Good. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and climate change efforts [1].
No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is:
* They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.com/moracamilo/Bitcoin/blob/master/Randi_Tabl... (when in fact 60-70% of the mining power comes from a single row in this table: Antminer S9). This error causes their calculated average efficiency (J/GH) to be much overestimated as their dataset contains mostly inefficient obsolete ASICs
* They overestimate future power consumption by ~50x by assuming it grows linearly with the transaction rate (in reality it doesn't). Power consumption grows with miners revenues, proportional to {block rewards + transaction fees}. Fees account for currently ~2% of revenues (average of last 60 days). Rewards decline over time, so that fees will eventually account for close to 100% of revenues, which will happen on the authors timeline of 100 years. So if fees per transaction remaimed constant, we could see a 50x tx rate growth with no increase of power consumption.
* They assume the proportion of CO2 emissions per kWh never improves over the next 100 years (great progress of renewables coming to a sudden stop?), and that Bitcoin consumes more fossil fuels than what the entire world currently consumes (infinite fossil fuel reserves?). It is not unrealistic to imagine the proportion of CO2 per kWh could be in a century 20% of what it is today.
Overall, these errors combined mean their scenario overestimates CO2 emissions by a factor of about a thousand: (3 to 5) x 50 ÷ 20% = 750x to 1250x
There are a billion people living under authoritarianism who are stuck with an increasingly devalued Yuan and steadily losing the ability to obtain other currencies.
Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? It certainly has before. I don’t think we should be comfortable with blanket bans just because they are accompanied by government greenwashing PR.
I am not bitcoin proponent, however to be fair I wouldn't judge only one side.
The World's economy is currently based on assumption of constant growth therefore it is going to be catastrophic as well. I have no hard data but look how much resources the present monetary systems consume, that including cost of running air-condition in any big financial hub offices.
there are few things on this planet that are less wasteful and more useful/important for our civilization than bitcoin. it's the first time in history we've been able to express and implement monetary value and security thereof in terms of pure energy without any middlemen.
Bitcoin transactions don’t use a material amount of energy: no matter how many miners the transaction capacity is fixed. Energy use just increases as miners compete for the block reward.
Why don't people rail like this against the aluminum industry? It's just as wasteful. Bitcoin provides substantial utility and value to society, the energy to secure bitcoin is a cost just the same as the energy to smelt aluminum.
But it still doesn't waste as much energy as the standing armies fiat currencies rely on. And if your country doesn't have a large standing army then your currency is being subsidized by those you ally with who do have standing armies of significance.
And the good it brings to the world in being a non-nation state controlled currency is obvious. From enabling continuation of money transfer in failing or restrictive governments to allowing for capital exchange between individuals directly without rent seeking or censorship it provides good every day.
From an energy-consumption standpoint, I'm not too surprised at this. They have better uses for their mostly-non-renewable power generation. This will probably continue the push towards bitcoin mining in places with stable renewables (like hydro and geothermal).
Actually, most crypto mines in China are located in Sichuan or Yunnan, precisely because of an oversupply of hydroelectricity. More than a quarter of the world's hydropower is generated in China (350 GW) and most of that is from Sichuan & Yunnan. 350 GW is more hydropower generated than the next three biggest hydro producers combined (US + Brazil + Canada.)
Because of the demand-supply imbalance in Sichuan an Yunnan, kWh prices are cheap, hence mining is profitable. ~90% of the electricity in these regions is generated from hydropower.
The oversupply is a result of inadequate grid infrastructure preventing the transport of electricity to resell it to neighboring regions, and a slowdown of China's economic growth.
Sources:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.01.090 — Hydropower curtailment in Yunnan Province, southwestern China:
Constraint analysis and suggestions — "The increasing curtailment of hydropower generation not only
caused large-scale waste of sustainable energy [...]" In 2016 alone, Yunnan was forced to waste 15% or 31.4 terawatt-hours of hydroelectricity.
mining bitcoin with renewables is still a waste. You are now wasting renewable energy instead of nonrenewable energy. Both which despite the wording are limited.
* It kills the narrative that China controls Bitcoin.
* It severely diminishes the Chinese state's ability to disrupt the Bitcoin network by commandeering hashpower.
* The Chinese miners will move their operations overseas, leading to higher geographical/jurisdictional decentralization.
* It becomes relatively speaking more profitable for Chinese ASIC manufacturers to directly sell their miners compared to mining themselves. This will diminish their oversized power in the ASIC market and decentralize mining in terms of operators.
* BTC itself isn't banned, OTC demand will stay, causing a premium. This means some mining will likely continue in smaller, less obvious operations outside the reach of the state. Everything about that is healthy for the network.
* The biggest source of Bitcoin blocks won't be behind the biggest firewall of the globe anymore.
* The article mentions a phasing out, so the two-week difficulty adjustment period can more than likely gracefully handle this.
* Although a lot of Bitcoin mining is done with hydropower in China, it also has a significant share of cheap coal-powered mining. This likely makes overall Bitcoin mining greener, hurting the Bitcoin climate change FUD.
>This likely makes overall Bitcoin mining greener, hurting the Bitcoin climate change FUD.
I dislike the fact that Bitcoin fans have commandeered the term "FUD". The term originally referred to coming out of Microsoft, but you are using it to refer to well-intentioned people saying things that are true.
It's the same as what happened to the term "fake news."
Bitcoin has some very serious problems. We all know what they are. If you keep pretending they don't exist, you only hurt your own credibility.
* It becomes relatively speaking more profitable for Chinese ASIC manufacturers to directly sell their miners compared to mining themselves. This will diminish their oversized power in the ASIC market and decentralize mining in terms of operators.
Don't see this equation actually changing. Like you mentioned, operations will just be moved elsewhere. ASIC manufacturing and mining "tech" will still be hoarded and profit maximized.
Commenters are applauding the environmental implications of this policy, but I’m curious why no one is considering the human side of this ban. There are a billion people living under authoritarianism who are stuck with an increasingly devalued Yuan and steadily losing the ability to obtain other currencies.
Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? I don’t think we should be comfortable with blanket bans just because they are accompanied by government greenwashing PR.
When people realize that Bitcoin mining is a mechanism to prevent fraud, the energy consumption suddenly makes a lot more sense. How much waste in the world is the result of fraud and lack of trust? Quite a lot of it.
That said, reducing the energy consumption of Bitcoin should be an absolute priority. Lightning Network and other such technologies help.
If it would 'prevent fraud' it should be possible to e.g. retrieve stolen funds.
Instead, it is a mechanism to ensure money is only spent once.
Cash solves this rather cheaply (because it is physical). Electronic money does it a lot more efficiently that bitcoin. Perhaps the power usage of all banks is higher than bitcoin, but power per transaction is a lot better.
This will probably crush Bitmain and other Chinese bitcoin mining giants and they will probably move elsewhere, however Chinese courts have said bitcoin itself is legally allowed. Probably what is going to happen is that you can own but you can't mine or even obtain more bitcoins in China.
As a techie and a math lover, I was initially excited with Bitcoin, and did a bit of mining, transactions, etc. But after learning about the environmental impact, I no longer support Bitcoin. It's just not worth the cost, a very beautiful idea but with a serious flaw (which I hope can be fixed in the future). So this sounds quite sensible to me.
Oh thank the lord this idiotic waste of (often fossil) energy will find it's end.
Crypto proof of work is such a flawed (proof of) concept in many ways.
I think bitcoin has been really overhyped (and manipulated in many different ways), and would be happy to see it fade into history (if not some of the technologies and ideas it's based on).
However, I'm not happy to see an outright ban on it, for all sorts of reasons. Not only are there fundamental freedom of speech issues involved, but it sets a dangerous precedent with regard to decentralized computing in general. I also believe that the best way forward in a bitcoin-free future is to leave things be, expose rather than suppress, and to let people do what they want so as to encourage transition.
I'm surprised to see so many comments supportive of this move here. First they come for bitcoin, then they come for Matrix?
Genuine question. Would it be possible for mining facilities to harness the heat from the miners and use it on steam turbines to generate power that'll be used by the miners?
I doubt the corrosion and maintenance problems would be worth it. Most steam turbines operate on superheated steam, I vaguely recall 1200°C and 100 atmospheres of pressure being a working starting point for a lot of problems in college. Low pressure turbines are a thing, but that's not where you get most of the power. They're often, as much as anything, in place to draw down energy in the steam before sending it to the condenser.
Not an engineer so maybe someone else will have to chime in but i doubt the radial heat from a GPU is enough to heat an element which in turn can flash water to steam.
Surely you cant get the density needed before the GPU's themselves burst in to flames?
This should help a little against centralization. With the cheaper electricity out of the game, more locations might become viable as sites for bitcoin mining.
We're still stuck with two Chinese ASIC manufacturers, but at least more of the actual mining will be outside china.
in the long run I believe cryptos that doesn't require mining this way will be more popular, such as EOS and maybe Ethereum soon. But mining will probably never go away completely
[+] [-] kevintb|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8
[+] [-] mrb|7 years ago|reply
* They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.com/moracamilo/Bitcoin/blob/master/Randi_Tabl... (when in fact 60-70% of the mining power comes from a single row in this table: Antminer S9). This error causes their calculated average efficiency (J/GH) to be much overestimated as their dataset contains mostly inefficient obsolete ASICs
* They overestimate future power consumption by ~50x by assuming it grows linearly with the transaction rate (in reality it doesn't). Power consumption grows with miners revenues, proportional to {block rewards + transaction fees}. Fees account for currently ~2% of revenues (average of last 60 days). Rewards decline over time, so that fees will eventually account for close to 100% of revenues, which will happen on the authors timeline of 100 years. So if fees per transaction remaimed constant, we could see a 50x tx rate growth with no increase of power consumption.
* They assume the proportion of CO2 emissions per kWh never improves over the next 100 years (great progress of renewables coming to a sudden stop?), and that Bitcoin consumes more fossil fuels than what the entire world currently consumes (infinite fossil fuel reserves?). It is not unrealistic to imagine the proportion of CO2 per kWh could be in a century 20% of what it is today.
Overall, these errors combined mean their scenario overestimates CO2 emissions by a factor of about a thousand: (3 to 5) x 50 ÷ 20% = 750x to 1250x
Edit: simplified bullet point #2
[+] [-] drak0n1c|7 years ago|reply
Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? It certainly has before. I don’t think we should be comfortable with blanket bans just because they are accompanied by government greenwashing PR.
[+] [-] siwatanejo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coretx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaolti|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imhoguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DennisP|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keymone|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulsutter|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tfha|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|7 years ago|reply
And the good it brings to the world in being a non-nation state controlled currency is obvious. From enabling continuation of money transfer in failing or restrictive governments to allowing for capital exchange between individuals directly without rent seeking or censorship it provides good every day.
[+] [-] CaliforniaKarl|7 years ago|reply
That being said, I just found https://www.coindesk.com/norway-ends-power-tax-subsidy-for-b..., which makes me wonder if current prices would be able to support mining there. Also, at least part of Washington State is interested: https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/6853387-151/central-wa...
[+] [-] mrb|7 years ago|reply
Actually, most crypto mines in China are located in Sichuan or Yunnan, precisely because of an oversupply of hydroelectricity. More than a quarter of the world's hydropower is generated in China (350 GW) and most of that is from Sichuan & Yunnan. 350 GW is more hydropower generated than the next three biggest hydro producers combined (US + Brazil + Canada.)
Because of the demand-supply imbalance in Sichuan an Yunnan, kWh prices are cheap, hence mining is profitable. ~90% of the electricity in these regions is generated from hydropower.
The oversupply is a result of inadequate grid infrastructure preventing the transport of electricity to resell it to neighboring regions, and a slowdown of China's economic growth.
Sources:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.01.090 — Hydropower curtailment in Yunnan Province, southwestern China: Constraint analysis and suggestions — "The increasing curtailment of hydropower generation not only caused large-scale waste of sustainable energy [...]" In 2016 alone, Yunnan was forced to waste 15% or 31.4 terawatt-hours of hydroelectricity.
https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/chinese-... ("In 2016, for instance, overcapacity from hydropower stations in Sichuan and Yunnan amounted to a whopping 45.6 terawatt hours")
It's so bad that China is now restricting the constructions of dams in Sichuan an Yunnan to not exacerbate the overcapacity problem.
[+] [-] benmarten|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crimsonalucard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sekai|7 years ago|reply
* It kills the narrative that China controls Bitcoin.
* It severely diminishes the Chinese state's ability to disrupt the Bitcoin network by commandeering hashpower.
* The Chinese miners will move their operations overseas, leading to higher geographical/jurisdictional decentralization.
* It becomes relatively speaking more profitable for Chinese ASIC manufacturers to directly sell their miners compared to mining themselves. This will diminish their oversized power in the ASIC market and decentralize mining in terms of operators.
* BTC itself isn't banned, OTC demand will stay, causing a premium. This means some mining will likely continue in smaller, less obvious operations outside the reach of the state. Everything about that is healthy for the network.
* The biggest source of Bitcoin blocks won't be behind the biggest firewall of the globe anymore.
* The article mentions a phasing out, so the two-week difficulty adjustment period can more than likely gracefully handle this.
* Although a lot of Bitcoin mining is done with hydropower in China, it also has a significant share of cheap coal-powered mining. This likely makes overall Bitcoin mining greener, hurting the Bitcoin climate change FUD.
[+] [-] asgionio1234|7 years ago|reply
I dislike the fact that Bitcoin fans have commandeered the term "FUD". The term originally referred to coming out of Microsoft, but you are using it to refer to well-intentioned people saying things that are true.
It's the same as what happened to the term "fake news."
Bitcoin has some very serious problems. We all know what they are. If you keep pretending they don't exist, you only hurt your own credibility.
[+] [-] rtpg|7 years ago|reply
I feel like you really don't get the... particulars of being a Chinese national, on multiple levels
[+] [-] coralreef|7 years ago|reply
Don't see this equation actually changing. Like you mentioned, operations will just be moved elsewhere. ASIC manufacturing and mining "tech" will still be hoarded and profit maximized.
[+] [-] arcticfox|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|7 years ago|reply
It's not FUD if it's true, which you're implying with the first half of that there sentence...
[+] [-] drak0n1c|7 years ago|reply
Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? I don’t think we should be comfortable with blanket bans just because they are accompanied by government greenwashing PR.
[+] [-] pakitan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ackbar03|7 years ago|reply
Plus your entire premise is wrong, yuan is definitely not increasingly devalued. Even if it was that wouldn't directly mean it's a problem
[+] [-] killjoywashere|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 127|7 years ago|reply
That said, reducing the energy consumption of Bitcoin should be an absolute priority. Lightning Network and other such technologies help.
[+] [-] jayd16|7 years ago|reply
If you buy counterfeit goods with bitcoin there's not much you can do. A credit card protects you from fraud over $50.
What exactly is this bitcoin waste getting us?
[+] [-] rocqua|7 years ago|reply
Cash solves this rather cheaply (because it is physical). Electronic money does it a lot more efficiently that bitcoin. Perhaps the power usage of all banks is higher than bitcoin, but power per transaction is a lot better.
[+] [-] forkLding|7 years ago|reply
https://www.ccn.com/chinas-merchants-are-legally-allowed-to-...
[+] [-] mpoteat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garmaine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tudorizer|7 years ago|reply
Existing systems, banks and all adjacent institutions and companies, are close to impossible to track and measure.
[+] [-] sekai|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulfw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheekybillberry|7 years ago|reply
However, I'm not happy to see an outright ban on it, for all sorts of reasons. Not only are there fundamental freedom of speech issues involved, but it sets a dangerous precedent with regard to decentralized computing in general. I also believe that the best way forward in a bitcoin-free future is to leave things be, expose rather than suppress, and to let people do what they want so as to encourage transition.
I'm surprised to see so many comments supportive of this move here. First they come for bitcoin, then they come for Matrix?
[+] [-] AFascistWorld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|7 years ago|reply
It surely doesn’t help keeping the rivers clean
[+] [-] chakintosh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killjoywashere|7 years ago|reply
https://www.steamtablesonline.com/
To get steam at 70°C you would have to draw a vacuum on the system. I see this ending expensively.
[+] [-] swarnie_|7 years ago|reply
Surely you cant get the density needed before the GPU's themselves burst in to flames?
[+] [-] rocqua|7 years ago|reply
We're still stuck with two Chinese ASIC manufacturers, but at least more of the actual mining will be outside china.
[+] [-] balboah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HNLurker2|7 years ago|reply
What do you think?
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SRTP|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mengkudulangsat|7 years ago|reply
These are mobile, and will surely emigrate.
[+] [-] gayFaggot|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]