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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#351

Post by jokethrowaway »

cromwellian wrote: post #223
young_unixer wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh come on. My portfolio is safer in a diversified basket of stocks, bonds, real estate and other holdings than it is in bitcoin. > we can freely speculate Right, because that worked oh so well for Long Term Capital Management, or the 2008 Housing Crisis, or the Great Depression, or Dutch Tulips, or... This libertarian, nay, Austrian, fantasy that if only we would deregulate everything, these incredible damaging boom…

While I agree with you on Bitcoin safety (your portfolio is safer because the only thing keeping BTC up is speculation), I don't think you can say the Austrian school is fantasy.

It hasn't been attempted and I think deregulation / decentralization of the economy has good chances of getting rid of boom/bust cycles.

Without a central bank playing with credit you wouldn't have boom / bust cycles: what's more likely is that you'll find smaller players doing boom / bust cycles in different industries with far less damaging effects.

I sympathise with the libertarian ideas behind BTC, but it's also the most inefficient and power hungry way of reaching the goal. This is a political problem and we need to solve it politically, not technically.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#352

Post by Applejinx »

vkou wrote: post #318
jrek wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> What exactly is your issue with a growing money supply? The primary issue is that simply sitting on a dragon's hoard of money should entitle me to a bigger share of the world's wealth, as time goes on, rather than a smaller share.

Socially, why? I could see making the argument for 'the same share, in perpetuity' as that is kind of the whole idea of what money is: parking value in some way.

Why bigger, exactly? What is the justification?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#353

Post by EdwinLarkin »

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…

That's absurd.

>I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere.

Ok then lets end 2 biggest industries that pollute the planet the most. Construction and food production.

We can live in environmentally friendly uniform grey boxes and eat protein bars.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#354

Post by maxerickson »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #129
maxerickson wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's reasonably likely that there will be a run on dollars at some point. If/when it happens, the bitcoin network collapsing is a pretty likely outcome. (what I mean by a run on dollars is that lots of people may decide they want dollars instead of bitcoin, so the people with dollars won't have to pay as much for bitcoin, and then the people who want dollars will have to accept less for their bitcoin, and then…)

There's an outside possibility that mining will drop off so quickly that the 2016 block difficulty recalculation will struggle to happen, but honestly if that happens there will be a consensus fork. Thankfully what will happen if the price collapses is that mining will reduce. Bitcoin has been through a cycle of a "run on dollars" before, it has never died before.

In the article or discussion here someone states that $2000 of electricity is used per bitcoin in the block reward.

If the price collapses to $100 that's a lot of hardware that isn't running.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#355

Post by throwaway271818 »

arcticbull wrote: post #271
throwaway271818 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah, but they’re calculating e-waste in the form of specialized mining hardware (ASIC) that, at present, goes obsolete every few years.

The e-waste generated this way is not an intrinsic cost of handling a transaction, since the hardware could hypothetically be reused or recycled. It seems unwise to think of it as an irreducible cost per txn, rather than a dynamic figure that would likely improve over time (especially if the carbon externality were appropriately taxed)

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#356

Post by Slartie »

admax88q wrote: post #186

All this talk about Bitcoin causing global warming is starting to feel like a targetted misinformation campaign. Yes it's wasteful, and yes it's using a fair amount of energy at the moment. But all estimates show it's still a very small fraction of the problem. It feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about bitcoins carbon footprint for its size.

It feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of energy running the bitcoin network for its benefits.

That's the reason it comes up a lot in those debates. Sure, cars use more energy emitting more CO2 right now, but the benefit of all the cars worldwide is in an entirely different dimension compared to Bitcoin. Most people intuitively grasp that stuff having a huge benefit for a huge lot of people must be allowed to use up more energy in absolute terms than stuff that has a very minor benefit for a very small group of people.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#357

Post by maxerickson »

vmception wrote: post #249
maxerickson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why they are talking about the flaring instead of hydroelectric, to sell the idea that it's using power that wouldn't be recovered otherwise. Of course it is sort of likely that cheap hydroelectric is a much bigger component of the supply than gas power plants installed just to mine bitcoin.

they? Its not a cabal, just say whats not accurate about the statement and we’ll discuss that, states are desperate to reduce their flaring emissions and on-site miners are a big solution for them and its actually happening. If the percentages are currently wrong just say so

It's a singular they, not an imagined cabal.

It's a neat trick to not say anything specific and then demand people argue the specifics.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#358

Post by EdwinLarkin »

totony wrote: post #350
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If using a GPU to mine crypto is unethical shouldn't using a GPU to do things like videogames and rending hollywood super hero movies should also be taxed I mean they both run GPUs at 100% for hundreds of hours. Perhaps computing power in general should be capped so it can only use small amounts of power.

Carbon tax is not about making something illegal. You playing a game 4h/day is nothing compared to 1000 gpus mining 24/7. One is pennies in tax and the other would (presumably) be way more significant.

Even today carbon taxes are the stupidest idea people from rich nations thought about.

Around 5BN from the developing world will laugh at this proposal.

They will not be able to trade with you? Oh well they might trade among themselves and dont have to face competition from rich countries.

I call this win win.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#359

Post by roenxi »

arcticbull wrote: post #261
caf wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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…

There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run.

Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency.

All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let people keep reliable records without bringing in the inflation tax or changing the rules, things like gold and bitcoin wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting. But they are interesting, because it is normally policy to block anyone who tries to store (small-time) wealth for more than a couple of years.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#360

Post by CTDOCodebases »

tsss wrote: post #319
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The miners don’t compute hashes of random data. They confirm transactions. If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.

It does so with the same efficiency as a Rube Goldberg machine moves a marble from one place to another.

Efficient or secure. Take your pick.
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