Patently false. Bitcoin put a dollar value on under-utlized energy. That can be coal, hydro, whatever. If you believe that Bitcoin is just a more wasteful version of Paypal or ACH, then it matters a lot that this subsidized energy is being converted into waste heat by a bunch of special-purpose ASICs that have no use outside of *coins, and take a lot of metals and energy to create and ship, on limited-capacity fabs.
I ctrl-F "subsid" in your link and don't see any source for your claim. Bitcoin puts a dollar value on (subsidizes) -ALL- energy. If there's a dirty coal plant you can run in your backyard without the government shutting you down, Bitcoin wants to know about it.
Your claim is (1) bitcoin takes energy (2) renewable is cheaper than nonrenewable (3) bitcoin is causing tons of new renewable capacity.
If that were true, why isn't every power plant in the US renewable? How on earth did Bitcoin manage to get this capacity that nobody else has? Money talks, right? Why aren't the mayors of San Francisco, New York, Chicago etc. trumpeting their new 100% renewable grids?
Then you might say that Bitcoin is tech-enabled and decentralized, you can run a mining rig near any energy+internet source. But that's equally true of a cloud compute farm. The fact that bitcoin is pointless hashes and not cloud compute is a historical quirk. Any Bitcoin node/farm could be replaced with an identical-power-usage server farm and do more good for society.
I'd like a source on your Bitcoin only uses renewable claim. I think if I run a miner on my home PC, which I believe has some natural gas in the energy mix, that argument fails.
> But right now the only places that Bitcoin is causing environmental damage are places where some government has unwisely subsidized fossil-fuel consumption, and Bitcoin itself is what puts an end to those subsidies.
I wrote this whole comment without getting to the end of your inane post. We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy). But your wordsmithing here is bad faith. Your argument is basically "governments thought people wouldn't be complete jerks, and Bitcoin sure proved them wrong!" Yeah it's human nature and perhaps inevitable, but 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.
Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe. Get back to me when China and the US ban all forms of carbon-emitting energy production. Until then, those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find. I suggest cloud computing as a baseline. "environmental destruction right now" is exactly the current state of things.
It's disappointing that you felt the need to post such an aggressive and poorly informed comment, without, as you admit, even bothering to read the comment you were ostensibly responding to. There is a great deal more information about most of the points you touch on in my comments from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443
I don't think bitcoin is "causing tons of new renewable capacity", if by that you mean inducing people to bring up many new power plants; its overall power usage is estimated at only about 12 GW. By comparison, PRC installed 71.7 GW of new wind power in 02020; at China's historical wind capacity factor of 22% that'll be 15.8 GW, more than the entire bitcoin network. Including the parts that are running off hydropower and the parts that are outside China.
> We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy)
I wasn't talking about implicit subsidies, which aren't enough to make fossil-fuel power price-competitive with renewables. I was talking about explicit subsidies. Like when I was in Venezuela you could fill up the 20-gallon gas tank on an old car for 19¢, because the gasoline was subsidized. That's the kind of subsidy that can make fossil fuels cheaper than renewables: you can run your bitcoin farm off a gas generator. It's not just "failing to tax them".
> 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.
Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about.
> those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find.
Not really. I mean, a little? That 01967 Buick swilling that 1¢ per gallon gasoline is producing almost exactly the same amount of CO₂ as if the gasoline were getting burned by a nice new Honda motorcycle (or generator), and it's also producing a fair amount of unburned hydrocarbons and even methane. That matters a lot to the kids with asthma who live next door, and the global warming potential of the total horrific exhaust cocktail is a bit higher than if it were cleanly burned to CO₂ and H₂O. But, from a climate-change point of view, the high-order bit of the problem is that the government was subsidizing the burning of fossil fuels, which results in a lot more fossil fuels getting burned.
So the real problem is not what the energy is getting used for, but that the subsidies make it attractive to get that energy from fossil fuels instead of solar, because you pay for solar but the government pays for gasoline. If bitcoin mining could bring those subsidies to an end by making them suddenly much more costly, which I doubt, then so much the better.
But really, zooming out a bit, Venezuela is not the main culprit in climate change. Whatever happens there isn't going to have a big effect on climate change, one way or the other, until things chang a lot. Europe and the US are the main culprits.
> Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe.
12 GW is about 0.07% of total world marketed energy consumption. There's an ongoing real-time climate catastrophe, but at the moment Bitcoin is almost as much of a distraction as plastic straws. Not that it couldn't get bigger.
I ctrl-F "subsid" in your link and don't see any source for your claim. Bitcoin puts a dollar value on (subsidizes) -ALL- energy. If there's a dirty coal plant you can run in your backyard without the government shutting you down, Bitcoin wants to know about it.
Your claim is (1) bitcoin takes energy (2) renewable is cheaper than nonrenewable (3) bitcoin is causing tons of new renewable capacity.
If that were true, why isn't every power plant in the US renewable? How on earth did Bitcoin manage to get this capacity that nobody else has? Money talks, right? Why aren't the mayors of San Francisco, New York, Chicago etc. trumpeting their new 100% renewable grids?
Then you might say that Bitcoin is tech-enabled and decentralized, you can run a mining rig near any energy+internet source. But that's equally true of a cloud compute farm. The fact that bitcoin is pointless hashes and not cloud compute is a historical quirk. Any Bitcoin node/farm could be replaced with an identical-power-usage server farm and do more good for society.
I'd like a source on your Bitcoin only uses renewable claim. I think if I run a miner on my home PC, which I believe has some natural gas in the energy mix, that argument fails.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...
> But right now the only places that Bitcoin is causing environmental damage are places where some government has unwisely subsidized fossil-fuel consumption, and Bitcoin itself is what puts an end to those subsidies.
I wrote this whole comment without getting to the end of your inane post. We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy). But your wordsmithing here is bad faith. Your argument is basically "governments thought people wouldn't be complete jerks, and Bitcoin sure proved them wrong!" Yeah it's human nature and perhaps inevitable, but 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.
Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe. Get back to me when China and the US ban all forms of carbon-emitting energy production. Until then, those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find. I suggest cloud computing as a baseline. "environmental destruction right now" is exactly the current state of things.