Comment by random5634 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by random5634 | Hacker News Reader

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For every dollar spent building a train station there are $50 dollars of health and climate damages.

This ignores the USE of the train station, and just focuses on energy costs to build it.

This study is only focused on mining new coins. Heads up, some of the (wildly inflated) value of bitcoin is tied to (arguable) uses and the ability of the blockchain to operate as a non-repudiation public ledger that allows global transfer of value with strong guarantees totally independent of any other central party.

Some quick math.

1 bitcoin is lets say worth $50,000. Let's assume $10K in electricity to mine this. So for every $1 in bitcoin, you need 20 cents of electricity.

Reduced to it's simplest, the claim here is that for every 20 cents of electricity, there is another 50 cents of health impacts.

Fair enough, but if you believe this, then a lot of other things have huge damages.

Right, other things have huge damages too.

Pointing out other things also have an environmental impact just dilutes the discussion about Bitcoin and doesn't add anything to it.

And neither is highlighting bitcoin, especially by focusing ONLY on the mining aspect of it. The use of the network is also part of the bitcoin story. If instead of using new bitcoins mined they did transaction value per day (ie, $20B+) the math would be totally different.

If you applied this same damage model to something people had fondness for (ie, driving an electric car) you'd realize we should be working as HARD as we can to kill EV cars dead, because there is a MASSIVE unaccounted for cost to charging them (using this model).

Reality though is bitcoin chases low cost power, and that is currently often actually green (hydro, excess solar during day when their is curtailment and negative pricing etc). I can't imagine the economics making sense to mine using coal power.

What good would transaction value per day be? This is like counting your salary twice, once when you earn it, once when you spend it, lol.

Because the transactional ledger of bitcoin is what is driving electricity use, and another statement might be, for every $1 transacted on the bitcoin ledger, 0.0005 dollars in health damage is caused. (it's roughly a factor of 1000 more volume then new mining, and over time new mining is going to get smaller and smaller)

You mean the mining isn't driving electricity use?

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