[esimov]

I cannot recommend enough for everyone who has a minimal sensibility towards the climate impact to read this thread: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064. Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.

[hombre_fatal]

This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are.

If your concern is about avoidable energy waste, you'd need to have a bizarrely weird misunderstanding of the scales here to pick Bitcoin as your hill to die on.

It's like when people complain about how much water you waste by leaving the tap on while you brush your teeth while my dad has the water rights to waste 10,000,000L/year of creek water because he owns a single cow. People have such little understanding of the relative scale of everything, so they laser-focus on whatever inconsequential, concrete morsel that sounds good to them.

[neolog]

> The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several million US households.

That seems like a lot, no?

[tappio]

None of the things you listed are on the same scale if that 621KWh is true. What you should say is: "crusading against people who leave their a/c on for 2 months when they are away, people who drive 2500 miles for fun every day, people who run their clothes drier for a month non-stop even though it's empty".

Regardless, I would be sceptical about that 621 KWh. Does not sound realistic...

[imtringued]

> This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are.

You didn'tconsider that the things you have listed cost money. There is an incentive to reduce them to the absolute minimum because you would go broke if you leased commercial property and put 200 clothes dryers running 24/7.

Mining bitcoin is a profitable activity. You can afford to do that. The price of bitcoin dictates how profitable mining is. The higher the bitcoin price and transaction fees the higher the margins and that means you can buy more miners and thus waste more energy. There is no limit to how much energy can be wasted. Every time you think this is an insane amount of energy it can always get worse. Right now it is only at approximately 80 TWh. In 10 years it could be at 300 TWh. In 20 years it could be 1000TWh. There is no reason why this shouldn't happen.

Bitcoin doubled multiple times in the last decade. The value of a bitcoin could easily outpace the reduction in block reward.

[Thorentis]

This depends on your moral framework. A large part of moral culpability is proximity. How close are you to the issue at hand, and how easy is it for you to take/not take some action. For example, worrying about poverty in a country on the other side of the world, when there are homeless people sleeping on a bench on your street. I can't possibly convince a mega corp to stop wasting energy, but I can try and waste less myself. I can't stop people from using Bitcoin, but I can try and develop/advocate for better alternatives. When all is said and done, is it better to have shrugged and done nothing, or done what was within your power to do? "All we have to decide, is what to do with the time that is given to us".

[disruptalot]

This thread is nothing new. This exact sentiment has been repeated over and over for the last 10 years.

From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste. The reality is that you live in world where people have different understandings and values than you may have. So advocating against Bitcoin is no different than advocating against air travel. You see no issue in the huge amounts of energy consumption for "seeing the world" and "business travel" but maybe I do.

Use resources the way you wish and so will others. Free markets will decide where scarce resources work best.

[meheleventyone]

The last sentence is the entire problem. It ignores the externalities of whatever it is you’re doing. Which in turn (amongst other things) makes the claim of efficient distribution questionable.

Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.

[crumbshot]

The climate catatrosphe that looms upon us all has been caused by individuals and organisations using resources as they wish.

What we've ended up with is a planetwide tragedy of the commons - and free markets aren't going to solve this. They can only continue to exacerbate it.

[antpls]

> From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste.

The debate is not about useless/useful, it is about : can we solve the same needs with a lot less spend energy?

> Use resources the way you wish and so will others. Free markets will decide where scarce resources work best.

That way of thinking leads us to the carbon catastrophe the entire world is trying to reverse right now.

[mtrycz2]

That thread is assuming that BTC runs on fossil, non-renewable energy, which was mostly correct ten to five years ago, but will be mostly wrong onwards.

BTC runs mostly on surplus hydroelectric power. This may change based on what's locally available and the local cost of oil gas and coal, but when renewables will become cheaper than fossil (which will never be soon enough) it will not make any sense to mine on fossils.

[127]

Since nobody has made any better citation, here's one article giving a bit more depth to the issue: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/

Seems at least half of Bitcoin is currently mined directly using coal.

[saberience]

Citation please.

[illustriousbear]

Nevermind traditional banks with their towering office buildings full of air conditioning/appliances, employees commuting to work, remote branches, sophisticated vaults and online infrastructure.

I can never take the bitcoin climate change hysteria seriously. I wonder why the people who write these articles aren't calling out traditional banks? hmm.

[tappio]

Traditional banks pay their electricity bill, so they naturally need to account for that. On the other hand, bitcoin network pays for that collectively. No single entity pays the bill. If a single entity had to pay for 621KWh for every transaction, I don't think that bitcoin could exists. That is the main difference here: multiple parties are doing small contribution to the energy consumption, instead of a single entity. That is the reason why bitcoin networks ecological footprint is huge compared to traditional banking per transaction.

[LittlePeter]

> Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.

I would advocate for renewable energy. It's not like miners demand electricity to be from fossil fuels. The electricity gets paid for, how you use it is up to you.

If Bitcoin would run 100% on solar power I guess then it would be fine? Or maybe you're unhappy with Bitcoin because of its goal and not the means it gets there? That would be different discussion.

It feels like people want to argue against Bitcoin, don't have credible arguments, and bring out the climate card.

Climate is going to shit, but not because of Bitcoin.

[JohnJamesRambo]

Or just move over to Ethereum which is actually moving forward on proof of stake, which solves this problem in an elegant way. It also has major plans for scaling, which Bitcoin has ignorantly refused to budge on.

[pharmakom]

Proof of Work is a simple algorithm that has worked for over 10 years. Proof of Stake is incredibly complex and might be broken in implementation or from a game theory perspective. It also might be a huge improvement over PoW... it’s just too early to say.

[XorNot]

This reply to that thread addresses the better comparison of power usage I've seen (https://twitter.com/ipvkyte/status/1350922562935681024):

(in response to a single BTC transaction consuming 621 kwh)

A Tesla gets 4.1 miles per KWh. So one transaction costs 2,546 miles. Seattle to Boston is 3k miles.

Paying for a burger with bitcoin has the same environmental cost as driving that burger to you from the other coast.

[disruptalot]

This is not how it works at all. A bitcoin block can have 0 transactions and still need the same energy to produce.

a) Sending payments is not the only purpose of the network, it's issuance, it's security, it's to make the ledger immutable.

b) No one's buying a burger with bitcoin. Bitcoin's production is a monetary base. Using the same block space you can have an infinite number of economic transactions happen with the same power consumption (block) on multiple layers, each with a degrading level of security. Of course you don't need the full force of the bitcoin network for a coffee or burger.

[runeks]

Bitcoin mining on a block secures not just this block's transactions, but the transactions in all previous blocks as well. For each block that is added to the blockchain more transactions are secured by the following blocks. Consequently, these "power usage per transaction"-figures are misleading.

[pharmakom]

People computing the joules/tx of Bitcoin are missing that PoW scales such that the amount of a transaction has nothing to do with the amount of mining work that validates it.

I hope that initiatives like Lightning Network can help it scale further though.

[dpatru]

Before you criticize bitcoin you should understand the problem it is solving. Bitcoin is a technological solution to a government-created problem: the creation of money from nothing because politicians and government leaders want to spend more than they can collect in taxes.

Other solutions to this problem include owning gold and stocks, both of which are also costly, but in ways that are harder to quantify.

If you want to avoid the waste caused by government money printing, lobby your government to stop confiscating wealth by allowing gold-backed money and reducing taxes.

[esimov]

No strictly related to Bitcoin, but to the cryptoworld in general: https://memoakten.medium.com/the-unreasonable-ecological-cos...

[gogopuppygogo]

#truth

It’s also a good time to explore the tether bubble: https://link.medium.com/Wsf1ZmBT7cb

[emteycz]

This thread does not answer the predominant usage of waste electricity by Bitcoin miners. Can't take it seriously without any mention of that. Bitcoin is mined where it makes profit, and you can't make any profit without using waste electricity. Today's mining hardware is smart enough to turn off when the powerplant signals there is too much demand and no waste (thus increased prices), and turn back on when convenient.

[preya2k]

Do you have any sources to undermine your statement that miners predominantly use waste electricity?

[127]

At least start to advocate forking it off to something less environmentally destructive.

[arisAlexis]

and favor Proof of Stake and other more modern implementations of the blockchain that accomplish both technological innovation and climate preservation

[mathiasrw]

The power consumption is a reflection of man's greed - not what is needed to operate bitcoin.

[cloudhead]

This guy has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about unfortunately. There is no evidence of any environmental impact.

[yunohn]

What do you mean by “no evidence”? Could you expand your argument further, or are you just dismissing the reality of large amounts of energy being used to run Bitcoin?

[joshxyz]

Thats just lame and missing the entire point of bitcoin lol.

I dont even know where to start, the fact that you're really criticizing bitcoin when you got factories cars and plastics around you, or the fact that the energy isnt wasted but spent to secure and preserve its speculated market value.

Sure, we could just use fiat (paper money), it's eco-friendly, right? But good luck in dealing with inflation lol.

Simple math for all: your 1 USD today is 0.99x tomorrow, while 1 BTC will always = 1 BTC.

[libertine]

I don't know much about the subject, and I'm one of those that misses the entire point of bitcoin itself and other mined cryptos... but if 1 BTC = 1 BTC, why is it being always indexed to USD?

I doesn't seem to make sense to say 1BTC = 1BTC, when people reference it's value to regular currency.

[imtringued]

>But good luck in dealing with inflation lol.

2% inflation is necessary to keep economies fair and productive. Without inflation you basically get hoarders that do nothing productive with their wealth. Deflation increases wealth inequality and is far worse for the average person.