[awrence]

The math on the PoW energy FUD just doesn't check out.

- At current levels, bitcoin uses very roughly 0.1% of global electricity but electricity only represents 25% of fossil fuels emissions so current PoW contribution to global emissions = 0.025%, ie a rounding error. This issue is currently a total red herring. Now let's project into the future.

- bitcoin total addressable market cap if it took over the entire global monetary world (full global monetary premium): ~ 250tn or 300x from here implying a worst case outcome of 7.5% of global emissions, IF this happened TODAY and hashpower linearly tracked price. This is impossible off the bat because building out that infrastructure would take at least a decade. But more importantly it will take a decade or two for price to get there, by which time...

- The block subsidy will have gotten cut by ~ 10 (three halving cycles). Transaction fees might grow of course so let's say 5x lower which gets us back to 1.5% of global emissions.

- Add to that the following:

- 30% of CURRENT electricity production is stranded / wasted. All terminal bitcoin energy usage needs to do is tap into 5% of that to be emissions neutral. And it's heavily skewed towards tapping into that exclusively as that's the cheapest source and PoW is location neutral.

- the proof of work energy mix skews towards not only wasted / stranded but renewable which is trending towards being the cheapest form of energy.

- green power production is on an exponential adoption curve and enough sunlight hits the earth to power humanity for a year. Clean energy is there in amounts dwarfing societal needs, it's just a matter of harnessing it. This doesn't even include geothermal or nuclear.

- At an even higher level, if you got to this point, you would have replaced all the fiat systems in the world thereby: - eliminating the energy spent on maintaining the fiat system which is easily more than 1.5% of global emissions - flipping the world into a hard money world that is no longer incentivized to consume at all costs (read misallocate capital) ergo hugely reducing conspicuous consumption / GDP growth at all costs which is arguably the biggest driver of unnecessary emissions

- This final line of thought would have you conclude flipping to PoW would be emissions negative in the long run, but you don't really need to go there though, the energy numbers alone make this at best a chronically misunderstood narrative.

[endless1234]

>At current levels, bitcoin uses very roughly 0.1% of global electricity but electricity only represents 25% of fossil fuels emissions so current PoW contribution to global emissions = 0.025%, ie a rounding error.

How does this argument make sense? Let's split up the world's energy consumption into 0.025% emission sized chunks in some arbitrary way we choose. Does nothing then make any difference, since everything is just a rounding error? The question is, does bitcoin provide value for the emissions it generates? For what it's worth, estimates seem to put the current usage at around 0.6% of total worldwide energy consumption.

[awrence]

I see your point but my first bit just meant to highlight the unfair disproportionate energy attention PoW has been getting specifically vs just about any other use case.

I don't personally think you should be making moral judgements about energy use though. Let the market decide what's a good use of energy. If you have a carbon problem, tax / regulate that, PoW won't care. It will adjust through difficulty adjustments.

But if you are worried about PoW boiling the oceans if left unchecked, the numbers should comfort you it's at worst going to tap mostly into wasted energy / mostly renewable and probably not have a noticeable impact even extrapolated to a peak outcome (and probably even be a net positive).

[spywaregorilla]

I think bitcoin using 1 out of 1000 units of energy produced is pretty disgusting, hard stop.

[zaphar]

You make a lot of claims here but I don't see anything in your post to back up the numbers. I'm too lazy to go do this research myself so I'm left as a result with defaulting to disbelieving you.

[awrence]

I've been following this topic intensely for years and am very comfortable with these numbers but fair enough. I agree I should reference some official sources which I'll try and dig back up. Happy to discuss any assumption in closer detail though.

[cwkoss]

> eliminating the energy spent on maintaining the fiat system which is easily more than 1.5% of global emissions

Absolutely. It's impossible to accurately account for, but a significant part of why the US Military Industrial Complex is so over-provisioned is to maintain dollar hegemony. 800 international US military bases, the Iraq war, invasion of Libya, force projection exercises by the navy, etc. Being the world police is expensive (in both dollars and CO2), and we wouldn't need to be if we weren't trying to tenuously maintain our status as world reserve currency.

"the DOD is the world's largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world. 5 From FY1975 to FY2018, total DOD greenhouse gas emissions were more than 3,685 Million Metric Tons of CO2 equivalent."

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Pe...

Certainly the US military has other goals besides maintaining dollar hegemony, but if the dollar wasn't the world reserve currency there would be less need and funds for maintaining such a bloated amount of power.

[IlliOnato]

[quote]if the dollar wasn't the world reserve currency there would be less need and funds for maintaining such a bloated amount of power[/quote]

Citation needed.

You really think that other countries, and businesses and individuals in these countries store their savings and denominate their contracts in US dollars at gunpoint?

Ridiculous.

[paulgb]

> And it's heavily skewed towards tapping into that exclusively as that's the cheapest source and PoW is location neutral.

Are there any big miners who are known to be using stranded/wasted energy that would be produced anyway, as opposed to operating stranded plants that would otherwise be shut down or have capacity reduced? I only really follow the publicly traded miners (and with a bearish thesis), and I've seen a lot of miners getting dedicated coal/natural gas capacity but very little in terms of recapturing wasted energy.

And these are (mostly) US-based public companies, so they have the most to gain by projecting an ESG image.