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Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

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Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#261

Post by sudosysgen »

la_fayette wrote: post #255
arcticbull wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part is that according to Cambridge some 40% of that is coal power [1]. Frequently the dirtiest coal power in the world, between Xinjiang (no longer, probably...) and Kazakhstan. Coal power causes excess mortality of anywhere between 25 and 278 deaths per TWh generated depending on how you're counting it and (most importantly) where it's generated. [2,3,4] Bitcoin's addiction to dirty coal killed between 15…

There are no new dirty power plants like coal or nuclear built specifically for bitcoin mining. There are definitely new renewable energy sources built for bitcoin mining. So dirty energy would be used anyway! The rate of new renewable energy sources created because of bitcoin is higher overall than without bitcoin.

I'm sure fewer coal power plants would have been built in China before the ban if it wasn't for Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#262

Post by cipheredStones »

boramalper wrote: post #232
cipheredStones wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, if your system can handle the vast majority of cases easily and most edge cases with some effort, you don't think about tearing it down to replace it with an entirely new one that's far less efficient and far more difficult for the end user. The appeal of cryptocurrencies for most buyers is that Bitcoin dectupled in a year and people seem to be getting fabulously rich off of them everywhere you look. No mo…

Two things: (1) No one is tearing anything down as far I am concerned, rather people are working on a new system that is intended to complement, surpass, and eventually perhaps even replace the current one in a distant future. For instance, I do not put my savings in neobanks nor would be able to get a mortgage from them anyway, but they are absolutely fantastic for day-to-day use. Is it really impossible to imagine…

Part of my point is that cryptocurrency as it stands really doesn't complement the normal financial system.

Your landlord isn't going to accept crypto for your deposit because it would require them to invest a great deal of time and effort to learn about how to use crypto, force them to accept additional risk (of e.g. having their coins stolen, of losing access to them), and give them marginal-if-any benefit.

And that issue generalizes to most cases you can think of: big institutions could figure out how to do Bitcoin, but won't want to (financial risk, legal risk, complexity, institutional conservatism), and most individuals won't or can't do it (are the sex workers excluded from the normal financial system supposed to figure out how public-key cryptography works?).

For these problems of interfacing with the normal system to disappear, crypto would likely need to become the predominant way many people exchange value - and that would be bad.

Or, alternatively, you could have most people do crypto through centralized platforms that abstract most of these problems away, which gives you many of the disadvantages of crypto without any of the permissionlessness.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#263

Post by pudo »

la_fayette wrote: post #255
arcticbull wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part is that according to Cambridge some 40% of that is coal power [1]. Frequently the dirtiest coal power in the world, between Xinjiang (no longer, probably...) and Kazakhstan. Coal power causes excess mortality of anywhere between 25 and 278 deaths per TWh generated depending on how you're counting it and (most importantly) where it's generated. [2,3,4] Bitcoin's addiction to dirty coal killed between 15…

There are no new dirty power plants like coal or nuclear built specifically for bitcoin mining. There are definitely new renewable energy sources built for bitcoin mining. So dirty energy would be used anyway! The rate of new renewable energy sources created because of bitcoin is higher overall than without bitcoin.

Source? To what extent has this been quantified? Of course there's some anecdotes that someone puts a couple of solar panels on a mining cluster, but for all the numbers I've seen around this, it's lipstick on a pig. The climate balance of the thing is horrific.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#265

Post by hocuspocus »

jakub_g wrote: post #185
hocuspocus wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's none. It's mind boggling that 12 years later, people like the parent poster are still claiming bullshit like that when there's literally zero evidence, rather the opposite. No country with underdeveloped banking and payment systems is interested in something like Bitcoin. They need something cheap and efficient, federated and... centralized! Many African countries are perfectly fine using M-Pesa.

I'm a crypto hater as much as one can be, but there are many countries in Asia and S.America where locals may not want to stick to local currency due to sky high inflation, and getting foreign currency is not easy or illegal, and/or making international transfer is not possible or expensive.

Which is a political problem and has nothing to do with their banking systems. These people don't want to use Bitcoin, like they didn't want to use USD or EUR before.

And using Bitcoin as a workaround against authoritarian governments sounds pretty risky to me. Everything leaves a trace on the blockchain and it's fairly easy to control (and ban) conversion to/from fiat currency. Going back to peer-to-peer barter is something, I guess, but I don't think we should celebrate that.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#266

Post by arcticbull »

cableshaft wrote: post #256
arcticbull wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So now what? Can't ban bitcoin mining in China twice. How are we going to get them to reduce emissions now? Indeed, they have a lot of work ahead of them. I will not disagree. I'm hopeful their huge push towards nuclear power will help them bridge the gap. They are one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions and all sorts of other pollution in the world. > You are neither the worst person I know, nor did you mak…

Fair enough. Sounds like we're mostly on the same page on this issue after all, except I don't want to see bitcoin eliminated, just somehow figure out a way to significantly reduce how much electricity it's started consuming and for it to be run on 100% renewables someday (hopefully sooner than later).

I would love it to be, but it won't, I concede.

Its energy and resource consumption cap is proportional to its unit price times block reward. For the foreseeable future, as long as number go up, consumption will go up. And this is the most critical time for climate change in our lives. Any green energy we generate must go to displacing carbon-intensive processes or we'll be trading bitcoin for citrus from rafts on waterworld.

The worst part is, once we run out of block reward, there's no guarantee people will be willing to pay enough per transaction to actually secure the network to any meaningful degree, so all this resource consumption today may well be for nothing.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#267

Post by xiphias2 »

it_citizen wrote: post #245
xiphias2 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that changes is that governments have to raise the taxes from people explicitly instead of a hidden inflation tax. I think it’s great for goverments as well, as it gives them more responsibility over how they are spending money. Norway of a great example of people paying high taxes because they see the government as responsibly spending and reinvesting its tax revenue. I never asked money from other pe…

How do you keep inflation within an economic zone between 2 and 3 percent without control over your money? No matter if the economic growth is between -1% and 10%?

Bitcoin has a built in inflation schedule. If you believe that over long term price inflation of scarce assets (like New York real estate) will follow the inflation of the emission of the currency (which I believe), Bitcoin will make sure it will stay under 1% in the future.

Right now Bitcoin is in the adoption phase, that’s why people are seeing the crazy price moves, but I expect it to normalize in the future (maybe 10 years from now).

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#268

Post by user-the-name »

scottiebarnes wrote: post #171
arcticbull wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rather than scapegoat Bitcoin for our climate crisis, start by... I too enjoy whataboutism to distract folks from the environmental impact of my favorite Ponzi scheme. > Do those things, and Bitcoin will literally subsidize and accelerate clean energy infrastructure investment. If you invest in massive solar and wind plants then use that energy to roll rocks up and back down a hill forever like Sisyphus, that's jus…

It's a waste to you, but not to the people who use and value it.

And they are all sociopaths who would boil the planet so that they can gamble and scam people.

Fuck them. Seriously, fuck them. Ban bitcoin, smash every bitcoin mining rig. The world will be better in every way the next day.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#269

Post by [deleted] »

woodruffw wrote: post #71
mwattsun wrote: post #25

The counter argument is that Bitcoin is a battery [1] so that if you live in a place like Iceland with plentiful energy, so much that even exporting it as aluminum leaves extra, then you can turn it into Bitcoin and export it that way. But most Bitcoin mining is not that. I feel like Joni Mitchell in the Big Yellow Taxi: "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" [2] Why are we allowing this to happen? (Well, at…

Bitcoin is a sink , not a battery. You can dump excess power into it, but you can't take it out. The aluminum analogy is apt, but at least I can cook eggs on aluminum pans and wrap my leftovers in tinfoil, even if I can't turn it back into electricity. Bitcoin and other PoS schemes have no such upside.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#270

Post by hsavit1 »

xiphias2 wrote: post #141
hsavit1 wrote: post #28

We are rapidly depleting our remaining carbon budget. Can a bitcoiner please explain to me why this is a necessary technological development right now?

Sure, if you are serious, the Bitcoin Standard book is a worthy read. But what’s important is that Bitcoin solves the inflation problem, and proof of work is the only system that we have for getting rid of the Cantillon effect of modern banking: the closer people get to the top of the central banks, the richer they get and destroy life for those who don’t have access to the inner layers of central banking. With Bitco…

thanks for responding. why does bitcoin remove this cantillion effect? Remember that Roger Ver, who was in the room when Segwit 2 was discussed, decided to go forth with the bitcoin cash fork, which pleased the miners. It appears to me that miners are able to turn profit, that's why we see new mining facilities popping up around the world. also, does the market actually select the most efficient technology? Anecdotally speaking, crypto "investors" en masse appear to know very very little about the underlying tech - most appear to invest because "number goes up" Finally, there is legitimate risk of societal collapse on the table due to climate collapse. Is that something you factored into your perspective?
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