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Comment by jf22 | Hacker News Reader

Right, and all those things are harmful to the planet.

Making the study about bitcoin in particular seems like a clickbaity way of getting attention, when the core issue seems to be dirty power generation. Bitcoin makes up a tiny fraction of non-essential American power usage, so focusing on it in particular just seems like jumping on the "Bitcoin is terrible for the environment" bandwagon. Articles on this topic seem to pop up every couple weeks on HN lately, and they generally aren't novel or interesting.

Human life in general is harmful to the planet.

So what are you saying?

I don't understand why you would feel as though this reply says anything. There is always something worse or has alternative consequences.

That it's important to measure the impact of each accurately so that we can make sensible decisions about where to curtail said damages.

Many I just listed use more energy than btc...so yes, they are.

So what are you saying, that because other things are also bad we can't have a discussion how bad one thing is?

Im saying you were being sarcastic thereby making the claim that those things are not harmful, and they are. Im not sure whats confusing here.

I was not being sarcastic. Those things are harmful.

You mentioned five things, all of which are frequently focused on as contributors to global climate change. Well, I'm not sure I've seen "AI and video rendering" mentioned in that context, but I'm also not sure that they use more power than crypto mining. But definitely I've seen articles addressing idle electronics[0], big homes with AC[1], leisure travel[2], and "all the useless crap bought and manufactured in China with dirty coal"[3].

So it shouldn't be surprising that crypto mining is added to the list.

Any and all heavy users of energy are contributing to climate change in some way, and the cost/benefit analysis for some are more justifiable than others. Food production is energy-hungry, but without it, people die. Nobody would die if crypto mining ended tomorrow. Thanks to government standards, idle electronics are better now than they were, and will continue to improve in the future. Big homes with A/C is a largely American problem without anything to really address it yet, but there has been a lot of attention focused on the issue already.

In general a bad thing is bad whether there are worse things or not. Crypto mining is a big drain on energy resources with very little benefit, or with benefit to very few people, and it doesn't have to the biggest drain, or benefit the fewest number of people the least for that to be true.

0. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/keep-your-devices-wasting-energ...

1. https://www.ajc.com/news/local/are-air-conditioners-slowly-k...

2. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/25/8881364/greta-th...

3. https://phys.org/news/2017-11-impact-climate-china-substanti...

By endlessly arguing about regulating minor consumer/production classes the attention span and opportunities for effective change diminish. The regulation should happen for the big polluters first, i.e. coal plants, transport ships. When that is done and the problem is largely fixed, you can spend your time arguing about cryptocurrency taxation, why not.

It makes no sense, in the current situation, to discuss 10000 small energy consumers and appropriate pollution tax for all of them. We need to fix the damn energy production first.

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