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

Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem

sciencedirect.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 177 posts

Re: Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem

#101

Post by tiluha »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #84
tiluha wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transactions do not matter at all. The energy is used to mine blocks. The same energy is used whether the blocks contain transactions or are empty

Ok so there's no value for a transaction, but rather for a block. However,many miners compete for a block, is this accounted for or is the number an average for the winning miner?

I don't really get what you are saying, but the calculation for CO2 emissions per block is basically this:

reward_per_block * price = value_per_block

cost_per_hash * avg_hashes_to_find_block = cost_per_block

cost_per_hash is the cost of electricity and mining hardware . If value_per_block > cost_per_block, mining is profitable and more miners will join the network, increasing avg_hashes_to_find_block, until value_per_block == cost_per_block.

co2_emissions = avg_hashes_to_find_block * co2_per_hash.

So the emissions are a function of the price of bitcoin and the price of (electricity + mining hardware).

Re: Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem

#102

Post by formerly_proven »

tudorizer wrote: post #71
yawaworht1978 wrote: post #25

One bullet point says: "On average Bitcoin generates 272 g of e-waste per transaction processed on the blockchain." So transactions on exchanges are less wasteful? A deposit from wallet to exchange generates the same pollution? Or is it "only" mined transactions? Does the transaction size matter?

as opposed to how many grams over the regular banking system that is running on networks far less efficient than Bitcoin?

The big three CC companies process around 1.3 billion transactions per day, while Bitcoin processes around 250 thousand transactions per day. That's 5200x more transactions, and you claim they're less efficient than Bitcoin. So... those three companies use >5000x as much electricity as Argentina? (Bitcoin currently uses 150 TWh/year, 5200x that is about 30x global electricity generation FYI).

(This is obviously not quite apples for apples, since you'd also have to account for VISA & Co. likely employing more people than Bitcoin, on the other hand, Bitcoin also requires absurd amounts of throw-away hardware.)

Re: Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem

#103

Post by CubsFan1060 »

only_as_i_fall wrote: post #87
CubsFan1060 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. But that's everyone. I've yet to meet a single person who is willing to make the personal sacrifices needed to actually help the world. You get a bunch of normal people (i.e. 'peasants' if you wish) sitting around talking about how to save the environment while eating fruit grown in a faraway land and trucked to them in a refrigerated truck. Everyone wants to say the solution is that other people should…

We just need to align incentives. If externalities were factored into the cost of imported fruits for example, it wouldn't even be a problem. As it stands do you even know what the relative carbon cost of growing or importing an apple vs a watermelon is in your area? Do you know how to tell if a fruit is grown locally or not while standing at the supermarket? Do you think the average person can reasonably be expected…

Some things yes, some things no. I suspect many people realize there are no local producers for a lot of things (I don't think North Dakota has a lot of Coconut production), and seasonality is also important (not a lot of apples are grown in January in New York). But even when it's obvious, people still make choices.

Including externalities would be an interesting path. I don't know what that would realistically look like though. Gas tax?

Re: Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem

#104

Post by jcranmer »

mcjshciejebcu wrote: post #93
freeflight wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These comparisons have been around for a while and they always look really bad for Bitcoin [0], not just in terms of resources but particularly in terms of speed and responsiveness. [0] https://www.businessinsider.in/cryptocurrency/news/a-single-...

That's getting close, and it doesn't look good for bitcoin, but the estimates of visa's energy useage are from a visa published report, and they seem to omit the energy usage needed to sustain employees. Of course, the bitcoin energy estimates also omit the energy usage for employees, but it's easy for me to imagine those are dwarfed by mining costs, and it's not easy for me to imagine something similar for visa.

The energy usage to attribute to employees should be proportional to the number of employees more than anything else. There's no a priori reason to expect that a "Bitcoin employee" uses more or less energy than a "VISA employee."

So as far whether or not that matters... do you expect that there is a substantially different number of employees need to maintain the VISA system than the Bitcoin system, on a per-transaction basis? Even if you're generous and say that VISA needs 10× the employees that Bitcoin would (were it the same size as VISA), it would still require that an employee use 100,000× the energy cost of a transaction to overcome the fact that Bitcoin transactions require 1,000,000× the energy of VISA.

Re: Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem

#105

Post by BLKNSLVR »

disruptalot wrote: post #98
jacknews wrote: post #83

"The soaring demand for mining hardware may disrupt global semiconductor supply chains." May? Have you seen graphic card prices lately? Even really old cards are selling for multiples of what they were a year or so ago.

Using graphic cards to mine bitcoin became unprofitable about 10 years ago. The graphic card shortage can be linked to other cryptocurrencies.

Primarily Ethereum, which will hopefully be migrating away from proof of work (mining) in late 2021 / early 2022, so hopefully there will be an abundance of cheap second hand options (which will admittedly have lead hard lives), but also dramatically reduce the demand for new cards.

Re: Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem

#106

Post by mcjshciejebcu »

only_as_i_fall wrote: post #94
mcjshciejebcu wrote: post #35

Whenever I read anything about how resource intensive the bitcoin network is, I wonder how it compares to the total energy and other resource use of traditional finance. Those costs have got to be pretty high for traditional finance, especially considering minting and transportation of physical money and considering the innumerable humans needed to run it. However, I've never seen a serious estimate of those numbers,…

Unless bitcoin can credibly be a total replacement for traditional finance this isn't really a meaningful comparison though. Perhaps bitcoin or some other crypto can serve as a currency in a sense, but you'd still need financial institutions to do things like write loans and manage other assets.

Another commenter bbrought this up. I agree, it's not an apples to apples comparison, but think it would still help give a sense of scale.

Re: Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem

#107

Post by [deleted] »

nowahe wrote: post #82
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why people complain so much about the environmental impact of AirPods. I mean it would be great if they were rechargeable and recyclable etc - but they weigh 4g - about 1/50 of a pair of headphones. If the average person uses them for 2 years they'll be a drop in the ocean to the tens or hundreds of kilos of plastic and other objects they don't recycle fully in that time.

For me, it's not the plastic casing or even the battery that seems the biggest waste, but their ICs. It's not that it's polluting the environment that much, more that it's wasteful and creates a unnecessary demand in IC production when they are thrown away in perfect working order.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN