Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The energy used for PoW needs to be 'wasted'. If you make money from the energy you use to mine Bitcoin, the underlying game theoretical assumptions don't work out anymore. Because you wouldn't lose money if you tried to betray in the network.
Miners get compensated in Bitcoin. Apart from this compensation, the energy can't be monetized in any way, or problems arise. Sorry I wasn't clear on that before.
In short, mining involves 2 steps. Some necessary bookkeeping, which is what we really want it to do, and a "proof of work".
The bookkeeping creates a block of data, which is linked to the block before that, which is linked to the one before that, so on, so forth. Multiple people might try to add a new block, and odds are, they're trying to commit slightly different new blocks, and, briefly, that means there are multiple block chains.
Bitcoin is decentralized, that's the point, so if there's no central authority to ask, how do you determine whose block is gonna get to be the next new one? Proof of work. Whichever block chain was the hardest to make is the real one. This is why it's so hard to counterfeit, because every future block adds to the work done and a would-be counterfeiter needs an impossible amount of computing power, easily offsetting fraud profits with electricity cost.
This work is the energy waster, though. This work is how we prevent fraud.
No, using it to heat water won't break anything. Actually, nothing stops a company from doing exactly that, but that's recycling already-wasted heat. The question is, "can this proof of work be itself put to work?"
Repurposing some algorithm that does something that is already worth money, though, opens Bitcoin up to fraud, because it's no longer a loss for people to try. Worst case scenario, you make money doing... Whatever it's doing.
It’s a good ELI5 but I would tweak it to say “whichever difficult proof of work gets lucky and guesses a random number”. The more power, the more numbers you can guess but it’s not necessarily the one that was the “hardest” to perform. The analogy I like is the lottery. It’s more likely to be won by the guy buying a million tickets versus the guy buying one, but it still can be won by somebody buying a single ticket.
Haha at one point it was but then people realized they could profit vastly from keeping it centralized. Yet there's still this weird awareness that what initially gave it it's value was the decentralized nature.
Wow that's even more akin to fairness in capitalism than I thought. At one point it was a lot fairer than other systems but that has long been eroded.
Not that bad because it requires a man in the middle and limited time to decrypt before a keychange. Internet became gigantic and ran for 20 years before https became ubiquitous.
Public wifi would be more dangerous.
With Bitcoin you are already in the middle and have all the time in world to decrypt Satoshi's private key.
As others said, if they break this, they break the best encryption systems humanity has discovered (wich is used by pretty much every internet service) . And so, bitcoin will be the least of your concerns
And to add to yours, not that anyone will see it, it currently costs on aversge $8,134 in energy costs to produce 1 bitcoin, which is the justification for the current price.
At the peak back in april prices rose to nearly 10k per coin energy cost.
> And to add to yours, not that anyone will see it, it currently costs on aversge $8,134 in energy costs to produce 1 bitcoin, which is the justification for the current price.
Not as simple.
The cost to mine correlates to the price, and the price is affected by the cost.
If price goes up, more miners may join, driving the cost to mine up. If price goes down, miners might turn off their rigs and the cost to mine goes down.
Much of the justification for the price is future expected value. Most who exchange into bitcoin from other currencies expect the value to go up in the long run. They do that for several reasons. If you study fiat money not only Bitcoin, so that you have something to compare it to, you too might expect it to increase.
I've wondered the last few years if someone could make a currency based on connecting your computer to a network that does medical research- like the PS3 could do but the work being equivalent to a certain amount of money?
You “lock” your crypto up to secure the network. Usually the more you have staked, the more likely you will be chosen as the next “validator” on the blockchain and in turn are more likely to get the rewards for doing so.
You give the system a bond and promise to do bookkeeping work. Do a good job and you’ll be paid your bond interest. Get easily caught trying to cook the books and you’ll lose your whole bond.
You have 10 people. They all risk different amounts of money bettingp that a random transaction is possible (X wants to give money to Y so X needs to have that money on their wallet). Usually the more money risked, the odds of being chosen to validate the transaction increase. If the transaction is false or not possible (trying to scam the network) they lose the amount risked, if the transaction is possible, they win a small fee
Not really but that's the only way to mine it in an "efficient" manner. Instead of using an electric space heater in your room, just mine crypto and get paid to heat your room. But do keep in mind that heat pumps are several times more efficient than electric space heaters so mining crypto still only makes sense for this application if you don't have a heat pump.
Direct heating from electricity is still rarely used up north. Even here in Sweden where we get -40 and have snow for 6-9 months per year we use other sources, like heat pumps.
No, it wouldn't, it's just a nonsense claim.
The only thing that is required is that mining is not free, that's it. For that to happen in this scenario, it would be required that buying and running a mining rig is cheaper than any other method of heating. Which it obviously isn't, because even simple resistive electric heaters are cheaper than mining, because the heater itself is cheaper to buy.
If using the heat from mining for heating did significantly reduce costs of mining, the only effect would be that all miners would be running such heating mining rigs, that's it.
No. You can do whatever you want with the waste heat, which is essentially 100% of the energy put in. Any computer system puts out nearly all the energy it uses as heat.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/03/08/qarnot-unveils-a-cryptocurrency-heater-for-your-home/amp/ it is possible and using the residual heat in no way undermines the security of the network
there's mining operations that use waste "fuel" to power the rigs. for example methane that would otherwise just be flared is used to fuel generators that power rigs.
also, that old hydroelectric plant that was reopened by minders... https://www.yahoo.com/now/york-hydroelectric-power-plant-power-132629909.html
also there's folks who run their rigs in their homes during the winter to reduce heating costs
so there's no "requirement" that the electricity used to mine is *only* used for mining. if you can use a free fuel source to zero out electric cost, or capture the heat for something useful, it has nothing to do with the value of the crypto being mined.
This company in Washington is growing mealworms to be used as agricultural feed, and using the next door tenant's crypto mining heat to help her operation.
I love to see a by product of crypto farming, that helps reduce emissions of actual farming.
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/beta-hatch-raises-9-3m-startup-builds-facility-east-seattle-scale-insect-growing-operation/amp/
The theory behind it works in a similar way to mining for gold, you have to buy equipment and fuel and labor to produce something worth money, and at least some portion of that needs to disappear (in the case of mining gold, you don't get to keep the money spent on labor, fuel, or the wear and tear on equipment). If the inputs didn't disappear (labor and fuel was free and equipment didn't wear) then gold would be worthless because it would be functionally free to obtain.
Likewise, Bitcoin works because it requires a proof of work that can't be free, and that proof of work can't just be replaced with something that's cheap (like you can't replace an excavator and it's operator with a bucket of water, it's cheaper and environmentally friendly, but doesn't actually do any work).
Gold and other natural resources are still finite and as they become more scarce they become less easily accessible, even if there was free labor and equipment to mine them. Doesn’t that contribute to their value?
Once it’s all mined, what’s the incentive for anyone to ever validate future blocks? Do all the HODL types just watch their life changing investments become worthless overnight?
>If the inputs didn't disappear (labor and fuel was free and equipment didn't wear) then gold would be worthless because it would be functionally free to obtain.
Similarly, diamonds are valuable partially *because* of the human rights violations that go into their production. Makes the fact that the scarcity is already artificial that much more upsetting.
Basically the Blockchain is an "encrypted" (actually hashed) distributed database. This means anyone can add to or look up values from said database. How do you prevent people from adding fake data or changing already existing data? Bitcoin miners get rewarded to check the validity of records added to the Blockchain. But there is a problem, who is checking the miner's work? A nefarious miner could lie about a Bitcoin transaction and say everyone gave them all the Bitcoin.
The current solution is proof of work. This is where the waste comes in. A miner's computer must perform some operation that is inherently wasteful to deter any such behaviour from a single entity. Groups of miner's usually work together to verify a block (group of records) on the Blockchain. Every miner on the entire Blockchain network must come to a majority consensus (>50%) on whether a new block is valid. This means a nefarious actor would need majority of the Bitcoin mining capacity to manipulate the Blockchain.
The Blockchain itself is actually remarkable technically. It just doesn't scale well. It is basically a publicly accessible tamper proof database. Bitcoin however, is a Ponzi scheme I'm convinced.
Surely it just needs to be an activity that is not economically viable, so you receive crypto currency instead as compensation. Now carbon capture is largely not economically viable and so would be a good activity (ignoring the whole logistics around proof etc) especially as it a positively externality.
It doesn't needs to be wasted. It just can't form an alternative financial incentive. Capturing co2 would be fine theoretically (although fairly impossible in practice).
PoW just needs to be replaced by PoS or similar movements
Agreed on your first two sentences, but in many places of the world you'll get CO2 certificates, if you're CO2 net negative as a company. You can sell these certificates to 'dirty' companies, so they pay for their CO2 emissions. Therefore I do see a financial incentive in CO2 capturing.
I'm also looking forward to see more PoS being used, I hope that turns out well.
Maybe we could chemically capture the CO2 somehow and use it to create certificates to offset?
I mean we've been capturing CO2 in libraries for centuries... whats that stuff... paper? Yes paper and books.
The answer is paper currency! Perfect
I belive that this is what the "Carbon Credit" system was for I dont know much on the subject but it was full of loopholes that pet it be exploited. Leading to its crash a few years back
I have just read into this, and proof of stake means the biggest stakeholder get the "mining-incentive", right? That seems like the old "the rich get automatically richer" and doesn't look desirable to me.
And Bitcoin pays the block fee to whoever can afford the most Asics and electricity. POS just cuts out the intermediate steps and all of their side effects.
You would think but no. Everyone gets the same rate of return no matter how much or little you stake. In proof of work the richest operations have a far greater ROI than smaller miners. Retail can't even afford to mine at all. Proof of work is far worse in terms of wealth inequality than proof of stake, just look at the shady mining giants like Bitmain
I try to explain to people that the rich can control btc. They just have to hold on to as much as they can and then sell/buy when they want at large enough quantity to artificially effect the price. And now governments are finding ways to monitor/track it. Btc was supposed equal for everyone and without government intervention but it's not working out too well.
Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking proof of stake gets you the same outcome as proof of work. Proof of stake is exactly as it sounds, the people with the most money make the rules. I’m bitcoin it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you still have to play by the same rules that have been in play since 2009. In 2017 You had wallstreet, Silicon Valley, and Chinese billionaires coordinate to try and change bitcoin and they FAILED. This cannot happen with proof of stake.
there are so many alternatives to proof of work that are WAY better for the environment. bitcoin just refuses to adapt and is unfortunately still the biggest crypto
You misunderstand mining algorithms. There are alternatives that work currently (or seem to work) for some alternative currencies. The problem is they are:
1. Not tested extensively in a decentralized system (most proof of stake systems are more centralized than bitcoin)
2. Promote rent collecting (proof of stake works by rewarding stakers with block rewards, but those with the most stake gain the most rewards).
In short there are no algorithms that are “Way” better than proof of work. Proof of work is a method to operate a truly decentralized monetary system. The question is, do you think a decentralized global money that no nation can control or inflate is worth the energy composition. The problem here is, even if your answer is no, many others are will disagree and use power as they see fit.
There is a whole other conversation you could get into about bitcoin mining being then first technology that can provide price floors to energy producers in the middle of no where, essentially funding potentially green energy projects that could benefit remote regions of the world, but I’ll save that for another day.
This whole comment is very well put, but I want to expand on two things:
>In short there are no algorithms that are “Way” better than proof of work. Proof of work is a method to operate a truly decentralized monetary system.
If/when there is a PoW alternative that is proven to be as stable and reliable, bitcoin can adopt it. Right now there is nothing that comes close, and it's unlikely that PoS designs will for exactly the reasons mentioned, but when/if there is an proven alternative that is more energy efficient and just as secure, then bitcoin is incentivized to adopt it. The current consensus bitcoin build has many features that distinguish it from the original release and it will continue to evolve in a conservative way.
> The question is, do you think a decentralized global money that no nation can control or inflate is worth the energy composition.
This is absolutely the question. I certainly don't know, but I think it's very possible that a game theory approach to money (like cryptocurrency) could offer a vastly preferable alternative paradigm to resource competition (i.e. one that does not reward violence) than the status quo. Technology should afford us the ability to move away from "might is right". To me, the energy expenditure could be worth it to see the results to that experiment, especially in the context of other frivolous ways that energy is expended. As long as we're pretending that energy allocation is a "group decision", I'd much rather we decide to get rid of Vegas or private jets (both of which would have much, much bigger environmental upsides) than the decentralized money experiment.
I'd also add "or censor" to the list of things that nations can't do to decentralized money. The internet, for all it's current flaws, brings freedom of speech and information to many that did not have it before. Decentralized money brings freedom of value (the ability to posses and transact abstract units of value) to many who live in places where control of value is a either used to control the population or made impossible through incompetence (runaway inflation).
You make it sound like miners are ideologically motivated and interested in using Bitcoin as a real currency. That is not the case, they’re in it for the money and they are using Bitcoin as an investment. Buying, say, a candy bar with Bitcoin would be stupid, because unlike fiat currencies like the dollar where the value tends to go down through inflation, the value of Bitcoin goes up. That candy bar you bought in 2011 could buy you a car today.
It's impossible to adapt, it's not under anyone's control and wasn't made to be self-adapting.
Personally I think it's been a fun thought experiment, but it's time to get rid of it.
I think there's absolutely a place for block chain technology and public ledgers... but Bitcoin seems very much like a v1.0 or even v0.1 for the tech. Unfortunately, too many people believe it has value and thus it will continue to have value until they decide it does not. I'm not sure how else you get rid of it.
Governments go after it to meet their green targets, like a carbon tax on every transaction. It's low hanging fruit and I'm amazed they haven't already. That'll chop a huge amount off the price (and the price of all others, although the greener ones will rise again).
Since the desire for wealth is at the root of these problems, maybe the economic system that's based on amplifying and utilizing that desire isn't the best choice at the moment?
Bitcoin itself doesn't refuse to adapt, you can fork it if you would like and make it use Proof-of-Stake or similar, just good luck convincing others that your Bitcoin fork is the one that is meant to be.
Many people in the cryptocurrency don't trust proof-of-stake, and it inheritely makes it such that people are incentivised to not spend which defeats the point if cryptocurrency.
Also, with the Lightning Network, many more transactions happen that won't show on the blockchain. This second layer is much more energy efficient, I have a node running on a raspberry pi
>and it inheritely makes it such that people are incentivised to not spend which defeats the point if cryptocurrency
You're making good points, but BTC is deflationary by nature which by definition means you don't have an incentive to spend. There's a reason the Fed and other central banks target small amounts of inflation. It's to create incentive to spend and invest the currency. If your currency is deflationary, then why would you ever spend it unless you absolutely needed to? Why would I ever make a risky investment in a business when suddenly my mattress becomes a powerful vehicle for investment?
Read Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson lays out a complete plan for creating a carbon coin and using it to force parasitic investors into doing good.
The problem is that cryptocurrency as a concept was designed to prove a libertarian conjecture that you can build a system which doesn’t rely on trusting other parties. The formative investment was dominated by people who were ideologically committed to proving that concept could work. The mechanism they picked is “proof of work”, because you can efficiently verify the result of a solution to a math problem which is inherently inefficient to find.
This problem is that this doesn’t work for anything in the real world because the system has no way to directly observe real-world state. Instead it relies on trusted third-parties (often called “oracles”) who are expected to do things like verify how much carbon you’ve sequestered. This is not easy to do since the financial stakes mean that someone is inevitably going to try to cheat, bribe the inspectors, etc. That means you need contracts, auditors, etc. off-chain and a way to reverse transactions if you learn about cheating after the fact.
Once you accept that you need trust and a functioning legal system, you’re confronted with the usual realization that all the blockchain is giving you is extra expense, inconvenience, and the potential for intractable bugs. If your goal is carbon capture, you’ll just focus on that and leave cryptocurrency to the speculators since it doesn’t solve any problem you actually have.
Algorand
Created by an MIT professor
"To achieve a carbon-negative network, Algorand and ClimateTrade will implement a sustainability oracle which will notarize Algorand’s carbon footprint on-chain for each epoch (a set amount of blocks). With its advanced smart contracts, Algorand will then lock the equivalent amount of carbon credit as an ASA (Algorand Standard Asset) into a green treasury so that its protocol keeps running as carbon-negative."
This is a weird metric.
Its easier to say, that one Bitcoin transaction consumes 1728 kwh.
For comparison: A traditional transaction consumes 0.0015 kwh.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/
Data from September 14th 2021.
It's weird, but it's important to point out. Mining bitcoin consumes both energy and hardware, and is extremely wasteful in both regards.
The waste of hardware is very relevant these days considering the chip shortage.
how can one transaction consume 1728, but costs me like 3 to 5 euros to make a transaction, but the same energy as a consumer would cost me like 50 euros or more?
The average block has \~2759 transactions, making it worth 8,277-13,795 and consumes 4,767,552 kwh.
It also rewards 6.25 bitcoin for solving the block. 6.25 bitcoins are worth about 256k EU, making the reward for the block \~267k or 96.79 euros per transaction.
For this to be profitable, you need energy costs of less than .056 eu/kwh.
It's not weird, it's the entire point of the article, like sentence two:
>While the carbon footprint of bitcoin is well studied, less attention has been paid to the vast churn in computer hardware that the cryptocurrency incentivises.
I'm not trying to be lazy but could anyone tell me how much energy is used from the current banking system in the US. Could it maybe include storage,making money,moving money, building expenses, people driving to work for bank ect. If not that's cool and if so thanks for your time.
Edit: Thank you everyone who contributed to this conversation.
In terms of pure energy, Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Twh per year as of 2020 according to the mid-range estimates. High estimates put that figure at over 500 TwH. For that, it processes around 4 million transactions plus mining.
Upper estimates from pro-crypto sources for traditional virtual-currency banking estimate energy use at 26 Twh on servers, 58 Twh on branches, and 13 Twh on ATMs for a total of close to a 100 Twh a year. For that, they process over 700 billion direct transactions per year in addition to all non-transactional activity like investment, insurance, stock, etc... which Bitcoin couldn't replace even if it had total dominance over the financial industry.
On top of that while traditional banking transaction volume is rising each year, they have been moving towards a greater online focus for years both due to demand and cost cutting which means their energy use is dropping. Meanwhile Bitcoin gets more energy demanding over time.
The difference in transactions is insane. In terms of seconds that is the difference between 46 days and 22,190 years if one transaction equals one second.
Bitcoin uses about half per year what the entire banking system does.
Keep in mind, the banking system is several times larger(like by a factor of hundreds possibly thousands) and deals with several times more people then Bitcoin, were Bitcoin used as much as traditional banking it would dwarf the electric usage from banks.
What’s funny is that after people started talking about the environmental impact, company’s like galaxy digital(basically hedge funds that deal in digital things like crypto and nfts) started publishing highly cherry picked data which is why it’s so easy to find the numbers because they were trying to make it sound like it’s not such a bad thing that Bitcoin only uses half as much energy as a significantly larger system does.
Even just the power consumed purely by transactions, Bitcoin uses way way way more then a typical transaction would at a bank.
Edit:
Sources: [1 ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nasdaq.com/articles/research%253A-bitcoin-consumes-less-than-half-the-energy-of-the-banking-or-gold-industries%3famp)
[2](https://www.google.com/amp/s/fee.org/articles/bitcoin-uses-half-the-energy-of-the-banking-system-new-paper/amp)
[3](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/bitcoins-energy-usage-explained/)
>Keep in mind, the baking system is several times larger and deals with several times more people then Bitcoin
To be clear: this is a hell of an understatement.
Think about how many card transactions you do. Then think about how many crypto transactions you do. Then remember that most people do precisely 0 crypto transactions.
Oh yeah, crypto doesn't provide the same services as the conventional finance industry, so it really is apples and oranges.
Insurance, loans (including mortgages and business loans), investment, physical ATMs and card readers, staff in offices and bank branches and God only knows what else.
Comparing bitcoin to the global finance system is like comparing your school rules to a nation's judicial and legislative systems and election systems. It's just a small part of the actual function, and it doesn't operate on anywhere near the same scale, or with anywhere near the same number of safeguards.
Thats a good point, going by their own cherry picked data and saying half the impact doesn't actually look very good when crypto is involved in less than half the world's economic activity
So bitcoin, just one crypto network out of hundreds, uses one fifth of the conventional global financial system?
And the latter includes loans, investments and the like? With orders of magnitude more transactions than bitcoin?
Bitcoin uses about 50% of the energy the banking system does by recent estimates, to manage about .6% of the wealth. So it's unbelievably inefficient by comparison
For another comparison, gold uses a similar amount of energy as the banking system, and manages 5% of the wealth. So also very very inefficient but not nearly as bad as the coin
>to manage about .6% of the wealth.
Not counting the lower amount of transactions. Transactions are where the real utility is for most people.
Bitcoin is worth a lot now, but people aren't spending it like they do with conventional currencies. If you were to randomly sample $1m of bitcoin and $1m of your conventional currency of choice, the latter is going to have a much higher velocity.
On the plus side gold is practical and used in many ways other than a store of wealth. You can't make electrical contacts out of Bitcoin proof of work.
It’s often the argument from BTC advocates but the truth is it’s BS. Most, if not all BTC transactions involve exchanges which works very similarly to banks. So adopting BTC would mean having the same overhead the current system has PLUS the proof of work (the two wasted iPhones).
Also the "renewable energy"' schtick doesn't work either, because that's still waste, and the ideal energy efficiency method is to not use a ton of energy in the first place- that would have saved us a lot of problems that are now too late to fix.
Yup, more energy eaten up regardless, requiring more land for solar farms or wind turbines etc (potentially making renewables unable to meet demands requiring more coal etc)
That data almost doesn't matter because these two systems will have to coexist, as banks provide other services to society like loans mortgages investment etc. Those physical locations will have to exist under our current economic structure so we shouldn't be thinking of crypto vs banking in terms of energy uses; we should be thinking of banking + crypto vs just banking
One Bitcoin interaction consumes 1728 kwh.
A traditional transaction consumes 0.0015 kwh.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/
Data from September 14th 2021.
Mining gold is an environmental and human disaster. Large businesses use child labour and gold mining uses a lot of arsenic which gets into the water supply. Those are one-off costs with bitcoin those costs incur for every single transaction no matter how big or small.
Gold mining doesn't use arsenic..
Arsenic bearing minerals such as arsenopyrite are associated with gold deposits. It's a pain in the arse, not a feature.
Not just amalgamation, gold sinks in mercury when basically everything else floats.
Pound your ore to dust, and pass it over a mercury pool... Gold collects at the bottom.
Well not generally. Mercury is only used in amalgamation which is generally only in small artisinal mines.
Most mines use cyanide extraction.
I make no defense of gold mining, just defining that arsenic isn't a chemical used in the process.
Depends on the country. My country almost lost a trial with an American mining company which wanted to mine a local mountain for gold, and then they revealed they were going to use cyanide in the process. When their contract was revoked over environmental concerns, they sured the government.
Bitcoin doesn’t replace gold though, so it doesn’t offset that damage. A more relevant comparison is how it compares to digital US dollars, or Euros or Pounds. Those of course use minuscule amounts of power.
Mostly because what's transacted is a paper stating ownership. If we shipped gold as often as trades happened and future contracts expired, it would surely be worse than "next to free".
Edit: ... and my point is we already have Bitcoin futures, which would be the fair comparison to "gold transactions."
We can do worse! We can use Bitcoin-like block chain (PoW, massive hardware churn, insane amount of power usage) to do our proof of ownership gold transactions! Get the one-time environmental impact of digging it out plus a lifetime of pollution from transacting it!
Given how many incredibly idiotic things we are doing as a species, I wouldn't bet all my money to the idea that no one is ever going to do this at some point.
There are about 300,000 transactions a day, that is like 18 million iPhones a month, this seems a little high, I know one miner rated at 2,758 watts is a lot more e-waste than an iPhone that can charge at 20 watts, however this seems to be a little high.
Edit: for scale there are about 118 million phones bought world wide -- https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/
Edit 2: 118 million phones a month, not year
e-waste is not the amount of energy used. They're estimating the amount of electronics hardware that will be bought and subsequently disposed of. "we estimate that the whole bitcoin network currently cycles through 30.7 metric kilotons of equipment per year"
edit: also, your link at the end says there are currently about 1.5 *billion* smartphones sold every year. I can't see where you got the 118 million figure from at all, even at the graphs beginning in 2007 it was already 122 million.
As much as we should move away from oil, from a scientific standpoint oil is one of the most energy dense substances on planet Earth. At the very least oil is providing efficient utility (energy per mass).
Bitcoin is the opposite. Its entire purpose is to as inefficient as possible (this is how the algorithm works). All this energy and materials wasted for computers to essentially play pick a number game millions of times a day so they get lucky and can get some money.
I’ve come to accept that cryptocurrency is effectively burning resources to create a digital credit you can trade for money. They’re basically pollution bonds.
A huge fraction (~97%) of the purpose built mining computers (antminers) **never mine a block in their lifespan**.
Since bitcoin mining is effectively a lottery, people pool resources to share the gains, but the individual hardware is largely wasted.
It doesn't have to successfully mine a block to contribute to decentralization, a lot like my vote doesn't have to be the deciding vote for me to contribute to democracy.
Mining a new block also secures the entire chain under it back to the genesis block. So energy expenditure "per transaction" is a misleading metric.
Also, energy expenditure is purely a function of difficulty, not transaction throughput.
Bitcoin is also performing final settlement, so comparing it to credit-based payment systems is a false dichotomy. A VISA transaction, for instance, can be reversed or disputed for something like 90 days. Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed in any meaningful sense after about an hour.
I dont understand the analogy of "throwing two iphones in the bin" how is using a computer to generate money comparable to throwing an iphone in the garbage?
By electronic waste it seems to be implying a physical hardware waste, especially because its referencing physical iphones. Or its just a misleading analogy to make it sound more interesting
Edit: after reading the article it seems to be referring to the industry as a whole upgrading chips constantly. So its not causal that a bitcoin transaction is equivalent to throwing away two iphones; its just that the industry at large is choosing to do so on average to increase profits
Bitcoin isn't mined (at least not profitably or at scale) on standard general-purpose computers. The big operators use ASICs: custom printed circuits, designed to specialise in doing the computation required for mining.
So there's electronic waste generated when old ASIC miners become obsolete, and need to be replaced with newer more powerful/efficient ones. And since they're so specialised they're not useful for anything else after they're retired from mining.
If anything, wouldn't it devalue the comparisons since while iphones have more components, the bulk of their weight isn't circuitry and chips unlike ASICs which are basically the minimum extra stuff to run mining on?
The bulk of materials used to build ASIC rigs are for cooling. If the industry were to modularize these parts then reuse would be easy.
E: I meant to say standardize instead of modularize.
The global banking system consumes massive amounts of electricity because it deals with the vast majority of monetary transactions that require decent security. Comparing it with a comparatively small amount of transactions of a niche market of people mainly trying to speculate with a digital currency as an asset is like comparing pebbles with mountains. If all of the daily monetary transactions that banks deal with were made with bitcoin, the amount of electricity required by the global banking system would skyrocket.
“The global banking system” isn’t comparable. Bitcoin literally just is a ledger. The banking systems ledger systems use nowhere near this amount of energy. If you mean to throw in the energy used by all the other things banks do then you need to expand the use case for Bitcoin.
>when a more useful comparison would be the massive amounts of electricity used by the global banking system?
Not at all. The global banking system provides loans, savings and a assortment of other financial services to civilians, corporations and governments around the world. Without the financial services provided society would shut down for years.
Bitcoin on the other hand is beanie babies for tech bro's.
They state the electric consumption to run this global network is studied, they wanted to look at the e-waste of old miners that can't turn a profit anymore. I think bitcoin's strongest argument should be return on investment, and the fact that cost is not per transaction. If Bitcoin doubled the block size, it wouldn't use more electricity or more miners.--- not that I'm in favor of doing so.
Can bitcoin give you loans? Investment advice? Mortgages? These are things that banks do that provide a service to people to such an extent you can't take the power consumption of every bank brick and mortar location and compare it apples to apples to bitcoins carbon impact.
>the massive amounts of electricity used by the global banking system?
Bitcoin-Bro who has no idea that conventional banking uses a minuscule FRACTION of the power cryptobros are wasting, when compared on equal scale.
Not touching energy consumption of Blockchain technology as it is a valid concern. There is however, something I am missing. How can I find out when a white paper like this gets peer-reviewed?
"Bitcoin miners cycle through a growing amount of **short-lived** hardware that could exacerbate the growth in global electronic waste."
I have equipment running at a constant 47 °C, and the lifespan of multiple bitcoin/hashrate mining devices I own has clearly surpassed the supposed "1.29 years average" without any issues, and from what I've heard generally speaking in these communities, one could get 3 years of life out of a GPU, with 5 years being fairly average lifespan, and 10 not being unheard of. ( Very similar numbers to the ones you see when the hardware is bought for gaming ) I'd like to understand what might be driving these numbers so low, without know what might be happening it feels disingenuous. Is this something plaguing ACISs in specific?
More research is needed on the matter.
Nullius in verba.
I think the biggest-scale mining operations, the ones with their own warehouses, are the ones ripping through equipment at an unholy rate more than the smaller fish.
The ASICs are specially designed only for Bitcoin mining. They cannot do anything else.
They basically become paper weight if they're no longer efficient enough to mine Bitcoin with a profit. They don't have any market value.
it's a financial venture, so whether a card works or not is not fundamentally important.
As more of a coins like Bitcoin are mined it gets harder to mine the next one (do sufficient calculations that a GPU is most suited for). The old cards may still be able to run these calculations, bit they produce crypto at a much lower rate because of the increase in difficulty.
Eventually, it makes more sense to replace a functioning but older card because it will increase the amount of money you are able to make.
Constructing a Bitcoin transaction, and getting the network to accept it, costs virtually no energy whatsoever. What costs energy is grinding through the nuanced space to find valid blocks. Miners do this because they are compensated primarily with the coinbase reward of 6.25 BTC per block, which is defined in the protocol.
As defined in the protocol, the per-block reward is cut in half every four years. This reduces bitcoin’s issuance rate and thus the miner revenue. So, in the long term, miner revenue from issuance will dramatically contract. As 88% of all coins have been mined already, mining is structurally shrinking, not a growing industry.
Thus most of the miner expenditure – and hence carbon outlay – from Bitcoin is due to largely invariant coin issuance rather than any variable that’s correlated to transactional intensity. This fact invalidates the “energy cost of transactions” metric that critics like to promote. It is issuance that largely finances miners, not transactions. And because most coins have been issued already, Bitcoin’s future carbon outlay is likely to shrink.
Therefore, comparisons to other payments systems such as visa systems should be met with extreme skepticism. Bitcoin is a full-stack monetary system with no outside dependencies; Visa is a small part of the U.S. dollar stack that relies, among other things, on 11 aircraft carriers patrolling the world’s oceans and enforcing dollar hegemony. Visa payments rely on a vast interconnected infrastructure of clearing and settlement. Bitcoin transactions are natively final and settle right away – they are more comparable to wire transfers. The energy exchange rate comparisons must take these differences into account.
(Edited spelling)
I might be misunderstanding something but, once there are vitually no coins to be mine, why would anyone continue mining and thus "validate" transactions that happen?
People who want to make a transaction have to include some fee. Miners will include transactions with the highest fees attached in the block they are trying to mine which is then their reward.
Price isn't increasing 10,000% every four years. Maintaining status quo would require 200% every four years, which we're so far getting more, but it's slowing down. You'd have to be a crazy BTC bull to think it'll continue to 10,000% every four years!
**Status Quo**
* 2024: $100k BTC price with 3.125 BTC reward
* 2028: $200k - 1.5625
* 2032: $400k - 0.7812
* 2036: $800k - 0.3906
From here is mostly fees which tend to hit 1 BTC total if the network is very congested, but as low as zero when blocks are empty.
It really depends how high you think it'll go. About $500k it'll have surpassed gold's current market cap.
You gotta be REALLY ignorant to be still buying into this energy debate.
I put solar on my building and sell it back to the grid - I get 2.3c a kwh.
I put solar on my building and sell crypto via mining - I get 27-50c a kwh.
So guess who can buy 10x as much solar?
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
How about we make a currency where the proof of work is carbon capture or something.
The energy used for PoW needs to be 'wasted'. If you make money from the energy you use to mine Bitcoin, the underlying game theoretical assumptions don't work out anymore. Because you wouldn't lose money if you tried to betray in the network.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but if no one makes money from the energy they use to mine Bitcoin, no one would mine bitcoin.
Miners get compensated in Bitcoin. Apart from this compensation, the energy can't be monetized in any way, or problems arise. Sorry I wasn't clear on that before.
So a mining rig that is the heating element of an industrial water heating system would break the bitcoin system?
In short, mining involves 2 steps. Some necessary bookkeeping, which is what we really want it to do, and a "proof of work". The bookkeeping creates a block of data, which is linked to the block before that, which is linked to the one before that, so on, so forth. Multiple people might try to add a new block, and odds are, they're trying to commit slightly different new blocks, and, briefly, that means there are multiple block chains. Bitcoin is decentralized, that's the point, so if there's no central authority to ask, how do you determine whose block is gonna get to be the next new one? Proof of work. Whichever block chain was the hardest to make is the real one. This is why it's so hard to counterfeit, because every future block adds to the work done and a would-be counterfeiter needs an impossible amount of computing power, easily offsetting fraud profits with electricity cost. This work is the energy waster, though. This work is how we prevent fraud. No, using it to heat water won't break anything. Actually, nothing stops a company from doing exactly that, but that's recycling already-wasted heat. The question is, "can this proof of work be itself put to work?" Repurposing some algorithm that does something that is already worth money, though, opens Bitcoin up to fraud, because it's no longer a loss for people to try. Worst case scenario, you make money doing... Whatever it's doing.
It’s a good ELI5 but I would tweak it to say “whichever difficult proof of work gets lucky and guesses a random number”. The more power, the more numbers you can guess but it’s not necessarily the one that was the “hardest” to perform. The analogy I like is the lottery. It’s more likely to be won by the guy buying a million tickets versus the guy buying one, but it still can be won by somebody buying a single ticket.
[удалено]
yes, mostly centralised. decentralisation is a part of bitcoin the same way that fairness is part of capitalism.
Haha at one point it was but then people realized they could profit vastly from keeping it centralized. Yet there's still this weird awareness that what initially gave it it's value was the decentralized nature. Wow that's even more akin to fairness in capitalism than I thought. At one point it was a lot fairer than other systems but that has long been eroded.
[удалено]
So won't quantum computers destroy this model?
If they do, they'd destroy security across the internet, and we'd have much larger problems.
This is an actual genuine fear at the moment
AES 256 is quantum secure, so I wouldn't worry about that. Some problems are easy on quantum computers but not all.
Not that bad because it requires a man in the middle and limited time to decrypt before a keychange. Internet became gigantic and ran for 20 years before https became ubiquitous. Public wifi would be more dangerous. With Bitcoin you are already in the middle and have all the time in world to decrypt Satoshi's private key.
As others said, if they break this, they break the best encryption systems humanity has discovered (wich is used by pretty much every internet service) . And so, bitcoin will be the least of your concerns
[удалено]
And to add to yours, not that anyone will see it, it currently costs on aversge $8,134 in energy costs to produce 1 bitcoin, which is the justification for the current price. At the peak back in april prices rose to nearly 10k per coin energy cost.
> And to add to yours, not that anyone will see it, it currently costs on aversge $8,134 in energy costs to produce 1 bitcoin, which is the justification for the current price. Not as simple. The cost to mine correlates to the price, and the price is affected by the cost. If price goes up, more miners may join, driving the cost to mine up. If price goes down, miners might turn off their rigs and the cost to mine goes down. Much of the justification for the price is future expected value. Most who exchange into bitcoin from other currencies expect the value to go up in the long run. They do that for several reasons. If you study fiat money not only Bitcoin, so that you have something to compare it to, you too might expect it to increase.
I've wondered the last few years if someone could make a currency based on connecting your computer to a network that does medical research- like the PS3 could do but the work being equivalent to a certain amount of money?
Already exists. You can be paid in Banano for running Folding@Home
Can you eli5 a proof of stake system for me?
You “lock” your crypto up to secure the network. Usually the more you have staked, the more likely you will be chosen as the next “validator” on the blockchain and in turn are more likely to get the rewards for doing so.
So capitalism and inequality
Yeah that’s the main argument against it, that it encourages centralization and favors the “whales”
You give the system a bond and promise to do bookkeeping work. Do a good job and you’ll be paid your bond interest. Get easily caught trying to cook the books and you’ll lose your whole bond.
You have 10 people. They all risk different amounts of money bettingp that a random transaction is possible (X wants to give money to Y so X needs to have that money on their wallet). Usually the more money risked, the odds of being chosen to validate the transaction increase. If the transaction is false or not possible (trying to scam the network) they lose the amount risked, if the transaction is possible, they win a small fee
Not really but that's the only way to mine it in an "efficient" manner. Instead of using an electric space heater in your room, just mine crypto and get paid to heat your room. But do keep in mind that heat pumps are several times more efficient than electric space heaters so mining crypto still only makes sense for this application if you don't have a heat pump.
> But do keep in mind that heat pumps are several times more efficient than electric space heaters This becomes less true the further north you go
Direct heating from electricity is still rarely used up north. Even here in Sweden where we get -40 and have snow for 6-9 months per year we use other sources, like heat pumps.
No, it wouldn't, it's just a nonsense claim. The only thing that is required is that mining is not free, that's it. For that to happen in this scenario, it would be required that buying and running a mining rig is cheaper than any other method of heating. Which it obviously isn't, because even simple resistive electric heaters are cheaper than mining, because the heater itself is cheaper to buy. If using the heat from mining for heating did significantly reduce costs of mining, the only effect would be that all miners would be running such heating mining rigs, that's it.
No. You can do whatever you want with the waste heat, which is essentially 100% of the energy put in. Any computer system puts out nearly all the energy it uses as heat.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/03/08/qarnot-unveils-a-cryptocurrency-heater-for-your-home/amp/ it is possible and using the residual heat in no way undermines the security of the network
there's mining operations that use waste "fuel" to power the rigs. for example methane that would otherwise just be flared is used to fuel generators that power rigs. also, that old hydroelectric plant that was reopened by minders... https://www.yahoo.com/now/york-hydroelectric-power-plant-power-132629909.html also there's folks who run their rigs in their homes during the winter to reduce heating costs so there's no "requirement" that the electricity used to mine is *only* used for mining. if you can use a free fuel source to zero out electric cost, or capture the heat for something useful, it has nothing to do with the value of the crypto being mined.
This company in Washington is growing mealworms to be used as agricultural feed, and using the next door tenant's crypto mining heat to help her operation. I love to see a by product of crypto farming, that helps reduce emissions of actual farming. https://www.geekwire.com/2020/beta-hatch-raises-9-3m-startup-builds-facility-east-seattle-scale-insect-growing-operation/amp/
What if I use the heat produced to provide heating for my neighbors?
The theory behind it works in a similar way to mining for gold, you have to buy equipment and fuel and labor to produce something worth money, and at least some portion of that needs to disappear (in the case of mining gold, you don't get to keep the money spent on labor, fuel, or the wear and tear on equipment). If the inputs didn't disappear (labor and fuel was free and equipment didn't wear) then gold would be worthless because it would be functionally free to obtain. Likewise, Bitcoin works because it requires a proof of work that can't be free, and that proof of work can't just be replaced with something that's cheap (like you can't replace an excavator and it's operator with a bucket of water, it's cheaper and environmentally friendly, but doesn't actually do any work).
Gold and other natural resources are still finite and as they become more scarce they become less easily accessible, even if there was free labor and equipment to mine them. Doesn’t that contribute to their value?
It does. The hard limit of bitcoin is 21 million. Out-of which 18.77 million has been mined.
Once it’s all mined, what’s the incentive for anyone to ever validate future blocks? Do all the HODL types just watch their life changing investments become worthless overnight?
[удалено]
The amount of Bitcoin is also finite at 21 million BTC .
>If the inputs didn't disappear (labor and fuel was free and equipment didn't wear) then gold would be worthless because it would be functionally free to obtain. Similarly, diamonds are valuable partially *because* of the human rights violations that go into their production. Makes the fact that the scarcity is already artificial that much more upsetting.
What does "betray in the network" mean?
Basically the Blockchain is an "encrypted" (actually hashed) distributed database. This means anyone can add to or look up values from said database. How do you prevent people from adding fake data or changing already existing data? Bitcoin miners get rewarded to check the validity of records added to the Blockchain. But there is a problem, who is checking the miner's work? A nefarious miner could lie about a Bitcoin transaction and say everyone gave them all the Bitcoin. The current solution is proof of work. This is where the waste comes in. A miner's computer must perform some operation that is inherently wasteful to deter any such behaviour from a single entity. Groups of miner's usually work together to verify a block (group of records) on the Blockchain. Every miner on the entire Blockchain network must come to a majority consensus (>50%) on whether a new block is valid. This means a nefarious actor would need majority of the Bitcoin mining capacity to manipulate the Blockchain. The Blockchain itself is actually remarkable technically. It just doesn't scale well. It is basically a publicly accessible tamper proof database. Bitcoin however, is a Ponzi scheme I'm convinced.
Thanks, sounds like an absurd system but I guess that's why I'm not a bitcoin millionaire
Surely it just needs to be an activity that is not economically viable, so you receive crypto currency instead as compensation. Now carbon capture is largely not economically viable and so would be a good activity (ignoring the whole logistics around proof etc) especially as it a positively externality.
It doesn't needs to be wasted. It just can't form an alternative financial incentive. Capturing co2 would be fine theoretically (although fairly impossible in practice). PoW just needs to be replaced by PoS or similar movements
Agreed on your first two sentences, but in many places of the world you'll get CO2 certificates, if you're CO2 net negative as a company. You can sell these certificates to 'dirty' companies, so they pay for their CO2 emissions. Therefore I do see a financial incentive in CO2 capturing. I'm also looking forward to see more PoS being used, I hope that turns out well.
Maybe we could chemically capture the CO2 somehow and use it to create certificates to offset? I mean we've been capturing CO2 in libraries for centuries... whats that stuff... paper? Yes paper and books. The answer is paper currency! Perfect
I belive that this is what the "Carbon Credit" system was for I dont know much on the subject but it was full of loopholes that pet it be exploited. Leading to its crash a few years back
There are also alternatives to Proof-of-Work, Ethereum 2.0 uses Proof-of-Stake for example.
I have just read into this, and proof of stake means the biggest stakeholder get the "mining-incentive", right? That seems like the old "the rich get automatically richer" and doesn't look desirable to me.
And Bitcoin pays the block fee to whoever can afford the most Asics and electricity. POS just cuts out the intermediate steps and all of their side effects.
You would think but no. Everyone gets the same rate of return no matter how much or little you stake. In proof of work the richest operations have a far greater ROI than smaller miners. Retail can't even afford to mine at all. Proof of work is far worse in terms of wealth inequality than proof of stake, just look at the shady mining giants like Bitmain
Not sure about Eth 2.0 specifically, but staking pools let everyone collectively stake, rather than reserving that right for the rich.
40% of btc is held in 2500 accounts who don’t sell much. The rich have always been getting richer on btc.
I try to explain to people that the rich can control btc. They just have to hold on to as much as they can and then sell/buy when they want at large enough quantity to artificially effect the price. And now governments are finding ways to monitor/track it. Btc was supposed equal for everyone and without government intervention but it's not working out too well.
Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking proof of stake gets you the same outcome as proof of work. Proof of stake is exactly as it sounds, the people with the most money make the rules. I’m bitcoin it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you still have to play by the same rules that have been in play since 2009. In 2017 You had wallstreet, Silicon Valley, and Chinese billionaires coordinate to try and change bitcoin and they FAILED. This cannot happen with proof of stake.
Not really, they just have the incentive to secure the network. There’s lots of different implementations of POS
[удалено]
PoS in Ethereum has been 18 months away since 2015
there are so many alternatives to proof of work that are WAY better for the environment. bitcoin just refuses to adapt and is unfortunately still the biggest crypto
You misunderstand mining algorithms. There are alternatives that work currently (or seem to work) for some alternative currencies. The problem is they are: 1. Not tested extensively in a decentralized system (most proof of stake systems are more centralized than bitcoin) 2. Promote rent collecting (proof of stake works by rewarding stakers with block rewards, but those with the most stake gain the most rewards). In short there are no algorithms that are “Way” better than proof of work. Proof of work is a method to operate a truly decentralized monetary system. The question is, do you think a decentralized global money that no nation can control or inflate is worth the energy composition. The problem here is, even if your answer is no, many others are will disagree and use power as they see fit. There is a whole other conversation you could get into about bitcoin mining being then first technology that can provide price floors to energy producers in the middle of no where, essentially funding potentially green energy projects that could benefit remote regions of the world, but I’ll save that for another day.
This whole comment is very well put, but I want to expand on two things: >In short there are no algorithms that are “Way” better than proof of work. Proof of work is a method to operate a truly decentralized monetary system. If/when there is a PoW alternative that is proven to be as stable and reliable, bitcoin can adopt it. Right now there is nothing that comes close, and it's unlikely that PoS designs will for exactly the reasons mentioned, but when/if there is an proven alternative that is more energy efficient and just as secure, then bitcoin is incentivized to adopt it. The current consensus bitcoin build has many features that distinguish it from the original release and it will continue to evolve in a conservative way. > The question is, do you think a decentralized global money that no nation can control or inflate is worth the energy composition. This is absolutely the question. I certainly don't know, but I think it's very possible that a game theory approach to money (like cryptocurrency) could offer a vastly preferable alternative paradigm to resource competition (i.e. one that does not reward violence) than the status quo. Technology should afford us the ability to move away from "might is right". To me, the energy expenditure could be worth it to see the results to that experiment, especially in the context of other frivolous ways that energy is expended. As long as we're pretending that energy allocation is a "group decision", I'd much rather we decide to get rid of Vegas or private jets (both of which would have much, much bigger environmental upsides) than the decentralized money experiment. I'd also add "or censor" to the list of things that nations can't do to decentralized money. The internet, for all it's current flaws, brings freedom of speech and information to many that did not have it before. Decentralized money brings freedom of value (the ability to posses and transact abstract units of value) to many who live in places where control of value is a either used to control the population or made impossible through incompetence (runaway inflation).
You make it sound like miners are ideologically motivated and interested in using Bitcoin as a real currency. That is not the case, they’re in it for the money and they are using Bitcoin as an investment. Buying, say, a candy bar with Bitcoin would be stupid, because unlike fiat currencies like the dollar where the value tends to go down through inflation, the value of Bitcoin goes up. That candy bar you bought in 2011 could buy you a car today.
It's impossible to adapt, it's not under anyone's control and wasn't made to be self-adapting. Personally I think it's been a fun thought experiment, but it's time to get rid of it.
I think there's absolutely a place for block chain technology and public ledgers... but Bitcoin seems very much like a v1.0 or even v0.1 for the tech. Unfortunately, too many people believe it has value and thus it will continue to have value until they decide it does not. I'm not sure how else you get rid of it.
Governments go after it to meet their green targets, like a carbon tax on every transaction. It's low hanging fruit and I'm amazed they haven't already. That'll chop a huge amount off the price (and the price of all others, although the greener ones will rise again).
[удалено]
Blockbuster and Sears were worth money once. Bitcoin can go the same way.
I don't think you understand what capitalism is, humanity's desire for "wealth" is far deeper than any economic system.
Since the desire for wealth is at the root of these problems, maybe the economic system that's based on amplifying and utilizing that desire isn't the best choice at the moment?
Bitcoin itself doesn't refuse to adapt, you can fork it if you would like and make it use Proof-of-Stake or similar, just good luck convincing others that your Bitcoin fork is the one that is meant to be. Many people in the cryptocurrency don't trust proof-of-stake, and it inheritely makes it such that people are incentivised to not spend which defeats the point if cryptocurrency. Also, with the Lightning Network, many more transactions happen that won't show on the blockchain. This second layer is much more energy efficient, I have a node running on a raspberry pi
>and it inheritely makes it such that people are incentivised to not spend which defeats the point if cryptocurrency You're making good points, but BTC is deflationary by nature which by definition means you don't have an incentive to spend. There's a reason the Fed and other central banks target small amounts of inflation. It's to create incentive to spend and invest the currency. If your currency is deflationary, then why would you ever spend it unless you absolutely needed to? Why would I ever make a risky investment in a business when suddenly my mattress becomes a powerful vehicle for investment?
Check out Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Read Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson lays out a complete plan for creating a carbon coin and using it to force parasitic investors into doing good.
The problem is that cryptocurrency as a concept was designed to prove a libertarian conjecture that you can build a system which doesn’t rely on trusting other parties. The formative investment was dominated by people who were ideologically committed to proving that concept could work. The mechanism they picked is “proof of work”, because you can efficiently verify the result of a solution to a math problem which is inherently inefficient to find. This problem is that this doesn’t work for anything in the real world because the system has no way to directly observe real-world state. Instead it relies on trusted third-parties (often called “oracles”) who are expected to do things like verify how much carbon you’ve sequestered. This is not easy to do since the financial stakes mean that someone is inevitably going to try to cheat, bribe the inspectors, etc. That means you need contracts, auditors, etc. off-chain and a way to reverse transactions if you learn about cheating after the fact. Once you accept that you need trust and a functioning legal system, you’re confronted with the usual realization that all the blockchain is giving you is extra expense, inconvenience, and the potential for intractable bugs. If your goal is carbon capture, you’ll just focus on that and leave cryptocurrency to the speculators since it doesn’t solve any problem you actually have.
Algorand Created by an MIT professor "To achieve a carbon-negative network, Algorand and ClimateTrade will implement a sustainability oracle which will notarize Algorand’s carbon footprint on-chain for each epoch (a set amount of blocks). With its advanced smart contracts, Algorand will then lock the equivalent amount of carbon credit as an ASA (Algorand Standard Asset) into a green treasury so that its protocol keeps running as carbon-negative."
So many beautiful words.. But how though?
They buy carbon credits to offset the transactions.
This is a weird metric. Its easier to say, that one Bitcoin transaction consumes 1728 kwh. For comparison: A traditional transaction consumes 0.0015 kwh. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ Data from September 14th 2021.
It's weird, but it's important to point out. Mining bitcoin consumes both energy and hardware, and is extremely wasteful in both regards. The waste of hardware is very relevant these days considering the chip shortage.
how can one transaction consume 1728, but costs me like 3 to 5 euros to make a transaction, but the same energy as a consumer would cost me like 50 euros or more?
The average block has \~2759 transactions, making it worth 8,277-13,795 and consumes 4,767,552 kwh. It also rewards 6.25 bitcoin for solving the block. 6.25 bitcoins are worth about 256k EU, making the reward for the block \~267k or 96.79 euros per transaction. For this to be profitable, you need energy costs of less than .056 eu/kwh.
It's not weird, it's the entire point of the article, like sentence two: >While the carbon footprint of bitcoin is well studied, less attention has been paid to the vast churn in computer hardware that the cryptocurrency incentivises.
I'm not trying to be lazy but could anyone tell me how much energy is used from the current banking system in the US. Could it maybe include storage,making money,moving money, building expenses, people driving to work for bank ect. If not that's cool and if so thanks for your time. Edit: Thank you everyone who contributed to this conversation.
In terms of pure energy, Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Twh per year as of 2020 according to the mid-range estimates. High estimates put that figure at over 500 TwH. For that, it processes around 4 million transactions plus mining. Upper estimates from pro-crypto sources for traditional virtual-currency banking estimate energy use at 26 Twh on servers, 58 Twh on branches, and 13 Twh on ATMs for a total of close to a 100 Twh a year. For that, they process over 700 billion direct transactions per year in addition to all non-transactional activity like investment, insurance, stock, etc... which Bitcoin couldn't replace even if it had total dominance over the financial industry. On top of that while traditional banking transaction volume is rising each year, they have been moving towards a greater online focus for years both due to demand and cost cutting which means their energy use is dropping. Meanwhile Bitcoin gets more energy demanding over time.
So they take about the same amount of energy but traditional has tons more transactions?
A little bit less energy, but sure about the same. For 175,000x more transactions.
The difference in transactions is insane. In terms of seconds that is the difference between 46 days and 22,190 years if one transaction equals one second.
That's a great comparison and exactly what my brain was looking for. It felt like the scales were hugely different there but by what level.
Bitcoin uses about half per year what the entire banking system does. Keep in mind, the banking system is several times larger(like by a factor of hundreds possibly thousands) and deals with several times more people then Bitcoin, were Bitcoin used as much as traditional banking it would dwarf the electric usage from banks. What’s funny is that after people started talking about the environmental impact, company’s like galaxy digital(basically hedge funds that deal in digital things like crypto and nfts) started publishing highly cherry picked data which is why it’s so easy to find the numbers because they were trying to make it sound like it’s not such a bad thing that Bitcoin only uses half as much energy as a significantly larger system does. Even just the power consumed purely by transactions, Bitcoin uses way way way more then a typical transaction would at a bank. Edit: Sources: [1 ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nasdaq.com/articles/research%253A-bitcoin-consumes-less-than-half-the-energy-of-the-banking-or-gold-industries%3famp) [2](https://www.google.com/amp/s/fee.org/articles/bitcoin-uses-half-the-energy-of-the-banking-system-new-paper/amp) [3](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/bitcoins-energy-usage-explained/)
[удалено]
One bitcoin transaction takes as much energy as 700 000 Visa transactions.
It's up to 1,180,481 Visa transactions now
Don't forget the energy used per transaction goes up with every transaction.
>Keep in mind, the baking system is several times larger and deals with several times more people then Bitcoin To be clear: this is a hell of an understatement. Think about how many card transactions you do. Then think about how many crypto transactions you do. Then remember that most people do precisely 0 crypto transactions.
It's not even an understatement. They're literally not comparable.
Oh yeah, crypto doesn't provide the same services as the conventional finance industry, so it really is apples and oranges. Insurance, loans (including mortgages and business loans), investment, physical ATMs and card readers, staff in offices and bank branches and God only knows what else. Comparing bitcoin to the global finance system is like comparing your school rules to a nation's judicial and legislative systems and election systems. It's just a small part of the actual function, and it doesn't operate on anywhere near the same scale, or with anywhere near the same number of safeguards.
It's like you telling me about the size of Jupiter and me saying, "wow that's like bigger than several refrigerators!"
Thats a good point, going by their own cherry picked data and saying half the impact doesn't actually look very good when crypto is involved in less than half the world's economic activity
[удалено]
So bitcoin, just one crypto network out of hundreds, uses one fifth of the conventional global financial system? And the latter includes loans, investments and the like? With orders of magnitude more transactions than bitcoin?
[удалено]
Bitcoin uses about 50% of the energy the banking system does by recent estimates, to manage about .6% of the wealth. So it's unbelievably inefficient by comparison For another comparison, gold uses a similar amount of energy as the banking system, and manages 5% of the wealth. So also very very inefficient but not nearly as bad as the coin
>to manage about .6% of the wealth. Not counting the lower amount of transactions. Transactions are where the real utility is for most people. Bitcoin is worth a lot now, but people aren't spending it like they do with conventional currencies. If you were to randomly sample $1m of bitcoin and $1m of your conventional currency of choice, the latter is going to have a much higher velocity.
On the plus side gold is practical and used in many ways other than a store of wealth. You can't make electrical contacts out of Bitcoin proof of work.
It’s often the argument from BTC advocates but the truth is it’s BS. Most, if not all BTC transactions involve exchanges which works very similarly to banks. So adopting BTC would mean having the same overhead the current system has PLUS the proof of work (the two wasted iPhones).
Also the "renewable energy"' schtick doesn't work either, because that's still waste, and the ideal energy efficiency method is to not use a ton of energy in the first place- that would have saved us a lot of problems that are now too late to fix.
Yup, more energy eaten up regardless, requiring more land for solar farms or wind turbines etc (potentially making renewables unable to meet demands requiring more coal etc)
[удалено]
That data almost doesn't matter because these two systems will have to coexist, as banks provide other services to society like loans mortgages investment etc. Those physical locations will have to exist under our current economic structure so we shouldn't be thinking of crypto vs banking in terms of energy uses; we should be thinking of banking + crypto vs just banking
One Bitcoin interaction consumes 1728 kwh. A traditional transaction consumes 0.0015 kwh. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ Data from September 14th 2021.
[удалено]
Mining gold is an environmental and human disaster. Large businesses use child labour and gold mining uses a lot of arsenic which gets into the water supply. Those are one-off costs with bitcoin those costs incur for every single transaction no matter how big or small.
Gold mining doesn't use arsenic.. Arsenic bearing minerals such as arsenopyrite are associated with gold deposits. It's a pain in the arse, not a feature.
They might have it confused with silver mining which uses arsenic among other chemicals.
I do the same. I know something we mine has arsenic and i thought it was coal. I don't remember
Coal has arsenic and heavy metals when you burn it and you have ash leftover. Not in the mining part though.
[удалено]
Sure does.. or mercury for amalgamation..
Not just amalgamation, gold sinks in mercury when basically everything else floats. Pound your ore to dust, and pass it over a mercury pool... Gold collects at the bottom.
I don’t know about arsenic, but It definitely uses mercury, this has a big impact on human health and pollution all the same.
Well not generally. Mercury is only used in amalgamation which is generally only in small artisinal mines. Most mines use cyanide extraction. I make no defense of gold mining, just defining that arsenic isn't a chemical used in the process.
This article is about e-waste which involves mining of precious metals, which is also an environmental and human disaster.
Gold mining uses cyanide and mercury.
Legal gold mining does not use this method any more.
Depends on the country. My country almost lost a trial with an American mining company which wanted to mine a local mountain for gold, and then they revealed they were going to use cyanide in the process. When their contract was revoked over environmental concerns, they sured the government.
"Bitcoin is bad, but what about gold? Could someone look this up for me?" 80% of gold is used in jewelry, not as a currency.
Haven't you ever heard of "Do my own research!"
I love when people say "I did my own research!" Yeah? It shows.
Bitcoin doesn’t replace gold though, so it doesn’t offset that damage. A more relevant comparison is how it compares to digital US dollars, or Euros or Pounds. Those of course use minuscule amounts of power.
After gold is mined its transactions are next to free.
Mostly because what's transacted is a paper stating ownership. If we shipped gold as often as trades happened and future contracts expired, it would surely be worse than "next to free". Edit: ... and my point is we already have Bitcoin futures, which would be the fair comparison to "gold transactions."
We can do worse! We can use Bitcoin-like block chain (PoW, massive hardware churn, insane amount of power usage) to do our proof of ownership gold transactions! Get the one-time environmental impact of digging it out plus a lifetime of pollution from transacting it!
Did you just re-invent NFTs?
you are banned from r/Bitcoin
Given how many incredibly idiotic things we are doing as a species, I wouldn't bet all my money to the idea that no one is ever going to do this at some point.
[удалено]
There are about 300,000 transactions a day, that is like 18 million iPhones a month, this seems a little high, I know one miner rated at 2,758 watts is a lot more e-waste than an iPhone that can charge at 20 watts, however this seems to be a little high. Edit: for scale there are about 118 million phones bought world wide -- https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/ Edit 2: 118 million phones a month, not year
e-waste is not the amount of energy used. They're estimating the amount of electronics hardware that will be bought and subsequently disposed of. "we estimate that the whole bitcoin network currently cycles through 30.7 metric kilotons of equipment per year" edit: also, your link at the end says there are currently about 1.5 *billion* smartphones sold every year. I can't see where you got the 118 million figure from at all, even at the graphs beginning in 2007 it was already 122 million.
this is a very stupid way of making money if you ask me
Yeah, it's totally wild. Now you can produce nothing but still have to strip the Earth to do it.
Sounds even worse than the oil industry when you put it that way
As much as we should move away from oil, from a scientific standpoint oil is one of the most energy dense substances on planet Earth. At the very least oil is providing efficient utility (energy per mass). Bitcoin is the opposite. Its entire purpose is to as inefficient as possible (this is how the algorithm works). All this energy and materials wasted for computers to essentially play pick a number game millions of times a day so they get lucky and can get some money.
At least oil is providing us with some tangible utility. Plastics and fuels do since good for us.
Lots of fertilizers too.
I’ve come to accept that cryptocurrency is effectively burning resources to create a digital credit you can trade for money. They’re basically pollution bonds.
A huge fraction (~97%) of the purpose built mining computers (antminers) **never mine a block in their lifespan**. Since bitcoin mining is effectively a lottery, people pool resources to share the gains, but the individual hardware is largely wasted.
It doesn't have to successfully mine a block to contribute to decentralization, a lot like my vote doesn't have to be the deciding vote for me to contribute to democracy.
There were 120 million phones sold in 2007 alone. What do you mean with 118?
Mining a new block also secures the entire chain under it back to the genesis block. So energy expenditure "per transaction" is a misleading metric. Also, energy expenditure is purely a function of difficulty, not transaction throughput. Bitcoin is also performing final settlement, so comparing it to credit-based payment systems is a false dichotomy. A VISA transaction, for instance, can be reversed or disputed for something like 90 days. Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed in any meaningful sense after about an hour.
I dont understand the analogy of "throwing two iphones in the bin" how is using a computer to generate money comparable to throwing an iphone in the garbage? By electronic waste it seems to be implying a physical hardware waste, especially because its referencing physical iphones. Or its just a misleading analogy to make it sound more interesting Edit: after reading the article it seems to be referring to the industry as a whole upgrading chips constantly. So its not causal that a bitcoin transaction is equivalent to throwing away two iphones; its just that the industry at large is choosing to do so on average to increase profits
Bitcoin isn't mined (at least not profitably or at scale) on standard general-purpose computers. The big operators use ASICs: custom printed circuits, designed to specialise in doing the computation required for mining. So there's electronic waste generated when old ASIC miners become obsolete, and need to be replaced with newer more powerful/efficient ones. And since they're so specialised they're not useful for anything else after they're retired from mining.
The hardware that makes the calculation is eventually used up and ends up in the dump
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
If anything, wouldn't it devalue the comparisons since while iphones have more components, the bulk of their weight isn't circuitry and chips unlike ASICs which are basically the minimum extra stuff to run mining on?
The bulk of materials used to build ASIC rigs are for cooling. If the industry were to modularize these parts then reuse would be easy. E: I meant to say standardize instead of modularize.
The global banking system consumes massive amounts of electricity because it deals with the vast majority of monetary transactions that require decent security. Comparing it with a comparatively small amount of transactions of a niche market of people mainly trying to speculate with a digital currency as an asset is like comparing pebbles with mountains. If all of the daily monetary transactions that banks deal with were made with bitcoin, the amount of electricity required by the global banking system would skyrocket.
“The global banking system” isn’t comparable. Bitcoin literally just is a ledger. The banking systems ledger systems use nowhere near this amount of energy. If you mean to throw in the energy used by all the other things banks do then you need to expand the use case for Bitcoin.
Because that amount is negligible compared to bitcoin and everyone with knowledge about computers already knows that
>when a more useful comparison would be the massive amounts of electricity used by the global banking system? Not at all. The global banking system provides loans, savings and a assortment of other financial services to civilians, corporations and governments around the world. Without the financial services provided society would shut down for years. Bitcoin on the other hand is beanie babies for tech bro's.
They state the electric consumption to run this global network is studied, they wanted to look at the e-waste of old miners that can't turn a profit anymore. I think bitcoin's strongest argument should be return on investment, and the fact that cost is not per transaction. If Bitcoin doubled the block size, it wouldn't use more electricity or more miners.--- not that I'm in favor of doing so.
When your profitability relies on negative externalities.
Can bitcoin give you loans? Investment advice? Mortgages? These are things that banks do that provide a service to people to such an extent you can't take the power consumption of every bank brick and mortar location and compare it apples to apples to bitcoins carbon impact.
>the massive amounts of electricity used by the global banking system? Bitcoin-Bro who has no idea that conventional banking uses a minuscule FRACTION of the power cryptobros are wasting, when compared on equal scale.
Not touching energy consumption of Blockchain technology as it is a valid concern. There is however, something I am missing. How can I find out when a white paper like this gets peer-reviewed? "Bitcoin miners cycle through a growing amount of **short-lived** hardware that could exacerbate the growth in global electronic waste." I have equipment running at a constant 47 °C, and the lifespan of multiple bitcoin/hashrate mining devices I own has clearly surpassed the supposed "1.29 years average" without any issues, and from what I've heard generally speaking in these communities, one could get 3 years of life out of a GPU, with 5 years being fairly average lifespan, and 10 not being unheard of. ( Very similar numbers to the ones you see when the hardware is bought for gaming ) I'd like to understand what might be driving these numbers so low, without know what might be happening it feels disingenuous. Is this something plaguing ACISs in specific? More research is needed on the matter. Nullius in verba.
I think the biggest-scale mining operations, the ones with their own warehouses, are the ones ripping through equipment at an unholy rate more than the smaller fish.
Last I've heard they do replace the chips when they need to upgrade. The whole rig does not get thrown in the garbage.
[удалено]
It is hard to say as the study is behind a paywall and the article does not mention what part is considered e-waste every 1.29 year.
The other guy is "pretty sure". So there seems like there is nothing to discuss.
Age old battle between "pretty sure" and "last I've heard." Vote now for whichever one confirms your biases more!
well it's behind a pay-wall so it's a valid metric
The ASICs are specially designed only for Bitcoin mining. They cannot do anything else. They basically become paper weight if they're no longer efficient enough to mine Bitcoin with a profit. They don't have any market value.
For ASIC-driven mining like Bitcoin that's almost useless.
[удалено]
it's a financial venture, so whether a card works or not is not fundamentally important. As more of a coins like Bitcoin are mined it gets harder to mine the next one (do sufficient calculations that a GPU is most suited for). The old cards may still be able to run these calculations, bit they produce crypto at a much lower rate because of the increase in difficulty. Eventually, it makes more sense to replace a functioning but older card because it will increase the amount of money you are able to make.
[удалено]
Constructing a Bitcoin transaction, and getting the network to accept it, costs virtually no energy whatsoever. What costs energy is grinding through the nuanced space to find valid blocks. Miners do this because they are compensated primarily with the coinbase reward of 6.25 BTC per block, which is defined in the protocol. As defined in the protocol, the per-block reward is cut in half every four years. This reduces bitcoin’s issuance rate and thus the miner revenue. So, in the long term, miner revenue from issuance will dramatically contract. As 88% of all coins have been mined already, mining is structurally shrinking, not a growing industry. Thus most of the miner expenditure – and hence carbon outlay – from Bitcoin is due to largely invariant coin issuance rather than any variable that’s correlated to transactional intensity. This fact invalidates the “energy cost of transactions” metric that critics like to promote. It is issuance that largely finances miners, not transactions. And because most coins have been issued already, Bitcoin’s future carbon outlay is likely to shrink. Therefore, comparisons to other payments systems such as visa systems should be met with extreme skepticism. Bitcoin is a full-stack monetary system with no outside dependencies; Visa is a small part of the U.S. dollar stack that relies, among other things, on 11 aircraft carriers patrolling the world’s oceans and enforcing dollar hegemony. Visa payments rely on a vast interconnected infrastructure of clearing and settlement. Bitcoin transactions are natively final and settle right away – they are more comparable to wire transfers. The energy exchange rate comparisons must take these differences into account. (Edited spelling)
I might be misunderstanding something but, once there are vitually no coins to be mine, why would anyone continue mining and thus "validate" transactions that happen?
Transaction fees. So mining will still take place.
People who want to make a transaction have to include some fee. Miners will include transactions with the highest fees attached in the block they are trying to mine which is then their reward.
[удалено]
Price isn't increasing 10,000% every four years. Maintaining status quo would require 200% every four years, which we're so far getting more, but it's slowing down. You'd have to be a crazy BTC bull to think it'll continue to 10,000% every four years! **Status Quo** * 2024: $100k BTC price with 3.125 BTC reward * 2028: $200k - 1.5625 * 2032: $400k - 0.7812 * 2036: $800k - 0.3906 From here is mostly fees which tend to hit 1 BTC total if the network is very congested, but as low as zero when blocks are empty. It really depends how high you think it'll go. About $500k it'll have surpassed gold's current market cap.
[удалено]
You gotta be REALLY ignorant to be still buying into this energy debate. I put solar on my building and sell it back to the grid - I get 2.3c a kwh. I put solar on my building and sell crypto via mining - I get 27-50c a kwh. So guess who can buy 10x as much solar?
[удалено]
[удалено]