This strikes me as hysterical. Bitcoin miners tend to co-locate with the cheapest sources of electricity, which tend to be places where electricity is abundant and hard to export. Like hydro power, geothermal, and flare gas at refineries. To assume they're using the same mix of power generating processes as average, or as everyone else, doesn't make any sense. They aren't. They're effectively finding a financial mean…
The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
#32Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about our inability to generate clean energy while ignoring our ability to generate clean energy.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
#33To counter the whataboutisms abounding in the comments thread here, I will start a comment tree differently. How does the bitcoin community solve this problem? Is migrating to a proof-of-stake system viable in the long term? Would doing so affect the value of bitcoin as an asset? Would it improve it's value as anything else?
Their mainnet has been out for a month and people are able to mine ("farm") using low-energy hardware. There are people that are farming petabytes of storage with a single Raspberry Pi. I myself am using an old crappy laptop with some unused hard drives I had around the house.
Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
#34Food for thought: 65% of bitcoin mining occurs in China [1], China is still building nuclear reactors [2], there are millions of tonnes of uranium reserves on the planet [3]. Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about…
Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
#35How are non-proof of work algorithms doing?
Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
#36Food for thought: 65% of bitcoin mining occurs in China [1], China is still building nuclear reactors [2], there are millions of tonnes of uranium reserves on the planet [3]. Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about…
On the other hand, if we were not doing Bitcoin, we could use that nuclear power for something else , like replacing coal plants...
Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, if we were not doing Bitcoin, we could use that nuclear power for something else , like replacing coal plants...
We have so much uranium that we can do Bitcoin AND everything else.
Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
#38Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
#39How are non-proof of work algorithms doing?
Chia (by bittorrent inventor Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time and is specifically billed as a scalable, energy-efficient alternative with the same Nakamoto guarantees as Bitcoin. Their mainnet has been out for a month and the network is growing like 35% week over week. https://chia.net/
Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin
#40I wonder how much energy is used by just the cafeterias combined in all of the federal reserve's many offices.
That. Then, add all the energy consumed by the 24/7 monitoring and safeguarding of every single one of those facilities, and for good measure add to each cost line the energy cost of the whole chain of processes that selects, sets up and maintains enough of both humans and machines to accomplish that task at scale.