Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption

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Why is commercial power so cheap and residential so expensive? We could fix two problems by balancing that back.

Deceptichum

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Because companies > people in the eyes of the state.

just_another_person

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It depends on which state, which is even more sad.

joekar1990

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Something something job creators….something something trickle down

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It's more like companies = jobs in the eyes of voters.

ETA: What's with the downvotes? You guys think this is wrong?

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I have never once gave a flying fuck about a nebulous concept of "jobs."

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Sounds like you are in a very good position to appreciate how the average voter feels about this.

ETA: I think we'd all be better off if people had a more realistic and practical attitude to jobs.

Nighed

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My understanding is tha some commercial/industrial users will get a highly variable tariff. This may be cheaper much of the time, but can get ridiculously expensive at times of high demand.

The difference is that a bitcoin farmer can shut down at those expensive times, but a home user still needs to heat/cool their house, run their fridge etc, so the savings cancel out. Because of this, averaging the costs works out easier/better for most home consumers

frezik

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You can get time of use billing at home with many power companies. Only makes sense if you have solar panels or storage batteries or some such.

st3ph3n

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I have real time pricing from my utility. It works out well because we charge 2 electric cars overnight for a fraction of what they would cost to charge at the standard fixed kilowatt-hour rate. My house is heated by natural gas; I don't think the savings would be there if I also was heating my house with electricity as I live in the midwest, where it gets cold as fuck for the winter.

AbidanYre

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My Volt (and I assume other EVs) has a setting to charge when power is cheaper.

SocialMediaRefugee

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They don't produce anything except some numbers. A total waste of energy. I had to laugh when this guy I know who is very "progressive" and environmentally concerned got pissy when I pointed out how much energy was wasted on bitcoin mining just because he was into it.

escaped_cruzader

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My comment here is a much better use of energy

GhostMatter

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Recording my next fart would be a better use of energy than Bitcoin.

n3m37h

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Even if you upload it as an 8k video

crystalmerchant

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My lower-down comment is an even better use of energy

n3m37h

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Pfft, my comment is the best use of energy

Socsa

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Right this is the fundamental problem. There needs to be some value to the Blockchain application which the crypto tokens support beyond just token speculation.

iquanyin

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no. it just needs to end, as does pretty much our entire economic system, worldwide. and the social systems that support wasteful, destructive living. transform or die. that's the point we're at. is humanity up to it? well know within our own lifetimes.

echodot

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Money is how you get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. Farmers don't like farming they do it for the money, truck drivers do it for the money, factory workers do it for the money.

So if we get rid of economics then who's going to farm the food, who's going to pick the food, who's going to transport the food to the stores (although at that point I guess they are just public distribution centers), who's going to run the stores?

They only solution to all of these problems is automation but we're not there yet. So what is your solution for today?

hatedbad

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you understand there’s more than one way to have an economy right? that there’s more than one way for labor to be rewarded for its output?

saying “our economic system needs to end” has nothing to do with what you wrote

maniclucky

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Do you have a proposal or are you just theorizing? Obviously there are more economic models, but all of them center on allocation of finite resources. As stated above, automation isn't there yet to even approach post-scarcity.

So, what you got?

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seeing as everyone starved before the advent of capital... oh wait

The reason we don't have famines isn't because of money, it's because of one Jew's patriotism to what he saw as his German fatherland.

The reason we have the internet is due to an organization need in warfare, not a profit motive.

The reason we have modern medicine was because people wanted to help other, even if they went broke to do it, sometimes even being outcast from society.

The reason the Nazis were stopped was not because it made a lot of profit, but in spite of it.

do not conflate the achievements of modernity with the inherent economic system you ascribe to.

maniclucky

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So many words shoved in my mouth. At no point did I say that people can't do good things with minimal incentive. Though it's either naive or disingenuous to pretend that some form of bartering didn't exist before capital or would be suitable solution the modern problems.

Could that one person feed a city on his own? Or keep it clean? Or supply it power? Water? Maintain the infrastructure?

I wasn't talking about individual achievements and technological leaps. I'm talking about the day to day necessities that a functioning society requires. A city like New York is not some simple thing. To make it possible for all those people to coexist, the effort and man power is staggering.

And a bunch of it sucks.

Garbage, sewage, paperwork. You name it, there's some poor bastard that has to deal with it and doesn't want to. In fact, there's a shortage of power lineman (I may be out of date) that can stand as my example. Difficult job, risk of death, need a bunch of them. And you're not going to find enough people passionate about power lines to fill the roster and that job is essential for modern lives.

Now, I'm not rushing to defend capitalism. Holy shit the crimes committed for the unholy dollar. No. I'm generally for socialist practices in any industry that should be a public work (education, utilities, healthcare, etc) and leave capitalism to the luxuries. But I'm getting off track.

I wasn't defending capitalisms many crimes. I'm calling you out for being a child about what can be done about it. Ideals don't pave roads, specific plans and actions do. So what are yours? This system sucks? I fucking know. What changes should be made short of a violent revolution that would almost certainly leave everyone in a worse place? We don't have the luxury of sci-fi tech that can provide for our needs with trivial cost.

Example: taxing the fuck out of the rich, single player health care, investment in green energy, walkable cities, forbidding Congress from owning individual stocks. These things push the world in a better direction.

Next time you advocate for burning it all, try to remember that we live in the most peaceful time in all of human history.

pedroapero

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You should check out the impact of gold production also.

furzegulo

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fuck crypto shit ffs

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More like fuck crypto mining. There are cryptos that dont need mining.

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If there's no demand for a particular crypto then people mining it can't sell it and go out of business. People mine this stuff because other people will pay them for it.

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Good job, totally missed my point.

You can buy/sell ones that arent dependend on mining. Not every crypto is the same.

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Ah, you're referring to non-proof-of-work chains. There's no need to be snarky, your comment could be interpreted in multiple ways.

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You're right, sorry, wrong destination

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No problem.

jollyrogue

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Which ones? I’m curious since I don’t follow the scene and only know of mainstream stuff.

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Beats me, I'm only interested in the technology :D Chia was plotted and not mined I think, but other then that ...

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This is as useless as saying "fuck currency shit ffs".

Wodge

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Crypto isn't a currency, it's a commodity for trading. One that doesn't physically exist. No inherent use and no inherent value.

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The vast majority of "real" currencies are fiat currencies and don't have inherent value or use either.
US dollar hasn't been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it's collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.

darthelmet

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But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.

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Anything can be a currency, if you use it as a currency. A currency is not defined by its ability to be exchanged for gas or used to pay taxes.

If children in some school start to exchange pogs for junk food or video game cartridges, the pogs become a currency. By definition. The fact that the use is clearly limited and the value is a subject to rapid change or speculation is irrelevant.

There isn't a single currency in the world the value of which is set in stone. There isn't a single currency in the world which is universally accepted. Just because there exist currencies linked to some of the strongest economies in the world, which are relatively stable and incredibly hard to affect the value of via speculation, doesn't mean they're immune to speculation, nor does it mean that any smaller currencies, be it currencies or small countries, crypto or pogs, are "not real".

darthelmet

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I mean sure. Anything someone is using like currency can be called currency. But we’re talking practical terms here. Things we “collectively agree to value.” My WoW gold might be useful for buying potions, but it’s not generally accepted anywhere outside that narrow context. The fewer people who are willing to accept the currency, the less useful, and arguably less “real” it becomes, in so far as currency is defined by its value to others. I could print “me bucks” that I value at $1B USD, but that doesn’t mean much if nobody will give me a sandwich for it.

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If you're in the US, it's not very practical to try to pay for things using Turkish liras either, for example. But it's not any less "real" because of it. There is still a market for that currency, even if you might need to look around for a bit to actually use it or exchange it for a different one. Same for WoW gold or crypto.

frezik

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But there's so few uses of actually buying things with crypto. People don't use it as a medium of exchange outside of illicit goods and money laundering. We're more than a decade into this and using crypto to buy a pizza is still a novelty.

A major proof of this is that FTX collapsed and took a chunk of the crypto market out with it. The market at large shrugged this off. If it were actually linked in to the broader economy, then it would have had similar ripple effects to a major US bank failing.

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I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I'm an artist) and to pay my VPS's rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.

And, honesty, it's pretty great, compared to alternatives.
Last time I've used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.

honey_im_meat_grinding

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In the EU they're getting a digital euro which allows them to avoid bowing down to Paypal, Payoneer, and all the services interlinked with them (e.g. Patreon) - the ancillary services can even offer digital euro payouts instead, too. So as long as what you're doing is legal, you can break the Paypal/Payoneer terms of service as much as you want and avoid their privately enforced authoritarianism that goes beyond the scope of the law for whatever reason. So those problems are being solved as we speak, depending on where you live.

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The "Criticism and risks of the digital euro" section on Wikipedia outlines my concerns about such a system pretty well.

Unless they are going to implement a cryptocurrency with centralized minting (essentially giving themselves both as much and as little control over the digital currency as they have over physically printed money), it doesn't seem that much different from what we have already. Just because it's going to be a new system, doesn't really mean it not going to have issues with false-positives suspending regular transactions or fees that are higher than they need to be.

deafboy

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One failed bank NOT causing an international disaster is a good thing imho.

AtmaJnana

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That's a specious comparison eveey time you cryptobros use it. The US dollar is backed by the US military and the US economy. Not exactly "nothing."

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Tbf, most money nowadays doesn't physically exist nowadays. Only a tiny fraction of the "money" that is out there has a physical instantiation. Most of it is just numbers in bank servers

bhmnscmm

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You literally just defined the attributes of a currency. ~~The only difference is that crypto isn't backed by a government.~~

Edited. See below. Apparently some crypto is government backed. There is no functional difference between traditional currency and (at least some) crypto.

parpol

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"Crypto isn't backed by a government"

"CBDC is a digital form of fiat—money that is issued by central banks. It is designed to be a digital representation of the country's physical currency. Unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, CBDC is backed by the government and is legal tender."

CBDC is blockchain based, i.e cryptocurrency.

Japan is developing a similar cryptocurrency as well.

xep

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There is no reason for CBDC to use blockchain.

bhmnscmm

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I stand corrected. There is literally no functional difference between "currency" and (at least some) crypto.

agent_flounder

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How much energy is required for use of each?

kirklennon

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CBDC is blockchain based, i.e cryptocurrency.

A CBDC can be blockchain based, but almost none actually will be. China's isn't. Japan's CBDC is not. In the US, the Federal Reserve is still in early stages but I'm confident it won't use blockchain either.

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The big difference is that crypto is "decentralized". Traditional currency is, to some extent, controlled by a central bank. The CB seeks to ensure price stability.

Digital cash schemes are much older than bitcoin/crypto. It's not "crypto" just because it's digital money.

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Sure, it's like if you printed ink on paper and pretended it was equivalent in cost to material goods.

snooggums

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Or if you pretended that material goods had an inherent value.

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Pretense is not required for inherently valuable material goods.

Two sheets of cloth sewed together into pants provide protection, warmth, legal obedience.

Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.

Ink stamped onto a piece of paper(or usually plastic)? A bunch of people with shared values have to agree that it means something, even though it inherently does not.

Carrying your stamped paper or plastic doesn't mean you won't freeze to death, starve to death, or anything else.

It's only value is by societal consensus, which while valuable, is not inherent, as with certain material goods.

snooggums

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Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.

Can be, but pants do not have inherent value in the context of a tropical climate where freezing is not an issue and nudity is allowed. They have contextual value.

Food does not have inherent value, it scales with availability and demand. An excess of apples that will spoil before they can be processed into something that can be consumed do not have inherent value.

This is important because while money's value is far more volatile, the argument that material goods have inherent value as a comparison is flawed.

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Pants have value in any climate.

Exposure is a problem in any climate.

Dehydration, sunburns, bug bites, there are plenty of reasons you want clothing.

Clothing has inherent value whatever climate you're in.

Food does have inherent value.

Food is necessary to keep the human body, and the body of many other species, alive.

The excess of food for a given population may have less value, but you can trade that excess, or harvest or store it; the food itself still has inherent value to humans and other organisms that eat food.

You're looking for particular circumstances that mitigate or otherwise affect the inherent value of certain goods, though your scenarios depend on those goods having inherent value in the first place.

The fact that certain material goods have inherent value is not flawed, but you can keep trying.

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Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.

This is still dependent on societal consensus. Well, the going-to-jail part, anyway. The protection from cold issue is dependent on the climate and time of year of where you happen to be located. There are many parts of the world where you could comfortably go naked.

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Clothes have inherent value by protecting you from exposure.

Spoons have inherent value in conveying food.

Containers have inherent value in holding and protecting resources.

Many material goods have inherent value, currency simply does not.

pirat

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Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.

Sounds like without pants, I'll be freezing to death — then going to jail for that!

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Probably not. Not many countries prosecute the dead.

But let me know.

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Indeed. All "value" is ultimately something that is collectively decided upon by society. A chunk of rock could be worthless or worth billions depending on how much people want it.

deafboy

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There is no such thing as inherent value.

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Not all crypto are the same.
Nano has been designed as digital money.
It has no mining, 0 fees (none for transactions, none for opening accounts), finalizes transactions sub-second (typically), has no built-in throughput limits and works across (political) borders.
I'd say these attributes offer some use and value.

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Does my grocery store or gas station accept it?

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Just because it's useless to you doesn't mean it's useless in general.

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Does your grocery store or gas station accept Qatari riyals?

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If that were my local currency, then I'm sure they would

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At which point your local grocery store or gas station wouldn't be accepting whatever currency is your current local currency. The point would remain the same - a currency doesn't have to be universally accepted everywhere on the entire planet for it to still be a useful currency.

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Except it's not really a currency is it? Nobody actually uses this stuff for buying goods and services, they treat it as a stock. Usually short-term trading that's essentially just gambling.

Normal currency also doesn't use more than 2% of the power generation of a massive country.

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People speculate on the price of "normal currency" too.

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I'm well aware.

But far, far, far, far more people use it as currency. Exchanging it for goods and services is clearly the main use for it.

Crypto is used like a stock.

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In addition to using it as a currency, sure. But as I asked rigatti, is that a problem? At worst one might perhaps argue that the name "cryptocurrency" is misleading, but I've never cared much about semantics like that.

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You're saying "in addition to using it as a currency" as if that's actually what people do with crypto. They don't.

And yeah, it is a problem. It renders it useless outside of as a bit of gambling on the side.

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Alright, so let's call them cryptotokens instead. I've always preferred that myself, it's a much more general description of what they do. It doesn't change what they are but if that term makes you happier we can go with that.

It renders it useless outside of as a bit of gambling on the side.

Hardly, there are lots of things you can do with these things. A ledger is more than just for tracking money, it's a database. You really can't think of useful things that could be done with a completely decentralized and permissionless database?

deafboy

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There are people who ride the bike as a means of transport. Then there are people who build their entire identity around riding a bike. That doesn't mean one or the other rides it wrong.

A token of value can have multiple different usecases at the same time.

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Bikes are used as a mode of transport. That's what everybody uses them for.

Crypto isn't really used as a currency. It is used like a stock. That's what everybody uses them for, if we're being honest.

rigatti

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But faaaarr fewer than those who use it for transactions. In the crypto world it's reversed.

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Is that a problem?

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Yes, the price fluctuations created by speculation make it hard to use for payment. How do you agree on a fair price when you don't know what the "money" will be worth in a few weeks.

The deflationary effect caused by hoarding currency, as is done with bitcoin, would bring about a Great Depression scenario in a real economy.

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If you need the token's price to be stable then there are stabletokens specifically designed for that.

Revan343

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Except it's not really a currency is it? Nobody actually uses this stuff for buying goods and services

Except Montero

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Yes, cryptocurrencies, aka "currencies", are used for buying goods and services.

Energy consumption is a great point if you ignore the material resource acquisition cost, worker cost, production cost, sundry cost, hardware cost, conventional debit and credit fees, service personnel cost, data centers, servers, and telecommunication network costs of conventional currency infrastructure.

Yeah, if we ignore all of that, then the resource consumption of a single energy intensive cryptocurrency seems high.

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Yes, cryptocurrencies, aka "currencies", are used for buying goods and services.

No no no. Cryptocurrencies aren't used for buying goods and services outside of extremely fringe scenarios.

People trade them like they do stocks. You can pretend that's not the case all you want, but you know it to be true.

I can't go to Aldi and pay for my shopping with bitcoin or whatever shitcoin you hold. I can't pay my bills with it. I can't go get a haircut with it.

All I can do is treat it like a stock.

Energy consumption is a great point if you ignore the material resource acquisition cost, worker cost, production cost, sundry cost, hardware cost, conventional debit and credit fees, service personnel cost, data centers, servers, and telecommunication network costs of conventional currency infrastructure

I'm not ignoring any of that. Crypto still uses far more, and to top it all off, can't really be used as a currency.

You cryptobros have been saying crypto will replace real currency any day now for years. It's not happening. Sorry to burst your bubble.

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Yes, you can buy groceries or a haircut with cryptocurrency.

Because most of them are less than a decade old, it isn't as widespread as many more established currencies, but you can absolutely buy groceries, buy a haircut, eat at restaurants, buy a house, buy a car, pay utility bills, obviously pay for various forms of entertainment like twitch, hardware at newegg, there's tons of stores that you can use cryptocurrency.

You can also buy gift cards with cryptocurrency that you can use for literally anything.

It's fine if you don't like it, but people are using it as a currency to purchase any type of material good you would purchase with conventional currency.

You keep throwing your tantrum about how cryptocurrency is going nowhere while it grows by 100 million per year and many of the world's governments are developing and purchasing cryptocurrencies.

They're probably developing those cryptocurrencies for fun, right?

It's probably like that dumb digital debit and credit card system they came up within the '70s.

Total bullshit, credit and debit cards.

Good thing that credit rating system never caught on, huh?

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Cool. I'll explain this to the person at the till next time I'm buying some milk, then I'm sure they'll accept my dickbutt coin.

People are developing crypto as a gamble/investment. Not as a real currency.

And lol at you saying crypto is like debit/credit cards. It isn't.

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They probably won't take such a disused currency.

But you can use more popular crypto to buy groceries, yes.

Look at you, confident that digital currency is fundamentally different than...digital currency.

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Where? Where do you see that? I've literally never been to a grocery store or hairdresser that accepts ANYTHING other than cash or card (maaybe checks)

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Haha, checks! Yeah, we live in different areas.

Whole Foods(this little supermarket chain) accepts crypto, coffee shops, bars, hair stylists, there's a bunch of places.

Might want to open those peepers.

bamboo

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Real currencies use significantly less power despite orders of magnitude higher transaction volumes. They also have physical exchange options that incur no transaction costs and require no digital infrastructure. Crypto is just bad as a currency.

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Love to see some proof. Seems unlikely with the amount of necessary infrastructure, especially relative to ultra high efficiency cryptos.

bamboo

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What proof do you want? Real currency can be printed on paper or forged into coins, and then used until the physical medium wears out with zero electrical usage and zero transaction fees. No digital currency of any form can beat literally zero.

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Literally zero.

Everybody keeps every dollar they own physically on them at all times.

These dollars do not have to be printed, the cotton does not have to be woven, the plastic does not have to be stamped, the dyes do not have to be mixed, nobody has to account them, nobody has to account for their storage, nobody is maintaining the number and circulating supply of them, nobody is regulating the distribution and influx through centralized institutions.

Sounds like a cakewalk.

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LOL wake me up when you're circulating currency instead of just speculating against the bag holders.

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Pst. Pssst

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Cryptocurrencies have uses beyond just currency.

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Found a bag-holder.

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You think that there are only two possible uses for these things, and if I'm not interested in one of them I must therefore be using it for the other? Pretty weak logic.

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You keep saying there are lots of uses, but you haven't listed a single one

I don't want you to feel bad for being a fan of crypto, but passionately (and incorrectly) defending it just makes you seem like a shill (or worse, a fool)

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Heh. I bet if I had been suggesting particular uses you'd be calling me a shill for those particular uses. "Shill" is such a lazy accusation to throw about, you can sling it at anyone who's interested in anything.

How about ENS? It's a decentralized version of the Domain Name System.

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🤣

lickmygiggle

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Yes, all those dollars that get pulled out of the earth by the blood sweat and tears of miners?

What are you talking about. If there are coins that don’t need mining why are we wasting electricity (or anything really)on the ones that do.

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I don't get it, you sound combative but are reiterating my point.

parpol

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Yes, all those dollars that get pulled out of the earth by the blood sweat and tears of miners?

You mean the nickel and copper mines?

theskyisfalling

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Centralised banking Stockholm syndrome is real.

bamboo

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Don’t most crypto users use one of a handful of highly centralized exchanges anyways? Like sure you can self host everything, but you can do that with real money too, and most people don’t have the care nor the skill to do it.

rusticus

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JFC how long do we have to wait for a carbon tax

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Permanently Deleted

brophy

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That's. That's the whole point. Things costing their true value.

Business exist to make money (even non profits need to make enough money from either sales or donations to cover operating costs). If something costs them more, it's going to cost their customers more. This way negative externalities aren't swept away to become an unmanageable problem in the future. The true cost of consumption is reflected in the price we pay.

What you're describing as a bad thing is really the system working for good, as it was intended.

evranch

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Unfortunately they are correct as the carbon tax in Canada is indeed a racket. It's only on consumer consumption.

oil exports, our largest source of emissions, are exempt
agriculture and forestry, the next largest, also exempt
shipping and rail, oh look, exempt
heavy industry can buy phoney carbon credits for $5/ton instead of paying the $65/ton tax. Some of these are for forests that have already burned down
oh yeah the greatest emission source last year, dwarfing all others, 80% of our total emissions came from the massive forest fires for which our policy is just to LET THEM BURN

So the only people who carry the burden of the Canadian carbon tax are the ordinary taxpayers. But hey, the optics are good! Looks very progressive. Despite the fact that Canadian consumer consumption is the definition of a drop in the bucket that is global emissions.

If Canada wanted to make a difference they would nationalize the grid, build nuclear and renewables. Or forget it all for now and just put out the damn fires!

Edit: I forgot one more, as imports are not taxed, the carbon tax actually encourages the import of goods made with coal power in China, over goods made with hydropower in Canada!

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Do you have a source of your wildfires cause 80% of our carbon emissions?

Only thing I could find was about 25% which is much different then the number you showed.

evranch

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I believe it was a CBC article last fall that mentioned it, talking about the massive rise in acres burned from previous years. But I can't directly give you a link at this time unfortunately, am on mobile and can't find it either.

https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/climate-change/greenhouse-gas-emissions/sources-sinks-executive-summary-2023.html

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I’d be really surprised if you could because it’s a made-up number.

evranch

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Not made up, but estimated. Rather than find the exact article, here are the numbers after all was said and done:

In 2021, Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 670 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (couldn't find 2023 quickly on mobile but it will be close)

https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/copernicus-canada-produced-23-global-wildfire-carbon-emissions-2023

The wildfires that Canada experienced during 2023 have generated the highest carbon emissions in record for this country by a wide margin. According to GFASv1.2 data, the wildfires that started to take place in early May emitted almost 480 megatonnes of carbon

470 / 670 = 72%

To be fair this is not 72% of total emissions including wildfire smoke, but wildfires emitted 72% as much as the Canadian economy did.

So yes, it's not 80% of total emissions - but it's still a massive amount. Putting out these fires would have had nearly the same effect as shutting down our entire country and letting them burn.

Or you could say letting them burn nearly doubled our emissions, and in the hand-wavey world of emissions accounting you would be pretty close.

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I'm Canadian and I support the carbon tax.

I would like to see our government stop subsidizing the fossil fuel companies and establish a national oil fund too.

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Permanently Deleted

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I support the carbon tax means that I support the carbon tax that we have.

What form would you like to see?

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Permanently Deleted

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I pay almost 30% in taxes to heat my home.

I don't understand this part of your comment, can you explain it please?

Boxtifer

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It means for every $10 he gets charged, he's paying $3 for stuff like gst, carbon tax, etc. $7 is for the actual gas or whatever he is consuming.

dgmib

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And you get CAIP now, which, for most Canadians, especially lower income Canadians, CAIP is greater than the additional cost you pay for goods and services due to the carbon tax.

The carbon tax is quite literally a tax on the rich that gets given to the poor, while at the same time making high carbon intensity products more expensive incentivizing choices that lower carbon emissions.

Only the very rich lose.

The people who speak out against it, are either rich, or they are useful idiots, people who are ignorantly shilling to scrap the tax to their own detriment because they were told by their rich tribe leader it’s bad.

Which one are you?

BedSharkPal

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I love how downvoted you are and how many people can see through this BS.

BrianTheeBiscuiteer

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That sucks. It's not like climate change is everybody's problem.

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Permanently Deleted

Klear

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We can see you are not against it. Also go fuck yourself.

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Permanently Deleted

EdibleFriend

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Your not against climate change, your just against helping the environment costing you money.

Frostbeard

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The tax will just be the cost of doing business. But surely "tHe MarKeT" will correct this by finding cheaper non carbon transport sell a cheaper product.

Personally I support tax of fossile and subsidization of alternatives. Worked like a charm to electrify Norways car park.

The cons are however that increased demand for electricity means building wind, hydro, solar power, with a huge cost to local environent both in most land and the diesel used by construction euipment

assassin_aragorn

•

There's still market incentive for reducing emissions. Either lets you charge the same and for higher margins, or reduce prices and be more appealing to consumers.

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Silentiea

•

Hey, just because companies always choose (and get away with) "make more money by cutting costs" instead of "attract more customers with lower prices" doesn't mean they have to ...right?

assassin_aragorn

•

When has there been a carbon tax in recent years?

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Ullallulloo

•

What does the government do with all the extra revenue? Theoretically it should be able to reduce other taxes proportionally so that those with low carbon usage come out ahead instead of just being a negative for everyone.

n2burns

•

Yup, the Climate Action Incentive is a Pigouvian tax, so the government estimates the revenues, divides that up to comes up with a number for each resident, and we receive it back in quarterly payments.

Chocrates

•

Any suggestions on how we can actually make corporations pay for the carbon they emit if a carbon tax isn't it?
Doing nothing is what we have been doing and it isn't working.

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Silentiea

•

How would you implement that? Like, how do you propose to impose a tax on the company that they can't just pass along to the customer?

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Silentiea

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How would that law work? Unless you're setting the price as a matter of law, how could you ever prove that a price rise was because of the tax and not "other economic factors"?

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FlashMobOfOne

•

There is no good reason why this isn't illegal.

GiddyGap

•

Not a good reason, but money.

TheAlbacor

•

Not even real money, tech bro phantom bullshit.

Sami_Uso

•

The tech bros are convincing stupid people it is real money though. Just like they always have, whether it's this or something else.

Halcyon

•

Crypto is the digital coal of our times.

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Halcyon

•

With the disadvantage of large stakeholders dominating the network and undermining the decentralization.

parpol

•

Which is just as true with mining, except money is staked into mining rigs.

•

It's actually more true for proof-of-work mining than it is for proof-of-stake. PoW mining has strong economies of scale, a professional miner with a warehouse full of mining rigs and a special deal with an industrial electricity supplier can churn out hashes more cheaply than a home miner can. Whereas the hardware needed for PoS is negligible so there's nowhere near that disparity between small and large miners.

Also, under Ethereum at least (the largest proof-of-stake chain and the one I'm most familiar with the workings of), stakers don't "dominate" the network. They have no decision-making power over what the consensus rules are. If the users decide to upgrade to a new version and the stakers refuse to go along with that or try to push an upgrade that the users don't want then those stakers lose their stake after the resulting fork.

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•

I went Googling for sources, and what I found says the opposite. Ethereum was becoming increasingly centralized under PoW but after the switch to PoS it became significantly more decentralized.

in order to stake to a pool, you need to lock your tokens away, making them impossible to spend for a specified time period.

This is exactly the point of proof-of-stake. You can't prove you've staked some coins if you don't actually stake them. If you've retained control over your tokens then they're not staked. I'm not sure how you think it could work otherwise.

most of the criticisms I have of ETH are more damming of the way they went about the transition between two radically different consensus algorithms than about Proof of Stake itself.

The transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake has been on Ethereum's roadmap since the beginning. It was rolled out in stages over the course of years. What was "damning" about the transition?

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demesisx

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This is exactly the point of proof-of-stake. You can't prove you've staked some coins if you don't actually stake them. If you've retained control over your tokens then they're not staked. I'm not sure how you think it could work otherwise.

WOW. Straight up wrong.

I'm guessing you have a YUGE bag of ETH staked. 🤣

Since you're so wrong, it's clear that you are absolutely guessing here while anon is spitting facts, being intellectually honest about which drawbacks actually exist in the world for proof of stake. Take the L, dude. haha

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Halcyon

•

I don't defend anything - I simply do not consider the existing crypto assets as an alternative to currencies at all. They are still so far from being reliable or stable to be a good means of general exchange. They have their place in the area of investment and speculation and that works fine for me.

•

How about stabletokens, many of which are pegged directly to the value of the USD?

•

Primecoin wants to have a word having done useful PoW for over a decade.

•

Never heard of it but I’ll look into it. Before I DYOR, What useful work is being done in that case?

•

Prime numbers are searched for doing the PoW. The blockchain essentially contains a data base with prime numbers. As far as I can tell Primecoin never was popular,.but I like the novel approach of doing things, when most cryptocurrencies of that time were lame copies.
Btw. the Primecoin creator made Peercoin, which was afaik the first (and apparently still running) network being secured by Proof-of-Stake.

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SpeakinTelnet

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Hybrid pow/pos has been worked on since the beginning. Peercoin is still alive.

wahming

•

Whoever Satoshi was, I wonder how he's responding to the thought that he's personally contributed more to global warming than the average billionaire.

JasonDJ

•

Satoshi is estimated to have wallets totaling as much as 1.1 million btc. That would make them the 26th richest person in the world.

If, Satoshi and the wallets actually still exist. Most of those wallets have been completely idle since they were mined

I imagine that “Satoshi’s Wallet” is the stuff of legends among cryptographic security researchers.

Artemis_Mystique

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The ONE PIECE is real /s

•

It's a bit more than just an estimate. If you want to know more, have a look here: https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/
The keys to the addresses exist. Whether someone is in control of them is unclear. It can't be proven that they've been lost.

JasonDJ

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Ok I was kind of dumbing it down when I said “if the wallet exists”, but yeah, obviously a wallet and key “exist”, but whether or not anyone actually has them is unknown.

Really sucks for Satoshi, too. If the keys are still in someone’s position, they can’t use it, because people are watching those wallets like hawks and if they move, that means there’s a new billionaire. For a brief moment. Until Bitcoin takes a massive nosedive from which it’ll never recover.

That must be some special kind of hell. To be an actual billionaire (and truly of their own making, which is even more rare) but not able to spend a cent of it. Spending it instantly reduces its value and likely kills the very thing that created it. Man, that’s like a Monkeys Paw billionaire.

kautau

•

Probably not thinking about it on his yacht that he doesn’t pilot or maintain, having built the most successful grifter scheme of all time

NikkiDimes

•

I feel like calling bitcoin a grifter scheme is kind of like calling fiat currency (edit: in general) a grifter scheme. Which I guess isn't entirely untrue...

echodot

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Oh not this again.

Crypto is also fiat. It's backed by nothing except the trust that it exists, therefore it's fiat.

NikkiDimes

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That's my point. Sorry, I should have said "fiat in general".

UnrepententProcrastinator

•

no, the US dollar is backed by the fact that you can use it to pay your taxes to the US government, and interact with the US government in general, quite literally backed by more than crypto.

and I hate to break it to you, but all currency, ever, is fiat.

all that gold standard stuff? you just abstracted the fiat nature from the money to the metal, there was never any actual basis for the value of gold outside its value, and there are plenty of more sparse metals that people don't value as highly

NikkiDimes

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👍

maness300

•

It's a drop in the ocean compared to how much energy the banking industry uses.

•

Watch out! Lemmy is full of Fudd that are not part of the cult. You need actual data to convince them and not even just the comparison of 2 numbers but something that takes into account the comparative size of both industries.

Don't worry, you will be able to laugh at them after your gambling addiction pays up.

(Jk you might not even be a line goes up guy but you do seem to have a lot of the crypto bible memorized)

reattach

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I can't tell if these crypto people (comparing the energy use of banking to Bitcoin) are dumb, or if they think everyone else is.

blazeknave

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Yes.

exhaust_fan

•

Banks use negligible electricity lmao

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Yeah. 600k Branches, 1 million atms, data centers..

clgoh

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Including everything, about a million times less energy per transaction than crypto.

•

yup, tho they also serve more people than crypto bros, about 100,000 times as many

maness300

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the banking industry

Might want to brush up on that reading comprehension.

Dra

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I think this is the most forced 'lmao' I have ever read

clgoh

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The banking industry uses at least 50x more, right?

https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks

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Lets talk about the bank branchs, data centers, and energy consumption vs crypto.

"Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity

"Traditional banks' total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. Totaling 139 TWh."

Not to mention banks impact on people's lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class.. to purchase disposable products. Like the old tale of buying a expensive boot vs a cheap one.

I'm all for less power usage .. but seems like a witch hunt compared to what banking gets away w. It's the the first time banks can point the finger at someone other then themselves.

clgoh

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A system used by everybody, and a system still used by a tiny fraction of the population are using a comparable amount of energy?

•

hey, most of the crypto fans are all temporarily embarrassed billionaire libertarians anyway, so the bottom 99.5% can all eat shit and die

calcopiritus

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So it's okay for crypto to consume more energy than banks because... Banks somehow limit the purchasing power of the poor?

I don't think I'm understanding your argument.

RememberTheApollo_

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Modern day gold rush.

Digging up more and more dirt for diminishing returns while destroying the environment.

Bitcoin using more and more power for essentially the same.

•

You'd think with all of the money they're pulling in, they'd invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.

Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?

RizzRustbolt

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It's Bitcoin, of course common sense isn't involved.

•

I mean, fair, but still. People should push them to go green.

long_chicken_boat

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they should be doing that, otherwise I don't get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn't worth it to mine cryptocurrency.

•

no, that's the magic of speculative market financing

phoenixz

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Solar panels give about 100 watts per square meters best case, practically you'll be on half of that.. With the amounts of electricity they use, they'll need to cover entire nature reserves with solar panels to feed their miners. It's simply not practical

•

Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that's slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
Don't misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I'd rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.

Huschke

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Maybe pay off would be so far into the future that they don't want to risk it? Who knows how long crypto will be a thing.

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You can get solar panels for like $100-$200 on Amazon right now. Nice ones. The price of them dropped like a fucking rock since China got involved.

this_1_is_mine

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With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don't know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you're walking by one of the coin ATMs that's at one of my local stores I've watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks

•

Vs. Banks. That have offices, branches, atms, data centers... banking does use more energy yearly. So why not both invest in renewables

stoy

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Sure, but how much of the global financial market does crypto represent?

I susptect that the energy consomption per transaction is considerably higher for crypto than for a normal financial transaction.

•

no, it is exorbitantly higher for a single crypto transaction

stoy

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I did find some information about this, and have posted about it in the thread, and you are absolutely right about this in regards to Bitcoin, I did not find a lot of information about other crypto apart from Etherium, which claimed that the energy use of one Etherium transaction would not consume any power at all, which I doubt.

makeasnek

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Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, there is no "mining" in a traditional sense, so its power consumption is more akin to e-mail than mining crypto. But proof-of-stake leads to centralization over time, which is antithetical to what Bitcoin people want.

•

I agree with you. That still means Bitcoin is on the hook though.

•

Misleading title - the problem is not "crypto", it's pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top 10 9 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.

•

dogecoin is top10

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ah yes the 10th place - still, Doge is estimated to use ~1% of the energy Bitcoin uses and it's been in steady decline since the meme blew up.

•

>it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.

it got a pretty big bump from elon a couple years back, but dogecoin is nearly perfect money. it isn't deflationary, it's cheap to transact, and the on-ramps are ubiquitous.

•

the entire Bitcoin block chain could be run on the phone I'm using to write this. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.

and dogecoin merge mines with all the other script coins so how can you even calculate its independent usage?

•

there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.

Yes there is, massive power use is the entire point of proof-of-work. If Bitcoin blocks could be produced without massive power use then the blockchain's system of validation would fail and 51% attacks would be trivial.

•

the hash rate for the first blocks was achievable with a pentium 3. the protocol functioned then. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates more hashpower is used. a 51% attack is the protocol functioning properly.

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That's because there were just a handful of people mining the first blocks and there was no demand, so the price was basically zero.

The protocol is meant to promote decentralization, so I have no idea how a 51% attack would be an example of the protocol functioning properly. A 51% attack is a demonstration that the protocol is controlled by a single entity.

•

a 51% attack means that 51% of the hashpower has agreed on a certain chain. this happens every 10 minutes.

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idk their methodology - source

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if they don't explain their methodology, there is no reason to believe they got it right

•

then there's no reason to believe they got it wrong.

also they're vague estimates, even bitcoin has a huge margin for error.

•

there is every reason to not believe them. they clearly have a motivation to paint power consumption as worse than is true, and the complexity of extracting the use of dogecoin mining from the rest of the mergedmine is, personally, unfathomable. maybe i'm dumb and there is a simple calculation that can be done, but without evidence of their methodology, i'm not going to believe them, and no one should.

•

two of the top 10 by market cap ar stable coins.

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what's your point?

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that market cap is a dumb metric to use to dictate protocol specifications

•

wtf are you even talking about? What protocol specs? Who's dictating what?

•

the specifications of the bitcoin protocol require proof of work. using the market cap to dictate what the protocol specification should be is absurd.

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and who's proposing that? I picked the top in market cap to illustrate what most relevant coins are doing because most of them are irrelevant shitcoins.

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seems like you undrestand that market cap is irrelevant to the protocol design.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In

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Want to suggest a better one?

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uh... adoption, stability, code commits, forks....

SuckMyWang

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Isn’t it strange no one gave a shit about this a year and a half ago when the price was lower? It appears everyone’s concern for the environment and energy consumption only increases when the price goes up. Interesting correlation or may be causation.

Nilz

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Everyone already gave a shit about this a long time ago. It's also one of the reasons Ethereum switched from proof of work to proof of stake.

SuckMyWang

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Yes but only when the price was high did anyone care and ethereum switch. Barely a peep for the last 2 and a half years

fidodo

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I've been hearing about the stupid amount of energy usage for years and years. You just created a straw man that isn't based on reality.

SuckMyWang

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I’ve been keeping a close eye on the news about crypto and there has been virtually no stories about any crypto for the last 2 years, prior to that when the price was high there were a lot of stories about it which is my point. They only started to come back into circulation about 6 months ago. If you remember otherwise you are wrong.

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Skua

•

can always just pump up more oil out of the ground.

No, this is actually exactly the fucking problem

•

No it's not? The fact that the energy supply can adjust to demand is a good thing rather than a problem. At least in the US. Looked into it, and it seems that there's an estimated to be over 300 billion barrels of recoverable oil that is mostly economically viable. Compare that to a current annual consumption of 7 billion barrels a year. There's enough to maintain current consumption for another 40 years. That is most of my remaining lifetime from domestic production alone.

Skua

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I have some bad news for you about the environmental effects of burning lots of oil

nadir

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They're a crypto bro. They probably think they'll live on a swimming libertarian island by then.

matjoeman

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As long as there's enough for your remaining lifetime that's fine. We don't have to worry about anyone else's lifetime after that.

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nadir

•

I think you're telling on yourself

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Not really. You still don't know much.

Anyways, having the wrong opinion and looking stupid by "telling on myself" here barely affects me at all.

•

You mean proof of work? And I disagree, Ethereum moved from PoW to PoS and gained market cap since then. The high costs are just a consequence of the consensus mechanism in use.

adrian783

•

bitcoin has got to be invented by an alien or something so that we would terraform for them...

Odd_so_Star_so_Odd

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Probably just a fool thinking free fusion energy was just around the corner

wizardbeard

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It's more that it was originally a theoretical white paper meant to present a potential solution for a very specific problem space. Energy use wasn't a consideration in the design, because that wasn't part of what it was meant to address. Likewise, anonymity in the sense of hiding transactions wasn't part of the design either, besides avoiding centralized banking's requirement that every "wallet" is associated with a government ID.

It was a fun toy meant as a proof of concept solution to centralized banking.

Eventually market speculators saw what the nerds were getting up to, got some ideas, and everything freaking exploded. It wasn't meant to drive speculative markets.

baltakatei

•

Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).

Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.

Pulptastic

•

Don't forget the opportunity cost of achieving orbital velocity.

I'd say ban it but the cat is out of the bag. Tax it and provide alternatives and hopefully it will die.

Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject

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dude you can totally ban it, it's not even difficult, you just don't let them suck up infinite power

mvirts

•

Mineral resource mining as well

Meowoem

•

What year do you think we'll get the first product mined and manufacturered in space? And how about the first space grown food sold commercially?

I would guess 2040 and 2050 respectively, we'll have the automation tools to get started by 2030 with government science projects then a decade for it to mature into something a company can try to create a market with, probably something that can only be made in low gravity like solve form of novelty such as space glass spheres or a special use material.

I think food will be fast behind because people will pay a lot for it and there's already a lot of research into it for use in space based living facilities.

Simulation6

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There may be some manufacturing processes that need microgravity or a good vacuum and could be be profitable, but I think you are being much too optimistic.

Meowoem

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Maybe, it's so hard to guess which way things will go. I would place a safe bet though that a rich person will buy a bit of jewelry or a watch that was made in space from space mined metals within in the next ten years.

burble

•

AstroForge thinks they can close the business case for asteroid mining. Their concept is to launch mining satellites to near-Earth M-type asteroids to mine platinum group metals. These would go on 2 year missions to bring back $100 million+ in metal at a time. With launch and satellite costs dropping, it might just work. Their forge demo sat has been struggling but moving forward. Their asteroid flyby demo sat should launch later this year.

Redwire 3d printed a meniscus in space last year. That'll take awhile to get worthwhile scale and cost, but it's another interesting avenue.

Varda hit regulatory trouble, but their orbital drug manufacturing demo did its job.

Meowoem

•

Oh I had totally missed the 3d printing in space that's really cool, just watching their video about it and wow is it painful with the marvel tie ins and stuff but looks very cool

Seems like the ability to control temperature dissipation without convection could be really useful especially with metals like platinum, might be even sooner that it's commercialised at scale if they can gather raw platinum and make high quality parts especially something like premium bike or boat parts, the corrosion resistance would make it perfect for tidal generation components too.

That could be a possible first strong business, if the space platinum to earth pipeline is already in progress then it should be relatively cheap to divert some for manufacturing then parachuting them in splash down zones would make sense for tidal generator parts.

Of course with progress on fusion it's possible there won't be a huge market for reliable cheap energy but we'll see. I suspect the first thing made will be jewelry that's sold in small amounts for absurd prices.

echodot

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The problem is still rocket launches are expensive and complicated. But if maybe we can get orbital tethers working then we may be okay.

burble

•

I don't think this is true anymore. The cost of a rideshare with SpaceX is super accessible. Companies can launch for <$1 million. This has been huge for a lot of companies trying to launch a proof of concept or one-off, and even for some operational constellations.

PipedLinkBot

•

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maness300

•

Wait till you find out how much energy banking uses...

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In

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Per transaction?

baltakatei

•

Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.

SketchySeaBeast

•

How much? How much of total US power is used by banks? You have a number, right?

PanArab

•

Destroying the environment and not even for real money

pirat

•

What makes it less real than other fiat currencies, if I may ask? If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I'd argue it is "real money".

PanArab

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It’s a speculative asset, based on the bigger fool theory. You need to sell it for real money to pay your taxes.

n2burns

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If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I'd argue it is "real money".

That right there. The vast, vast majority of people don't think it's valid, therefore it's not real money.

prole

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Just a PSA that the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (ETH) is no longer proof of work, and in the process, reduced their power consumption by ~98%.

JasonDJ

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Satoshi is estimated to have wallets totaling as much as 1.1 million btc. That would make him the 26th richest person in the world.

TypicalHog

•

That's why I prefer Cardano, it has a good PoS (unlike Ethereum) and uses thousands of time less energy than Bitcoin.

ohlaph

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And father.

https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks

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"Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity"

Not to mention banks impact on people's lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class.. to purchase disposable products

hypersigil_media

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Elon Musk's private jet uses energy equivalent to 980 average American households a year. What's your point?

iquanyin

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the point is we need to stop all this kind of ish or we die. our species is at a crossroads.

nadir

•

Ah, but we won't all die. Just the poor. The majority will just live worse, much worse lifes.

The important people like Elon will be mostly fine though and isn't that what counts?

moon

•

How does this logic make sense in your head? Does this suddenly not become an issue because something irrelevant is also bad? How does that make sense??

•

I've always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like "Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy" and we're supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn't say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.

Also, we don't make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don't go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.

There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me

bassomitron

•

Air conditioning literally saves lives, especially medically vulnerable people, the hell are you on about?

As others have pointed out, ~2% of the entire US's energy output is absolutely insane. According to the eia.gov, the US produced around 100 quadrillion BTUs worth of energy in 2022 (I don't fully know why they chose BTUs to measure the total energy output, they explain on the website, but that's besides the point). 2% of that is 2 quadrillion BTUs. According to psu.edu (I googled these sites on my laptop so don't have exact urls on my phone at the moment), the entirety of US households in 2017 used 4.58 quadrillion BTUs.

Think about that. Bitcoin/PoW coin miners are using enough electricity to power around half of all homes in the US. According to statista.com, in 2022 there were 144 million homes. These miners consume 72 million homes worth of energy. And for what? To solve math problems that benefits no one but Bitcoin/PoW coin investors?

We're literally seeing our weather patterns become more and more extreme every year due to climate change, which is also killing our oceans which is causing a severely negative chain reaction in the rest of our ecosystems... But, you know, fuck all that, I need to use an extremely inefficient method of generating currency that no one but enthusiasts/speculators/investors asked for. I'm not inherently against cryptocurrency; however, fuck Bitcoin and other extremely wasteful PoW coins.

And yes, printing dollar bills/other fiat currencies creates pollution, too. I agree that process should be modernized as well. And in some ways, it already has been undergoing modernization as more and more people use electronic payments vs cash, thus decreasing the need to print more bills.

drcobaltjedi

•

Dude. It's 2.3% of a massive industrialized nation where most citizens have access to some luxury goods. A nation with nearly 350 million people being the 3rd most populous country.

It does NOT fucking matter if it's """"""waste"""""" energy. And no, we don't fucking make that arguement about things like ac because you know why? Someone is getting comfort out of it instead of burning seals to make a line go up.

•

It does NOT fucking matter if it's """"""waste"""""" energy

Sounds like you don't actually care about the energy use, you just hate this for moral reasons. Using excess energy has zero externalities

drcobaltjedi

•

Yeah, its not like we could store that energy in say a battery and then use it another time when demand is higher for actually useful things instead of jerking off techbros/cryptobros.

•

I would love if this were an option, but it's not. The current battery technologies don't have the scale for grid level storage capacity. The only grid scale storage solution that is really being done is to build very expensive infrastructure that moves water between two dams of different heights, and building more of those doesn't seem politically likely at the moment

The reality is that there is much a whole bunch of excess energy supply that is produced because power plants can't cycle up and down with demand. So they have to keep producing at peak demand 24/7 (there is some nuances based on the type of power plant, NatGas is faster to turn on/off, but this is broadly true)

I have my qualms with Bitcoin. As a currency it has significant transaction speed problems, and potential security ones after a couple more halvenings. But I don't see a problem if Bitcoin miners want to pay energy producers to use energy that would be produced anyway and earn the producers nothing.

emergencyfood

•

There are plenty of projects that use spare computational power for useful things. Like folding@home, which models protein structures to come up with potential drugs. Why not use the excess electricity for one of those?

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That would be great! And I'm sure there are people doing it. And if 2.3% of the US Power grid were dedicated to that I'm sure some people would be upset about it too

My basic point is I don't think there is anything morally wrong with Bitcoin miners using energy, even though this is a narrative that is very popular now. There are plenty of other valid criticisms of Bitcoin, but I don't think this one stands up to scrutiny.

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It's a lot of energy for a global (!) maximum of around 7 transactions per second.
Unless you want to use the replica of traditional finance called Lightning Network. Then you have more transactions per second and a whole new set of drawbacks.

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Holy shit. 7 transactions a second is horrible and pretty much definitively proves (to me) that it's not currently used as a currency

By chance, do you have a source for that or know where I would go looking?

ililiililiililiilili

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Because the max blocksize of BTC is heavily crippled, max transactions per block is around 3,500ish. That puts us at about 500k transactions max per day (1 block every 10 min). So divide 500k by how many seconds are in a day (86,400) and you get slightly under 6 TPS. Whoever came up with 7 TPS probably did more accurate math than me.

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Different transactions use different amounts of space so it's always going to be a rough estimate.

ililiililiililiilili

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Yep. That 3.5k I pulled out of my ass was just by looking at a graph of max transactions per block thus far. It highly depends on the efficiency of the transactions and size of each.

emergencyfood

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So what happens if a lot of people want to make transactions at the same time? Do they have to queue? Also, this sounds like anyone can cripple the system by scheduling a few thousand tiny transactions.

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Yes, there's a queue called mempool.
Clogging up the network is possible, but costs money (BTC), because transaction fees need to be added to the transactions and those fees need to be higher than those of the highest not yet processed transactions if "regular" users' transactions shall be delayed.
Miners prefer transactions with higher fees (to be precise: higher fees per occupied block space), because they earn them when creating the block successfully - together with the BTC that get issued when a block gets created.

IAm_A_Complete_Idiot

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There's a transaction fee, the higher you pay the more priority you have (since miners get a cut).

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You can look how much space a transaction requires, how much size is available per block and how many blocks per time are being created (at average).
The only way to exceed the figure is by creating transactions with 1 (or few) input(s) and a lot of outputs as they are more efficient in terms of space per tx. Individuals rarely have use for that, but exchanges tend to do that.
If you want to do your own research, start with the fundamentals and investigate the numbers (size per tx depending on type of tx, size per block, blocks per time).

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Oh yeah there are many criticisms of Bitcoin one can make, I just don't think the energy one is very convincing if you think about it a bit

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Shall I add the mountain of electronic waste to the list?
I mean, Bitcoin mining devices can literally do nothing else but calculate SHA256.
Once they can no longer be operated economically, they're garbage.
At least Ethereum's PoW ran on GPUs, which can be used for, let's say: gaming!
And Ethereum showed that a transition from PoW to PoS is possible.
I think that Bitcoin sparked a great idea, but way better implementations of that idea are available. Bitcoin has a massive network effect and first mover advantage. technology wise it's no longer on top of the list.