From the article.<p>"Bitcoin is deeply colonial, deeply extractive, and deeply damaging to the environment and marginalized people around the world. This privileged crypto-colonialism almost exclusively benefits white men"<p>While just a few paragraphs before that, the author states that most Bitcoin mining is now happening in China...<p>I hate this neo-racist narrative so much, it sucks out oxygen and reason from every space it occupies. Is nowadays ecology subsumed under critical race theory? Can't you make an environmental argument without dumping on someone's skin color?<p>At least the author does not try to argue that Bitcoin is intrinsically transphobic, I would frankly expect it to be added to the mix above.
From the article.<p><i>> There is no physical, economic, or social justification for something like this.</i><p>Personally I do feel there is very much an economic justification for Bitcoin to exist and to a lesser extent a social justification (privacy).<p>Bitcoin allows people to keep their wealth outside of the hands of the government and I feel this is a good thing.<p>Bitcoin makes it cheap and easy to transfer value to another country. Much cheaper compared to using banks with their crazy interbank currency conversion that is very expensive. Also, banks are often quite slow to do the transfers, especially in weekends.<p>I like the facts that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be traded 24-7. Again this to me is a good thing. The markets are always open.<p>I don't like what Western central banks have been doing in the last few years: Quantitate Easing (QE). QE basically caused the rich to become richer and the poor to become poorer since most of the printed money arrived in the stock markets. And rich people own stocks. So rich people in turn might have rebalanced their portfolios by selling some stocks in order to buy property, causing property prices to increase as well. Inflation is visible in the stock and property markets.<p>But wages at the same time have not grown much (if at all) in some countries for a very long time now. At least Bitcoin is doing the opposite - keep it in your wallet and its value grows. Now I am not sure if the Bitcoin approach is the best idea, to me it seems a very small consistent inflation (~2%) every year is a good thing - especially since wallets get lost and such, but I guess we'll see how it pans out.<p>But ... perhaps it's a good thing in the long run to have a currency that increases in value if it's not being used. Such a currency might encourage saving and thus reduce consumption which might be good for the environment as well.
Bitcoin is hugely problematic from an energy consumption point of view. Do we actually need it? Is there any mainstream use of it outside of speculation and gambling? Largely it seems to be a tool to make money, exploited by the rich and powerful with machine learning and automatic trades.<p>If we <i>really</i> need a way to transact without using banks, there's alternatives that have massively lower energy footprints such as Nano. Do we need Bitcoin? Should there be regulations around digital currencies and energy usage given the state of play with global warming?
I find the most frustrating issue & the most compelling part of this argument to be the last: there are decent crypto alternatives that don't have this problem.<p>You can find all sorts of people who will justify bitcoin for all its thrilling advantages over traditional finance, and explain why this ecological garbage fire is a good idea. I'm yet to find a single person who even tries to argue that bitcoin's advantages over other cryptos are worth the huge comparative cost.<p>At the beginning of crypto, bitcoin was the only option. Today, bitcoin is successful purely because it has the highest price, and so the most opportunity to make random investors rich, rather than any technological advantage. When that price eventually crashes so that there's serious competition between crypto alternatives for usage & investment, I don't see how bitcoin can possibly survive without a huge reinvention.
This is a poor example of this genre of the article, but that doesn't make its conclusions wrong. For a better article covering similar ground: <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a9bd5b42-272e-465c-9284-9fe2a7906f48" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/a9bd5b42-272e-465c-9284-9fe2a7906...</a> [1]<p>Everyone in this thread parroting the usual lines about bitcoin[0] needs to explain why legacy environmentally destructive proof-of-work coins should not be superseded by vastly more efficient proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies.<p>[0] "banks also have lights and computers", "it's mined with renewable energy", "something something secure the network"<p>[1] bypass paywall <a href="https://crosat.com/the-environmental-idiocy-of-teslas-bitcoin-bet/" rel="nofollow">https://crosat.com/the-environmental-idiocy-of-teslas-bitcoi...</a>
What are some examples contrary to Bitcoin of human made things that are high in monetary value, but low on total (creation, distribution and maintenance) environmental impact?
The core issue has nothing to do with Bitcoin: The environmental impact of "X" has to be priced into the product cost. That is a legal question at its core. I know that is easier said than done, but it is the only long term solution. CO2 certificates are one way to do it, and it already helps.<p>*X= Air Travel, Bitcoin, Cement... whatever creates large amount of CO2<p>And while we are at it: Overfishing is another huge tragedy of the commons that needs more attention.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons</a>
These "Bitcoin is using too much energy" articles are posted almost weekly here.<p>With all the great minds in the world, instead of fighting and complaining, why hasn't anybody come up with something better than Proof-of-Work to keep Bitcoin alive? Bitcoin is open source, if there is something that can keep the network secure without using all the energy, feel free to submit a bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP).<p>After all, if the world would agree and shutdown the Bitcoin network today, all the energy after all these years would "really" be wasted.
I see a lot of these articles, but realise bitcoin is 'only' consuming half of the electricity of dormant (always on but inactive) devices in the US. This isn't taking into account the amount of green energy used in mining bitcoin, or the fact it could easily be powered entirely by green energy in the future. I do think it is a slightly overblown argument.<p>Aside from that, there's the normal point that crypto is moving towards proof of stake which means you no longer use 'mining' to maintain the network which will stop this argument entirely, albeit bitcoin may not go this way itself.<p><a href="https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons" rel="nofollow">https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons</a>
I keep seeing statements both like "most electricity used to mine Bitcoin comes from fossil fuels" and like "Bitcoin is using 75% renewables". It seems like people just choose those that fits their agenda. I assume there really isn't a way to know what sources of energy Bitcoin mining is using, and how those sources were used if it wasn't for Bitcoin, right?
To put this in perspective, YouTube (243.6 tw/h) uses about double of Bitcoin's (124 tw/h) energy consumption, but there is no outrage about that. People care about the environment if it doesn't take away their comfort, airconditioning use is about 2000 tw/h globally, expected to triple in the next 30 years, some of the outrage on Bitcoin is being written in airconditioned rooms by people that drive combustion engine cars.<p>If you compare Bitcoin's environmental footprint to the whole financial system with air cooled offices around the world, with equipment, server rooms it doesn't come close.<p>A positive side of Bitcoin mining is that it's geographically independent and it can move to where they have too much energy which cannot be stored. In some cases the abundance of energy would be wasted through gas flaring which puts more CO2 into the atmosphere. Now they can get rid of their excessive energy and store it in the form of Bitcoin.<p>* <a href="https://thefactsource.com/how-much-electricity-does-youtube-use/" rel="nofollow">https://thefactsource.com/how-much-electricity-does-youtube-...</a>
* <a href="https://research.arcane.no/news/equinor-partners-with-bitcoin-mining-company" rel="nofollow">https://research.arcane.no/news/equinor-partners-with-bitcoi...</a>
The article is a frankenstein of all cliches stitches together. You can reverse the order of words in it and it won't lose meaning, for its just a soup of emotions. Highly recommend to read it.
There are two angles of attack on Bitcoin by the fiat printer operators: terrorist use and electricity consumption. Currently both are being tried to see what sticks, to justify the imminent regulatory action.
I wish the people who are rightfully bringing up the negative environmental impact of Bitcoin would do two things: (1) never buy Bitcoin and (2) never work in the cryptocurrency Industry.
The biggest problem I have with Bitcoin et al is not even the electricity consumption. It's that you can't even find decent GPUs at a decent price anymore. I have just given up on ever being able to buy a good RTX3070.
BiTcoIn IS baD foR EnviroNment, in other news mining, centralized banks and others are very good...<p>Bitcoin is bad for environment? Yes it is but did any of these critics ever bother to study or complain about all banks and mining industries around the world?<p>I can guarantee you that these two other industries produce much more harm to the environment in several scales of magnitude than bitcoin<p>Also, never seen such propaganda about those industries like they are doing to bitcoin...