Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

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Use of energy is not necessarily incompatible with climate change mitigation. PoW uses electricity and is completely agnostic to whether that electricity is generated by fossil fuels or clean renewables/nuclear. Piddling about how civilization chooses to use electricity as a solution to climate change will be a never ending game of whack-a-mole. The only solution is to address it at it's source, by internalizing the negative externalizes of carbon pollution in the cost of this energy use. Anything else is feel good bullshit.

Moreover, to the proponents of PoW, it is not a flaw to be removed, but a necessary foundation that makes the protocol incorruptible and eternally open and permissionless for anyone to join as first class citizens, even late adopters. This stands in stark contrast to PoS which gives an absurd level of power and protocol control to early adopters that potentially can't ever be diluted, and may even increase since PoS rewards holders of coin with even more coin.

This is a mix of climate denialism and Bitcoin religion.

1) A system that turns energy usage into $ will always gravitate towards the cheapest energy source (fossil fuels). Maybe we'll eventually figure out cold fusion, but for the next few decades it's pretty important to promote carbon neutral energy production even if it's more expensive while simultaneously cutting out gratuitous industrial scale waste like PoW mining.

2) "makes the protocol incorruptible and eternally open and permissionless for anyone to join as first class citizens, even late adopters". Ah yes, let me just fire up my warehouse full of ASICs connected to a dedicated power plant. Any old Joe could do it.

> cheapest energy source (fossil fuels).

Renewables are often cheaper - it depends.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new...

This is a mix of Bitcoin denialism and climate religion.

1) Bitcoin mining is increasingly migrating to hydro and geothermal, because fossil fuels are too expensive in comparison. Presumably, nuclear will come eventually.

2) See what I did there in my first sentence? We should have an intellectually hygenic discussion; there is no valid place for the kind of rhetoric you're employing.

Well, I thought it was clever

No, you just misunderstood him. He's saying that energy generation and use should be carbon taxed. If you internalize the carbon externality, fossil fuels will not be cheap.

There are arguments against these, but yours is a poor one.

Thank you. Everyone replying to this comment seems to be intentionally ignoring my point.

Since one of the inherent properties of PoW cryptocurrencies is it doesn't matter where the mining takes place, mining will always take place in whichever country doesn't impose a carbon tax. Ironically they're much more "censorship resistant" to carbon taxes than actual attempts by major economies to ban their use (which would only need to be partially effective to squash the price bubble and by extension reduce incentive to spend on mining)

That's already a problem. Developing nations are consuming an ever expanding amount of fossil fuels. And they're sure as hell not going to stop, because the advantage to their citizens of developing their infrastructure towards Western standards of living far outweighs projected threats of climate change.

Developed countries are already making okish strides on decarbonizing, but how can we in the first world effectively decree that the developing world must halt or slow progress towards the lifestyles that we enjoy. That reeks of a new kind of colonialism, and simply won't go over well without the threat of global violence.

The only way we'll actually make strides on decarbonization is with some kind of global carbon tax. I'm not going to pretend I know how we accomplish that, but if we can't, we're not going to mitigate climate change in any reasonable way.

Geopolitical energy cost arbitrage is a major climate change issue, but I feel like it's disingenuous to focus on crypto as the main problem.

The majority of these harms are in heavy industry, manufacturing, logistics, etc. I'd estimate only 1% of this problem can be attributed to cryptocurrency.

If crypto was somehow globally banned, the problem would not be significantly diminished. If bitcoin eventually becomes responsible for 10%+ of dirty energy, only then would this argument be compelling to me.

We hear this same story every single time the topic comes up. It's not the most convincing argument. First, the real world experience is that bitcoin miners don't care about whether they are using renewable energy. Furthermore, we should not ignore the substantial carbon emissions from building the mining infrastructure (the mining hardware, plus also the power generation). A protocol that promotes a colossal amount of e-waste is swimming in the wrong direction when it comes to fighting climate change.

The system we currently rely on is founded on proof of violence, which also creates a colossal amount of waste, and not just in our garbage dumps.

And you seem to be ignoring my point, that until we internalize the costs of burning fossil fuels, there will always be someone willing to burn it, even if it's not bitcoin miners.

You can't rely on the consumers of electricity to solve the problem of it coming from fossil fuels. This is a policy problem, and unless people start caring about what goes on in government it doesn't matter. Washington, for example, has demonstrated recently that even an administration that is supposed to be taking climate change seriously has encouraged fossil fuels to flourish.

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