41–50 of 88 posts
"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...
But he got 195 by multiplying 29 by 6.7. And 6.7 is the ratio between bitcoin and Apple CO2 emissions.
I'm not convinced that any of this computation is meaningful. We don't need this to prove that bitcoin is a waste of energy.
The higher the price BTC go, the more miners will mine to get it near break even. Imagine 600k price where some pumpers are targeting, you are looking at potentially 10x the energy used to mine blocks. Is that a correct characterization of the problem at hand?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The demand is there. Let's talk when covid is over. It wouldn't be the first time it drops 80%
Why would Covid drive up the price of Bitcoin? Sure, the pandemic is being used for attempted government power grasps, but those won't go away with Covid.
This articles makes absolutely no sense. It uses market capitalisation of Apple and bitcoin to compare the CO2 emissions of an iPhone and a bitcoin transaction which is clearly nonsense. You could calculate the rough CO2 emissions of a 1 BTC transaction by dividing annual estimated CO2 emissions by bitcoin miners (35 million tonnes) by the number of annual transactions (100 million) which equates to about 350kg of CO…
Because, with all the remaining dollars, you’re not going to destroy them, you’re going to consume other services/products, and if they are heavier in CO2 emissions per dollars in average, we’re not in a better position.
I 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 fr…
One component would be reasonably straightforward, take the fee paid for the transaction and divide it by the block reward it appears in, it's arguably directly responsible for that percentage of the emissions related to that block.
The other potential component would be any impact on the value of bitcoin due to the transaction. It's likely close enough to zero most of the time, but when it isn't zero it's gonna be a doozy.
This articles makes absolutely no sense. It uses market capitalisation of Apple and bitcoin to compare the CO2 emissions of an iPhone and a bitcoin transaction which is clearly nonsense. You could calculate the rough CO2 emissions of a 1 BTC transaction by dividing annual estimated CO2 emissions by bitcoin miners (35 million tonnes) by the number of annual transactions (100 million) which equates to about 350kg of CO…
I completely agree that using arbitrary numerology to cast shade on a technology you would rather not exist is not very good reasoning, but some folks respond to it so it persists.
I 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?
A comparison I found recently is that Bitcoin uses 10x as much electricity as Google.
Why is this? Well, you can think of Bitcoin as giving away prize money to miners who win a contest. Currently they are giving away over $50 million in Bitcoin every day. [1] The electricity spend by miners is capped by the amount of prize money.
Why so much? It wasn't planned. The bug in Bitcoin's algorithm is that energy usage is proportional to market price, and the amount it went up wasn't anticipated. If Bitcoin crashed to a tenth of its current market value, it would be about even with Google. That's still way too much for what it does. Maybe it should crash to 1% its current price, to be reasonable?
Besides a market crash, the other way to fix it would be speeding up the schedule for lowering miner awards. It's going to drop in half this month, but there's no principled reason to wait another four years for the reward to drop in half again. But good luck getting consensus for that. More revenue is better than less revenue and miners don't want the prize money to drop.
Another comparison: Musk sponsored a $100 million X Prize for inventing carbon capture technology. That's a very big prize for an important cause, and it's only 2 days of Bitcoin prize money.
The Bitcoin prizes are too damn high.
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_miners_revenue_per_da... [2] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk
This articles makes absolutely no sense. It uses market capitalisation of Apple and bitcoin to compare the CO2 emissions of an iPhone and a bitcoin transaction which is clearly nonsense. You could calculate the rough CO2 emissions of a 1 BTC transaction by dividing annual estimated CO2 emissions by bitcoin miners (35 million tonnes) by the number of annual transactions (100 million) which equates to about 350kg of CO…
Also, 1 BTC is about 30 iPhones in money. It’s as interesting as saying a holiday consumes more than a bus trip: only CO2 / dollar is interesting. Or equivalent-CO2 “per service provided”. Because, with all the remaining dollars, you’re not going to destroy them, you’re going to consume other services/products, and if they are heavier in CO2 emissions per dollars in average, we’re not in a better position.
A bitcoin transaction is virtual. Some bits have to be flipped. That it is such an energy intensive and environmentally bad clusterfuck is a tragedy.