Only if you buy one at a time. Trying buying in bulk.
I personally don't have the cash to buy more than one and I feel like a lot of the point of cryptocurrency is that individuals don't have to trust a financial institution.
Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
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Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
#32Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
#33Apple operates at pretty comfortable profit margins. At one time it was the most profitable company in the world. I'm not sure this comparison is fair - Apple is famous for creating highly valuable outputs with relatively minimal inputs.
This comparison is just for fun, but there seems to be some buzz about Bitcoin not being environmentally friendly I don't know why people are all grumpy about Bitcoin, there are a lot of things that we waste energy on.
Maybe if the world governments were a bit more responsible with their currencies then there wouldn't be a need for Bitcoin. It was a direct response to the outrageous actions taken after the '07 crisis.
Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
#34I was a bit disappointed in the article given the headline. The analytical methodology used here is a bit odd to me, and there was no explanation as to why this methodology was used.
I still don’t know how much incremental CO2 is emitted from buying a Bitcoin or an iPhone after reading it. All I see is a weird CO2 divided by market cap calculation...
Does anyone else have good data on the incremental CO2 emissions from either of these?
Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
#35I feel like it's really easy to pin bitcoin on its energy usage just because it's so easily measurable. Is there any research that compares a traditional banking platform in terms of W/tx in comparison to bitcoin?
It's not that power intensive to do a BTC transaction (although the requirement for every full node to duplicate the work kinda limits its relative efficiency). What drives up the power usage is the way miners compete for new bitcoins. 25 new bitcoins are minted every ~10 minutes, and 1 BTC is worth 56,378.78 USD right now, so the miners can collectively spend up $1.4 million (in electricity, hardware depreciation, etc) every ten minutes and still break even.
Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
#36I feel like it's really easy to pin bitcoin on its energy usage just because it's so easily measurable. Is there any research that compares a traditional banking platform in terms of W/tx in comparison to bitcoin?
It gets pretty thorny because you have to be careful about what aspects of traditional platforms correspond to the problems addressed by bitcoins. Some folks will try to compare the electricity usage of Visa to that of Bitcoin for example, even though Bitcoin doesn't provide low-latency payments and Visa doesn't provide distributed consensus.
Another easy thing to measure about Bitcoin is its economic value. You can readily assess the market capitalization, and you can also examine the blockchain to see precisely how much it cost users to conduct the transactions in recent blocks. The bottom line for me is that the miners aren't working for charity; they are taking fees+reward >= their electricity cost, and this is paid for by the users of Bitcoin. So those who criticize Bitcoin as an environmental catastrophe might as well say the same thing about YouTube, Aluminum production, or modern industry more generally.
It's just a particularly easy target because many people find the economic importance of Bitcoin and the recent development of the same mystifying.
Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
#37How can this be calculated? I mean, it's possible to use solar energy for running mining equipment.
It's probably all bullshit. There are papers by professors of music studies claiming listening to streaming services wastes a gigazillion of CO2. It's all just back of the napkin estimates.
Ha. Reminds me of the old warning message that used to come up in rn when you posted something to USENET:
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
#38> Does that mean cryptoassets are doomed technology? No, this spells the need for established institutions to adopt and support crypto. The demand is there. Meanwhile, we need to be more cautious of the actors we currently enable in crypto networks and the corners they’re willing to cut in the pursuit of profit. Exactly. Everyone that matters is putting their energy towards creating incentives and software that allow…
> The demand is there. Let's talk when covid is over. It wouldn't be the first time it drops 80%
1. COVID-19 isn’t going to be “over” in any conventional sense any time soon. There are too many cases and too many variants.
2. With billions of institutional money and billions more waiting until ETFs in the US are approved, Bitcoin has something it didn’t have back in the day: a floor.
The days of 80% drops are over.
Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
#39"the decision to buy one Bitcoin versus about 29 iPhone 12 Pros emits 195 times as much CO₂" The headline made it sound like 195x a single iPhone...
you're right, I reworded that incorrectly - now updated, thanks for spotting it!
No you... didn't? The headline is "Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone" on both HN and Medium.
Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone
#40But one lasts forever and the other is wasted in 2-3 years?
Forever sitting in your wallet, because its an "investment" and cannot be spent normally?
It’s an asset. So I suppose I wouldnt really compare it to cash or ATM card. I’d compare it to a bar of gold or real-estate. But unlike either of those it can be easily spent.