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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

#71

Post by tromp »

skybrian wrote: post #48
wqsz7xn wrote: post #11

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?

You don't need detailed research because a little back-of-the-napkin math shows that it's way too much. 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…

> Besides a market crash, the other way to fix it would be speeding up the schedule for lowering miner awards.

That doesn't really fix it, because transaction fees will start to dominate the block subsidy within 4 halvings or so.

Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone

#72

Post by scientismer »

vmception wrote: post #70
dehrmann wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people buy BTC as an alternative to gold That's a reasonable premise, but the price of gold is flat YoY. Gold actually peaked in Aug. 2020. You'd think that at least some of the bitcoin interest would have gone to gold, but it hasn't. Maybe people are selling gold to buy bitcoin, but again, they don't act similarly. Bitcoin is a speculative asset that has so far gone to the moon. Gold has maintained its value for c…

> Gold actually peaked in Aug. 2020. You'd think that at least some of the bitcoin interest would have gone to gold, but it hasn't. Maybe people are selling gold to buy bitcoin, but again, they don't act similarly. To add to this discussion, gold traded range bound for 20 years from 1980 to 2000, across many different economic realities, across several different Federal Reserve money supply increasing policies, in sl…

Personally, I would consider gold as an insurance. The current price does not matter that much. What matters that in case of a catastrophe (financial crash, system crash, socialist takeover, whatever), it would be valuable. I would assume that in case of a system crash, gold would be more likely to retain some value than most other assets. Like think socialist takeover - all other assets (real estate, company stock) would be devaluated over night.

Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone

#73

Post by incrudible »

bingbong70 wrote: post #68
incrudible wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The days of 80% drops are over. The days of 80% "over night" drops may be over, but a bear market to wipe 80% off the market cap is not out of the question.

Already a few billionaires with algos that autobuy on 10-15% drops, this number will increase. We aren't dealing with cs hobbyists, retail investors, and small nest eggs anymore, billionaire adoption is a game changer as Michael Saylor constantly points out... Welcome to BTC cantillonaires with access to ~unlimited leverage courtesy of central banks.

If you have unlimited leverage to buy Bitcoin, you have unlimited leverage to buy any other asset.

All the billionaires in the world are worth 11 trillion dollars. How much are they realistically going to allocate to Bitcoin, to support a >1 trillion market cap?

Bitcoin is like gold in that it just "sits there", it doesn't do any work. If gold can drop 30% over a few months, despite all the pandemic fears, then Bitcoin can drop 80% for just not being that interesting anymore, compared to other assets.

Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone

#75

Post by Nursie »

ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #65
Nursie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought experiment - Bitcoin supports fewer transactions than are needed for a mid-sized town, yet uses more power than most small countries. The upper limit of the amount of power a country’s financial system could use is the power footprint of that country. Likely the real usage is a small percentage of that, but that’s the upper limit. Now, given Bitcoin uses more power than countries of millions, but supports the…

Bitcoins are produced and secured through the mining process. It doesnt just process a transaction. Dollars are backed and secured by the USA. How much energy does the USA military use?

That's not just to secure the value of dollars, your comparison is meaningless. Also, reapply the thought experiment above - BTC is used by a handful of people, yet consumes more than countries of millions.

Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone

#76

Post by NicoJuicy »

alwillis wrote: post #38
NicoJuicy wrote: post #10

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%

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.

Vaccines are getting people to not get hospitalized anymore mostly, no matter the variant.

If you can't see that crypto only raised because of covid and things related to that, you should really check the timelines.

We've been through this story already in 2017, when stores tried to adopt crypto payments and it was unsuccessfull ( square, steam, woocommerce, ... ). It went from 20 k to ~4 k.

Nothing fundamentally changed, payments with crypto are practically zero offline and online.

Some people just have some percentage in it, because they think of it as value store.

And if digital currency would be adopted by countries, they are not going to take any of the excisting ones, but their own variant.

Change my mind with logic reasoning :), not emotionally because you want to protect your assets.

Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone

#77

Post by NicoJuicy »

scientismer wrote: post #54
dehrmann wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Halfway the same thing that's driving the prices of stocks and pokemon cards: people with extra cash from stimulus checks, spare time, and fomo. "Crypto being the future of finance" is a story people tell themselves to justify the price of bitcoin, and while some flavor of blockchain tech could someday back parts of finance, it won't be bitcoin. Buying bitcoin is a bet that more people will buy bitcoin.

Ok I forgot about the money printing, which may or may not stop after Covid. But I think people buy BTC as an alternativ to gold, not because of some banking narrative. The question is still what would be actually good investments. Maybe everything will crash when the money printing stops, but then some things will crash harder than others. Gold will probably remain gold.

Gold hasc always kept it's value.

Bitcoin dropped from 20k to 4k until covid hit over multiple years.

Bitcoin isn't gold. That was already debunked.

Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone

#78

Post by bingbong70 »

incrudible wrote: post #73
bingbong70 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already a few billionaires with algos that autobuy on 10-15% drops, this number will increase. We aren't dealing with cs hobbyists, retail investors, and small nest eggs anymore, billionaire adoption is a game changer as Michael Saylor constantly points out... Welcome to BTC cantillonaires with access to ~unlimited leverage courtesy of central banks.

If you have unlimited leverage to buy Bitcoin, you have unlimited leverage to buy any other asset. All the billionaires in the world are worth 11 trillion dollars. How much are they realistically going to allocate to Bitcoin, to support a >1 trillion market cap? Bitcoin is like gold in that it just "sits there", it doesn't do any work. If gold can drop 30% over a few months, despite all the pandemic fears, then Bitco…

>If you have unlimited leverage to buy Bitcoin, you have unlimited leverage to buy any other asset.

The hardest, most inflation protected and liquid asset wins. Bitcoin.

>How much are they realistically going to allocate to Bitcoin, to support a >1 trillion market cap?

Bitcoins adoption example = make BTC just 1% of your portfolio, wait, that 1% is now worth more than the other 50% of your portfolio...you can guess what happens next if trend continuation is expected. Two words, "Ape In".

>Bitcoin is like gold in that it just "sits there", it doesn't do any work.

Lossless store of value is "work"...if your billion dollar nest egg in fiat is losing 10-20% per year due to currency debasement, assets that result in not losing that $200M aren't doing valuable work?

Bitcoin has a Number Go Up monetary policy and other properties that are unrivaled. Losing interest really isn't in the cards since this network is scheduled to start demolishing larger and larger central banks around the world and hoovering up value...

Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone

#79

Post by ajkdhcb2 »

Nursie wrote: post #75
ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoins are produced and secured through the mining process. It doesnt just process a transaction. Dollars are backed and secured by the USA. How much energy does the USA military use?

That's not just to secure the value of dollars, your comparison is meaningless. Also, reapply the thought experiment above - BTC is used by a handful of people, yet consumes more than countries of millions.

The total market value of BTC is higher than the Russian Ruble. It is securing a lot of value. https://coinmarketcap.com/fiat-currencies/

>That's not just to secure the value of dollars, your comparison is meaningless.

Yes the calculation is not complete, but it demonstrates that the other calculations are completely invalid too because it doesn't consider those factors either

Re: Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone

#80

Post by Nursie »

ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #79
Nursie wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not just to secure the value of dollars, your comparison is meaningless. Also, reapply the thought experiment above - BTC is used by a handful of people, yet consumes more than countries of millions.

The total market value of BTC is higher than the Russian Ruble. It is securing a lot of value. https://coinmarketcap.com/fiat-currencies/ >That's not just to secure the value of dollars, your comparison is meaningless. Yes the calculation is not complete, but it demonstrates that the other calculations are completely invalid too because it doesn't consider those factors either

The question was what are the efficiencies per transaction.

The total market cap of a cryptocurrency is a somewhat meaningless statistic, it certainly doesn't directly translate to value.

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