Reducing damage to the environment should be a core goal of cryptocurrencies. As things stand now in most countries, miners can get away with burning fossil fuels to mine and profit, without paying the cost of the contamination produced. But others will pay the cost for sure. The pollution byproduct of crypto should be fixed ASAP, not rationalized.
Bitcoin as a Battery
51–60 of 319 posts
Re: Bitcoin as a Battery
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Refined aluminum is in quite a high-energy state. Chemically you could extract energy or make electricity from aluminum. It's used in some types of military explosives. Because the refining takes so much electricity, some well-meaning people suggest running it at times of low demand to balance the grid. But refining is capital intensive so you don't want to turn it off or you miss out on the returns from the investme…
You're right. If we further expand the idea we can extract energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant. I'll refrain from calling my dog a battery though. Now excuse me while I go feed little Duracell. Good girl!
> we can extract energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant.
You don’t need that either. Stacking concrete blocks can work as a battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmrwdTGZxGk
Re: Bitcoin as a Battery
#53I'm so happy that other people start to notice this dynamic. Why are we not yet fully running on renewables? Why don't we have trillions of dollars pouring into solar panels and wind turbines and pumped storage hydroelectricity and battery storage? The answer is there's not enough demand for excess electricity to create and keep excess electricity. I read about new pumped storage hydroelectricity installation closed…
What about training ML models as another example? It requires a lot of energy as well (and I expect it to be more significant in the future), and the optimal power draw should depend on the price of energy. Of course it requires GPU/TPU pricing to change depending on clock speed, which is hard to sell to customers. So yeah, for now Bitcoin mining is a more scalable solution.
Sure. That's also great if you can monetize trained ML models so easily that everyone can participate.
It's already being done to some very small degree by few companies that locate their ML server farms in places where energy is cheap and renewable.
I hope this application will some day compete with crypto for computing power and energy and win but I don't think it will be popularized and commoditized soon enough to bring money into green energy.
I hopefully await headlines "ML training now uses as much energy as Australia".
If you could create crypto based on ML training it would be so cool.
Re: Bitcoin as a Battery
#54The only way PoW crypto is superceded is if someone finally implements PoS. There is a lot of hope in ethereum "moving to" proof of stake, but I think a move will never happen. Miners will not allow it. It'll be a fork. Then, if it has to be forked why not start from scratch with something better? I imagine/hope many people are working on better crypto protocols at the moment.
It will happen, because the developers will get the same fees what the miners get right now without spending energy (which is a risky and low margin industry).
Good luck getting real institutional money getting into PoS based systems though, PoW took 10 years to get accepted as a secure store of value for the tresuries.
Re: Bitcoin as a Battery
#55This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart. Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.
It’s so totally misguided IMO that I feel like I am maybe not understanding that.
It seems to inspired or in the spirit of ‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson.
“ It’s called Carbon Coin in the book, a Bitcoin-like currency that the Ministry gives out for carbon sequestration — that is, any project that sucks CO2 out of the air, whether it’s carbon capture or farmers rewilding their fields — at a rate of one coin to one ton. Oil companies get coins if they stop being oil companies, basically, leaving their assets in the ground for a century or so. Coins can then be bought and sold on currency exchanges like any other.”
The only argument I can see is that the sheer resource hunger will force our hand in using renewable energy. Of course, I am not saying this is a good argument at all.
There is no such thing as virtual energy. And the other forms of payment we use are a million times more energy effective.
What bothers me is that newsletters as this one who I believe are widely read serve this up as a good idea.
https://www.exponentialview.co/p/ev-315
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Re: Bitcoin as a Battery
#56This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart. Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.
Bitcoin mining is good for the environment https://pomp.substack.com/p/bitcoin-mining-is-good-for-the-e...
Having an open mind but is good but make sure your brain doesn't fall out of its skull. Just because a mining operation produces methane gas and it is better to burn this gas at the site and turn it into carbon dioxide because it is the lesser of green house gasses shouldn't mean you can sell this as a carbon offset since there is still a net contribution.
Re: Bitcoin as a Battery
#57I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery. The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the a…
Well, low intensity heat. It's trivial to create a setup where you take your hot morning shower with water heated in last noon's solar surplus. Setups like that are actually not uncommon at all, but they use direct solar heat extraction instead of photovoltaics. But a "bitcoined" version would be way too small scale and idle way too much to ever make back the hardware expense, at least unless progress suddenly stops.
Granted, it could still provide value beyond hot water: if you happened to own a considerable amount of bitcoin, your net worth would benefit from a greenwashing strawman giving bitcoin some more press attention.
Re: Bitcoin as a Battery
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Refined aluminum is in quite a high-energy state. Chemically you could extract energy or make electricity from aluminum. It's used in some types of military explosives. Because the refining takes so much electricity, some well-meaning people suggest running it at times of low demand to balance the grid. But refining is capital intensive so you don't want to turn it off or you miss out on the returns from the investme…
You're right. If we further expand the idea we can extract energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant. I'll refrain from calling my dog a battery though. Now excuse me while I go feed little Duracell. Good girl!
There are aluminum batteries you know. There are practical reasons they're not in wide use, but they have incredible energy density, one of the highest of any battery.
Re: Bitcoin as a Battery
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can be utilized for heating human occupied spaces. Humans need a lot of heating.
If you are going to use electricity to heat human occupied spaces, you should use a heatpump which has much better efficiency, above 100%.
Sure, that's not optimal way of heating with electricity. That's just a way of utilizing heat from computing.
Re: Bitcoin as a Battery
#60I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery. The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the a…
Interesting, TIL: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fa....
This reminds me of another interesting point I recently saw raised regarding WWII. WWII is often credited with ending the Great Depression, but in reality was primarily helpful insofar as it made it politically viable for the US government to inject a massive stimulus into the economy far eclipsing the New Deal (and other governments to do likewise).
Tying that to the broken window fallacy, it seems the ultimate conclusion is that wartime economic policy without the actual war would have been a better way to achieve the desired result.
Of course the reality may not be so simple from a US perspective when we consider that all the broken windows were outside our borders, the national focus and urgency imposed by the war, and that removing the war from history would have dramatic unpredictable effects on our world today. Nevertheless, the idea seems convincing enough to me in abstract that starting a new war purely for perceived economic benefits would be an inefficient alternative to simple progressive economic policy on an equivalent scale.