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Comment by Imnimo | Hacker News Reader

If I give you a million shares of a company, that act and your ensuing sale of the shares are not (particularly) polluting. But if I send you bitcoin and you then sell them, those transactions occur via a polluting process.

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> those transactions occur via a polluting process.

How much CO2 pollution is each transaction responsible for, and how much would it cost to offset that CO2?

It seems like there should be some threshold above which the donation will include within it the funds needed to compensate for its externalities, but I don't know if it's possible to create a smart contract that only allows donations above a threshold amount.

It costs about $20 to buy the carbon offsets for a single bitcoin transaction (at least according to the first article I found on Google), so double that for the two transactions to receive and then sell. Carbon offsets in practice are often not as much as what you're paying for, so you would probably need to buy more of them to truly offset.

You would also have to factor in the pollution from e-waste generated by miners buying and replacing ASICs, although that's harder to quantify.

But we should also consider whether engaging in such a transaction is worthwhile as a matter of principle. If the organization's goals include environmentalism, does legitimizing Bitcoin by advertising their acceptance of it run counter to those goals?

There is a lot of game theory behind why people mine a PoW cryptocurrency. Attempts to quantify “CO2 per transaction” are fundamentally flawed in my opinion.

Bitcoin’s pollution is not strongly correlated with its transaction volume.

It’s a famous rare collectible. People will mine it whether there is a high volume of transactions or not.

> How much CO2 pollution is each transaction responsible for, and how much would it cost to offset that CO2?

369.49 kgCO2eq. https://www.forbes.com/sites/philippsandner/2021/11/19/bitco...

> An average Bitcoin transaction has a size of 670 bytes on the Bitcoin blockchain, representing an estimated carbon footprint of 369.49 kgCO2eq. Given a price of USD 50 per metric tonne of CO2eq, the compensation of one average Bitcoin transaction costs USD 18.47.

>How much CO2 pollution is each transaction responsible for

Near 0. PoW is about agreeing on what the current state is. A transaction itself doesn't cost very much energy. If you were to process 0 transactions for the next agreed upon state it would take just as much energy as processing thousands of them.

This is equivalent to claiming riding an airline doesn't emit any CO2 because the plane was going to fly anyways

Flying an empty plane does not generate a rare collectible that the airline is speculating may some day be worth over six figures each.

Bitcoin tansactions are unrelated to hashing power, to pollution.

Whether there are zero or a million¹ transactions in a block: the power to mine it is the same.

There is a misunderstanding that hashing power is related to throughput. That correlation does not exist. Hashing power is a function of the price of a Bitcoin.

¹yes, I'm aware of the limts imposed by block sizes. But that too has nothing to do with the power.

The Bitcoin network exists to process transactions. If there are fewer transactions, the per-transaction cost is greater because the network would not exist otherwise – it’s like trying to argue that driving an SUV to work pollutes less because only one of the seats is occupied.

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