Don't get me wrong, Bitcoin is an ecological nightmare and I think it should be shunned accordingly. But the "fun-fact" that it consumes more energy than solar produces is false.<p>"Power generation from solar PV is estimated to have increased by 22% in 2019, to 720 TWh" [1]<p>"Bitcoin miners are expected to consume roughly 130 Terawatt-hours of energy (TWh)" [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv</a>
[2] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocurrency-and-energy-consumption/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocur...</a>
Food for thought: 65% of bitcoin mining occurs in China [1], China is still building nuclear reactors [2], there are millions of tonnes of uranium reserves on the planet [3].<p>Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about our inability to generate clean energy while ignoring our ability to generate clean energy.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-by-country/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...</a>
To counter the whataboutisms abounding in the comments thread here, I will start a comment tree differently.<p>How does the bitcoin community solve this problem? Is migrating to a proof-of-stake system viable in the long term? Would doing so affect the value of bitcoin as an asset? Would it improve it's value as anything else?
limiting energy use, for bitcoin or not, is a dead end. We should be incentivizing clean energy and penalizing dirty one. Carbon taxes/quotas would be a great start.
Everyone competing to find hashes that start with a large number of zeros to secure a currency is significantly less of an ecological disaster than maintaining a standing army (or military alliances with someone who does) like fiat currencies use.
This strikes me as hysterical. Bitcoin miners tend to co-locate with the cheapest sources of electricity, which tend to be places where electricity is abundant and hard to export. Like hydro power, geothermal, and flare gas at refineries.<p>To assume they're using the same mix of power generating processes as average, or as everyone else, doesn't make any sense. They aren't. They're effectively finding a financial means of exporting cheap electricity that is more efficient than literally exporting it via high-tension wires or turning it into products (like aluminum, as Iceland does) on-site.<p>Could it be better? Hell yes. And I wish proof-of-stake and all the other ideas well.
Hahaha not this again. More ignorance and misinterpretation of how and why energy is used. It doesn’t matter how much energy is used! What matters is how it is made, and there is no better financial incentive than renewably mined bitcoin.<p>Eventually humanity should build acoustic Dyson spheres around nocoiners to convert their void screams into network hashrate.