60
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Bitcoin must die: if Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear
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- Title
- Bitcoin must die
- Authors
- Andrew Gallagher
- Published
- Oct 12 2018
- Word count
- 1803 words
Hey, people who support bitcoin,
Just because we can lower emissions elsewhere doesn't mean we shouldn't also cut emissions here
Thank you.
I had a conversation with someone about that yesterday. He claimed that 'energy is there anyways, and if we can get the energy from an erupting volcano in Iceland, why wouldn't we?'. I told him that that sounds like a good idea in theory but most bitcoin miners are operated with coal energy in China.
Then he compared it to banks, and their ceos with private jets. I looked up bitcoin compared to visa later and saw that one bitcoin transaction costs as much energy as a few 100k visa transactions
Imagine how many CEOs there are. Now take away all the ones who don't own private jets. Now look at how many times they'll actually use those jets. You're likely to find a ton of the techie type people that are patron saints of the bitcoin community.
That is a false dilemma, alright.
Yup. "We can't improve in one area because
I personally like itwe just can't, so it's not an option."The energy and proof of work, is the labor that gives it value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/8694dq/bitcoin_and_energy_consumption_rebuttals/
I think there is higher priorities to concentrate on, such as.. overpopulation, city design, housing efficiency, vehicle travel, air travel,
saw an article on this just last week,
I don't know why this point has to be brought up so often. But we don't have to focus on the biggest problems first and work our way down. Society is capable of multi tasking and that argument that there are bigger problems is unhelpful.
Also thank you for linking to the Wikipedia article, It's pretty interesting how damned dirty our fashion is.
But superior alternatives to Bitcoin already exist, even cryptocurrency ones, and it is a LOT easier and faster to switch software platforms than it is to redesign large segments of our society, though of course we should be doing both. Bitcoin is pumping tens or hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere to process an astounding three to seven transactions per second, shutting it down is a no brainier.
I'm really hoping Ethereum will be successful implementing Proof of Stake. That would be way more environmentally friendly than PoW.
PoS has yet to prove it can be as robust against attack at the same scale as PoW is. To do a hostile take over of a PoW blockchain you have to keep out mining everyone else for as long as you want to keep control. As soon as you slip or someone (or many someones) builds more/better mining power than you you lose control. With PoS once you have obtained 51% of the coins you can just sit on them and you get control of the chain for the rest of time.
Unless there's a hard fork, and people jump, because you're holding 51%. Then you get a period of fractured community. Like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Diamond, etc.
It's not too hard to hide that all of those coins belong to one person by spreading them around several unconnected addresses.
It would be very hard to keep that a secret - people have researched various methods to deanonymise Bitcoin since it first surfaced. Amazon even patented a method in 2014. Not all methods rely on those addresses being directly connected. There was also the eavesdropping attack, that could unmasked 60% of the Bitcoin network.
Ethereum's anonymity, is much less than that of the Bitcoin network.
It's half a percent of the world's power!
Very few things total to something that has that sort of impact, and we can live without Bitcoin. There are other cryptocurrencies, with similar value, but less global impact.
Yes, the fashion industry is a massive 10% of the world's pollution, but winding fashion down requires a global cultural shift before it even becomes practical.
Winding down Bitcoin just requires more people to jump ship to another cryptocurrency.
It isn't cryptocurrency burning half a percent of the world's power - that's just bitcoin.
It is a problem with bitcoin. Other Proof of Work implementations can be problematic, but by far less.
The next highest power-hungry cryptocurrency is Ethereum. They use less than a third of bitcoin, and are actively researching a more environmentally alternative - Proof of Stake.
Oh no shit! Well then I will have to correct myself. Thanks for the clarification.
Cryptocurrency reporting is always a bit difficult to parse out, you never know if a journalist actually can tell the difference between the concept and bitcoin.
https://medium.com/thebeammagazine/the-energy-consumption-of-the-crypto-world-b20e3628e0d2
Surely there are other, more impactful steps we can take than banning bitcoin outright?
I can't help but think that if the amount of effort/resources put forward to ban Bitcoin was put towards educating the public on best practices surrounding electricity (below) that the overall impact would be much larger.
I feel like this is the type of movement that gains traction because it requires no personal effort on behalf of the average person to not mine Bitcoin. If we want truly want to lower electricity demand, one should reach to lower their own footprint, and educate those around them.
Some Best Practices:
Swap older lightbulbs for LED bulbs
Get energy-efficient appliances, and maintain them. Poorly maintained appliances will have to work harder to produce the same effect as a normal appliance. For example, refrigerator coils only need to be cleaned twice a year, but no one makes time for it.
Use natural light instead of electrical light as long as possible - and turn the lights off in a room you don't plan to return to.
Unplug electronics that aren't in use.
None of those are exclusive with ending bitcoin's dominance of the cryptocurrency market, and the simple fact of the matter is that bitcoin is an unmitigated environmental disaster. Every transaction, requiring around 200kWh of power, releases almost a quarter of a ton of CO2. A simple carbon tax would be all that's needed to kill it.
Every transaction ... releases almost a quarter of a ton of CO2.WHOA I'm about to feel dumb - was that a figure in the article I admittedly didn't read? That's insane!
The straight numbers never come up in the article, that one comes from taking the power per transaction, which has been calculated by numerous other sources, multiplied by average carbon emissions per kWh. Another thing to keep in mind is that a ton of mining is done in China, so actual emissions might be even higher.
Not sure how it's misleading, considering mining is processing transactions.
The marginal power use per additional transaction is nowhere near as high as the total power use divided by the number of transactions. Most of the power use is fixed relative to the number of transactions.
Transaction fees are a tiny part of mining revenue right now. (Revenue being significant because that determines how hard miners are willing to work.) Most of it still comes from newly created coins. Looking over the last several blocks on blockchair transaction fees are accounting for less than one percent of miner revenue. If there were no transactions for a period of time but BTC kept its value miners would still put nearly the same amount of power into mining blocks because they would be competing for nearly the same amount of reward.
The rate of new coin creation will go down geometrically over time. Per transaction fee will go down as off chain layers like the Lightning Network take over. Total BTC rewarded per block will go down significantly. Whether or not mining revenue will go down in value depends on what the value of BTC itself will do.
Maybe we should just tell Ireland they need to stop.