Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

any infrastructure dedicated to the mining of crypto is opportunity cost. Even if you use renewables, that energy could instead replace traditional energy sources which could be turned off.

This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand. It's one of the reasons why we have globally barely made a dent when it comes to the increase of renewables as a total share of energy consumed despite the fact that the capacity has increased pretty much exponentially.

This is made even worse by the fact that green infrastructure itself necessarily often consumes non-green sources, in particular during construction.

View on HN

> This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand.

That is kinda the main point of a carbon tax... it is to make carbon usage LESS efficient, since you have to pay an extra tax in addition to the cost of the energy itself. Ideally, the money gained from the carbon tax is then redistributed to everyone equally, and that money can then be used for whatever you want.

> Ideally, the money gained from the carbon tax is then redistributed to everyone equally

i dont think that's a good idea - the redistribution does not decrease carbon.

I think the correct carbon tax is the amount of money it takes to fully remove the carbon emitted (at current tech levels). This pot of money is then used to actually remove carbon.

> that energy could instead replace traditional energy sources which could be turned off.

This is not true. Often, renewables aren't available to some locations but abundantly available in others. Other times, some people buy electricity from renewable providers and others don't.

With 50-75% of Bitcoin mining being renewable, one thing is clear - it's helped the adoption of renewables and made them cheaper.

It has helped the adoption of renewables in the same sense how polluting the local river has helped the anti-pollution industry. This is broken window logic. The reason bitcoin uses renwables in the first place is because much of it happens in China where misguided state projects and subsidies have created excess capacity. It makes for a pretty decent joke though, the libertarian currency de jure runs on the misguided state planning of the Communist party of China.

Any excess capacity spent on crypto currency is waste. It could go to scientific computing projects, it could simply not be used. The chips for the equipment (we are in a global chip shortage) could go to something that actually contributes to the real economy.

It may not necessarily be the same as "broken window" logic. Consider a world where no one had ever broken a window. There wouldn't be any window repair people. The first time a window breaks, we have a new opportunity to fill a need. Necessity is the mother of invention. The exponential demand for energy creates more pressure to develop more efficient renewable energy generation methods that probably wouldn't be incentivized by a constant amount of energy use. It's a risky bet, but it might be the only way to spur humanity into action.

We just need to increase carbon taxes at the same rate that renewables become affordable.

it's a complete non-argument you can use it to justify literally anything. Dropping atomic bombs on Japan, hey construction boom! Covid-19, pharma industry innovation! Do you turn the heater on and leave the fridge open to accelerate humanity's fight against climate change? No.

We have about a few thousand pressing issues that spur us on to push for renewables as it is, we don't need to waste energy on purpose.

> We have about a few thousand pressing issues that spur us on to push for renewables as it is, we don't need to waste energy on purpose.

Crypto mining is one of those issues, we don't have a choice. Your argument reduces to "if we had no issues pushing us, we would have enough issues pushing us" which is a contradiction.

"...helped the adoption of renewables and made them cheaper." How so?

Miners are chasing profit margin so they'll use whatever's cheapest. If that's renewable where some of them are, so be it. And if everyone else start reducing use of coal and that becomes cheap, miners who exploits that to derive higher profit margin will grow faster I imagine.

I would attribute growth and economies of scale that renewables have achieved to renewable proponents, industries, government subsidies and loan prorams. Crypto miners are energy consumers and some of them use renewable energy. But how do we go from there to miners being some kind of force for good in this context?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com