It's worth comparing Bitcoin's proof of work to other schemes of maintaining currency value to understand this in a relative sense. The Military Industrial Complex which arguably is the mechanism by which the dollar maintains its position as the global reserve currency puts out 152MtCO2/yr [1].<p>Without making any judgement on if this ratio is reasonable: this is 3-5x more than BTC POW but arguably also contains other negative externalities like loss of life, etc.<p>[1] <a href="https://earther.gizmodo.com/groundbreaking-report-gives-us-a-glimpse-of-the-u-s-mi-1835458508" rel="nofollow">https://earther.gizmodo.com/groundbreaking-report-gives-us-a...</a>
I am so conflicted about the environmental impact of Proof-Of-Work. In many ways it feels like an arbitrary energy spend - but I think criticizing cryptocurrency for it seems a little disingenuous when we don't apply the same logic to other areas.<p>What's the environmental impact of better refresh rates on monitors? What's the environmental impact of large scale cctv systems? What's the environmental impact of western-style mattresses?
Worth mentioning the cryptocurrency that Bram Cohen (inventor of bittorrent) is creating that is explicitly designed to be low-energy usage and more distributed: <a href="https://www.chia.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.chia.net/</a><p>It uses "Proof of Space" (proof that you're allocating a certain amount of storage space) instead of Proof of Work or Proof of Stake. Pretty interesting and they're coming out of beta into their mainnet in the next few weeks. Their on-chain programming language is even Lisp-based!
Cryptocurrency is still something that legacy financial systems could easily out-compete given an appropriate regulatory environment.<p>There are things Bitcoin is better at than e.g. credit cards. If you're a trusted merchant with shady customers, once the transaction posts you don't have to worry about scammers fraudulently disputing the charge or your bank cutting you off because that happened too often. You can get Bitcoin under a pseudonym and use it to buy something (e.g. banned or controversial books, VPN for dissidents) that you don't want tied to your meatspace identity. Things like that.<p>None of this would be impossible to do with ordinary financial systems except that existing regulations prohibit it. But if anybody can do it with Bitcoin regardless then there is no point in that and you might as well allow it in general. At which point, why are we burning all this energy on Bitcoin?
Cryptocurrencies are here to stay, environmentally unsound ones, probably not. Play your part and stop using/investing in cryptos that have a high carbon footprint.
How does this compare to the environmental impact of the millions of people constantly surfing sites like Reddit all day? I always hear about how bad Bitcoin is in terms of energy consumption, but nobody seems to perform similar analysis on actually frivolous activities we all accept in our society.
So many gems in this one that shows the bias of the author:
"Simply: the Bitcoin blockchain only transfers and secures bitcoins. It does not move actual money like Fedwire does."
This is factually incorrect when you actually own both of these "monies". But it wouldn't bother you if you only own the devaluing one.
What does ESG stand for? I searched the article and it’s not there. I’m sure it’s widely known in the literature this writes into, but key terms should still be introduced along with the acronym.
I think the mistake here is that the author doesn't understand the potential of cryptocurrency so sees electricity use for crypto as a pure cost. You can see this because of comparisons to centralized services.<p>On coal power: It's bad to use coal to mine Bitcoin, but it's bad to use coal to provide power for any activity. Coal power should be banned outright.
So since bitcoin is up right now, we're just going to see nonstop attacks on the fact that it's not climate friendly with its energy usage? Feels like this is the sixth article I've seen on Hacker News in the last month.<p>From a quick skim this article seems like it might have some good data, but it also has a bunch of loaded language in it that turns me off from wanting to read the article.<p>"Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG <i>nightmare</i>"<p>"This paper looks at the energy consumption of seven proof-of-work-based <i>anarchic</i> (public) blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum." (You know how anarchy is bad right, well we're going to say these are like anarchy, so they're bad too.)<p>"Many Bitcoin promoters <i>conjure</i> a future world...[where Bitcoin is king and leads to renewable energy]" (they're like spellcasters, this future doesn't really exist, they're trying to pretend they will create it out of nothing but they never will!)<p>"Putting aside the continual <i>greenwashing</i> that many advocates are guilty of" (You know how whitewashing is bad? Well so is greenwashing! I'm saying these people do that and that means they're bad!)<p>"The container ship <i>fetish</i> is a <i>slight-of-hand</i>[sic] trick..." (These guys have fetishes and fetishes are bad, also they're using slight-of-hand and tricking you, and tricking people is bad!) Also the writer misspelled 'sleight'.<p>If they wanted to change minds the writer should have used more neutral language in their sentences. You can be persuasive without resorting to this. I'll sit down and read it a bit later, but not feeling like trudging through all this loaded language.
Another issue is that proof-of-work may simply be inferior to other consensus mechanisms because of hardware centralization. I think the cryptocurrency world needs to solve this problem at its own pace though. Ethereum is already rapidly heading to proof-of-stake, precisely because it's seen as better on its own merits without considering energy costs.
I see the dyson cloud becoming Elon’s next big project to help maintain this network. Our energy production is too outdated and primitive.<p>The same to our legislative bodies, human society is having an anally retentive crises when it comes to technology. The system’s chocked and cant function well.
The solution to this problem is already invented, and working: Nano cryptocurrency. BTW forget about paying ANY fees.
Nano vs Bitcoin energy consumption:
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/lhveo4/bitcoin_vs_nano_power_usage_visualized/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/lhveo4/bitcoi...</a>
The locked up energy used for mining was never available to populated area's in the first place, it is exces energy.
It's a bit like if you compare taking a shower in the middle of the desert with standing under a water fall and telling someone not to waste water while standing there because you consume as much water as 10000 people.
Pleasant surprise: Chia uses a Lisp dialect as on-chain command language <a href="https://github.com/Chia-Network/wallets/blob/master/puzzles/make_puzzle_m_of_n_direct.clvm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Chia-Network/wallets/blob/master/puzzles/...</a>
Bitcoiners proposing that POW networks will bring about breakthroughs in energy production would be hilarious if they weren't destroying the planet while doing it<p>Edit: the article examples are just infuriating. "Bitcoin is a battery" No, absolute-fck-lutely not!
drink wall st. ESG kool-aid if you want, i have seen diamond merchants in ESG ETF componens. go figure.<p>your electric cars as well combustin engine cars use lot of energy worse than Bitcoin. oh cars get you from point a to point b. guess what, Bitcoin gets your value from point a to point b more efficiently than anything else out there yet and it maintains so keeping it as the hardest money known to humans<p>gold mining, banking services use lot of energy<p>you playing xbox or publishing dumb articles on an ad-tech trojan horse also takes energy<p>learn and adapt , else get extinct
I honestly just can't buy into high energy usage as a criticism. I think we should be focusing our efforts on massively expanding our power generation, not cutting back usage.
What's the energy cost of a financial sector that takes a ~3% cut of all retail transactions, puts up physical bank branches to manage money, empowers a federal reserve to manage the value of currency with more or less competency... Comparing BTC energy costs to some mythical world where we just burn free lunches for heat is not honest.