Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

nysfocus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 578 posts

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#271

Post by arcticbull »

throwaway271818 wrote: post #269
arcticbull wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 1…

Where did you get the 100g of e-waste figure from btw? Is that, roughly speaking, the e-waste mass of storage/txn * total number of nodes?

Digiconomist [1]. I should have linked it up top, my bad.

Looks like they, in turn used this reference [2].

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

[2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#272

Post by birracerveza »

SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #103
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.

Hard to do this when you can have other countries with much looser regulations allow Bitcoin miners run rampant. What probably should happen is to make converting from any cryptocurrency to major world currencies a crime. I have no delusions that this will halt activity in this sector entirely, but it will make it reasonably difficult to make any substantial money this way without raising some serious eyebrows.

>What probably should happen is to make converting from any cryptocurrency to major world currencies a crime.

I have a better idea, let's make everything that causes pollution a crime. Bought a plastic water bottle? Straight to jail. Refueled your car? Yep, jail. You used your heater? Believe it or not, jail. I'm sure we'll live in a pollution free utopia in no time.

Thank you for your insightful contribution. This is the quality comments I come to HN for.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#273

Post by ben_w »

jude- wrote: post #140
SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you handwaving away my concerns? You do realize cryptocurrencies (and to be specific, PoW ones) aren't replacing any of these so called other things that pollute. Speaking of which, can you quantify what things pollute more? At any rate, I get the feeling we are going to be talking past each other and wasting time and energy (heh) on this conversation.

> 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…

> Calm down.

FYI this is the worst thing one can say during a discussion. The effect, regardless of intent, is always to annoy the other.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#274

Post by jrek »

young_unixer wrote: post #195
ayngg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes. Cryptocurrencies are used because they're the only market that hasn't yet been regulated to death. People come to Bitcoin for 2 reasons, mainly: 1. It's a practical way to store value without the government destroying it by monetary emission. 2. People are free to speculate. The solution to the first point is that governments should stop pulling the rug from under people's feet. Monetary emission should be predi…

Monetary emission is already tied to the cost of consumer goods. Central banks make interest rate and reserve requirement changes that regulate growth in money supply. Those changes are aimed, in part, at achieving a price inflation target.

And price inflation, which is the relevant metric (as opposed to monetary inflation) in the context of a claim that the government destroys value, has been extremely predictable for 20 years.

This comes up again and again in bitcoin discussions. Money supply has to grow for price stability and to avoid deflation. This also applied even when there was gold convertibility.

What exactly is your issue with a growing money supply?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#275

Post by hannob »

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…

We know since many decades that a carbon price might be a good idea. But it's not that simple, because either you do it worldwide or you introduce lots of exceptions or you do something like carbon import tariffs (which the EU wants to do, but I think no such mechanism exists anywhere in the world right now).

Bottom line is: Most of the world has no carbon price, and the places that do have one (e.g. the EU ETS) there are so many loopholes that it is not very effective. It's not that it isn't worth trying to do better, but a carbon price is definitely not a short term solution.

So I'm inclined to think whoever proposes a carbon price as "the one true solution" really doesn't want a solution at all.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#276

Post by jobigoud »

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.

The way it works is that your electricity provider company buys the amount of electricity you consume from renewable electricity producers. It balances out and it's equivalent on average to you using only renewable electricity.

Multiple providers are working like this in Europe at least. They partner with many local solar/hydro/wind producers. It's approximate of course they can't predict exactly the amount required in advance but in the grand scheme of things it works by supply/demand mechanics..

You could trace btc to a reward allocated to a miner on a renewable electricity contract. Then you know an equivalent amount of energy used to mine these coins was produced sustainably.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#278

Post by jobigoud »

bawolff wrote: post #214

I'm surprised nuclear isn't used more here. My understanding that one of the problems of nuclear is you cant turn it on/off quickly. So why not just mine crypto at low load times?

I think most miners (i.e Chinese ones) are using hydro which is already more sustainable and flexible than nuclear or coal.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#279

Post by imtringued »

caf wrote: post #175
ayngg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Jewelry is a surprisingly big chunk of global gold demand. Yes it is ultimately meaningless other than to impress other humans, however this meaningless activity is part of human nature. We derive joy from it.

Meanwhile Bitcoin is just a means to an end, getting rich quick. The fun doesn't happen because we have Bitcoin, but rather because we get rid of them for an unreasonable price.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#280

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

jude- wrote: post #236
SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I'll just say right here I do believe your heart is in the right place and you want there to be an alternative to the government run and controlled fiat. That said, gold technically exists already to meet this in my humble opinion as a proper hedge. Also, to your point about greenifying Bitcoin, I just believe the assumption that bitcoin will just move over 100% to green energy sources is naive at best, and con…

> you want there to be an alternative to the government run and controlled fiat. I, uh, never said that. I don't see Bitcoin as a currency at all. > That said, gold technically exists already to meet this in my humble opinion as a proper hedge. No thank you. Gold-mining is way more ecologically disastrous. If Bitcoin replaces gold, the environment will be better off for it -- at least you can mine Bitcoin with nothin…

>I, uh, never said that. I don't see Bitcoin as a currency at all.

I stand corrected.

>No thank you. Gold-mining is way more ecologically disastrous. If Bitcoin replaces gold, the environment will be better off for it -- at least you can mine Bitcoin with nothing more than solar panels and wind farms.

Well there's just one problem. You need gold as a component in the creation of systems that mine bitcoin. Oops! So we are kinda stuck with gold mining, which we need to do, just so bitcoin can be mined, which we don't have to do. With that in mind, why not just skip to just straight up owning gold?

>One way or another, the world is going to need to move all its energy production to 100% renewables, or humanity is going to be in for a world of hurt. But, this is true with or without cryptocurrencies.

On this point, I hope you are right. We do need to get off of coal and gas as soon as we can.

Post reply on HN