Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
This is the type of tragedy of the commons issue where regulation is needed. For any one actor they can justify spending infinity energy as long as their ROI is positive.
There are enough justifications out there that it's easy to convince oneself that you're doing the world a favor ("I'm just librating finance and fighting the good fight against the central bankers").
Each bitcoin mined in the US directly results in more than 264 metric tonnes of CO2. This is based on the following rough calculation:
1.65 billion metric tonnes * 2% / (900 bitcoins per day * 38% * 365 days)
It's almost like if it wasn't valuable to society than it wouldn't make economic sense.
And here I thought America was a market economy.
It kind of is!
But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation. As governments print increasingly more money, and the amount of BTC stays the same, each BTC becomes worth more. It's very simple. The demand for such an asset is apparently quite high; high enough to spend up to 2.3% of total US energy.
If the world operated on non-inflationary systems there would perhaps still be a small need for BTC, such as providing liberty in committing financial transactions, but I doubt it'd be nearly as big as it is today on that basis alone.
Bitcoin is a terrible inflation hedge. This is quantitaitvely demonstrable over its entire existence. It's a good gambling asset, and in my opinion, should be taxed as such.
You might lose 30% of your value, but hey, you didn't lose that 3.2% to inflation!
What do you think should happen?
Are you implying that BTC is a "sound monetary system"? Because many people will argue with that.
You are completely ignorant. I'm not saying that in a mean way, I mean it in the purest sense possible: You have no idea what you are talking about.
According to the graph below, BTC goes up when inflation goes down. That is the opposite of a hedge! It proves that Bitcoin is not valuable due to "not having sound monetary systems."
Bitcoin is obviously a speculative asset whose value goes up when inflation is low and people have money to spend on speculative assets. The fact that we use 2.3% of our nation's electricity on it is unjustifiable.
> https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-inflation/
That graph is charting BTC price to BTC supply inflation, not general economic inflation (which is what I'm talking about).
(edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven that crypto is intrinsically bad for everything I love - except insofar as I believe it can't be stopped.)
1. There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.
2. The title of the article is itself editorializing the content of the article and is speculative according to their own words. From TFA: "[The EIA] released a study suggesting that cryptocurrency mining represents up to 2.3% of U.S. power demand." It could be less, much less, or much less, although I haven't read the actual report yet (I'm criticizing this article only), because "suggesting" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting
3. "Just 137" isn't meaningful AFAIK. Who cares if it's 100 or 10 or 10,000 miners? The point is the amount of crypto being mined. (The number of miners will always be in flux by design anyway.) And the answer to that, from TFA: "The EIA found that the global share of Bitcoin mining that takes place in the U.S. grew from 3.4% in 2020 to a whopping 37.8% in 2022." So roughly ~2% of US power is generating over 1/3 of the world's Bitcoin. This is only obviously bad if you believe Bitcoin is a total waste of energy, which I don't, but I understand that some do.
4. Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist. Fossil fuel consumption is. From TFA: "We intend to ... quantify the sources of electricity used to meet cryptocurrency mining demand." Meaning this has not been done, and publishing scary warnings is premature. If Bitcoin mining ends up using a higher proportion of renewable energy than, say, traditional banking, it could be seen as a net good for crypto use to rise.
This is your first mistake: the traditional banking system does not have a security model predicated on the ability to waste power. Bitcoin does, and it’s dynamic so there’s no way to waste less power which isn’t explicitly ceding control.
The second error is treat the two as comparable without recognizing that one of them is used daily by millions of people making billions of transactions, and the other has almost no real world adoption. That matters in two ways because it’s not just that bitcoin uses more power to do so much less but also that the real financial system has higher power draw for work in addition to processing transactions. For example, Visa can do on the order of tens of thousands of transactions per second versus Bitcoin’s 7 but if you are looking at how much power they use, the figures will include running a ton of anti-fraud and other support systems which Bitcoin is missing.
Crypto still needs POS systems and accounts and large staffs in large offices and all the trappings of finance outside of mining.
That's not intrinsic to cryptocurrency, but it is part of the reality we're living in, which is what I want people to be looking at.
Bank of America alone has 69m customers and real people have real needs - things like going to a branch occasionally, calling customer service, taking out cash, etc. Not only is BoA itself larger in terms of users than all of crypto (I've done the analysis, checked block explorers, etc) it's actually usable by real people in the real world for real activity that contributes to the real economy and actually provides value and utility other than pancake swapping your doodle coins for poodle coins.
Again, if you think all cryptocurrency has 0 value, then all usage is obviously bad. But the reality is that it has some value, and much of that value is in the form of scams (most types of coins, by number, are scams), and much of the value is just speculative investment, but it is a real thing that people spend real money on. Focusing on miners makes it seem like all the value of crypto comes directly from energy - but nobody would spend energy mining it if others wouldn't buy it.
Yea this is a constant issue in almost all journalism. Numbers are provided mostly without context. E g. "$100k of drugs seized in bust". But was that a single day's re-up? Does it meaningfully impact the local drug supply at all?
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In this case we can dig into numbers somewhat. Bitcoin.com claims the traditional banking sector uses about 2x as much energy. But cryptocurrency handles a tiny, tiny fraction of worldwide banking stuff, so if it was operating at the scale of e.g. 20,000 qps of credit card transactions, for example, it might have substantially higher energy use compared to now.
The second error is implicitly assuming that the number of people Bitcoin serves is correlated with it’s power usage. You could serve the same number of people as the banking sector does now without increased power consumption when you bring layer 2 or 3 solutions into the picture.
For the second point, are you talking about Layer 2 solutions that track cryptocurrency in a centralized database, like an exchange, where most transactions happen? Basically just traditional banking but with crypto as the unit of account. Or are you talking about decentralized layer 2 solutions like Lightning Network? I don't think Lightning Network can scale to match what the banking sector does, even if you ignore all the services banks provide other than facilitating transactions. For example you could not pay the US workforce with Lightning Network because it would take several months worth of of blocks just to open a channel to each person, and quickly those channels would run out of inbound capacity and you'd need to open more on top of that, so the Layer 1 capacity still limits the ability to use LN at that scale.
Bitcoin is like that times 1,000,000 when it comes to energy usage.
The energy and resources expended mining for diamonds is wasteful also.
This is a logic error: securing a financial system is not waste but paying more than you need to is. If my bank secured my money by paying an army of dudes with guns to sit around watching cash and did transfers by putting a check on the corporate jet, I’d say that was wasteful, too.
Similarly, the argument that the current system could be matched by L2 systems is both speculative and conceding defeat: even if that worked as well as the sales pitch claims it’d be using more power, and we know that there’s no plausible scenario where usage goes up while power consumption goes down.
The argument that L2 systems is the answer is also directly undercutting your earlier marketing pitch. If the justification for the inefficiency is that it’s needed for security, telling people that they should switch to your I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Bank is either admitting that the security benefits are either not real or necessary, or that they can be provided more cost effectively.
The only people who are committed to using Bitcoin are the people who’ve already bought in: everyone else is going to look for advantages relative to what they’re already using. It’s not just enough to handwave about how the system might at some point be less distant from parity, you need a serious plan for being better at something before you’ll see any significant adoption. Parity might seem like a far off goal, and it is, but it’s not enough to get most people to switch.
Except, in good old libertarian fashion, they tend not to pay for it. First, the vast majority of the around $100 it costs to process a BTC transaction comes not from explicit fees, but from (invisible) money supply increase (the mining reward). That still neglects the environmental externalities, which are probably in the $30+ region.
Also, when talking about extra service payment networks like Visa offering, like anti fraud, gotta remember that at least part of problems this service solving is caused by the design of the network itself. And while it is not obviously energy hungry service, it is part of what everyone is paying 2-3% in credit card processing fees.
I would love to see a solid comparison of traditional banking total cost vs Bitcoin (if it would replace traditional fi), but it is certainly not as simple as the above, if even possible...
The design of credit cards does suck for fraud. I go to a website to buy a product, I put in my card number, exp date, CVV, and it turns out that site was actually compromised and some attacker got my card info. Now I have to cancel it and get a new card. It would be way better if what I entered on that vendor's site was a one-time authorization code, not the full information with which the attacker can spend from my card at other places.
Crypto is better in this regard since I never transmit my secret information to the vendor! But crypto is also worse, in that, if I do send a transaction to the wrong place (for example, because the vendor's website was compromised and told me the attacker's address to send to), I'm screwed. And if my electronic device is compromised and my private key stolen I'm really screwed.
Ultimately even though crypto has a technically better design, since it also has no support department and no dispute resolution I'm at higher risk. I've never lost money from a stolen credit card. You're right that I pay for that in the 2-3% processing fees... but it's not like Bitcoin is feeless, either.
Oh, no argument there but that’s not the only part of fraud I’m thinking about. I’ve had a card stolen but it cost me exactly zero because their anti fraud system was able to detect that the person with the credential wasn’t buying the kinds of things I buy at places I normally shop and blocked it. That’s a LOT better than the countless stories of people making a mistake in where they sent cryptocurrency or losing control of their wallet, and not getting help other than people saying it was their fault.
My point definitely isn’t that the current system is perfect but rather that what seems to happen a lot is that people focus on one technical problem like operating a ledger and forget the surroundings. I’d definitely like to see a detailed comparison, too, but my preferred solution to all of this would be an increasingly steep carbon tax to incentivize everyone to do better.
This doesn't make sense. The power is used to secure the network. Your first mistake here is you must think of Bitcoin as useless and any use of power is a waste. Just to help you, if BTC was useless it would be worth $0 traditional banking dollars, as this is not the case your whole premise is a waste.
It’s a great software engineering case study: the algorithm is a neat solution to a problem that almost nobody has, so while it’s cool as an intellectual exercise it’s failed to see much adoption even as it passes the middle of its second decade because it’s not cost effective for most people. It’s kind of like the idea of a supersonic airliner: a neat engineering challenge but a failure in the marketplace because 99.9% of people don’t need the problem it solves desperately enough to pay so much more.
The more billions it costs to run bitcoin, the more it costs to 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system.
It would be useful it some state, eg., russia or china, would just cut off networks and forge bitcoin network traffic -- and hence bring the whole thing down. Or, do a 51% attack by controlling 51% of the hashing power.
The whole thing is a joke, one only tolerated by states because it's supports joke levels of economic transactions. Were any % of an economy to run on this, states would just seal the network in their borders and end the whole charade.
It's proportional to the amount of money it "burns", in the form of capital costs (miners) and electricity costs (for those miners). If electricity prices would rise tenfold globally, electricity use from crypto miners would drop by about the same factor.
Take the peer-to-peer traffic of the cryptocurrency network of any area, prevent it from getting outside that area (ie., just block it talking to IPs outside some range) -- then to that network, you can trivially control the total hashing power.
So split any cryptocurrency network into small segements, then add your machine to that network with a false history, design the network to be small enough, and your machine will out-hash the rest, and so it's history will win. Rinse-and-repeat.
It's trivial for any state to take down a cryptocurrency. There's nothing magic about it; it's an incredibly fragile system whose 'safety' relies on no one owning the network, and if that's the case, no one being able to russle-up huge amounts of electricity.
In both cases, this is false for states. So any state, if it wishes, can really do anything it likes.
The global bitcoin system is well within rearch of a hostile state 51%'ing it, even at the global level -- though the cost would be non-trivial. It would be trivial to do it in its own borders though.
As any state, of course will, if you can ever go into a shop and buy somehting with it. At that point you're imperilling a state's ability to use monetary policy to manage its economy, and that's an existential security threat. So bye bye your monopoly money tokens.
Countries have this neat tool called violence that tends to override all security whenever humans are a linchpin
This only applies to Proof of Work blockchain.
Invalid blocks are rejected trivially by any node as soon as it sees them. You can't "force" an invalid block to be accepted by throwing hashrate at it and miners don't need to do anything to make an invalid block be recognized as such.
The issue is on malicious actors trying to rewrite/replace recent blocks (to double spend, usually) which was the core innovation, but that also includes trying to censor txs or generally DoS the network by refusing to allow txs to be accepted.
Out hashing does not give you any extra powers. Maybe you will be able to rollback a few minutes of transactions, that is all.
You mine quietly, outpacing the regular network, creating your own longer chain. Perhaps you do this for an hour, several hours, or a day. The only transactions on this chain are those in which you send your own coins to yourself -- maybe plus some random transactions from the mempool you throw in to help cover your own tracks. Meanwhile you spend those same coins (UTXOs) on the "honest" chain.
Once you are satisfied, you publish your longer chain. By the rules of the network the longest chain is the true one. Honest miners immediately begin building their blocks on top of your dishonest version of events. Since you are now working together with them, blocks are produced quickly. The honest chain dies.
Chaos would ensue.
Anybody who received coins on the dead chain can try to republish the transaction to the mempool and hope it gets mined again, so they get their money again. But if the sender is fast, they might realize they have a double-spend opportunity here, and submit a higher-fee transaction in which they sent those coins to themselves. It's a race. Of course, for your own UTXOs that were already spent in the dishonest chain, the race has already been won. Those double spends are successful.
As for "a few minutes", it depends on which one we're talking about. BTC, yes -- but disrupting the global BTC network requires only a few minutes of time. Just dump everything into unusable addresses, and watch the reaction.
Oops, nope sorry. Most don't use PoW..
Bitcoin used 844670Wh per transaction [2].
[1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil...
Bitcoins are just speculative assets . All crypto is, nobody is actually doing real economic transactions on them, I.e buying and selling services/goods for bitcoin. It is not practical to do so with transaction/gas fees .
If you think of it as an Asset transactions then it makes sense, those are always expensive.
A real estate deal for a house will have buyer agent, seller agent government taxes etc easily 5-10% , if you sell an artwork a gallery will probably charge upwards of 10-20% etc.
1. Bitcoin is a final settlement system, akin to moving gold bars from one vault to another. It achieves this settlement in minutes and requires no trusted intermediaries.
2. Bitcoin's energy consumption is a function of price, not of transaction throughput, so the two are orthogonal.
You could fly gold bars around in small planes, and it would still be more efficient than Bitcoin.
Seems I was off by about 5 orders of magnitude, in Blockchains favour!
BTC is about 9 orders of magnitude less efficient than the effective work it does.
Look, you can run a full Bitcoin node on a Macbook that uses 20W. It can easily verify 5 transactions per second, put them into a block, and compute the hash of it, and do some network communications.
The actual network uses 20GW, a billion times more energy, because they have thousands of nodes replicate the same work and then add PoW as a cherry on top.
In theory it’s possible for a Bitcoin-like blockchain to record all of Visa’s transactions in a single giga-block with only a single mining hash attempt.
Transaction throughput is not meaningful here.
"Well, it's supposed to suck like that" doesn't change that Bitcoin is consuming tremendous amounts of energy to serve very, very few customers.
Sorry, but this is a ridiculous statement.
Electricity is one of the most fungible things in existence, and renewables don't yet make up 100% of production, therefore any additional consumption _for the most part_ might as well be 100% generated from fossil fuels.
Even if a miner has a contract with a solar farm for all of their power, that's still electricity that someone else could be using instead of electricity from fossil fuels.
(Not arguing for or against this application, and it may be that this is too rare a phenomenon to matter; just quibbling over the fungibility.)
Not if the infrastructure wouldn't have been built without the miners.
https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2003/data/papers/SS0...
Update: if you're going to downvote me, see below before you do so. I have been there, I have seen it, I have talked to people who worked at the plant and the dam.
Citation needed .
It is rarely if ever too expensive to transmit electricity anywhere . We have offshore wind solar farms in remote places , there is even cross continent lines between Africa and Spain .
I am deeply skeptical it is too expensive for upstate NY to transmit power when there is probably 50 million people living in metro areas within say a 750 mile radius .
Every other dam is remote, every coal plant is remote they are all perfectly able to transmit to urban and industrial centers
Yet you rolled out the standard crypto talking points flawlessly.
> Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist
Again, I suspect you aren't an environmentalist either. Please just be straightforward with your motivations here.
Also just get some Bitcoin :)
1. The banking industry is thousands of times more important that crypto for everyday Americans. It's what literally makes our entire economy run. Crypto is used for speculation. What you should be comparing bitcoin against is the energy it takes to list a few ETFs on an exchange, which is essentially the cost of a few hundred servers, aka nothing. Bitcoin is ungodly inefficient and will only become more inefficient.
2. "It could be less, much less, or much less," This is a filler argument. Study says "around" a number, so you're arguing it could be a really broad definition of "around"? Not a serious take.
3. The absolute number matters because it's showing the economic activity is being concentrated in the pockets of just 137 entities. This is NOT a broad-base economic phenomenon that helps employ people in communities around the country, like say running gas stations (another polluting industry). If you're going to use 2% of the nation's electricity, you'd want the benefits spread across at least 2% of the population. Not 0.00002%.
4. Net energy consumption pulls from our current energy grid. Within a grid, if you use more clean electricity in one area, it'll pull more supply from dirtier sources elsewhere. Saying that bitcoin mining helps "green" the grid is a myth because you have to mine it 24/7/365, which means intermittent sources like wind and solar are at a big disadvantage. Battery storage tech is not there yet, thus gas plants and dirtier sources have to kick-in to keep up with 24/7 consumption.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
I ran the numbers a few days ago (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234766). Bitcoin miners plausibly use more energy than the entire traditional banking sector. Not just on a per-transaction basis (which is blindingly obvious if you think about it), but on a gross energy consumption basis.
So less than 1% of US pop. in banking sector. And I guess banking use less power than e.g. mining, manufacturing per worker ...
Bitcoin probably uses more energy then the banking industry and their workers living their lives.
1) “No comparison to the banking industry made” - sure, but the banking industry serves the entire world’s financial system, handling billions of transactions a second, while bitcoins transactions take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours and process, like, 7 transactions a second. There is no reality we live in now where crypto transacts faster, more cheaply, than our current financial infrastructure.
2. Even if the it’s something g much lower, like .5%, point 1 above doesn’t absolve crypto from its share of energy expense for comparatively little work.
3. Again, splitting hairs and taking cover behind technicalities and specific figures doesn’t change the wider picture that crypto is insanely inefficient at what it’s trying to do compared to the financial systems it want to replace. I guess it’s clear I think it IS a waste of energy.
4. Where do you think the lions share of energy generation to feed crypto mining comes from? Even if it was purely renewable energy sources the gross inefficiency of crypto is still notable given its goals. There are better systems to do it.
If an org has a big polluting coal plant powering a bunch of crypto miners and with a wave of a magic wand I give them an equivalent amount of clean renewable energy, they wouldn't turn off the coal plant, rather they would just double the number of hashes they are pumping out.
Proof of work is designed to be as wasteful as possible, it will never ever be efficient or environmentally friendly.
>Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist.
Despite a few people specifically calling this sentence out as 'ridiculous' or whatever, I think this is a completely valid point. If 100% of the energy powering something comes from renewables, who gives a shit?
Renewable energy production has externalities, same as everything else. The power production equipment has to be built, which needs materials. It has to be transported, which needs energy. It needs to be maintained and so on. Just saying "well, we can always add a few more renewable power plants, who cares?" would only be valid if we could produce them out of thin air.
I agree that most arguments in this area resembles tribal war more than rational debate, much like any discussion involving either trump or musk, where rationality is also thrown out the window in favour of signalling tribal affiliation
It's rational to conclude the costs are not worth those supposed benefits.
We simply cannot currently generate enough renewable energy to cover all our energy needs, so if you are wasting power that could've been used for something more important, it's a waste regardless of the source of your energy.
The more energy society demands, the more likely it becomes that some of it is generated by coal. And does it really matter which electrons are used for what at the end of the day?
1. Even if the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry is comparable or higher, it supports the daily activities of literally 5 or 6 orders of magnitude more entities and people than the 137 outfits mentioned in TFA.
4. The environmental angle is only one aspect - the other is simply that energy costs have never been higher, and crypto mining adds another energy consumer competing against householders, pushing costs up yet further. (Yes, I know, crypto mining can be set up to happen only when there's spare capacity, and I'm sure the miners can be relied upon to act responsibly in that regard...)
Digieconomist [1] states that a single Bitcoin transaction is "equivalent to the carbon footprint of 1,044,177 VISA transactions or 78,521 hours of watching Youtube."
Statista [2] estimates a similar energy-cost ratio of about 470,000 Visa transactions to 1 Bitcoin transaction.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
All commercial buildings in the United States used about 6.8 trillion BTUs, or 2 trillion kWh (2 petawatt-hours), of power in 2018 [1]. That's just over half of the 3.9 petawatt-hours used by the country as a whole [2]. Of that, 16% was consumed by offices [3], so we're down to 8%. That's all office buildings, so what percentage of office building space is devoted to banking? Does banking use more than 1/3 of total office space in the United States? If so, you have a point. That seems highly unlikely.
(Datacenters used less than 0.1 petawatt-hours in 2020 [4], or about 2% of total energy consumption. Again, I doubt banks were using the lion's share of that, so it doesn't move the needle much.)
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/commercial...
[2] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/power-and-utilities...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/office.php#:~....
[4] https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-center-e....
FWIW, that's a projection from 2016, but it should still be in the right ballpark.
Comparing Bitcoin power usage to all other data center power usage is also enlightening. Those data centers are hosting the majority of the world's online services as well as providing services used by physical businesses; they're doing a lot more useful work, for more people, than Bitcoin is.
Great, thank you for doing so. I wish TFA had given even half this effort.
On the other hand if crypto being on renewables is displacing things that otherwise would have been - is that a win?
We can get a reasonable upper bound: the block reward is 6.25 BTC + fees (the blocks I saw tended to have around 0.5 BTC in fees), so let's be generous and say 7 BTC per block. 144 blocks per day are 52560 blocks or 368k BTC per year. Currently, they're worth 47k each, so $17.3B/year.
The 91 TWh figure (from https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364) seems derived directly from a 240 TWh global power consumption multiplied by the assumed % of mining happening in the US, so since we're using global revenue, it only makes sense to use the global number, 240 TWh = 240e9 kWh.
17.3e9 USD / 240e9 kWh => 7.2 ct/kWh
That's the absolute maximum that electricity could cost in order for mining to be profitable.
That's making some very generous assumptions - I used the current price (annual high!) instead of the much lower average over the past months or year, and it completely ignores the very significant cost of the mining hardware. But given that 7.2 ct/kWh is roughly what industrial electricity costs in the US, and miners might be able to get power cheaper (since they can be more flexible than e.g. an aluminium plant that would suffer expensive damage if power is cut unexpectedly), it's not an entirely unreasonable number for an upper bound.
Getting accurate numbers through mandatory reporting isn't the worst idea, if only to prevent such bullshit headlines.
Basically, take the overall hashrate of the entire network which is determined from the block difficulty (this fluctuates and was likely higher when bitcoin was more valuable, though not necessarily), and assume all blocks are mined by operators running state of the art mining hardware (realistically 90-98% of blocks will be mined by people running hardware that's 80-100% of the maximum possible efficiency, and any miners running worse hardware will be consuming more energy, but we can pretend they're all on the best hardware)
Using that, you can get the overall hashrate of the network. Once you have that, you can take the percentage of blocks mined by these 137 miners in a year. Again, be generous and assume they're all running state of the art hardware. If 10% of all blocks are mined by these 137 mining ops, guess what, they're using 10% of the total energy being inhaled by the network.
"The results of this survey show that the members of the BMC and participants in the survey are currently utilizing electricity with a 63.1% sustainable power mix."
https://bitcoinminingcouncil.com/
The BMC is mostly composed of US miners.
Production of any energy causes pollution: those wind turbines and solar panels aren't carbon-free, they took a bunch energy/carbon to produce ("embodied carbon").
Increasing energy use for anything causes the need to produce new plants to be built. If you can use less energy to produce the same results and thus reduce demand it may obviate the need for more more supply in the first place.
Now, the above argument is only relevant if we can prove that Blockchain transactions actually are a waste of energy, and you seem to attempt to argue against that as well, by asking for a comparison with the traditional banking system.
I'm not sure that the traditional banking system add a whole uses less energy than Blockchain as a whole, but I AM sure that the traditional banking system handles several orders of magnitude more transactions than all Blockchains does combined, and absent any proof to the contrary, I'm assuming the traditional banking system is not using more than an order of magnitude more energy than Blockchain(since that would mean that traditional banks use around 23% of American energy, which is an absurd amount of energy)
As long as Blockchain uses more energy per transaction than traditional banking, it's a waste of energy, relatively speaking. And while I don't currently have any good sources to prove this point, I see very little reason to believe Blockchain isn't using at least 2 orders of magnitude more energy than traditional banking per transaction.
>The point is the amount of crypto being mined.
Is it? According to who? You? What's the utility of crypto? I've yet to see any materialization other than casino and funding terrorism.
It can't even serve every lunch in Vermont without extra layers running on top of it.
Yes, because cryptocurrency is the thing we're measuring. The number of miners is meaningless in this conversation. It would be like talking about how many companies manufacture wind turbine blades.
Most of traditional banking is about financing, not about money transfer. The risk estimation and risk control are the tough parts of financing, and I don't see how on-chain computation is a good fit for that risk modeling.
So, "What's the energy cost of the combined Visa and Mastercard networks" is a much better benchmark than "What's the combined energy cost of the traditional banking system?"
One big energy use I optimized was daily risk calculation for exotic books. Say an Australian insurance company sold a bunch of life insurance in Japan. They want to cap their losses on $5 billion USD notional (maybe 2,500 policies, each for $2 million) over the next 30 years, and they want to cap their losses at $1.5 billion AUD. This extremely bespoke, not something the bank can offload to another entity, so the bank is pretty much stuck with this re-insurance on its books for the next 30 years. How much does the bank need to keep on-hand in case this goes sour? To answer that question, every day the bank needs to run Monte Carlo simulations to cover shifts in the Japanese life expectancy curve and shifts in the JPY/AUD exchange rate over the next 30 years.
It turns out that for some of these exotic options contracts, just compute cost for calculating risk exposure over the lifetime of the trade can end up being a noticeable percentage of the profit from the trade.
Sure, you could pull some of that simulation compute on-chain in smart contracts, but what does a DAO do when it has insufficient reserves to cover its outstanding obligations? I guess you need a diverse enough DAO so its risk exposures are sufficiently uncorrelated, but that means that it needs to do vastly more computation to calculate its current exposure every time someone asks the DAO to enter into an obligation. Either all miners need to redundantly run these calculations, or you push them off-chain.
If you push the risk calculations off-chain, then you're back to the energy consumption being very different than the traditional banking system.
Re 3. My rule of thumb is that crypto uses about 1% of world electricity production [1]. I'm surprised that the US has such a disproportionate high proportion of mining, indicative of cheap energy & lax regulation?
[1] Note that electricity is roughly a fifth of energy production (the rest being fuel for transportation/heating).
2. "I haven't read the study but maybe it's wrong and maybe the real number is way way less"? C'mon. Give me a break. Trusting that an EIA report is generally accurate is not evidence of being "emotional." Handwaving it away without even reading it is.
3. It's interesting and newsworthy that a small number of players are using a tremendous amount of electricity. The article is about bitcoin mining. "Video games" probably use a lot of electricity too, but dispersed across hundreds of millions of users.
4. You're entitled to that opinion, but I assure you that caring about massive energy consumption is not evidence of an anti-bitcoin conspiracy.
That's not what I said. I said the author of the article did read the study and describes it as possibly wrong. In fact the article does actually mention a range given, "0.6% to 2.3%", which isn't orders-of-magnitude huge but nearly a 1:4 ratio. Usually if someone says, "I have this big scary number," and you find out the actual number is 25% of what they told you, you're allowed to be skeptical of the conclusions they draw from their math.
The 137 facilities they are talking about use an 2.3% of US electricity when run at capacity.
Separately they use CEBCI data to come up with a top-down estimate of bitcoin mining at 0.6% to 2.3% of US electricity.
Putting the two together suggests the true number is at the high end of the range.
That’s irrelevant. Banks aren’t going anywhere, end of story. Maybe not in a current form, but they’ll stay, just because of sheer amount of infrastructure built on them.
Despite declaring yourself not one, this (and every other one of your points) comes up _every single time_ crypto proponents are trying to seed FUD in any reporting about the energy usage of crypto. This is especially laughable when you then say
> ~2% of US power is generating over 1/3 of the world's Bitcoin.
It's good to know that it takes 2% of the US power grid to power 2.3 transactions per second.
By your own argument - unless the traditional banking industry tops out at 100% of US power usage for 115 transactions per second - it is definitely not worse than bitcoin.
And it's worth pointing out that it comes up every single time without a shred evidence, just a hunch that the crypto enthusiast ensures us is correct. I'd love to see some actual numbers on the energy consumption of the banking industry vs. crypto.
Or lets be real, let's compare the amount of energy used by the banking sector to provide the same store of value and 3 transactions per second or whatever minor utility BTC provides.
What evidence could I possibly provide for the claim "This article doesn't give any evidence of impact."
It is very clear that crypto transactions, for example, are much less energy-efficient than USD transactions. The article could have easily mentioned that, but it didn't.
You have it backward, it comes up when reporting tries to seed FUD about crypto energy usage. Every point I made is that this article isn't actually saying anything obviously scary, it's just saying some facts in a scary voice.
> By your own argument - unless the traditional banking industry tops out at 100% of US power usage for 115 transactions per second - it is definitely not worse than bitcoin.
That's not my argument. They do different things. Despite its name, most cryptocurrency isn't really used as currency. As you say, it's slow and not very useful for that. I'm just making a comparison because most of the thoughtless FUD discussion assumes that USD is free (in energy terms).
Sure, but 2.7% of USA's electricity is almost certainly more than all of traditional banking. Now, I've just tried googling that, but the results are clearly being distorted by the exact things you're complaining about here, with estimates varying from 15.8 GW to 558 GW worldwide and that higher value being about 20% of global electrical demand which is obviously wrong as it's a bit more than the entire commercial/public sector of the global economy combined.
> which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.
Compared to what it could be, perhaps. But it would be surprising if it was as bad as a system which specifically regards using as much computational power as possible to be a security measure.
> The point is the amount of crypto being mined.
But that's designed to be independent of the energy use?
Also, mining isn't the value proposition of a currency, transactions are. One of the arguments that I often hear that's supposed[0] to be in support of bitcoin, is that it prevents inflation. But mining is inflation. Unfortunately, Bitcoin specifically has a transaction limit too small for just interbank balancing, let alone for direct personal use — for that, the system-wide limit would only barely cover Berliners taking cash out of ATMs once per week.
> If Bitcoin mining ends up using a higher proportion of renewable energy than, say, traditional banking, it could be seen as a net good for crypto use to rise.
No. To find out why, let's take it to absurd levels: build a Dyson swarm, cover the sun, use all that to mine crypto. What changes, economically or environmentally?
Nothing. Literally nothing.
The rest of the economy doesn't get greener, there isn't any more cryptocurrency than there would have been, the transaction rate hasn't changed.
[0] it doesn't actually support Bitcoin, but why is out of scope for this comment
https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/comparisons estimates 175.34 TWh per year for Bitcoin mining and 131 TWh per year for Gold mining.
Most gold is used in a similar way like Bitcoin (hoarded as a store of value because people believe that other people will continue to consider it valuable).
With Bitcoin mining, I believe the only relevant environmental issue is the power consumption (there's also some e-waste but I assume that's negligible compared to the power). With gold, the power consumption is a complete afterthought, the massive amounts of toxic waste and the abuse of workers are much bigger issues.
I'm shocked that both industries seem to be consuming a similar order of magnitude to be honest (I expected Bitcoin mining to be more energy intensive compared to gold).
In terms of value stored, gold stores low double-digit trillions, Bitcoin about one trillion.
Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn?
The very idea of sorting energy use like that is a very slippery slope. We have markets for a reason. They help us determine how the aggregated society values one or another thing without relying on value judgment.
As other have pointed out, Bitcoin relies on a larger and larger usage of energy by design. You could to a more energy-efficient Netflix, but you cannot do a more energy-efficient Bitcoin.
It's actually the opposite: its energy usage shrinks and shrinks, by design. Every 210,000 blocks (~4 years), the block reward (mining subsidy) drops in half. At the limit, it approaches zero, and the network can only afford to spend as much on energy as users pay in transaction fees.
Admittedly, "the limit" is quite a few years off, and there's a big subsidy still. I'm surprised we haven't seen taxing authorities go after block rewards specifically - they're why miners are currently willing to spend 10~20x on energy vs what users pay them for transactions.
(Ideally, this would be a global tax and not too high, since reducing mining too much would compromise security)
The closest you might come is something like road traffic where the situation gets asymptomatically worse as more people start driving, but even that is much better than Bitcoin because people aren’t just driving because they can and will reduce their driving when traffic is unpleasant. Bitcoin is somewhat uniquely poorly-architected in a way which deters adoption but has also become a quasi-religious point preventing the design from being fixed.
This is only the beginning of the outrage over Bitcoin, wait until it does another 10x gain in value and fiat currency failures grow worldwide. The next few decades will require a lot of popcorn to watch the show when calls to ban it only result in more rapid spikes in it’s value appreciating.
And Bitcoin/crypto evangelists still havent grappled with the fact that if they ever actually succeed in becoming a real rival of fiat currencies then they are going to find out what state violence looks like when they continue not complying with regulations.
Like do you really believe if Iran/North Korea/Russia converted over their entire economy to using bitcoin to escape US regulations, that you are going to be able to continue using it without any sort of reaction from the US? Or if Chinese citizens use it en masse to completely avoid government controls, that the Chinese government will just throw up their hands and say "shucks"? You can fill in that statement with any government and a group they intend to control and have the ability to exert violence on
> It takes both intellectual and emotional maturity to understand and accept the wisdom and power of free markets. God is delivering what the market wants an uncensored currency outside the control of governments. This is only the beginning of the outrage over God, wait until he does another 10x gain in value and fiat currency failures grow worldwide. The next few decades will require a lot of popcorn to watch the show when calls to ban God only result in more rapid spikes in his value appreciating.
Not really getting the cult leader vibes, sorry.
but I sure am getting some creepy authoritarian vibes from your comment. Feels like you’re itching to help hand out this violence …
I know you will smash down the doors of these disobedient Bitcoiners and seize their coins from under their pillows! or maybe bomb some mining facilities.
Good luck with that state violence. It’s obsolete.
Yes, they're all bad. Markets are no substitute for morality. And if the market properly accounted for environmental damage, all of those uses of energy would be priced out of existence.
Our society is addicted to energy.
I work in financial power derivatives, and there are entire trading desks devoted to "congestion trading" - ie the financial right to transmit power between grid locations with inherent transmission congestion. From the EIA map of mining operations, crypto mining tends to take place in remote areas where electricity is plentiful but hard to deliver to major load zones (cities) due to grid transmission constraints. On the whole, most crypto mining operations choose to operate in regions where the price of electricity is cheap (remote locations). Paradoxically, these operations running during off-peak times contributes to grid stability by smoothing the load curve and preventing expensive curtailment of alternative generation resources (think along the lines of a wind turbine needing to shut down on a windy day bc it's generating more power than the grid can consume)
So, the real argument is Bitcoin useful or not. Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.
The free market is often at odds with society at large, which is why we have regulations to protect society from the free market.
In addition, it tends to become more at odds with society as wealth inequality grows and that is at an all-time high and growing. Perhaps a signal that more people need to point out, as you did, every time the free market is tossed out as a universal solve-all.
Those same regulators also give tax breaks to large inefficient corporations and tell small businesses they must close down for arbitrary intangible public health reasons, while the large corporations can remain open.
In both examples, it's the regulators whom are detrimental to society, not the free market.
Virtually everyone that champions regulations are not for regulation, but for imposing political will in a way favorable to them. I know this because these people freak out and think it's the end of the world when there's a seat change in politics and the very same regulators they loved are now imposing political will in a way that's unfavorable to them. They also seem to believe in democracy, but only if when they win.
Bitcoin however provides what? A tiny fraction of the transactions per second that visa does, without all the consumer protection that credit cards encompass, with orders of magnitude more power consumed. All the while providing 'freedom' to a handful of activists, but most of all money launderers, drug sellers and all sorts of shady businesses.
Except Bitcoin mining is a perfect example of why these things should NOT be left to the free market.
I am ignoring a lot of things here: transactions per second can’t support it but let’s assume LN works well and also energy required to keep expanding may not be available (only one nearby star) which makes POW more Proof of Asic but potentially makes the network vulnerable.
Within Crypocurrency world there are Bitcoin maximalists who believe it is the only true coin and probably like PoW.
However other ones are moving to PoS which is better for the environment. Can’t comment on security but reckon they can make it secure.
No, but lots of people think the amount of energy they consume is bad, and lots of people and spent on trying to reduce the amount of energy.
In a world of dwindling EROI and exponential carbon emissions, all data centers are bad.
If we cared about the future at all, we'd be switching them off and triaging our energy use.
Where 75,502,165,623,893/75,502,165,623,894th of the work is literally thrown away.
Now, I'm myself torn on this, but I wonder.
Otherwise we would all be fucked.
Just in case you don't get it: have you ever seen a company making a high quality, sustainable and save product because of free market? Nope they do it because of laws we as a society make.
And in this particular case, i'm absolutly for banning it globally.
Ah yes, the mythical free market that no one ever questions, the unassailable arbiter of value in this world. This underpinning assumption needs to be pointed out. Clearly, the free market is not infallible. The question is how do mixed economies make best use of markets, regulation, taxation, and have a functioning justice system so that we don't shovel raw human souls into the profit machine.
Most people recognize a role for regulation in matters that concern everyone, particularly when there are large negative externalities that markets can't price in appropriately. I know HN conversations are necessarily curtailed for brevity, but generally, no, wasting vast amounts of energy for temporary profit doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should go unregulated when such waste produces large-scale environmental consequences for us all.
In this case, the free market can solve the problem: how high can the electricity price go, or how many power outages can there be, until people are sick and tired of this Bitcoin bullshit?
A crypto mining rig takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with the possible benefit of creating some valuable digital assets. Serious crypto mining setups can be quite power-hungry.
Crypto mining for the sole purpose of making money is often considered an egregious and possibly wasteful use of power resources.
Is crypto mining for the purpose of using the heat to warm my house, with the possible benefit of generating valuable digital assets, similarly egregious, wasteful or inconsiderate in some way?
You should get a heat pump. You will get your money back in no time.
This changes the equation.
Nevermind the fact that resistive electric heat in this day and age is wildly stupid except for maybe the northernmost parts of Siberia. Why pay X to get A heat plus almost no bitcoin, when you could pay X to get 3A heat using a heat pump?
Of course, buying heat pumps probably has higher ROI than buying crypto miners for heating...
First off, heating your house directly with electricity is a bad idea. A heat pump could be as much as 4x as efficient as direct heating. Improving the insulation in your house so you don't need as much heating is even better.
After those problems are solved I started to say "If you want to then do the remaining 1/10-as-much-as-before heating by mining bitcoin, then go ahead", but honestly that's still a bad idea because it supports and grows this insanely wasteful industry and that will incentivize other people to build more of these ridiculously wasteful and destructive mining operations.
The nerd part of me thinks bitcoin is super cool. The responsible adult who cares about people other than myself part of me hates it.
I don't care what we're spending energy on. Being stingy about it just makes all of us poorer. There's a quadrillion-cubic-kilometer flaming ball of plasma in the sky. We have the ability to generate literally infinite electricity; and quite literally the only way we get to that is by increasing the amount of electricity we're using, and thus need to generate.
Everything gets cheaper when electricity gets cheaper.
And even if it's true, an expansion of generation capacity is only useful if it's eventually freed up for non-crypto uses, right? Otherwise it's just a wash.
Increasing usage does not magically increase capacity by the same amount. Even if it did, the increased capacity resulting from the increased demand would not make electricity cheaper, since the corresponding demand would already exist.
In general, increasing demand for a resource increases the price for that resource.
A man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or, what's a heaven for?
- Robert BrowningIf a single one of these guys has processed a block with a single transaction for Hamas, they should go to jail for violating the sanctions. Bitcoin nodes should be required to do full KYC on everyone for whom they are processing transactions.
Build more nuclear, build more natural gas (cleanest 'fossil fuel') to replace coal and pipelines to pipe it. Doing anything other than vastly expanding energy production will result in the US economy being left behind as automation rises and demands more and more energy.
An energy poor country, Ethiopia, builds a new dam for hydro, all that supply goes to bitcoin!
Chinese bitcoin miners are flocking to Ethiopia, attracted by cheap energy, ideal climate: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3251352/chines...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 is the EIA report, which in turn references [2]
[2] https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci, which uses a series of approximations based on economic and technical factors (https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/methodology)
Like, the last time I did a back-of-the-envelope, physical spam mail was also a surprisingly large (but still tiny) fraction of US CO2 emissions. We could just stop sending spam mail, and save like a quarter percent of the US CO2. Not big, but you're also not losing anything of value.
In situations like this you prioritize... you cut the larger things that have the least value per amount of energy used.
Ending crypto mining is the easiest no-brainer in the history of energy systems.
Either poor(ish) people trying to get rich, or rich people trying to get richer.
Whether that is good or bad is a different question.
(Yes, crypto can be regulated. Of course it can. The point is that it will continue to exist irrespective of regulation.)
The use cases for it I see are:
1. Cheaply send large payments without having to pay a bank fee (instead you pay btc fees plus conversion to and from fiat fees).
2. Anonymously transfer money if using a washing service (illegal to offer one in the US) or if you spend rawly mined coins.
IMO, crypto is a US gov invention that was pushed to speculative theater to give threat actors huge incentive to break sha256/512 publically, as the best use of such tech atm is to steal massive amounts of money. It therefore acts as a canary for when someone finally does figure out how to crack it or easily solve prime factorization.
[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/bitcoin-soars-post-etf-laun...
I'd recommend reading "Check Your Financial Privilege".
Uses validators instead of mining, the power footprint of the ENTIRE network was reduced by 99.995%.
Crypto isn't power inefficient, BITCOIN MINING is power inefficient.
Can't wait for the typewriter (Bitcoin) to be replaced by the computer (Ethereum).
A) I don't think that attack is likely and B) the efficiency gains are worth the risk
Disclaimer: I have Ethereum so i benefit from other people buying it. I do honestly think it's better for the environment.
>> Explain Bitcoin as completely as possible in a single tweet.
> It's like if idling your car 24/7 occasionally produced solved Sudoku puzzles that you could then exchange for heroin.
* https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/113524359527398604...
Edit: per /u/tgamblin (of Spack fame), this was originally from @Theophite.
What drove that? Since this is the kind of thing that you could do pretty much anywhere, why should a such a disproportionate amount of it happen in the US?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/climate/bitcoin-china-ene...
"Over 2 percent of the US's electricity generation now goes to Bitcoin (arstechnica.com)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232838
The EIA analysis suffers from lack of comprehensive coverage and equal treatment of energy consumers - e.g. where's the EIA report on energy consumed by running high-frequency trading algorithms, which apparently are involved in 50% of stock market transactions these days? If the EIA's method for calculating cryptomining electricity consumption was applied across the board to all economic sectors, would they end up concluding total consumption was 2X total production or something nonsensical like that?
1- How much it takes to run the banking industry, even a JPM Chase would do. 2- Bot accounts on Instagram or Tiktok. 3- Gas flared on oil rigs.
Nobody slams the above three for "wasting" energy because they are closed systems that cannot be measured. Crypto is mostly an open system so it's easy to just point to a number with a headline "bitcoin used more energy than x country"
Many people don't think either use justifies the environmental cost.
The energy source of my wall outlets shouldn't be my problem. Electricity is cheap because fossil fuels are cheap because they externalize the true carbon cost. I assume with a carbon tax that less BS would be profitable.
Mining energy expenditure will stop when reward won’t match the price anymore.
Bitcoin mining as we know it will come to an end soon. Infinite energy waste is a myth.
Simple math will give you the ending date.
As for now, miners will mine.
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...
Since Bitcoin is completely decentralized, there’s no way to change the protocol without everyone just stopping using it, which miners don’t want to do.
Many miners have power purchase agreements and curtailment arrangements in place with grid operators that perform two very useful functions:
- Allow grid operators to better plan for demand, since they can anticipate the large load from the miner. Secondary effect: overbuild generation capacity when building new power plants, since there is a ready buyer for the new power.
- Sell energy back to the grid when weather strains capacity. Bitcoin miners can switch off instantly when the grid operator sends a signal, so the grid is more resilient to both predictable (cloudy days) and unpredictable (plant failure) supply changes.
So Bitcoin mining is good for power grids, both from the standpoint of capacity and stability.
What do you mean, "otherwise"?
Crypto mining is not needed to do grid balancing and wasting energy on pointless computation is always worse than short-term storage.
*Bitcoin, not crypto. Ethereum doesn’t work like that.
So, the mining does not generate economic surplus, but constitutes a transfer of value from the public to miners.
Wasn’t this the whole point of bitcoin? To guarantee a slow increasing supply of coins with a fine upper limit of 21 million bitcoins. Only 2 million more left and they get increasingly take more energy to mine.
There was a joke amongst my peers that the last bitcoin will take a Dyson sphere around the sun to mine.
Bitcoin makes sense as an instrument to hedge against inflation, but the charts correlate with stock market. So it is as speculative as the rest of market. Unlike say gold which usually has an inverse graph as a holder of value.
IMO the insane trading fees of bitcoin have ruined it for me.
I love what ethereum is doing with proof of stake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta...
The United States Department of Defense is one of the largest single consumers of energy in the world, responsible for 93% of all US government fuel consumption in 2007 (Air Force: 52%; Navy: 33%; Army: 7%. Other DoD: 1%).[1] In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity, at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD's electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.3 million average American homes. In electricity consumption, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 58th in the world, using slightly less than Denmark and slightly more than Syria (CIA World Factbook, 2006).[1] The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons (1.7×1010 L) of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons (48,000,000 L) of fuel per day. A large Army division may use about 6,000 US gallons (23,000 L) per day. According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden.[1]
There is no perpetual motion.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
If you don't hate a technology which disrupts an energy market by combining a local people centric market with global interets, ...
I really don't mind people playing around with blockchains, i hate that people who have access to cheap energy sell this advantage to some global weird fuckedup market and disrupting and overloading local power grids, increase demand for coal and other non renweable energy and waste double amount of resources through also requiring AC.
If every bitcoin miner would just run on real 'overpower', would use the process heat to heat houses and stop mining if energy is needed without compensation money, i would not care.
But thats just not the case for bitcoin.
And it doesn't even solve a problem because you never just transfer bitcoins from a to b and b to c without anything offchain and everything offchain can't be protected by the blockchain. So effectivly blockchain is garbage.
And don't tell me about smart contracts, this is not working. No company in the world will leverage the contract amount because 1. you would need the double amount of capital and 2. big rich companies/entities could destroy small entities because they could just frezze assets.
If the entire US grid was using renewables, the entire stack was carbon-free and the work had been done to offset the building of those facilities and all the transmission gear between production and consumption, your argument would hold up: using energy in this scenario becomes side-effect free. Using more of it would cause the creation of more of it, and more efficiently from a capital investment perspective, and prices would come down for everyone.
But that is not what is happening today.
The grid is already facing capacity issues. The industry is already concerned about "congestion": adding demand via EVs and heat pumps all over the globe is going to stretch the grid as it is. The cost - both time and capital - of upgrading it all is unfeasible, so we need to find ways to reduce consumption.
Add into the mix the need to complete the transition to renewables, and we're in a situation where really, Earth needs to become more conscious about energy usage and more efficient in its use.
If 2.3% of the power was being used to fabricate new technologies that would change the situation - manufacturing of more efficient machinery, building new wind turbines, fabricating new solar panels - we could make the argument that while energy resource is not infinite, this process would help us move to a point of better resource management.
Using it to create magic numbers that libertarians trade with each other, is just silly.
It's especially silly, because they could simply switch to a less energy intensive mechanism, and still have their magic numbers to try and take down central bankers with.
Ehh
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2023/03/24/america...
....all for a casino ponzi scheme that is creating a very volatile "asset". I'm all for free market, but electricity production in the US is highly regulated and very far from being free market.
Also, I'm not an environmentalist, but one of the things that has hurt electric car adoption has been the cost of charging, especially at DC fast chargers. Getting rid of this waste would reduce strain on the grid and help to drive down electric costs which could alleviate that problem.
It's surprising that environmental protestors have not started to show up at mining faculties.
Games are a product and bitcoin is a digital "currency" mainly used for financial speculation, fraud, gray and black market goods/services, and money laundering.
Clearly less than 50, at the very maximum. 2.3% is an absurd amount of power.
I'm curious about the statistics of crypto use to buy goods and services vs the crypto use for investment, gambling, scams, rugpulls, etc.
I wonder how much energy was used for NFTs which are neither efficient or ethical.
And then you're further implying that doing so meant we could or should disband the military? Uh, I don't know what to say to that other than that there are plenty of non-economic reasons to have militaries.
Bitcoin really is a complete waste of time and energy.
Bitcoin doesn't gurantee that if you give someone money and exchange it for bitcoin that you will get the bitcoin. It will not guarantee that if you want to buy something, that you receive the item in the expected quality, time and condition.
The only use case for bitcoin are ON chain transactions and the only solution to this are smart contracts which also don't solve the problem because its still only for digital things and it requires the same amount of capital which doesn't make sense because rich people could block you from ever accessing your money if they want to destroy you.
Please please please please start reading up on blockchain!1 :(
Can Bitcoin be used to stop people from attacking ships going through the Suez Canal?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis
Can Bitcoin be used to discourage people from grabbing marine territory from other countries?