because some people _really_ want to mine bitcoin?

Because carbon pollution is an externality no matter what its use case is.

The point of the tax is to make the carbon price correct so as to incentivize correct usage across all domains.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#178

Post by jakelazaroff »

peteretep wrote: post #66
jakelazaroff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? All transactions are verified by miners, so all transactions are equally "dirty".

It’s much much cheaper to verify than it is to mine. That’s kind of the whole point.

Verifying Bitcoin transactions is mining.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#179

Post by shp0ngle »

astrange wrote: post #167
shp0ngle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any energy mining bitcoin is clean by definition, because Bitcoin is good for whole mankind. By definition.

Seems like the fact people already own BTC is a minus for future users, if there's exponential adoption nobody has any reason to value the early users' claim and might just use a new currency.

That's not the One True Bitcoin (TM).

There can be only one bitcoin, all the others are false government shills.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#180

Post by graiz »

elil17 wrote: post #95
lwansbrough wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's renewable therefore I can waste as much of it as I want."

Exactly. If you're on grid, unless and limiting yourself to times when there's a surplus, every KW of clean electricity you use is a KW of dirty, natural gas or coal peaker plant electricity someone else has to use. If you've got an off-grid solar set up, you're just bidding up the price of PV panels.

As the volume of panels has gone up over the last decade, the he price of panels has also gone down as production scales and efficiencies improve.

You would need enough demand to create a global shortage. That doesn't seem likely and would cause a short-term spike, not a long term price increase.

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