Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#141

Post by wruza » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #107

How does this compare to the environmental impact of the millions of people constantly surfing sites like Reddit all day? I always hear about how bad Bitcoin is in terms of energy consumption, but nobody seems to perform similar analysis on actually frivolous activities we all accept in our society.

But how does reddit browsing scale? We may choose all-electric activities, but we still have only 24h/day. As far as I understand it, PoW mining and its energy consumption can grow arbitrarily, the only limit is a mining economy that grows with a coin value. And it grows fast. How much energy will it take if BTC or ETH hits e.g. $1M in few years?

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#142

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

ivanche wrote: post #126

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presumably, forcing illegal actions to happen through bitcoin adds friction to it. Adding friction to non-illegal actions is harm, not benefit. Adding friction to illegal actions is the opposite of what happens, because it's enabling something that wasn't previously possible. Also, criminals can survive higher friction than dissidents and vulnerable populations because the illegality creates a moat that raises marg…

> You go to some cryptocurrency hangout, pay some stranger a hundred bucks in cash and they transfer a hundred bucks in Bitcoin to your wallet. You go pay for a VPN with it. Then everybody can see that A transferred money to B and B transferred money to C, but nobody knows that you're B Nobody? Some stranger from above knows that you're B!

But they're a stranger. They don't know that you're you.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#143

Post by londons_explore » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #101

dwieringa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mined BURST for a while, another PoS coin. It's been around for 7 years, works great, and solves the PoW power problem. It's got a lot of functionality built in for the nodes, like messaging and marketplace functions. And nobody cares. If I had to guess, I'd say the attractiveness of mining the PoW coins is that it's very expensive, but accordingly very rewarding. When the coins are cheap and easy to secure as a no…

Any of these coins could have linked themselves to bitcoin. Ie. They could have issued coins at the start to all bitcoin holders. If they did that, they'd get over the "we're not bitcoin" hurdle, assuming the tech was any good.

The best way is to have a way to "lock" bitcoin which can then be "imported" with a 1:1 exchange rate into your new altcoin.

That way there is no proliferation of coins, and people will have trust knowing each of your altcoins is backed 1:1 with bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#144

Post by whoisninja » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

whoisninja wrote: post #135

drink wall st. ESG kool-aid if you want, i have seen diamond merchants in ESG ETF componens. go figure. your electric cars as well combustin engine cars use lot of energy worse than Bitcoin. oh cars get you from point a to point b. guess what, Bitcoin gets your value from point a to point b more efficiently than anything else out there yet and it maintains so keeping it as the hardest money known to humans gold minin…

read this if you want to help yourself:

https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#145

Post by deeeeplearning » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

solosoyokaze wrote: post #99

minitoar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people would use Bitcoin in this scenario? I reckon so few as to render it worthless. Ergo, Bitcoin requires the same expensive infrastructure as our fiat banking.

"This scenario" being the complete disbanding of the US military? I imagine everyone would be using crypto at that point since there would be no USD.

Yay I can't wait for a trip to the grocery store to take 12 hours because every transaction takes 20 minutes. lol. This is just pure bitcoin hype, there are far better coins to use if you are actually interested in them as currency.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#146

Post by Nursie » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #96

Nursie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that takes off, aren't we liable to see a rocketing demand for storage, doing to the storage market what PoW does for the graphics card market? And while it may be low energy to run, creating hard drives just to prove you have space seems a less than environmentally friendly activity. It looks just like another proof of waste

The main cost of compute is electricity. The main cost of hard drives is intellectual property (ie. Paying for the R&D, patents and licenses for all the tech inside). It isn't clear that "wasting" intellectual property is in any way bad for the wider economy. In fact, it probably just subsidies storage for the rest of us in the long term.

I was more thinking of the waste involved in manufacturing. If there's suddenly a much more direct profit motive to buying drives it's going to push more manufacturing, which is not the same as ongoing burning of energy for PoW, sure, but it's not going to be without side effects.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#147

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

lottin wrote: post #134

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presumably, forcing illegal actions to happen through bitcoin adds friction to it. Adding friction to non-illegal actions is harm, not benefit. Adding friction to illegal actions is the opposite of what happens, because it's enabling something that wasn't previously possible. Also, criminals can survive higher friction than dissidents and vulnerable populations because the illegality creates a moat that raises marg…

> You go to some cryptocurrency hangout, pay some stranger a hundred bucks in cash and they transfer a hundred bucks in Bitcoin to your wallet. You go pay for a VPN with it. Then everybody can see that A transferred money to B and B transferred money to C, but nobody knows that you're B and those are the only transactions for that wallet. Essentially you have to create a brand-new, single-use wallet for every transac…

So what?

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#148

Post by solosoyokaze » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #140

solosoyokaze wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine I'd have to give the bank much more money or information than I already have to get this business service. At the very least, it would take time. Anyone can do this now with HD wallets.

> I imagine... That’s moving the goalpost. There isn’t any barrier to programmatic banking. The use case is too narrow for it to be a widely-advertised service.

It's not moving the goal posts. I cannot do this right now.

> There isn’t any barrier to programmatic banking.

There absolutely is, there's no open API for this.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#149

Post by simiones » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

solosoyokaze wrote: post #112

ashtonkem wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m asserting that a country that used Bitcoin would still warmonger for oil.

I'm asserting that you can't have a currency independent of a country without crypto. It's a prerequisite to defunding warmongering countries.

Warmongering has next to nothing to do with currency.

If anything, limited supplies of anything, including bitcoin, are a likely to spark wars, not end them.

If you truly wish to help stop wars, join a peace-loving organization, attend marches, lobby politicians. You'll find all of the real work on this are in leftist organizations, which fight against the real foundations of war, such as inequality, ideas of exceptionalism, corporate greed and others. Fiat currency is well down on the list of the world's problems.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#150

Post by Nursie » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 6:00 PM UTC

solosoyokaze wrote: post #120

Nursie wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Escrow accounts and merchant layers are in development Right, so that means that Bitcoin is not providing many of the services the financial system provides now, so comparing its energy footprint to the existing financial system is pointless. That's the point I was making. You can't say "Bitcoin uses X electricity and Finance uses Y, which is bigger, and so is worse" when Bitcoin doesn't provide the same services or…

I actually agree with you that they're apples and oranges. But I also think it doesn't make any sense to complain about Bitcoin's energy usage as I see it as well worth the investment.

Needless to say, I think that in a world where we are trying to become (as a general rule) more power-efficient in order to combat CO2 emissions, that's not the case. Adding whole new countries-worth of power use just for some new financial geekery really doesn't seem worth it.

But I'm glad we agree the comparison with the existing system is a silly one.