Its a good thing I live in Ontario where energy is entirely green. Let's also forget places like Quebec where it's 100% renewable too
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So bitcoin and the energy used
- Thread starter C4lukin
- Start date
This has nearly tripled in a month or two. Good lord. That's my entire apartment's usage for a year in two transactions.
I'm beginning to get sick of people who have the stock defense of "oh, you haven't done enough research." Doesn't take a genius to see this is unsustainable and the whole "oh new coins are moving away from that" isn't much of a defense when they're all pointing to the top of the ponzi scheme. Unbelievable a programmar managed to create a ledger that consumes electricity at an exponential rate and people are still embracing it like it is a good thing while we head straight into the climate change abyss.
And I'm sure the most active miners use entirely green energy.
If you think BTC mining is going to be one of the main, or even a large part of the catalyst for future global warming then you're horribly misinformed.
But it seems everyone is citing that Digiconomist article
Here is a decent article that tackles the most recent wave of "BTC is going rapidly consume global electricity"
Even if the Digiconomist figures are correct, Koomey notes that power consumption from bitcoin mining would only amount to a fraction of 1 percent of global demand. He and others caution against making leaps about bitcoin's impact on the power sector until verifiable data are available.
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That's true. I'm sure companies like Renault, Mastercard, DNV GL, PwC, IBM, Disney and others are only investing in it for the pump and dump.
Like how I'm only in it because I hold Bitcoin, when I don't hold Bitcoin.
Right on the money with these takes.
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I have already said i don't like this part of crypto either and that I hope most coins change to pos.
Pow is very wasteful and is not sustainable. Things must change.
However this does not change the fact that the blockchain or dags or whatever can do alot of good and can make the world a better place in the future.
Also, there is no stopping technology and advancements. What we can stop is using fossil fuels.
...so you don't actually care that alternatives to proof of work exist, because you just think cryptocurrency is a Ponzi scheme anyways? It kind of seems like what you're saying is that this electrical consumption issue confirms your unrelated belief that Bitcoin is a scam?
What I see is energy consumption increasing exponentially. Unless something happens to slow the growth it will be much more than 1% of consumption very soon.
The ones in Iceland and Quebec do. Which by the way is where the majority of mining is moving to because of how cheap it is
Fair enough. If efficiencies are made I have no issues. I do think the tech is very interesting but right now the cost is unsustainable.
Which is mentioned in the article I posted,
The integrity of electric power forecasts is a subject close to Koomey's heart. He was part of the team in the mid-1990s that debunked widely circulated projections of power consumption by the internet. Those studies overstated the internet's share of U.S. electricity consumption by at least a factor of 8 and projected it would double in 10 years.
"It turned out to be a bunch of nonsense, but it takes pages and pages of work to debunk an errant sentence," Koomey said.
Now, Koomey sees the same pattern emerging as Digiconomist's data and other estimates weave their way into research reports and news articles, sowing the type of faulty conventional wisdom that could mislead investors.
...
According to Koomey, this kind of analysis makes a classic mistake: It projects high growth rates associated with a new technology into the future, resulting in an eye-popping demand forecast. Similar projections were made about internet data traffic and electricity usage from office computers and mobile devices, he notes. Sure enough, their initial growth rates moderated as they scaled up.
So your article basically says "wait and see," with no figures of their own to dispute the claim.
Great.
No, the article is about the single digiconomist paper that is being circled around which in itself is all projection and extrapolation with the article I linked citing people in the field who have dealt with similar topics that have parallels to past energy projections that turned out to be way off base.
It's why whenever you see any paper that is mainly based on extrapolation you need to take it with a huge grain of salt, because extrapolation is always met with a pile of potential issues and variables you aren't going to be accounting for.
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Energy is finite though. If all mining operations move there then they'll need non green sources if this trajectory continues.
Crypto currencies in their current form are a disgusting waste of resources at a time when we should be going to other way.
So do you think the energy consumed by these huge mining factories are all renewable.
And if so, would that energy not be better used to create better lives to those who are not burning the limited energy we have to create bull shit currency?
The cost of electricity can often be negative, meaning you get paid just to waste it. It's a part of the energy market. Of course that never makes its way to consumers.
A few things.
1. Im not in Bitcoin or any PoW coins for that matter.
2. I don't see my investment as pure gambling. I have done extensive research before investing in the coins that I currently hold. I don't trade and instead am planning to hold them for at least 5 years. I also haven't put in any money that i'm not willing to lose.
3. I think most of you are ignoring that it has been pointed out that mining is mainly done by huge companies and not your average investor.
4. Most of you are woefully uninformed yet act like you have got it all figured out and then act like all we care about is to just make a quick buck from this so called magic internet money.
At least do some research before pointing fingers and shit.
The context is in the linked article. Here's another one.
I would be really surprised if you could actually name any use of blockchain that wouldn't be done better with a trusted third party. I have a feeling that you are just going to repeat talking points from the crypto subreddits though.
Except they aren't taking in to effect the energy already being consumed. More than the entire country of Serbia.
Can you stop trying to downplay the global impact?
An increased demand in cheap, renewable energy, is not exactly a bad thing... This is kinda the same argument coal companies make against solar. Correct, in order to move the world to renewable energy we also need to increase our electricity generation. That's why we need more adoption of solar and other energy sources.
That is bull shit. Maybe you can up with an instance where that is true.
But in general energy is provided and burned. That energy goes somewhere.
You are defending a dead duck with a cocktail up its ass.
Probably not, and yes the energy could probably be used for more productive things, which is pretty much true of any resource on the planet and most aspects of society. The idea that if it wasn't used for Bitcoin it would be used for something productive is fallacious.
Of course but Iceland is a small country that can't just build forever to keep up and even if they could projects like that take a lot of time.
If they can't build enough to keep up with demand then they are doing well, and then the free market will temporarily hand that victory to fossil fuels until cheap renewable energy can fulfill the entirety of their demands, that's basically already how renewable energy works today anyways, most people have both because the solar isn't enough to power them through the year, and batteries are still too young. If people moving to green energy too quickly is also a bad thing then there is no win for cryptocurrency here.
It's a bad thing when crypto swallows up all the renewable energy advances. The caveat being if no efficiencies are found and energy consumption keeps increasing.
Jesus, one of the worst neo-liberal free market hogwash takes I've read in a long time.
"We waste energy for our nerd-currency, so that more renewable energy will be available in the future."
"But what if that's not going to happen."
"Well, then we'll burn fossil fuel until it does!"
By far the easiest way to accomplish 100% renewable energy coverage is to just...use less energy, not the opposite.
No they wont. They'll just continue building out renewable sources because it's cheaper and more efficient for them to do so.
Quebec alone has so much untapped hydro potential they could supply a good portion of the world if fully utilized. That doesn't even include what Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador if they started building out Hydro.
And Hydro is what Canada would build out in the eastern provinces. Similarly to Wind and Solar in the prairies. Or Nuclear Power (of which Canadian plants have earned praises worldwide). Already Ontario and Quebec generate too much energy that they have to either waste it or sell it to avoid destroying their grids.
This is similar with Iceland which can continue to build out geothermal and oceanic Hydro.
The energy sources the planet at large is moving to is energy tapped from the cosmos that is otherwise just slowly radiating away if not used. Solar taps into the sun which will burn for billions of years. Wind, Geothermal and Hydro pull from the movement and processes of the Earth itself which will continue to rotate until the sun eats the planet.
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Ok, I'm going to cite the digiconomist paper and tell you the total global impact.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption#assumptions
Total carbon emissions annually, 24,208 KT for BTC
Lets compare that number to some most up to date emissions data,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
The closest comparison is Azerbaijan, which produces 0.10% of global emissions per year at 38,000 KT annually
BTC consumes 49.4 TWh, so if we convert that to KWh we get ~49,400,000,000/kwh, which when compared to most up to date global energy usage compares us to Algeria, ranked 47th in global energy consumption.
Even with current data from digiconomist,
Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity consumption : 0.22%
If anything is off, let me know.
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It depends, really. Swallowing up = accelerated manufacturing of supply and cheaper prices
Same with GPUs
Everybody's complaining now and called crypto nerds selfish because they can't buy a cheap GPU for their own PC but the result will actually be a huge net benefit for the game and graphics industry, by lending it the financial support it couldn't receive from PC gaming.
The same way that video games helped pave the way for cell phones and improved computer graphics, crypto could very well end up boosting a future generation of game consoles.
Crypto "swallowing up" (demand being so high that people have to wait in line to get solar systems?) renewable energy would also be a net benefit in the long term for similar reasons, it could drive down prices and increase adoption, and lend financial support to the renewable energy sector, also the burden of crypto electrical consumption would have been lessened by it being done under the belt of renewable sources.
I don't see how crypto hypothetically boosting renewable energy could be a bad thing really, whatever amount of time there is where people are unable to get their own renewables would only be temporary and would actually result in others then receiving better and cheaper renewables down the line too. Demand being too high for green energy is not a problem, I don't think.
The immediate effect is that energy prices rise, which makes it lucrative again to start mining more costly fossil fuels like oil sands or push for fracking. Some of the most destructive mining practices in existence.
You are sugarcoating the whole problem here.
You're proclaiming the major global impacts of BTC, and I'm giving you the scope of the issue. The issue which is consuming less energy than what is required to keep the current internet operational, which I can easily argue is filled with mainly useless shit just like how BTC is viewed as pointless and meaningless.
Wow didn't know it was thst much electricity!
All so nerds can get fake money, amazing
That is staggering thst something so utterly useless can take so much energy.
All so nerds can get fake money, amazing
That is staggering thst something so utterly useless can take so much energy.
So it using as much energy as a country isn't an issue? I don't know what to tell you at this point.
This is a good chart
Remember that bitcoin does 7 transactions per second and Visa does between 2,000 and 50,000 per second.
Remember that bitcoin does 7 transactions per second and Visa does between 2,000 and 50,000 per second.
The internet as a whole produces as much energy as a country, do we really need all this internet just for our pleasure as we kill our planet?
If people want to proclaim BTC/ETH or what ever combination of coins are going to be a major cause for global warming, then you need to back that up with numbers. The current numbers shows it's literally a negligible impact at best with a carbon footprint of less than 0.1% of annual emissions
Saying "this uses as much energy as a country!" is meaningless considering the scope of global energy consumption and the usage of the country you're comparing it to.
Nope. Taking Quebec for example they are constantly building out their Hydro already. The reason being they are future proofing their grid for the eventual mass adoption of Electric vehicles and the electricity needs of tomorrow.
And by the way, Quebec has some of the cheapest electricity prices in all of North America by an order of magnitude. Prices would have to go up considerably before they began competing with fossil fuels again. Which when mixed with them continuing to build out their hydro capacity means prices will only continue to get lower
Lol.
So you have no interest in presenting a genuine argument.
Yes, that is one place on this planet, you are correct. Many other places are just waiting for energy prices to spike so they can use their fossil ressources.
I gave you the numbers, not my problem you don't want to discuss them
Yes, and the majority of mining is moving to low cost places like Quebec
Fossil fuels are already on their death beds and places with mass amounts of renewable energy are already taking advantage of the switch over.
Are you implying the internet serves as much purpose as bitcoin?
What? lol
If it mainly comes to Québec, our government will regulate and tax that shit into oblivion.
So I say let them come.