Sincerely, every single person involved in a crypto mining operation should be arrested. Just pretend they are financing the Houthis or something and apologize for it in a decade or two, we are way beyond the 11th hour to get our carbon emissions under control and nonsense like this isn't helping.
Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
191–200 of 499 posts
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#192I live in a house house exclusively warmed by electric heating (underfloor downstairs, wall-mounted upstairs). The heating system takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with no other direct benefits. As a whole the heating system can be quite power-hungry during cold periods. A crypto mining rig takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with the possible benefit of creating so…
Heating your house with direct electricity is wasteful. You should get a heat pump. You will get your money back in no time. This changes the equation.
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Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#1932.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. This is the type of tragedy of the commons issue where regulation is needed. For any one actor they can justify spending infinity energy as long as their ROI is positive. There are enough justifications out there that it's easy to convince oneself that you're doing the world a favor ("I'm just librating finance and fighting the good fight against the central…
> 2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane.
It kind of is!
But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation. As governments print increasingly more money, and the amount of BTC stays the same, each BTC becomes worth more. It's very simple. The demand for such an asset is apparently quite high; high enough to spend up to 2.3% of total US energy.
If the world operated on non-inflationary systems there would perhaps still be a small need for BTC, such as providing liberty in committing financial transactions, but I doubt it'd be nearly as big as it is today on that basis alone.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#194Power usage by itself is meaningless. The real question is the power providing utility or not. Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad. They provide real benefit and utility. But, perhaps power wasted on cloth dryers and Christmas lights are a western frivolity. So, the real argument is Bitcoin useful or not. Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.
It's really hard to gauge how much utility cryptos are providing. After all, people who need cryptos the most are those who can't use "proper" channels to transfer money.
Also, some portion of those likely shouldn't be allowed to use any channels of money transfer (criminal organizations and their ilk), as they ultimately provide negative utility to the rest of society.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#195I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
> 1. There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.
I ran the numbers a few days ago (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234766). Bitcoin miners plausibly use more energy than the entire traditional banking sector. Not just on a per-transaction basis (which is blindingly obvious if you think about it), but on a gross energy consumption basis.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem: as soon as you do anthing offchain, bitcoin doesn't protect you. Bitcoin doesn't gurantee that if you give someone money and exchange it for bitcoin that you will get the bitcoin. It will not guarantee that if you want to buy something, that you receive the item in the expected quality, time and condition. The only use case for bitcoin are ON chain transactions and the only solution…
> as soon as you do anthing offchain, bitcoin doesn't protect you except that most, if not all, off-chain networks are still based on-chain and have mechanisms for being a relatively secure way for exchanging day-to-day without having to settle on-chain for every transaction
Imagine a world were someone with a private key could send money transparently to someone else by just signing the transaction publicly.
Suddenly you don't need PoW anymore. The only thing bitcoins gigantic energy consumption does is making sure there is only one central blockchain. Nothing more. And for that it needs 2% of total US Power usage...
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#197I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
> There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry. This is your first mistake: the traditional banking system does not have a security model predicated on the ability to waste power. Bitcoin does, and it’s dynamic so there’s no way to waste less power which isn’t explicitly ceding control. The second error is tr…
I do admit that the comparison is not a strong one. It wasn't intended to be, honestly, it was just an easy example. My point was more that the data presented in the article aren't very useful on their own.
Again, if you think all cryptocurrency has 0 value, then all usage is obviously bad. But the reality is that it has some value, and much of that value is in the form of scams (most types of coins, by number, are scams), and much of the value is just speculative investment, but it is a real thing that people spend real money on. Focusing on miners makes it seem like all the value of crypto comes directly from energy - but nobody would spend energy mining it if others wouldn't buy it.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not a crypto proponent per se Yet you rolled out the standard crypto talking points flawlessly. > Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist Again, I suspect you aren't an environmentalist either. Please just be straightforward with your motivations here.
Your suspicions are wrong, but you're welcome to add to the debate if you have anything to contribute.
I'll be upfront with you: bitcoin is probably the worst "tech" ever mass-adopted. That's my bias.
1. The banking industry is thousands of times more important that crypto for everyday Americans. It's what literally makes our entire economy run. Crypto is used for speculation. What you should be comparing bitcoin against is the energy it takes to list a few ETFs on an exchange, which is essentially the cost of a few hundred servers, aka nothing. Bitcoin is ungodly inefficient and will only become more inefficient.
2. "It could be less, much less, or much less," This is a filler argument. Study says "around" a number, so you're arguing it could be a really broad definition of "around"? Not a serious take.
3. The absolute number matters because it's showing the economic activity is being concentrated in the pockets of just 137 entities. This is NOT a broad-base economic phenomenon that helps employ people in communities around the country, like say running gas stations (another polluting industry). If you're going to use 2% of the nation's electricity, you'd want the benefits spread across at least 2% of the population. Not 0.00002%.
4. Net energy consumption pulls from our current energy grid. Within a grid, if you use more clean electricity in one area, it'll pull more supply from dirtier sources elsewhere. Saying that bitcoin mining helps "green" the grid is a myth because you have to mine it 24/7/365, which means intermittent sources like wind and solar are at a big disadvantage. Battery storage tech is not there yet, thus gas plants and dirtier sources have to kick-in to keep up with 24/7 consumption.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#199The crypto industry financed a 2.3% expansion of the US's power generating capacity. I don't care what we're spending energy on. Being stingy about it just makes all of us poorer. There's a quadrillion-cubic-kilometer flaming ball of plasma in the sky. We have the ability to generate literally infinite electricity; and quite literally the only way we get to that is by increasing the amount of electricity we're using,…
This 2.3% mostly came from fossil fuels not new green generation capacity. You need to consider where these miners are located based on electricity costs and what infrastructure is built there not simply a hypothetical grid where arbitrary power can be moved anywhere at zero losses.
Wrong. And not just a little wrong; a LOT wrong.
86% of new energy capacity added in the United States in 2023 was from non-fossil fuel sources.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1304-augu....
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#2002.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. This is the type of tragedy of the commons issue where regulation is needed. For any one actor they can justify spending infinity energy as long as their ROI is positive. There are enough justifications out there that it's easy to convince oneself that you're doing the world a favor ("I'm just librating finance and fighting the good fight against the central…
> 2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. It kind of is! But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation. As governments print increasingly more money, and the amount of BTC stays the same, each BTC becomes worth more. It's very simple. The demand for such an asset is apparently…
It already exists it’s called gold. There are some hassles associated with physical storage and transport of gold but not 2.3% of total US power consumption worth of hassles.