This is my personal opinion, based on getting into Bitcoin mining in 2011 and shutting the whole mess down after realizing it was heating the entire house. [At the time, I was vaguely interested...
Exemplary
This is my personal opinion, based on getting into Bitcoin mining in 2011 and shutting the whole mess down after realizing it was heating the entire house. [At the time, I was vaguely interested in escaping the surveillance surface area of electronic credit card and bank transactions. Not for any criminal purpose, but because the totalitarian potential of data exhaust was becoming increasingly evident. It's now clear that the inherent traceability of the ledger is, in some ways, worse.].
Ban Bitcoin. Ban all proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. They are thermodynamic pollution engines with negative value and their abolition should be an essential part of climate change mitigation strategies. Continuing to allow them is an accelerant to ecocide.
Even banning "mining", the computation of new tokens, would help in terms of mitigating the extravagant, greed-fueled energy usage.
For those interested, this is a reasonably balanced review paper.
It is technically feasible to transition Bitcoin to a proof-of-stake framework, at the cost of Bitcoin's supposedly "democratizing".
Consensus mechanisms can be changed, as evidenced by the transition from PoW to PoS in the popular blockchain Ethereum. This transition, called “The Merge” since the original execution layer was joined with the PoS consensus layer, occurred in September 2022 and, according to the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute [26], reduced its energy consumption by 99.988% and the carbon footprint by 99.992%. This number seems to be conclusive proof for some that a transition of Bitcoin to PoS (which is doable in theory) would be the appropriate means to “improve” the protocol and to avoid public criticism [27]. The devil is in the details, however, since such a transition would fundamentally alter (some would even say “violate”) some of Bitcoin’s underlying principles. PoW and PoS look quite similar in regard to their underlying goal, which is reaching consensus in a network of computers that do not trust each other. However, the differences in the way this is done and the governance implications are substantial. In this regard, Lowery [28] formulated a framework called “Power Projection Theory” and argued that Bitcoin (and other PoW technologies) secures important information by imposing severe physical costs on potential attackers. In contrast, PoS resembles abstract power hierarchies in real life (e.g., ranks based on inheritance or job title) that do not use energy and therefore are prone to attacks, exploitation and corruption.
I am wholeheartedly in agreement with you. I do not see any ways in which cryptocurrency has been a positive thing for society. The closest thing to a positive is that it let people buy illegal...
I am wholeheartedly in agreement with you. I do not see any ways in which cryptocurrency has been a positive thing for society. The closest thing to a positive is that it let people buy illegal drugs over the internet, and there is a whole boatload of problems with that. The entire market for it has essentially been speculation and for every story of winning there are hundreds of losers. I feel sorry for the people who will lose their jobs running the mining operations or exchanges, but it’s doing a much bigger service to society and humanity’s future.
So off the top of my head: Helium increases US mobile coverage with cheaper phone plans USDC is used globally to make remittances around the world Visa is piloting a program on Solana and writing...
So off the top of my head:
Helium increases US mobile coverage with cheaper phone plans
USDC is used globally to make remittances around the world
Visa is piloting a program on Solana and writing tech deep dives
Warpcast is currently in the top 30 social networking apps, which is built with decentralized node operators in such a way that Elon and other billionaires can't simply buy the network.
These things pale in comparison to the inherent environmental cost of mining. In a very direct way, "value" is being generated by wasting energy. I really don't see why many of these things...
These things pale in comparison to the inherent environmental cost of mining. In a very direct way, "value" is being generated by wasting energy. I really don't see why many of these things couldn't be done with traditional currency.
Most of these things don't use mining, but even mining is mostly done by renewables these days. If we're looking at direct environmental cost, traditional money has much fewer features and burns...
Most of these things don't use mining, but even mining is mostly done by renewables these days.
If we're looking at direct environmental cost, traditional money has much fewer features and burns way more oil. The U.S. Dollar is quite literally backed by the extraction and sale of oil (for dollars), which itself is enforced by the largest consumer of oil in the world, the U.S. military. It's been this way since the 70's when we told Saudi Arabia we'd use our military to protect them so long as they promise to only sell oil in U.S. Dollars (making other countries have to buy these dollars, maintaining dollar stability.)
The trouble is, you can't realistically just buy bitcoin as a virtue signal, because no matter how you're buying it, you're buying it with foreign exchange stability given by the billions of gallons of oil burned to back US Treasuries.
The story of money is basically just a story of technology. We don't need crypto to have programmable money and global state sync'd as fast as physics and software latency allows. Point-to-point neutrino beams would make the current state of the art of crypto obsolete. We'll still need to come up with a value for our money, and maybe that is still oil and military protection, maybe it becomes PoW, but the message passing tech will certainly change as it always has.
You are right about taxes but wrong about the lack of important of petrodollar and importance of military. Even when we rent our military to countries like Japan we make them pay us in dollars,...
You are right about taxes but wrong about the lack of important of petrodollar and importance of military. Even when we rent our military to countries like Japan we make them pay us in dollars, not yen, as it acts as a FX stability forcing function in our benefit.
Look at any country that only taxes itself in its denominated local currency and has no market for it's treasuries. Most of them have severely devalued and hyper-inflated. Some lost over 95% of their value before being delisted from any reputable FX market.
To underline your point, here is an opinion piece by a NYT economist and columnist who goes into why the importance of the US reserve currency status is overstated....
To underline your point, here is an opinion piece by a NYT economist and columnist who goes into why the importance of the US reserve currency status is overstated.
A lot of what’s written about this subject begins with the assertion that the special role of the dollar gives America a unique ability to run a large balance of payments deficits, year after year, presumably because the dollar’s status forces other countries to accept our money. But even a quick look at the data shows that this claim is false. Yes, America has run persistent deficits, but so have other countries. We’re not even at the top of the league table.
It turns out that there are multiple nations able to run persistent deficits, and several have run bigger deficits relative to the size of their economies than we have. Britain, which has the deepest deficits, used to own a globally dominant currency — but the pound sterling stopped playing any important international role generations ago. The Australian dollar and the Canadian dollar have never been widely used outside their issuing nations.
Krugman has been making public predictions for many years, and everyone who makes predictions is inevitably wrong some of the time. The list of people who misjudged the impact of technology is...
Krugman has been making public predictions for many years, and everyone who makes predictions is inevitably wrong some of the time. The list of people who misjudged the impact of technology is full of luminaries.
Additionally, if he is wrong in his argument, refute the argument. Nitpicking the person rather than the position is arguing in bad faith.
The reason people are dredging up this old quote is that Krugman jokingly said Bitcoin is Evil. He doesn't think it's evil, but he is skeptical that Bitcoin can be a real store of money, and actually work as a currency.
As a way to discredit his thoughts on Bitcoin everyone is passing around that old quote about the Internet. The implication is See! He was wrong once! Thereforehence, he is a bozo and you shouldn't listen to him!
We emailed Krugman for a comment on the quote and here's his explanation:
Well, two things.
First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.
But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing. The issues about Bitcoin, however, are not technological! Everyone agrees that it's technically very sweet. But does it work as money? That's a very different kind of question.
And the fact that people are throwing around my 98 quote actually shows that they don't get this point -- that they're confusing technology with monetary economics
So before tossing out the nobel laureate in economics recent argument about monetary status because of a joke forecast outside of his area of expertise 25 years ago, maybe examine if you would be so quick to dismiss someone's argument if it supported your position.
I mean if I was that wrong about something, I'd also say it was not a real prediction, I was just having fun. This makes me more skeptical of Krugman, since throughout history, the story of money...
I mean if I was that wrong about something, I'd also say it was not a real prediction, I was just having fun.
But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology
This makes me more skeptical of Krugman, since throughout history, the story of money is a story of technology. Technology is more macro than macro, and if you understand the macro, you understand the technology.
I also disagreed with him about other topics, such as on minting the trillion dollar coin. He asserted that when the Treasury draws down cash, the Fed can sell its assets to offset the perceived inflation. Only one issue... who's the buyer? Krugman assumed the market will be able to easily absorb $1T in USTs. A simple look at their balance sheet suggested otherwise.
None of that is related to the merits of his piece on reserve currency status. Doubling down on ad hominems and pocket sand throwing unrelated topics doesn't address what I originally posted....
None of that is related to the merits of his piece on reserve currency status. Doubling down on ad hominems and pocket sand throwing unrelated topics doesn't address what I originally posted. Namely, that the reasons given to the importance of the USD being the global reserve currency don't necessarily hold up. E.g., the ability to sustain deficits, like in the case of Britain who once had a global currency and now doesn't.
I'm just giving several reason for why I think Krugman is a deeply unserious person. But I did a quick read of the specific article you seem to want me to respond to. While I agree with him on why...
I'm just giving several reason for why I think Krugman is a deeply unserious person.
But I did a quick read of the specific article you seem to want me to respond to. While I agree with him on why dollar dominance is not going away (especially not with crypto distributing even more dollar hegemony via USDC), I think he deeply misses the point on why. It's not just that "everyone uses it because everyone uses it." We built that plumbing after decades of coming off the gold standard. USTs didn't magically become the most liquid asset in the world, layers of global trade partners and IMF intervention brought us here, the history of which can be unwound and analyzed. Nonetheless we're in a "too big to fail" state because if USTs are mispriced, what does that mean about every other asset in the world?
I'm not sure that paying in yen vs. dollars makes much difference? It seems like there will be a demand for dollars either way, assuming that the US exchanges yen for dollars after receiving it....
I'm not sure that paying in yen vs. dollars makes much difference? It seems like there will be a demand for dollars either way, assuming that the US exchanges yen for dollars after receiving it. The order of these transactions (payment versus doing the currency trade) isn't going to make a lot of difference in principle, though there might be some wrinkles in practice.
The same goes for the argument that taxation drives up the demand for dollars. It does, but the same would happen if the US government accepted tax payments in yen. They'd be doing the currency trade for you.
To generalize: a wealthy government is one that has lots of revenue, of any kind. The government of a country that's rich has a lot more opportunities for getting revenue than the government of a poor country.
(The fact that everyone in the world is willing to loan you money helps too, but having good credit is based on expected revenue.)
As for countries suffering from hyperinflation, I'd want to look at specific examples and see what else went wrong. I'd guess the government is broke, the country is poor and/or the government has trouble collecting taxes, and nobody wants to loan them money either. These things tend to go together.
Then it's on the US to manage the FX rates of multiple currencies. Core advantage of us making everything priced in dollars is we only care about the price we set things at in dollar terms. If we...
Then it's on the US to manage the FX rates of multiple currencies.
Core advantage of us making everything priced in dollars is we only care about the price we set things at in dollar terms. If we ask for a $100mm in USD, we get $100mm even if Yen rips or draws down.
Yeah, good point. Currency risk is someone else's problem. Though, if it's still priced in dollars, usually an exchange rate can be offered that accounts for that risk.
Yeah, good point. Currency risk is someone else's problem. Though, if it's still priced in dollars, usually an exchange rate can be offered that accounts for that risk.
I have trouble believing this statement and the research articles that you shared in another post on this thread don't exactly pass the "sniff test." I'm familiar with the Green Software...
Most of these things don't use mining, but even mining is mostly done by renewables these days.
I have trouble believing this statement and the research articles that you shared in another post on this thread don't exactly pass the "sniff test." I'm familiar with the Green Software Foundation and even attained Linux Foundation's practitioner certification for it. So I have a bit of a basis of knowledge that supports my skepticism.
While curtailments are a great start and certainly provide an answer to the problem of excess production from renewable resources, there are so many more impactful actions that can be taken especially the idea of Demand Shifting and being aware of Carben Intensity.
I am doubtful that the majority of BitCoin miners shift their workloads to regions with lower carbon intensity on the basis those regions draw the majority of their energy from renewables. Often times the mining machines are on 24/7 and are not turning off their processes during higher carbon intensity moments as well. To take these considerations requires a cut in profitability and higher monitoring that seems counter to the whole "line goes up" mentality of BitCoin.
Unless if these BitCoin operations are directly wired to a renewable resource or purchase guarantees for renewables to be their energy source, they are not operating in a green manner.
You're welcome to dispute the data, in fact I think Daniel would encourage getting some feedback. https://batcoinz.com/beest/ This is the right thinking. It's not an environmental ethics problem...
You're welcome to dispute the data, in fact I think Daniel would encourage getting some feedback. https://batcoinz.com/beest/
I am doubtful that the majority of BitCoin miners shift their workloads to regions with lower carbon intensity on the basis those regions draw the majority of their energy from renewables.
I thought the biggest criticism of fiat currency was that it itself is not backed by anything valuable, just the word of a governing entity, and yet here you are saying its value is derived from...
I thought the biggest criticism of fiat currency was that it itself is not backed by anything valuable, just the word of a governing entity, and yet here you are saying its value is derived from oil.
Ready for these mindblowers? Helium could be easily replaced by <mobile provider> taking $20/month off their customer's bill by having them plug in an access point. Hell, Comcast did just that by...
Ready for these mindblowers?
Helium could be easily replaced by <mobile provider> taking $20/month off their customer's bill by having them plug in an access point. Hell, Comcast did just that by having all of their gear broadcast the Xfinity accesspoint for any other Xfinity (or Xfinity Mobile) customer. And those customers have the "privilege" of paying $15/month for their "modem rental."
USDC provides 0 value other than "lower fees than regular remittances." And that goes away if it gets traction. I see nothing other than "pilot programs" being announce. They have 2.9 million wallets....but there's no guarantee that translates to 2.9 million people. If anything, I'm betting most of those are just crypto-bros hoarding as much of any that they can get.
TRIP is a proof-of-concept that eliminates what little safety precautions Lyft/Uber do provide. At least they background check the driver and demand proof of insurance.
And a Ukranian draft dodger was able to skip the border by not waiting in line for an ATM instead of performing his civic duty. Yay?
I don't have much to add to the crypto debate (though I think PoW is self evidentally a bad idea in light of climate change). Just wanted to say that I don't accept the premise that a citizen of a...
I don't have much to add to the crypto debate (though I think PoW is self evidentally a bad idea in light of climate change).
Just wanted to say that I don't accept the premise that a citizen of a country is duty bound to die for said country. Ukraine is an unusually clear cut situation where a foreign aggressor is invading without any sort of ethical ideology as a premise. The justifications they've offered are hilariously bad, as if they understood no one would believe them so why even try.
That's definitely a situation where I would consider fighting for my country. But IMO it's a step too far to say that someone who chooses not to fight is bad or wrong. Leaving a warzone should be a universal human right.
The idea that you're honor bound to go to war for your group's interests has been a tool the powerful have used to convince poor people to die for them for 1000's of years. It's sad to me that we continue to buy that lie in the modern age.
Yeah, one of the big names can do it too, but Helium found product market fit and a growth loop with crypto that allows them to do this. It's $5/m in Miami, $20/m nationwide, if Verizon or...
Helium could be easily replaced by <mobile provider> taking $20/month off their customer's bill by having them plug in an access point.
Yeah, one of the big names can do it too, but Helium found product market fit and a growth loop with crypto that allows them to do this. It's $5/m in Miami, $20/m nationwide, if Verizon or T-Mobile want to follow their lead, I'd be all for it!
USDC provides 0 value other than "lower fees than regular remittances."
Every trading desk that can settle over USDC, and every VC that can do deals over USDC, are opting to do so. It provides 0 value, except its much faster, easily auditable by all counterparties, easier to programmatically build on, and no one who can use it for daily business would rather go back to sending wires or setup expansive collateral systems infra that doesn't cross-communicate in a timely manner if at all.
It might true that these institutions are just cryptography brothers. Nonetheless, they are using USDC over all other dollar sending tools out there.
And that goes away if it gets traction.
I mean how much does SOL need to increase in price for the network fee of sending USDC to go beyond sub-penny?
TRIP is a proof-of-concept that eliminates what little safety precautions Lyft/Uber do provide. At least they background check the driver and demand proof of insurance.
Trip has compliance auditors, verifiers, and operators built into the protocol.
And a Ukranian draft dodger was able to skip the border by not waiting in line for an ATM instead of performing his civic duty.
It's one way to look at it, but I think it's good that there was a form of value that someone was easily able to transport as their life became war torn. Of course, the amount was low enough to where an ounce and half of gold would provide the same value.
Except that "Unlimited" is really just "30GB then throttled and tethering capped at 5GB" just like every other plan. And that's not really that much better than other MVNOs. Some I can even get...
Except that "Unlimited" is really just "30GB then throttled and tethering capped at 5GB" just like every other plan.
And that's not really that much better than other MVNOs. Some I can even get down to $5/mo with 1GB of 5G data, which is more than enough for my use cases. I'll grant that it's half-price compared to another unlimited... but it's also a new entrant in an already crowded market. I guarantee that price will jump up within a few years to match others, after they've got a hooked userbase....just like most of the others do.
Just prop trading and asset mgmt firms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRW_Trading_Group https://crypto.marketswiki.com/index.php?title=Galaxy_Digital Also falconx as well https://www.falconx.io/
Looks like these all do cryptocurrency trading as part of their business, so it would make sense that they're set up to use USDC easily. And then, why not? But I have no notion of how many firms...
Looks like these all do cryptocurrency trading as part of their business, so it would make sense that they're set up to use USDC easily. And then, why not?
But I have no notion of how many firms there are like this, who the big players are, or how many of them do cryptocurrency trading. How likely is USDC to become a standard form of payment in the traditional finance ecosystem?
I've been wrong before but I think it is likely: BlackRock is an investor in Circle (issuers of USDC) Larry Fink (BlackRock CEO) has recently been vocal about tokenization BlackRock COO discusses...
I've been wrong before but I think it is likely:
BlackRock is an investor in Circle (issuers of USDC)
Larry Fink (BlackRock CEO) has recently been vocal about tokenization
Idk if BlackRock specifically is trading USDC now. I've heard from trading friends that a lot of traditional finance prop trading firms have a digital assets arm now, so if you speak in TradFi nomenclature but have a crypto trading background you can do that at a lot of these desks, but thats just anecdotal stuff I've been hearing.
To be honest I don’t think there is anything they can do. What you would need to do is to present me with a reasoned arguement that explains why it is better than fiat currency that weighs better...
To be honest I don’t think there is anything they can do. What you would need to do is to present me with a reasoned arguement that explains why it is better than fiat currency that weighs better against all of its downsides. That would mean a long conversation which I am not currently able to entertain.
It seems to me that crypto is not necessary for any of those, except perhaps the fleeing Ukranian refugee, and that use-case is essentially neutral: imagine the same situation, except instead of a...
It seems to me that crypto is not necessary for any of those, except perhaps the fleeing Ukranian refugee, and that use-case is essentially neutral: imagine the same situation, except instead of a Ukranian refugee, it's a sex trafficker.
I think something that is worthwhile to highlight regarding proof-of-work cryptocurrencies*, and which I think many uninitiated might not realize, is that the primary utility of how many...
I think something that is worthwhile to highlight regarding proof-of-work cryptocurrencies*, and which I think many uninitiated might not realize, is that the primary utility of how many transactions can be performed per unit of time using them is independent of the energy put into their mining.
If all existing bitcoin mining hardware is doubled, it'll consume twice as much energy and do twice the amount of work, but in a short time the protocol will double the amount of work that is needed for each block. Twice the hardware, twice the energy, twice the work, but the same transactional capacity.
The sole thing it provides is that it takes more work to take control of the network. In a sense, it's a continuously profit-driven arms race which has no benefit outside of the arms race itself. This is why changing the method of how it is secured can lead to such dramatic reductions in energy usage, because at the very least it switches what the arms race is about.
* or at the very least bitcoin, it's been long since I checked if there's any other variation of proof-of-work which actually scales performance with it
At this point, I’m just hoping somebody invents a cryptographic algorithm based on the mathematics of protein folding and makes a cryptocurrency out of it. It’s pretty clear this stuff isn’t going...
At this point, I’m just hoping somebody invents a cryptographic algorithm based on the mathematics of protein folding and makes a cryptocurrency out of it. It’s pretty clear this stuff isn’t going anywhere and people love their digital scratch off tickets. Maybe we could at the very least get some use out of it and solve math problems that actually represent something important.
Unfortunately, that defeats the purpose of proof-of-work based blockchain security. If the work has value beyond securing the chain, work-based attacks become that much cheaper, and more work is...
Unfortunately, that defeats the purpose of proof-of-work based blockchain security. If the work has value beyond securing the chain, work-based attacks become that much cheaper, and more work is required to achieve the same level of security.
Can you elaborate? I perform an internet search on several different engines for “work-based attack” (in quotes) and find less than 2 dozen results. All of them seem to be just using it as a...
Can you elaborate? I perform an internet search on several different engines for “work-based attack” (in quotes) and find less than 2 dozen results. All of them seem to be just using it as a euphemism for brute force techniques in cryptography in general. I am familiar with the 51% attack, if that’s an example of what you’re referring to then I think your reasoning is valid. But cryptocurrency has failed to demonstrate its practical utility for the average consumer for decades now, and in practice is mostly just used for gambling. Sure the reasons for that might be fraught and complicated but it is what it is, and I don’t really know how unfortunate it would actually be to have a popular, but philosophically imperfect implementation of cryptocurrency that could theoretically be taken advantage of more easily, in exchange for rapidly developing insights into medical research which could have profound consequences for all of humanity.
Yes, a 51% attack was what I was thinking about. Was not sure if there are other attacks based on generating proof-of-work, it's been a while since I was reasonably up to date on this stuff.
Yes, a 51% attack was what I was thinking about. Was not sure if there are other attacks based on generating proof-of-work, it's been a while since I was reasonably up to date on this stuff.
I have no expertise nor interest in crypto (I don't even know why I looked at this thread... Social media addiction I guess), but for what it's worth there's GridCoin that seems to leverage...
I have no expertise nor interest in crypto (I don't even know why I looked at this thread... Social media addiction I guess), but for what it's worth there's GridCoin that seems to leverage Folding@Home and BOINC (boinc is the middleware that powers SETI@Home ; I looked "boinc crypto" in DDG)
This seems written by someone who is not really knowledgeable about Bitcoin miners, their energy mix, and how they price energy. In the current state of Bitcoin: More than half of Bitcoin miners...
These are almost certainly fossil fuel plants that might be reasonable candidates for retirement if it weren't for their use to supply bitcoin miners. So, these miners are contributing to all of the health and climate problems associated with the continued use of fossil fuels.
...
But based on these initial numbers, it's clear that the relocation of so many mining operations to the US will significantly hinder efforts to bring the US's electric grid to carbon neutrality
This seems written by someone who is not really knowledgeable about Bitcoin miners, their energy mix, and how they price energy.
In the current state of Bitcoin:
More than half of Bitcoin miners run on renewable or stranded/wasted energy (nearly a quarter of that is hydro.)
Fossil fuels/coal being part of that mix is going down ~6.2% y/y
They provide flexible demand to renewable energy providers to curtail over-generation risk
ERCOT Grid operator from 2021-2023 said co-located Bitcoin miners lead to increased stability to the grid.
More than 10% of US grid methane emissions are mitigated by bitcoin flare caps
As a Texan, ERCOT is a bunch of fucking liars with their heads so far up their asses they know what's for dinner before they even eat it. So take any statement they make as not even being worth...
ERCOT Grid operator from 2021-2023 said co-located Bitcoin miners lead to increased stability to the grid.
As a Texan, ERCOT is a bunch of fucking liars with their heads so far up their asses they know what's for dinner before they even eat it. So take any statement they make as not even being worth the paper it's printed on, grid instability is practically a way of life in this shithole and threats to blackouts happen every other time an ant farts in Arkansas.
Very glad someone already commented on this. Many people have already died because ERCOT only really exists to serve the fossil fuel industry at this point. It's really disgusting, to be honest.
Very glad someone already commented on this. Many people have already died because ERCOT only really exists to serve the fossil fuel industry at this point. It's really disgusting, to be honest.
I never understood the Bitcoin mining thing in Texas. Yes, theoretically consistently higher prices from increased demand might encourage people to build more capacity to be online during...
I never understood the Bitcoin mining thing in Texas. Yes, theoretically consistently higher prices from increased demand might encourage people to build more capacity to be online during emergencies, but what other grids do is they just pay for capacity. Also, don't Bitcoin miners like cheap electricity anyway?
Besides, if the state of Texas wants load to increase, they can tell Texans that it's our patriotic duty to drop the AC to 68 or plug in our EVs at 6 PM or something. We're currently not supposed to do that on days that are risky for outages because Texas actually has significant renewable generation and the bottom of the solar/wind "duck curve" for generation intersects with almost the hottest part of the day right around 6-7 PM in the summer. I think being able to plug in my Mach E at a convenient time would be nicer for me than some guys mining crypto.
And according to my friend who works for PUC, the crypto guys don't really turn off when ERCOT sends out those notices. I wish I had a better source than "Trust me guys, my friend says so!" and it's absolutely fair if nobody believes me on that.
May I ask if you’ve seen any papers examining whether there’s an opportunity cost for using bitcoin mining to soak up excess electrical generation instead of the alternatives? Eg: data centres...
May I ask if you’ve seen any papers examining whether there’s an opportunity cost for using bitcoin mining to soak up excess electrical generation instead of the alternatives? Eg:
data centres focused on machine learning training,
Not papers but I've seen AI data centers co-locating similarly to bitcoin miners. For grid scale power storage and long distance grid interconnects, the tech needs to be improved. Once that tech...
Not papers but I've seen AI data centers co-locating similarly to bitcoin miners.
For grid scale power storage and long distance grid interconnects, the tech needs to be improved. Once that tech is improved you don't really need co-located flexible demand to curtail excess generation.
Of course, if we have point-to-point neutrino beams doing all our telecommunications, we also don't need crypto at all.
I feel like bitcoin, and crypto at large, discussions are just fraught with preconceived notions of it either being the best thing ever or a blight on the planet, and it colors the discourse on...
I feel like bitcoin, and crypto at large, discussions are just fraught with preconceived notions of it either being the best thing ever or a blight on the planet, and it colors the discourse on it.
For a variety of reasons, bitcoin isn't going away. It's usefulness is questionable but so long as there's enough of a market for it, it will exist. Further it's the sort of thing that would be very hard to completely stop, so the value of legally banning or inhibiting bitcoin is hard to really land on.
These "well it's using X% of the grid" things are pretty slanted in my eyes. There's LOTS of questionable usages of power out there, but do we really want to go down that road? How much power is used on video game servers? How much benefit is there from running Minecraft, Fortnight, League instances? Should youtube even exist at it's scale when so much of it's content is just useless entertainment? How about shutting down all those torrenting servers? That's probably illegal and a waste? Why haven't they done that?
I think crypto has a TON of bullshit behind it, and the world governments have been asleep at the wheel regulating, but speaking specifically to bitcoin, it's hardly anywhere near the drain of much more controversial practices, and I don't think there's a perfect argument to say it shouldn't exist.
Mostly though, I think crypto doesn't matter. Like either way. Suddenly passing legislation related to the mining of bitcoin will change nothing for the better. Doing nothing about it will likely also not harm anything for the worse. If anything it's probably better that Bitcoin is now being minded in an environmentally aware country like the US as opposed to China who's standards on the environment swing wildly (where the vast majority used to be, and may still be but harder to report on).
I think Bitcoin (vs cryptocurrencies in general) warrants somewhat more scrutiny than other economic activity that actually produces inherent value (e.g. multimedia content from your provided...
I think Bitcoin (vs cryptocurrencies in general) warrants somewhat more scrutiny than other economic activity that actually produces inherent value (e.g. multimedia content from your provided examples).
In the 15 years of its existence, BTC encroached on 2% of the US electricity usage. The overall US use of electricity has remained relatively flat during that time period.
Are we expected to allow Bitcoin to become 4% of electricity usage in another 10-15 years? When does it stop? ETH proved a transition to PoS is possible in 2022, cutting 99% of electricity usage, so why can’t BTC be required to reduce emissions in the same way?
bitcoin isn’t going away
Drug addiction, prostitution, gambling, gun ownership, and alcohol are clearly not going away any time soon, either. Generally providing a legal yet very regulated pathway to using these vices has historically proven a better policy than banning them outright. BTC proponents want to break rules and not answer to any laws…at some point it will have to at least succumb to the laws of physics (you can’t grow exponentially forever). If we’re going to accept that it’s here to stay, we should strive to make it sustainable, which it clearly is not.
Ethereum and Bitcoin have different design spaces. The design space of bitcoin set to make it such that it's a hard asset with a security budget (energy). Ethereum wants to be "ultrasound money"...
ETH proved a transition to PoS is possible in 2022, cutting 99% of electricity usage, so why can’t BTC be required to reduce emissions in the same way?
Ethereum and Bitcoin have different design spaces.
The design space of bitcoin set to make it such that it's a hard asset with a security budget (energy).
Ethereum wants to be "ultrasound money" with global state and general compute. It's arguably not as good as a hard asset as bitcoin, and not as good of as a global state and general compute as solana.
PoS Bitcoin would essentially just be an all around worse ethereum and solana.
BTC proponents want to break rules and not answer to any laws…
at some point it will have to at least succumb to the laws of physics (you can’t grow exponentially forever)
And not even linearly!
If we’re going to accept that it’s here to stay, we should strive to make it sustainable, which it clearly is not.
It does seem to be trending towards sustainability but agree its not there yet. My bet is that we see carbon-neutral bitcoin mining within 10 years. However, this doesn't mean % of electricity relative to US goes down! It could mean that bitcoin miners generate more electricity via renewables and nuclear. I would not be surprised to see bitcoin miners use 4% of electricity, but with the majority of that being energy that would otherwise not have been generated or captured in the first place.
I’m not able to dive into all of this right now but short version: Just because bit coin isn’t going away doesn’t mean it’s going to continue to grow. It ebbs and flows and probably has at least...
I’m not able to dive into all of this right now but short version:
Just because bit coin isn’t going away doesn’t mean it’s going to continue to grow. It ebbs and flows and probably has at least one more huge catastrophic event in the wings that might kill it and will certainly hobble it. The simple fact is it’s filling a niche that not much else can fill and that niche doesn’t look to be going away. Digital assets have advantages.
Dumb proponents exist for many things. Bitcoin has more than usual given its “fight the man” roots (turns out banking isn’t an evil plot so much as a natural evolution of common needs). There are reasonable people who understand that the role it fills must be regulated as we just watched a generation speed run why there’s rules in finance. The fact there’s dumb people involved doesn’t change the effectiveness of the niche.
How much electricity would it take traditional means to securely transact a similar amount? Taking into consideration running buildings, accountants, equipment, automotive pollution etc. Just...
How much electricity would it take traditional means to securely transact a similar amount? Taking into consideration running buildings, accountants, equipment, automotive pollution etc. Just curious what a fair comparison would look like.
There’s $7.5B in foreign exchange trading alone per day. That’s more than 1000x the volume of bitcoin, and I expect that is even dwarfed by the amount of transactions done in regular day to day banking and same currency transactions, although I have no convenient sources.
Quantifying the energy footprint of the financial sector or gold industry is far more challenging. For the banks, Galaxy Digital looked at four key areas of electricity consumption: data centres, bank branches, ATMs, and card network data centres. It estimates the global energy consumption of the banking system is 238.92 TWh per year.
For the gold industry, Galaxy Digital relied on greenhouse gas emissions estimates published by the World Gold Council to determine an annual energy usage of 240.61 TWh per year. The authors concede this estimate may omit some key sources of energy use, "like the energy and carbon intensity of the tires used in gold mines."
This is my personal opinion, based on getting into Bitcoin mining in 2011 and shutting the whole mess down after realizing it was heating the entire house. [At the time, I was vaguely interested in escaping the surveillance surface area of electronic credit card and bank transactions. Not for any criminal purpose, but because the totalitarian potential of data exhaust was becoming increasingly evident. It's now clear that the inherent traceability of the ledger is, in some ways, worse.].
Ban Bitcoin. Ban all proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. They are thermodynamic pollution engines with negative value and their abolition should be an essential part of climate change mitigation strategies. Continuing to allow them is an accelerant to ecocide.
Even banning "mining", the computation of new tokens, would help in terms of mitigating the extravagant, greed-fueled energy usage.
For those interested, this is a reasonably balanced review paper.
I am wholeheartedly in agreement with you. I do not see any ways in which cryptocurrency has been a positive thing for society. The closest thing to a positive is that it let people buy illegal drugs over the internet, and there is a whole boatload of problems with that. The entire market for it has essentially been speculation and for every story of winning there are hundreds of losers. I feel sorry for the people who will lose their jobs running the mining operations or exchanges, but it’s doing a much bigger service to society and humanity’s future.
So off the top of my head:
What are some other positive things crypto should do in 2024 to change the sentiment around it?
These things pale in comparison to the inherent environmental cost of mining. In a very direct way, "value" is being generated by wasting energy. I really don't see why many of these things couldn't be done with traditional currency.
Most of these things don't use mining, but even mining is mostly done by renewables these days.
If we're looking at direct environmental cost, traditional money has much fewer features and burns way more oil. The U.S. Dollar is quite literally backed by the extraction and sale of oil (for dollars), which itself is enforced by the largest consumer of oil in the world, the U.S. military. It's been this way since the 70's when we told Saudi Arabia we'd use our military to protect them so long as they promise to only sell oil in U.S. Dollars (making other countries have to buy these dollars, maintaining dollar stability.)
The trouble is, you can't realistically just buy bitcoin as a virtue signal, because no matter how you're buying it, you're buying it with foreign exchange stability given by the billions of gallons of oil burned to back US Treasuries.
The story of money is basically just a story of technology. We don't need crypto to have programmable money and global state sync'd as fast as physics and software latency allows. Point-to-point neutrino beams would make the current state of the art of crypto obsolete. We'll still need to come up with a value for our money, and maybe that is still oil and military protection, maybe it becomes PoW, but the message passing tech will certainly change as it always has.
You are right about taxes but wrong about the lack of important of petrodollar and importance of military. Even when we rent our military to countries like Japan we make them pay us in dollars, not yen, as it acts as a FX stability forcing function in our benefit.
Look at any country that only taxes itself in its denominated local currency and has no market for it's treasuries. Most of them have severely devalued and hyper-inflated. Some lost over 95% of their value before being delisted from any reputable FX market.
To underline your point, here is an opinion piece by a NYT economist and columnist who goes into why the importance of the US reserve currency status is overstated.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/opinion/us-dollar-reserve-currency.html
This is the same guy that said "by 2005, it would become clear that the Internet's effect on the economy is no greater than the fax machine's."
Krugman has been making public predictions for many years, and everyone who makes predictions is inevitably wrong some of the time. The list of people who misjudged the impact of technology is full of luminaries.
Additionally, if he is wrong in his argument, refute the argument. Nitpicking the person rather than the position is arguing in bad faith.
Finally, we can let him defend himself:
So before tossing out the nobel laureate in economics recent argument about monetary status because of a joke forecast outside of his area of expertise 25 years ago, maybe examine if you would be so quick to dismiss someone's argument if it supported your position.
I mean if I was that wrong about something, I'd also say it was not a real prediction, I was just having fun.
This makes me more skeptical of Krugman, since throughout history, the story of money is a story of technology. Technology is more macro than macro, and if you understand the macro, you understand the technology.
I also disagreed with him about other topics, such as on minting the trillion dollar coin. He asserted that when the Treasury draws down cash, the Fed can sell its assets to offset the perceived inflation. Only one issue... who's the buyer? Krugman assumed the market will be able to easily absorb $1T in USTs. A simple look at their balance sheet suggested otherwise.
None of that is related to the merits of his piece on reserve currency status. Doubling down on ad hominems and pocket sand throwing unrelated topics doesn't address what I originally posted. Namely, that the reasons given to the importance of the USD being the global reserve currency don't necessarily hold up. E.g., the ability to sustain deficits, like in the case of Britain who once had a global currency and now doesn't.
I'm just giving several reason for why I think Krugman is a deeply unserious person.
But I did a quick read of the specific article you seem to want me to respond to. While I agree with him on why dollar dominance is not going away (especially not with crypto distributing even more dollar hegemony via USDC), I think he deeply misses the point on why. It's not just that "everyone uses it because everyone uses it." We built that plumbing after decades of coming off the gold standard. USTs didn't magically become the most liquid asset in the world, layers of global trade partners and IMF intervention brought us here, the history of which can be unwound and analyzed. Nonetheless we're in a "too big to fail" state because if USTs are mispriced, what does that mean about every other asset in the world?
I'm not sure that paying in yen vs. dollars makes much difference? It seems like there will be a demand for dollars either way, assuming that the US exchanges yen for dollars after receiving it. The order of these transactions (payment versus doing the currency trade) isn't going to make a lot of difference in principle, though there might be some wrinkles in practice.
The same goes for the argument that taxation drives up the demand for dollars. It does, but the same would happen if the US government accepted tax payments in yen. They'd be doing the currency trade for you.
To generalize: a wealthy government is one that has lots of revenue, of any kind. The government of a country that's rich has a lot more opportunities for getting revenue than the government of a poor country.
(The fact that everyone in the world is willing to loan you money helps too, but having good credit is based on expected revenue.)
As for countries suffering from hyperinflation, I'd want to look at specific examples and see what else went wrong. I'd guess the government is broke, the country is poor and/or the government has trouble collecting taxes, and nobody wants to loan them money either. These things tend to go together.
Then it's on the US to manage the FX rates of multiple currencies.
Core advantage of us making everything priced in dollars is we only care about the price we set things at in dollar terms. If we ask for a $100mm in USD, we get $100mm even if Yen rips or draws down.
Yeah, good point. Currency risk is someone else's problem. Though, if it's still priced in dollars, usually an exchange rate can be offered that accounts for that risk.
I have trouble believing this statement and the research articles that you shared in another post on this thread don't exactly pass the "sniff test." I'm familiar with the Green Software Foundation and even attained Linux Foundation's practitioner certification for it. So I have a bit of a basis of knowledge that supports my skepticism.
While curtailments are a great start and certainly provide an answer to the problem of excess production from renewable resources, there are so many more impactful actions that can be taken especially the idea of Demand Shifting and being aware of Carben Intensity.
I am doubtful that the majority of BitCoin miners shift their workloads to regions with lower carbon intensity on the basis those regions draw the majority of their energy from renewables. Often times the mining machines are on 24/7 and are not turning off their processes during higher carbon intensity moments as well. To take these considerations requires a cut in profitability and higher monitoring that seems counter to the whole "line goes up" mentality of BitCoin.
Unless if these BitCoin operations are directly wired to a renewable resource or purchase guarantees for renewables to be their energy source, they are not operating in a green manner.
You're welcome to dispute the data, in fact I think Daniel would encourage getting some feedback.
https://batcoinz.com/beest/
This is the right thinking. It's not an environmental ethics problem for miners, its an economics problem. If the cost of energy is too high, the mining is no longer profitable. It turns out there is cheaper energy out there rather than fossil fuels! (Or build a nuclear mining plant like TeraWulf did, "Power cost averaged $16,737 per bitcoin self-mined, or approximately $0.05/kWh in January, which excludes the benefit of demand response or ancillary services revenue.")
I thought the biggest criticism of fiat currency was that it itself is not backed by anything valuable, just the word of a governing entity, and yet here you are saying its value is derived from oil.
It cannot be both.
Ready for these mindblowers?
Helium could be easily replaced by <mobile provider> taking $20/month off their customer's bill by having them plug in an access point. Hell, Comcast did just that by having all of their gear broadcast the Xfinity accesspoint for any other Xfinity (or Xfinity Mobile) customer. And those customers have the "privilege" of paying $15/month for their "modem rental."
USDC provides 0 value other than "lower fees than regular remittances." And that goes away if it gets traction. I see nothing other than "pilot programs" being announce. They have 2.9 million wallets....but there's no guarantee that translates to 2.9 million people. If anything, I'm betting most of those are just crypto-bros hoarding as much of any that they can get.
TRIP is a proof-of-concept that eliminates what little safety precautions Lyft/Uber do provide. At least they background check the driver and demand proof of insurance.
And a Ukranian draft dodger was able to skip the border by not waiting in line for an ATM instead of performing his civic duty. Yay?
I don't have much to add to the crypto debate (though I think PoW is self evidentally a bad idea in light of climate change).
Just wanted to say that I don't accept the premise that a citizen of a country is duty bound to die for said country. Ukraine is an unusually clear cut situation where a foreign aggressor is invading without any sort of ethical ideology as a premise. The justifications they've offered are hilariously bad, as if they understood no one would believe them so why even try.
That's definitely a situation where I would consider fighting for my country. But IMO it's a step too far to say that someone who chooses not to fight is bad or wrong. Leaving a warzone should be a universal human right.
The idea that you're honor bound to go to war for your group's interests has been a tool the powerful have used to convince poor people to die for them for 1000's of years. It's sad to me that we continue to buy that lie in the modern age.
Yeah, one of the big names can do it too, but Helium found product market fit and a growth loop with crypto that allows them to do this. It's $5/m in Miami, $20/m nationwide, if Verizon or T-Mobile want to follow their lead, I'd be all for it!
Every trading desk that can settle over USDC, and every VC that can do deals over USDC, are opting to do so. It provides 0 value, except its much faster, easily auditable by all counterparties, easier to programmatically build on, and no one who can use it for daily business would rather go back to sending wires or setup expansive collateral systems infra that doesn't cross-communicate in a timely manner if at all.
It might true that these institutions are just cryptography brothers. Nonetheless, they are using USDC over all other dollar sending tools out there.
I mean how much does SOL need to increase in price for the network fee of sending USDC to go beyond sub-penny?
Trip has compliance auditors, verifiers, and operators built into the protocol.
It's one way to look at it, but I think it's good that there was a form of value that someone was easily able to transport as their life became war torn. Of course, the amount was low enough to where an ounce and half of gold would provide the same value.
Except that "Unlimited" is really just "30GB then throttled and tethering capped at 5GB" just like every other plan.
And that's not really that much better than other MVNOs. Some I can even get down to $5/mo with 1GB of 5G data, which is more than enough for my use cases. I'll grant that it's half-price compared to another unlimited... but it's also a new entrant in an already crowded market. I guarantee that price will jump up within a few years to match others, after they've got a hooked userbase....just like most of the others do.
So short Helium, you can do it here:
https://app.drift.trade/HNT-PERP
Which trading desks use USDC? I’m wondering how common this is.
DRW, Galaxy, QCP are a few
Thanks, but it doesn’t help me because I’m unfamiliar with the industry. (Who are they?)
Just prop trading and asset mgmt firms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRW_Trading_Group
https://crypto.marketswiki.com/index.php?title=Galaxy_Digital
Also falconx as well
https://www.falconx.io/
Looks like these all do cryptocurrency trading as part of their business, so it would make sense that they're set up to use USDC easily. And then, why not?
But I have no notion of how many firms there are like this, who the big players are, or how many of them do cryptocurrency trading. How likely is USDC to become a standard form of payment in the traditional finance ecosystem?
I've been wrong before but I think it is likely:
Idk if BlackRock specifically is trading USDC now. I've heard from trading friends that a lot of traditional finance prop trading firms have a digital assets arm now, so if you speak in TradFi nomenclature but have a crypto trading background you can do that at a lot of these desks, but thats just anecdotal stuff I've been hearing.
To be honest I don’t think there is anything they can do. What you would need to do is to present me with a reasoned arguement that explains why it is better than fiat currency that weighs better against all of its downsides. That would mean a long conversation which I am not currently able to entertain.
It seems to me that crypto is not necessary for any of those, except perhaps the fleeing Ukranian refugee, and that use-case is essentially neutral: imagine the same situation, except instead of a Ukranian refugee, it's a sex trafficker.
I think something that is worthwhile to highlight regarding proof-of-work cryptocurrencies*, and which I think many uninitiated might not realize, is that the primary utility of how many transactions can be performed per unit of time using them is independent of the energy put into their mining.
If all existing bitcoin mining hardware is doubled, it'll consume twice as much energy and do twice the amount of work, but in a short time the protocol will double the amount of work that is needed for each block. Twice the hardware, twice the energy, twice the work, but the same transactional capacity.
The sole thing it provides is that it takes more work to take control of the network. In a sense, it's a continuously profit-driven arms race which has no benefit outside of the arms race itself. This is why changing the method of how it is secured can lead to such dramatic reductions in energy usage, because at the very least it switches what the arms race is about.
* or at the very least bitcoin, it's been long since I checked if there's any other variation of proof-of-work which actually scales performance with it
At this point, I’m just hoping somebody invents a cryptographic algorithm based on the mathematics of protein folding and makes a cryptocurrency out of it. It’s pretty clear this stuff isn’t going anywhere and people love their digital scratch off tickets. Maybe we could at the very least get some use out of it and solve math problems that actually represent something important.
Unfortunately, that defeats the purpose of proof-of-work based blockchain security. If the work has value beyond securing the chain, work-based attacks become that much cheaper, and more work is required to achieve the same level of security.
Can you elaborate? I perform an internet search on several different engines for “work-based attack” (in quotes) and find less than 2 dozen results. All of them seem to be just using it as a euphemism for brute force techniques in cryptography in general. I am familiar with the 51% attack, if that’s an example of what you’re referring to then I think your reasoning is valid. But cryptocurrency has failed to demonstrate its practical utility for the average consumer for decades now, and in practice is mostly just used for gambling. Sure the reasons for that might be fraught and complicated but it is what it is, and I don’t really know how unfortunate it would actually be to have a popular, but philosophically imperfect implementation of cryptocurrency that could theoretically be taken advantage of more easily, in exchange for rapidly developing insights into medical research which could have profound consequences for all of humanity.
Yes, a 51% attack was what I was thinking about. Was not sure if there are other attacks based on generating proof-of-work, it's been a while since I was reasonably up to date on this stuff.
I have no expertise nor interest in crypto (I don't even know why I looked at this thread... Social media addiction I guess), but for what it's worth there's GridCoin that seems to leverage Folding@Home and BOINC (boinc is the middleware that powers SETI@Home ; I looked "boinc crypto" in DDG)
This seems written by someone who is not really knowledgeable about Bitcoin miners, their energy mix, and how they price energy.
In the current state of Bitcoin:
Some more reading:
As a Texan, ERCOT is a bunch of fucking liars with their heads so far up their asses they know what's for dinner before they even eat it. So take any statement they make as not even being worth the paper it's printed on, grid instability is practically a way of life in this shithole and threats to blackouts happen every other time an ant farts in Arkansas.
https://tild.es/1a7w
https://tild.es/v5w
Very glad someone already commented on this. Many people have already died because ERCOT only really exists to serve the fossil fuel industry at this point. It's really disgusting, to be honest.
I never understood the Bitcoin mining thing in Texas. Yes, theoretically consistently higher prices from increased demand might encourage people to build more capacity to be online during emergencies, but what other grids do is they just pay for capacity. Also, don't Bitcoin miners like cheap electricity anyway?
Besides, if the state of Texas wants load to increase, they can tell Texans that it's our patriotic duty to drop the AC to 68 or plug in our EVs at 6 PM or something. We're currently not supposed to do that on days that are risky for outages because Texas actually has significant renewable generation and the bottom of the solar/wind "duck curve" for generation intersects with almost the hottest part of the day right around 6-7 PM in the summer. I think being able to plug in my Mach E at a convenient time would be nicer for me than some guys mining crypto.
And according to my friend who works for PUC, the crypto guys don't really turn off when ERCOT sends out those notices. I wish I had a better source than "Trust me guys, my friend says so!" and it's absolutely fair if nobody believes me on that.
May I ask if you’ve seen any papers examining whether there’s an opportunity cost for using bitcoin mining to soak up excess electrical generation instead of the alternatives? Eg:
Not papers but I've seen AI data centers co-locating similarly to bitcoin miners.
For grid scale power storage and long distance grid interconnects, the tech needs to be improved. Once that tech is improved you don't really need co-located flexible demand to curtail excess generation.
Of course, if we have point-to-point neutrino beams doing all our telecommunications, we also don't need crypto at all.
I feel like bitcoin, and crypto at large, discussions are just fraught with preconceived notions of it either being the best thing ever or a blight on the planet, and it colors the discourse on it.
For a variety of reasons, bitcoin isn't going away. It's usefulness is questionable but so long as there's enough of a market for it, it will exist. Further it's the sort of thing that would be very hard to completely stop, so the value of legally banning or inhibiting bitcoin is hard to really land on.
These "well it's using X% of the grid" things are pretty slanted in my eyes. There's LOTS of questionable usages of power out there, but do we really want to go down that road? How much power is used on video game servers? How much benefit is there from running Minecraft, Fortnight, League instances? Should youtube even exist at it's scale when so much of it's content is just useless entertainment? How about shutting down all those torrenting servers? That's probably illegal and a waste? Why haven't they done that?
I think crypto has a TON of bullshit behind it, and the world governments have been asleep at the wheel regulating, but speaking specifically to bitcoin, it's hardly anywhere near the drain of much more controversial practices, and I don't think there's a perfect argument to say it shouldn't exist.
Mostly though, I think crypto doesn't matter. Like either way. Suddenly passing legislation related to the mining of bitcoin will change nothing for the better. Doing nothing about it will likely also not harm anything for the worse. If anything it's probably better that Bitcoin is now being minded in an environmentally aware country like the US as opposed to China who's standards on the environment swing wildly (where the vast majority used to be, and may still be but harder to report on).
I think Bitcoin (vs cryptocurrencies in general) warrants somewhat more scrutiny than other economic activity that actually produces inherent value (e.g. multimedia content from your provided examples).
In the 15 years of its existence, BTC encroached on 2% of the US electricity usage. The overall US use of electricity has remained relatively flat during that time period.
Are we expected to allow Bitcoin to become 4% of electricity usage in another 10-15 years? When does it stop? ETH proved a transition to PoS is possible in 2022, cutting 99% of electricity usage, so why can’t BTC be required to reduce emissions in the same way?
Drug addiction, prostitution, gambling, gun ownership, and alcohol are clearly not going away any time soon, either. Generally providing a legal yet very regulated pathway to using these vices has historically proven a better policy than banning them outright. BTC proponents want to break rules and not answer to any laws…at some point it will have to at least succumb to the laws of physics (you can’t grow exponentially forever). If we’re going to accept that it’s here to stay, we should strive to make it sustainable, which it clearly is not.
Ethereum and Bitcoin have different design spaces.
The design space of bitcoin set to make it such that it's a hard asset with a security budget (energy).
Ethereum wants to be "ultrasound money" with global state and general compute. It's arguably not as good as a hard asset as bitcoin, and not as good of as a global state and general compute as solana.
PoS Bitcoin would essentially just be an all around worse ethereum and solana.
Lots of them just want clear laws that make sense given the technology. Some members of the SEC even acknowledge that these laws have not been made clear:
https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/peirce-statement-spot-bitcoin-011023
And not even linearly!
It does seem to be trending towards sustainability but agree its not there yet. My bet is that we see carbon-neutral bitcoin mining within 10 years. However, this doesn't mean % of electricity relative to US goes down! It could mean that bitcoin miners generate more electricity via renewables and nuclear. I would not be surprised to see bitcoin miners use 4% of electricity, but with the majority of that being energy that would otherwise not have been generated or captured in the first place.
I’m not able to dive into all of this right now but short version:
Just because bit coin isn’t going away doesn’t mean it’s going to continue to grow. It ebbs and flows and probably has at least one more huge catastrophic event in the wings that might kill it and will certainly hobble it. The simple fact is it’s filling a niche that not much else can fill and that niche doesn’t look to be going away. Digital assets have advantages.
Dumb proponents exist for many things. Bitcoin has more than usual given its “fight the man” roots (turns out banking isn’t an evil plot so much as a natural evolution of common needs). There are reasonable people who understand that the role it fills must be regulated as we just watched a generation speed run why there’s rules in finance. The fact there’s dumb people involved doesn’t change the effectiveness of the niche.
How much electricity would it take traditional means to securely transact a similar amount? Taking into consideration running buildings, accountants, equipment, automotive pollution etc. Just curious what a fair comparison would look like.
Some estimates put bitcoin as using comparably as much energy as the banking system, but keep in mind that’s total usage.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd
There’s something like $5B transferred in bitcoin per day. That’s peanuts compared to the banking system.
https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt2212f.htm#
There’s $7.5B in foreign exchange trading alone per day. That’s more than 1000x the volume of bitcoin, and I expect that is even dwarfed by the amount of transactions done in regular day to day banking and same currency transactions, although I have no convenient sources.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoins-energy-use-is-less-than-half-of-banking-gold-sectors-report-175813423.html#