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Comment by febeling | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin miners use surplus energy in remote places with lots of thermal or hydroelectric power. Remote China and Iceland. This electricity often can't be put to any other use anyway. The price of energy is probably enough to ensure this.

Besides, the cost of maintaining Bitcoin has to be compared with holding up a fiat currency empire like the US. This requires lots of military, suppression of democracy and generally violence. Seen through that lense it might be quite cheap.

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Energy grids are very big, and are planned very intentionally. Renewable energy produced in remote places is often used to power far away cities. It's very unlikely that a consistent energy source capable of powering a large bitcoin mine would not be integrated into the grid if the mine wasn't there.

Here's some further reading:

https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoins-climate-impact-global-c...

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7

https://decrypt.co/43848/why-bitcoin-miners-dont-use-more-re...

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Energy transports costs are non-negligible. In fact, in Europe I pay more for the grid transfer (~0.25/kwh) than generation (0.06/kwh).

Yes, that's one of the factors influencing planning. It will be very hard to get financing for a hydroelectric plant without existing infrastructure or some guarantee that transmission will be built. You can't just pick a river and hope the customers come to you.

The grids are large, but the transport is very inefficient. That's why Bitcoin mining is becoming an alternative to previous ways to avoid wasting energy surplus, like melting aluminum ore.

I understand the theory, but that just isn't what happens in reality, at least right now. Please at least glance at the links I listed.

I did glace at those, actually read most of it. It all depends also on how much energy consumption you'd deem adequate. And further, how you even tell or know what would be adequate.

The reason is I don't think the costs for our broken monetary system are fully appreciated, or even appreciated at all, at this point.

I can't back it up adequately right now, but I do believe most of the environmental damage today, most of inequality, most war, and most political corruption is caused by fiat money and its skewed incentives. Crypto at least has a real shot at fixing those.

Interesting question would be, how much of _all_ energy does bitcoin cost? Now I've looked up the numbers. Total consumption of the bitcoin process seem to be 78-87 TWh depending on which source you look at (I found one higher than what one of your source said and will use that, for 2019).

Total annual energy consumption is 584 EJ, or 162,222 TWh (statista numbers, 2019).

That would put bitcoin at 0.05% of total global annual. I feel that is not too high.

Given your premise, I agree that is an acceptable cost. I also agree that your premise sounds difficult to back up in the space of a comment. I've found that most people, myself included, have some kind of pet political issue that they believe to be the real cause of all the problems in the world. I'm not dismissing it out of hand, but I think you'll agree that it's an eyebrow-raising claim if you've never heard it before.

Bitcoin's share of carbon emissions is about 0.1% by my rough calculations (based on https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption and https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions). My position is that stopping the worst effects of climate change is going to require lots of relatively small changes across all sectors of life. Bitcoin is nothing compared to, say, heating and cooling homes, but we can't just get rid of heating and cooling. We can distribute more efficient appliances, build more insulated homes, influence behavior to lower usage somewhat. Each of these might give us a .1% improvement. Find a hundred things like this, and we've cut 10% of global emissions, that's pretty good.

I know bitcoin is here to stay, and I'm not suggesting government should try to ban it or something because it's bad for the planet. But until I'm convinced that it's the savior you say it is, it's not something I personally want to be involved in, and not something I can celebrate. Even ignoring mining, the cost per transaction is an enormous hurdle for me that I will need a lot of incentive to get over.

I can see where you're coming from and it's consistent reasoning. I also agree my scenario isn't substantiated (at all) yet, even though I believe it to be not uncommon in the crypto community.

I will put my thoughts on this together, and if you're interested ever hearing about it put some contact in your profile. In that case I'll ping you.

This exchange turned out productive. Thanks for that.

> This electricity often can't be put to any other use anyway.

This is false. If there is surplus electricity, prices would drop, and you could expand availability. Government, especially the Chinese government is more than capable of shaping market demand.

Furthermore, you could displace existing coal based electrical demand in the country.

The value of currency comes from trust that you manage it well, not from the number of bombers.

There exists energy where it's not economically viable to put on a grid, or really do anything with. Many mine Bitcoin with this energy. Even in the United States. The cost of transporting it is more then the energy is worth.

In Europe where I live, electricity costs 0.06 euro for generation and then 0.25 on top for transportation to me. So eve if the grid is vast, transport costs are vast as well.

Iceland definitely has surplus energy. There's been ideas to lay a cables to mainland Europe to export it since it's going to waste at the moment.

Curious what percentage of bitcoin's energy use is from surplus energy that otherwise no use?

recently Iran was blaming bitcoin for blackouts, so perhaps not all bitcoin is mined from hydro/thermal power. Of course it could that Iran was just looking for an easy scapegoat.

Bitcoin mining is also helping to end gas flaring in the US. Instead of just burning fuel, use it to run a mining farm https://www.crusoeenergy.com/news-and-media/2019/12/8/bloomb...

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