Supporting Bitcoin == Supporting Global Warming | Hacker News Reader

Supporting Bitcoin == Supporting Global Warming

nytimes.com

34 pointsowenfar41 comments

Supporting Bitcoin == Supporting a decentralized, permissionless, censorship-resistant network.

Supporting coal subsidies + lack of carbon tax == Supporting global warming.

If Bitcoin ran on solar panels nobody would give a shit. But because miners are able to arbitrage energy prices thanks to government subsidies and lack of carbon tax, Bitcoin can run on fossil fuels as well.

If you want to fix global warming, the appropriate policy action is very simple, and very clear.

"Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3 percent of global GDP) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5 percent of GDP) in 2017. The largest subsidizers in 2015 were China ($1.4 trillion), United States ($649 billion), Russia ($551 billion), European Union ($289 billion), and India ($209 billion)."

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...

"As of 2019, G20 governments, representing the world’s major economies, supported coal, oil, and gas production and consumption by, on average, $548 billion per year."

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/07/qa-fossil-fuel-subsidies

"If Bitcoin ran on solar panels nobody would give a shit."

If you told someone that bitcoin mining uses more power than all the solar energy harvested throughout the world I think most people would say its a waste.

Those people would say its a waste because they're imagining energy as a medium for the delivery of physical things. When energy fails to deliver something physical, they view it as a waste.

Money and value are social abstractions, not physical things. As an example: without trust in a government, fiat money would not function, and would become valueless.

Energy is the link between the physical world and the social-abstract human world.

I think it's a waste because that energy could've went to more productive on-demand energy-intensive uses like electrolysis, desalination, or carbon capture

That's false because the energy capacity for those things was there already, and those things did not grow and proliferate to consume energy the way you see Bitcoin consuming energy.

The problem with those processes is no one is willing to pay for them, ie. no profit incentive. That is a separate issue involving public spending and creating incentives to support industry.

What you've done is imagine ways to spend money/energy that isn't yours for a greater public good, which is pretty easy but otherwise overly simplistic.

Many people consume things others perceive as wasteful. Value is subjective. If consumers didn't value their purchases, they wouldn't buy them. There are some who say commenting online is a waste of time, but here we are.

warning, miners interests can make them go weird ways, rumors of texas natural gas companies cutting a deal with them to save their ass

i wish there was a solar mining farm just to see

Nothing turns HN comments more bitter and unthinking faster than the topic of Bitcoin, especially its insane energy use.

Pitching Bitcoin: "Imagine a currency... that doesn't materially change the status quo (and taken to the end game more-greatly enriches fewer people), is somewhere between 100,000x and 1,000,000x less energy efficient, slower to transact, more volatile, 100% traceable, easier to scam, harder to teach to laymen, causes supply shortages to other markets, whose production is owned in majority by our greatest geopolitical adversary, is treated as an asset and incentivizes saving over spending, and will continue to waste more and more energy for at least the next 100 years."

Absolutely insane invention, and the fact that people think this is worth money only tells you that they've bought in.

Bitcoin proponents like to pretend it circumvents government interference, as if Bitcoin exists in a vacuum. In reality, the moment the government does a double take of Bitcoin, the market blinks. Everybody knows the pitch of decentralization is just a gimmick, even if they aren't willing to admit it.

Blockchain presents, for the first time in history, the ability to coordinate humans at scale without a central authority.

Blockchain gives that ability, but Bitcoin isn't a good blockchain.

There is no central authority of humanity, just deeply embedded factions with long histories. If you don't think the same is happening to Bitcoin just look who the biggest players are in crypto (hint: it isn't decentralized individuals.) Bitcoin offers nothing new from the perspective of game theory, and only seeks to offload consensus to software which fails against hard power anyway.

Over three millennia ago, humans had the Bronze Age, which included two global markets (copper and tin) and had international trade without any central authority setting the prices.

I would pitch it as a global, provably immutable database network where anyone can participate pseudonymously, where state control is difficult and thus censorship is difficult.

Bitcoin is actually just a database. It makes no promise about money or value. But it turns out that those qualities mentioned above are also important qualities for good money, and so humans assigned value to the system.

If you don't think the network is useful, don't use it. Short it. But don't act as if there are no tradeoffs between security and convenience. Don't act as if negative interest rates and infinite quantitative easing are normal things.

> I would pitch it as a global, provably immutable network where anyone can participate pseudonymously, where state control is difficult and thus censorship is difficult.

The network is completely traceable. Anti-censorship is worthless without protection. I do something on the network my government doesn't like, they track me down and put me in jail. Great system. The failings of political systems are not overcome by changing the financial instruments used.

The network is completely traceable.

It is traceable when the appropriate dataset is overlaid on top of it. Ie. IP addresses, known public keys associated with people/organizations. Within itself, you don't know who is sending or receiving.

Anti-censorship is worthless without protection.

Protection comes from anonymity/pseudonymity.

I do something on the network my government doesn't like, they track me down and put me in jail. Great system.

Yes, its almost as if you need to take steps and precautions to ensure that your government cannot track you down. You know where its even easier to trace your transactions and freeze your assets? Your bank account.

> It is traceable when the appropriate dataset is overlaid on top of it. Ie. IP addresses, known public keys associated with people/organizations. Within itself, you don't know who is sending or receiving.

You mean the kind of information governments readily have access to?

> Yes, its almost as if you need to take steps and precautions to ensure that your government cannot track you down. You know where its even easier to trace your transactions and freeze your assets? Your bank account.

Ever heard of cash?

You mean the kind of information governments readily have access to?

Ever hear of a VPN, Tor, or BitTorrent? How's the war on movie piracy going?

Ever heard of cash?

Yeah, I've also heard of civil forfeiture where the police take your money without cause or ability for remediation.

I've heard of authoritarian governments who scan your face and keep your social credit score, and will prevent you from making transactions and opening accounts, making your life much more difficult.

I've heard of a house fire, and cash burns pretty easily if I recall, even if its the new stuff made of plastic polymers.

I've heard of counterfeit bills too.

the FBI can, and has, seized bitcoin. the FBI cannot, and has never been able to, seize cash they cannot find or otherwise touch with their hands.

The FBI can seize Bitcoin if the private keys are insecure by way of being physically available and unencrypted on servers/devices domiciled in the United States, or by cooperation of a party with access to said private key.

The FBI, or any government entity, cannot seize Bitcoin from an address otherwise. To do so would demonstrate the ability to break the encryption underpinning Bitcoin's opensource key creation protocol.

Put another way: there's a billion dollars sitting at addresses right now for you to steal. If you can crack the keys, go steal that money and make it public. That would destroy Bitcoin quickly. The open market bet is that you (or anyone else) can't.

Cash is easy to trace

on a metalevel view its also interesting, because the mob/mass effect is getting so huge that it's kinda becoming its own thing, absurd or not

it's also one of hottest superstition social study ever.

I’ve made quite a bit of money on cryptocurrency. For some of us, perhaps many of us, it’s been a net positive.

How much did you lose?

What you have made someone else has lost

I haven’t lost any, technically I exited at 10,000% gains (ETH $10 -> $1000) (not that much money all in all.) Since then I’ve seen the damage it’s doing to markets, environments, brains, etc. and realized it’s really just a net negative. Not everything that earns you money is good or worth it.

Supporting heating in the winter == supporting global warming

Supporting agriculture == supporting global warming

Supporting any kind of traveling and international trade == supporting global warming

Reading the NY Times == supporting global warming

Heating in the winter prevents people from freezing to death.

Agriculture feeds the world.

Travel, fair argument.

The power demand for a website is a drop in the ocean compared to the power consumption from a rack of GPUs or dedicated mining cards

…and Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology, providing a censorship-resistant money-exchange system.

We can discuss if this is worth more or less than <insert some other activity that contributes to global warming> and also discuss the merit of the new technology, but simple dismissing it as “contributing to global warming” is an inane argument.

It’s not even an argument. It’s pure propaganda spouted by oligarchs who have something to lose when humanity wins.

BTC opened the door and CBDCs will close it. Climate apocalypse is just a convenient rationale. They've often suggested using carbon credits as a supporting 'asset' for a CBDC system.

Hey NY Times, now do an article on clothes dryers which use 4x more energy than the BTC network[1][2] while air-drying can do it without any electricity.

[1] https://twitter.com/csuwildcat/status/1392639419920785411

[2] Same tweets but on threadreader https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1392639419920785411.html

Or try to estimate how much power the current financial industry takes, hint: it's not exactly a small scale operation. But while the motive for attacking BTCs might not always be honest (see this article also has no shame in casually calling out the early adopters of Bitcoins as "anarchists"), the point about energy consumption isn't entirely invalid. Right now it's probably on the line of being fine, but it a puts a real hard cap on how much further BTC will be able to scale. We definitely can't have another 10x increase in power consumption or something like this. So maybe protocol changes are needed, or things will slowly shift somewhere else, just something to keep in mind.

PC gaming alone as much as bitcoin and its useless as bitcoin in my eyes.

This might be one of the worse cases of an editorialized headline I've seen on HN recently.

By this logic any technology “supports global warming” if it uses energy. Or you must accept that 100% renewable energy bitcoin does not emit carbon.

I think the argument is more a moral judgement against bitcoin which many view as a “waste”, even though that’s just someone’s opinion.

Proof-of-work is necessarily a resource-wasteful scheme. I think it's okay to make a moral judgment about that with regard to it becoming the world's most expensive game of guess the number, principally for speculative purposes. We live in a resource constrained real world and this is something exclusively for the world inside of computers but with negative externalities on the real, outside world.

Same old recycled FUD, mainstream narrative.

You can say it as many times as you'd like, but the fact remains that Bitcoin takes an inordinate amount of energy out of the grid that needs to be replaced.

Homes, business, etc need to be powered. If miners start buying out old generation stations, then the carbon footprint is only going to grow further

All the more reason to switch to Ethereum, which transitions to a low-energy proof of stake model in the next six months.

That's been true for a while.

Or you could even switch to something that has working PoS now.

Tezos is proof of stake already and supports dApps/NFTs etc. with a tiny fraction of the fees of Ethereum. Cardano will be similar. I'm sure there are others. While it's better than bitcoin, people should be moving away from eth, not towards it.

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