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Comment by emteycz | Hacker News Reader

Energy and environment are very distinct. Yes, BTC uses a lot of energy - but it's also helping the environment.

For example, here they do heating of historical buildings (old castles etc - necessary for preservation of wall paintings and other artefacts) with BTC mining. That's good for environment because without the additional funds they would have to burn coal.

There are renewable energy projects that are economical only thanks to Bitcoin, for example a nearby solar park. Not every place has year round sunshine, so you must overbuild significantly - but that costs a lot of money and also destabilizes the electrical grid when there's too much sunshine in the summer. Solution is simple - use the excess energy for mining, fund half the park with revenue from it. The same is done with wind energy.

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Resistive heating is terribly wasteful. If you're going to heat a building electrically, far better to do it with a heat pump. The fact that some perverse quirk of economics makes it more economically viable to mine bitcoins than run a heat pump makes it bad for the environment, not good.

No matter how creative you get with the accounting, in the final analysis you're burning a lot of electricity with nothing tangible to show for it.

Heat pump is way too expensive. The issue here is cost.

No, no it isn't. Heat pumps are cheap compared to 3090s and whatever other ASICs you're going to be using.

Electricity costs also scale. You're paying 1/4 the electricity cost to heat your "castle" with a heat pump. That - in itself - is very important.

The castle is paying like 1/3 they were paying for coal+transport, they're paying for the heat as they go and the crypto mining company is handling the ASICs or GPUs or whatever - the castle doesn't care about that at all (this kind of project is not unusual around here, it's not one-off - energy companies have special tariffs for them now).

Unless you know about someone here who would offer this kind of deal with heatpumps, it's passe. The castle does not have enough money to invest, they're using donations from people to at least fix the most important problems - so projects like this are extremely important because every cent counts.

They can't invest $XXk and hope it returns in 30 years because they're never going to have that sum to invest, and if they had, they would use it to fix the castle, not for heat pumps. The castle needs it now, not in 30 years.

Wow!

Can someone help me describe the rhetorical device being used here? “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind, which describes a win where the cost was so severe it outweighs the benefits, like considering “heating old castles” to be an environmental win while the cost of such is running roughshod over the rest of the world’s environment, but that’s the name for a concept that describes this argument, not the rhetorical device.

I think there's a few false dichotomies? Either warm castles with electricity Bitcoin OR warm them with gas; Bitcoin is better than gas (is it actually though? where's the electricity come from?), therefore Bitcoin is "good". No mention of not heating the leaky old castles at all.

How is that a false dichotomy when that's exactly the choice this particular place has faced? No alternatives were available due to cost and non-existent gas infrastructure.

Not like we want to expand our gas usage anyways as here we buy it all from Russia, right?

Maybe they shouldn't be heating them at all! We don't owe it to old leaky castles to make it economically viable to heat them. Cheap gas is an ecological nightmare. That doesn't mean that other methods are not also ecological nightmares. How do you even know that the electricity they're burning to mine bitcoin didn't also come from Russian gas? There's no economic principle that says it can't. All Bitcoin does is make it profitable to waste energy - that doesn't mean wasting energy is good! How can paying people to use up electricity possibly be a net win?

Sorry but here we like to preserve our 2000+ years old culture. This particular castle is 1200 years old. I can understand you're not excited about preserving some random few hundred years old buildings, but this is highly valuable cultural legacy and one of the few remains from that age.

Czech electricity companies allow you to choose your energy mix (green/standard).

1) You don't need to heat a castle to preserve it.

2) If you really cared, as a society, you'd pay for the (more efficient!) heat pumps through taxes. Funding inefficient heating with Bitcoin just offloads the financial burden to new Bitcoin investors and is unsustainable in the long run anyway. TANSTAAFL.

1) You do. Castles are not just walls, there's stuff inside.

2) "if you really cared as a society" is not useful when there's simply not enough money in this society. We're not funding anything, this is a private project. The castle is buying some heat from them for a damn good price, that's it.

The argument is a broken window fallacy. It asserts that bitcoin energy use (the broken window) is good because it leads to increased spending on energy production and/or increased heat generation.

That's a wrong take of my opinion.

It's better to use energy at times of overabundance for something economically useful (money to make the renewable project cheaper = affordable), than to just throw the energy away. If Bitcoin can make renewables more economical, we can stop burning fossil fuels faster. And if Bitcoin causes coal to be replaced with anything, that's a win for the environment too - even if it's a net increase of energy usage and heat, it's still a net decrease of greenhouse gas production which is much more important that reducing energy usage.

I don't know if the energy required to heat a historical building from servers is 'good' from a Utilitarian viewpoint - the energy consumed to do this is surely greater than the amount of coal required to run some effective heaters and on the other hand if people aren't willing to fund green initiatives to keep the historical building going is it really worth the effort?

On the other hand if you can have a green energy project fund itself with bitcoin while being even slightly net positive then I think that's useful, if only because it'll increase funding to green energy producers and that's a good thing (more users should allow for the benefits of economy of scale).

BTC uses a lot of energy, some of it excess clean energy, but mostly just dirty energy. It is far from helping the environment.

Storing excess clean energy, now that would help the enviroment. Using excess clean energy for BTC means storage needs to compete with BTC, making storage economically less feasible.

So BTC not only uses lots of dirty energy, it also hinders innovation in using excess clean energy. BTC is just terrible for the environment.

Don’t have strong opinions on this, but not sure why the above got downvoted. Seems like an informed comment.

Probably because it's painfully obvious that "Bitcoin is good for the environment" cannot possibly be true, and rather than expend energy unpicking the logical fallacy in the reasoning they'd rather downvote and move on.

If it was painfully obvious, there wouldn't have been 10 years of debate and new projects wouldn't be coming up and wouldn't be successful.

Murder is said to be bad yet murder keeps happening. Why could it ever be? Murder must be successful!

Same logic.

Yeah, and Hitler blah blah

HN has very strong views on crypto along the lines of it's all bad, so even fairly reasoned arguments (that may well be flawed) are downvoted into oblivion without a decent debate on the points. It's why I wish Crypto was just banned from HN - it is rarely a decent conversation here.

I like it for that reason -- the attitude of a bunch of technically-proficient hacker types is a good bellwether for what can be expected from society in general. If even the HN crowd is making the calibre of comment HN people usually make, then either we are still super early, or I'm super wrong. Time will tell I guess.

The points have been debated ad nauseum on HN. There's really nothing more to say, hence the downvoting.

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