> Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable.
Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn't really matter whether you A) use non-renewable energy for BS or B) use renewable energy for BS, displacing other energy users to non-renewables.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.
Now, the claim could still theoretically be true, but I really want to see some hard numbers with sources from the next person trying to defend that claim.
Subsidized energy can be cheap or even free, and it's hard to compete with free. For-profit Bitcoin miners are in an intense competition to find the cheapest energy. Anyone who can steal their energy or get someone else to pay for it via subsidies will win there, but only until the free lunch ends. Energy free lunches are ending all over the world now; nobody wants to build a coal plant in order to give away the energy to bitcoin miners so they can retire in Switzerland.
And that's why the Chinese authorities kicked out all the bitcoin miners a couple months after that, dropping the bitcoin hashrate by more than half. It's on its way back up, but it hasn't fully recovered.
By contrast, especially in tropical regions, you can build a solar or wind power plant to mine bitcoin profitably without finding someone else to fob the bill off on. In much of the world, solar energy is now less than half the cost of fossil-fuel energy, though not in cloudy polar regions like Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK. There's a new record-low PPA price every few months, and it's always solar; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-... this April seems to be the latest, at US$0.0104/kWh, which is about a quarter of what coal energy usually costs.
That's why the Navajo Generating Station has been demolished, Peabody Coal has gone bankrupt and may do so again, and for the first time in human history, outside of PRC, more coal generating capacity was shut down than was built last year. This year that'll probably be true worldwide. Coal (and nuclear, and oil) just can't compete economically with solar anymore, even in temperate regions. And, consequently, neither can Bitcoin miners who are paying the cost of using coal. Fortunately for them, shipping their server racks to a more profitable region is a lot cheaper than doing the same with a steel mill.
Hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of the whole political-economic environment in which Bitcoin mining is happening than just a few hard numbers, which are of course fundamental.
Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they are some of the most location neutral energy consumers. This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy equipment. It allows them to achieve economies of scale faster and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy that we need.
It's estimated all of the U.S. is ~17% of global energy. [1]
"According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden." [2]
The incentives to use renewables are there... where the costs of fossil sources are high, and where the energy consuming process will be reliably profitable long enough to pay for all those renewable energy sources.
That last bit makes me doubt this would push renewables - who trusts that mining will remain profitable for years or even a decade? In other words, it may well incentivize energy sources with low down-payment costs.
Also: all those GPUs are expensive; is a miner really going to slow down mining significantly just because it's dark or no longer windy? Or will they prefer constant power, given the fact that GPU's will become obsolete much more quickly than the power source, and thus there's pressure to recoup that investment as quickly as possible, I'd guess... thus incentivizing baseload power, not unreliable but cheap power - conceivably, anyhow?
The high bit here is that coin mining is not 1 TW; it's 0.012 TW, so the overall effect is almost insignificant. But it's still interesting to know which direction the incentives run.
The cost of fossil-fuel electricity generation is about half capex and half opex (including fuel), and in much of the world, solar is now cheaper than either fossil-fuel capex or fossil-fuel opex. A large part of capex is machinery, much of which is so costly that shipping costs are insignificant, so the costs are the same anywhere in the world.
Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs, but your comments about intermittency and capital costs apply a fortiori to ASIC mining.
>This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission.
Sure, but there doesn't seem to be to be any indication that this is what actually happens. Is there any evidence for that?
If only we could send a self-replicating machine that builds raspberry pis and solar panels to the moon with an uplink.
Then the difficulty would jump and we'd need to send one to Jupiter.
Then to mercury to set up the dyson swarm.
Suddenly we are a Kardashev civ... but it's all for bitcoin mining for rich billionaire paranoia of centralized currency control by the US government, and the actual bitcoin production rate is constant since the difficulty rate on the coins exploded from galaxy-spanning miner fleets.
As explained above, the real number is closer to 0.012 TW, so while the impact on the renewable transition is probably positive, it's very small, more like 0.1% of global energy production.
It's disturbing that nobody in this whole thread thought to fact-check those implausibly large numbers; it indicates that the whole thread is dominated by herd instinct, not rational thought.
I think Bitcoin is ridiculous and wasteful, but I'm also conflicted because I think similarly about many physical products: jewelry, mansions, oversized personal vehicles. There's a lot of embedded energy in all of those goods. Who am I to judge which ones are worthwhile. It all makes me dearly wish there was a global tax on taking the resources out of the ground.
I'm curious why we don't find a similar backlash to people who put their energy into a hot tub or to cool a 5x sized home.. as these cases don't even purportedly support a valuable economic mechanism.
For instance. I don't cool my home with AC. does it bother you that I mine bitcoin overnight when the grid has surplus energy?
People do complain about excessive comforts too. It's one of the main complains those less well off make about those more well off.
That said, there's a couple of differences between hot tubs and AC, and crypto mining:
- Creature comforts don't consume the energy equivalent of a small developed country.
- In what they do consume, most of the use is around basic human needs; excessive use happens rarely.
- Most importantly, for almost[0] everything other than crypto, whether it's hot tubs or ACs or fiat banking system, energy use is considered waste to be minimized. Simply because energy is not free, the market is incentivized to reduce marginal energy consumption involved across the board[1]. In contrast, PoW considers waste a feature.
Cryptocurrencies are their own special thing - the perfect machine for consuming any surplus energy available. That's why they deserve their own special kind of backlash.
--
[0] - I can't really think of any thing other than PoW cryptocurrencies, where energy waste would be beneficial to the thing by design.
[1] - That, of course, doesn't mean we're using less energy overall - because both population and economic growth outpace efficiency improvements. But on the margin, it holds true.
- Creature comforts don't consume the energy equivalent of a small developed country.
you are incorrect here. 10% of global energy (not just electricity) is used for cooling.
I live in the deep south with no AC. "basic human needs; excessive use happens rarely." is extremely generous.
What you are describing is what makes you comfortable. I have no problem with that. be comfortable. Just consider that what you are describing is completely a matter of perspective and not some universal truth about use of energy. Just like you are not universally correct that every watt spent on crypto is "wasted". It's a perspective.... and my point here is to remind you to keep it in perspective of other trivial preferences people have, rather than turning it into an ideological war of good and evil.
To add, this isn’t really “surplus” energy that’s being consumed.
There are fossil burning power plants running only to produce PoW, and unless mining operations shut down to allow a generator to operate at minimum load, they are forcing shared generators to run and dams to drain.
you know that generator fuel consumption and dam water consumption is dependent on the load on the generator, right?
it's not like a generator burns 2gal/hr no matter the load. This is easily observable even (perhaps especially) on home generators - if you run it idle it might run for 12 hours and if you load it to maximum capacity it might be out of fuel in 2 hours. look at a product page for a generator and will probably be specified at a particular load level (50% load for example).
also if you keep pushing water through a dam at maximum rate even when the dam is under a light load, you'll overspeed the generator and blow it up. You have to have control gates to control the water flow.
basically, "how difficult" it is to spin the generator is determined by the electrical load (coupled through the magnetic field of the motor) and obviously you need more physical power to spin against a stronger field, which translates into more power/fuel.
A lot of people are in the habit of complaining about what other people do that might possibly but not likely indirectly affect them somehow. Of course the powers that be are fine with this (and probably promote it) because as long as the populace is pointing fingers at each other's lifestyle, they are ignoring the massive use of fossil energy (among other things) used to make a few rich people richer.
"Penny wise and pound foolsh."
Another example of this is plastic bottles. See it's your responsibility to recycle, not the company's responsibility to not use plastic. People nanny each other's recycling habits but don't say shit about Coca-Cola bottlers. Bottler's are too busy laughing their ass off on the way to the bank. Recycle, reduce, reuse.
In the case of cryptocurrency, there is a clear better alternative that is Proof of Stake. It's caused by techological, economical and educational inertia. Cryptocurrency is driven by community consensus, and that's what we're doing here... discussing an outdated consensus (PoW supremacy) in the hope of changing it.
Proof of stake changes the game and raises the bar for entry. It essentially creates a "rich get richer" scenario where the only way to increase the amount of coin you have is to either already have enough to participate in proof of stake, or to buy the coin from someone else. In that light, I wouldn't necessarily say that proof of stake is clearly better than proof of work.
As an example, the proposed proof of stake mechanism for Ethereum requires 32 ETH, which is around $100k USD today. So established parties with capital will be able to stake, but your average person will not. I'm not sure I like that aspect of it.
It seems there will be pool staking in ETH, although I agree ideally staking threshold should be low.
Consider the case with Proof of Work (ASIC-based): you need to purchase specialized hardware for several $k (apparently at least $2k), spend more on specialized infrastructure (power supply, cooling, servers) and live somewhere with almost free energy. Otherwise it's just not economical to mine. This leaves out the vast majority of people as well, and incentivizes (1) massive economies of scale of farms, (2) shady or corrupt deals for free energy, through local government or simply illegal connections to the network.
Ridding the world of centrally planned currency isn’t shits and giggles. We’re in the midst of the largest wealth transfer in history. Trillions are being given to the wealthy while the poor see their purchasing power wither away. I’m not certain we’ll successfully escape their depraved clutches, but wasting a little electricity is worth the chance.
I still fail to see how it addresses wealth distribution issues.
Crypto currencies are just an asset as any other financial asset.
Yes it's decentralised but the only thing it seems to have proved so far is that centralisation might not be an issue in the first place.
Since crypto currencies are more of a financial asset than a currency, it's also highly dependent on actual currencies in the end.
Because the powerful people with more crypto than you can't magically issue infinite more crypto and give it to themselves, devaluing the crypto in your wallet.
Classification as an asset is part of the state fighting against crypto currency. It's a non sequitor. If the dollar was deflationary more people would be holding onto it as an asset. But the dollar is intentionally manipulated/inflated so that it's a liability to hold it, therefore people trade it for other asset classes.
The difference is that the powerful people with a lot of crypto can't unilaterally decide to issue themselves trillions more bitcoins which devalues the few coins held by the poor. Yet this is exactly what happens with the dollar.
The energy use is of captured energy that would be lost in transport to other energy users, because it uses just as much energy or more to transport it.
This means that “renewable energy more than the output of Argentina was always being wasted for over a century every day because it was uneconomical to transport it”
Crypto mining has been unique in that it only needs power and housing to stay dry, low infrastructure, and doesn't need very good internet, compared to other large computational projects, or any other sector.
Okay, so we got the “ah it uses a lot of energy!” argument over to “ah okay its a relatively green sector compared to literally everything else but I don't respect the use in favor of literally everything else and this must be taking away from that” which is also not true so I’m curious how the goal post moves after this - assuming you are able to corroborate what I’ve told you at face value.
It would be more productive to advocate for specific sites to not raise prices for others if they did, or specific sites to use cleaner energy sources. I can understand how that could cause some consternation if your whole cause is not liking crypto mining at all. But it is important to remain vigilante on how these mining operations run, as it is possible for nation states to operate these uneconomically and actually do things that you imagine is happening now.
(Renewable and captured are not synonymous but usually its the same)
If your first paragraph is about rejected energy, then there's not a lot to say here except that rejected energy doesn't mean what you think it does.
If not, then I don't know what it is supposed to be about. No one builds power plants in places where there is no demand for power. Electric power can be carried over pretty large distances though with very low losses, so having say a few hundred km between a hydro-dam and a large consumer is not a major problem.
According to your post the best result would be that Bitcoin farms are powered by renewable energy plants build in places where nobody would have any use for that power anyway, because they're too remote to connect to any consumer. Even if this happens (and from what we're able to tell, it is not, instead we see coal and natural gas plants being ramped up to power bitcoin farms), it's still a net negative because building renewable energy power plants (as well as bitcoin farms) causes a significant amount of emissions. In normal use of e.g. a solar panel, this makes sense because it displaces non-renewable energy sources with higher emissions, so net emissions are reduced. In your scenario, there's a bunch of solar farms in the middle of the Saharan desert mining bitcoins, which - at this point - yes would not be able to displace non-renewable energy, but still represents a net-negative regardless because of the effort required to put all that shit there in the first place.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.
> (and from what we're able to tell, it is not, instead we see coal and natural gas plants being ramped up to power bitcoin farms)
like I said, advocate against those specific mining sites. those made headlines in your world, while others did not.
A lot of captured energy mining occurs at remote flare gas sites, where those sites are in the business of pumping oil and flaring off byproducts and not in the business of moving power a few hundred km. These are highly polluting places, and crypto mining is ironically (to you) their sustainability solution, as they provide a use for the energy that would have been flared into the atmosphere as hydrocarbons instead. As these are also fracking sites, the machines can use the polluted water for cooling. Those kinds of sites are only captured and not necessarily renewable, an important distinction because your example was limited to imagining uneconomical solar. There is much more energy like this able to be tapped while reducing hydrocarbons in the atmosphere, and if it was economical for other use cases that you respect more to tap into that energy, you and others had several decades to do so.
It's cheaper for them to just flare the gas. The only thing that has made economic sense, as an alternative to flaring it, is to mine Bitcoin. I understand the energy criticism, but flare gas is an example where Bitcoin mining actually makes something less polluting.
- It's approximately a 180° pivot to go from "unused renewable energy" to "flare gas for green bitcoins"
- It doesn't reduce the emissions. Whether you flare it or burn it in a gas turbine / engine driving a generator to mine bitcoin, the CO2 released is exactly the same, as you are burning ~100 % of the hydrocarbons either way. The difference is that one generates bitcoins, the other does not. This is only valuable to bitcoin stakeholders, and as has been pointed out up and down all these threads this is either of approximately no value or of negative value to society at large. And overall, creating the equipment to mine bitcoins with flare gas, and deploying that to remote oil fields w/ no use for gas, creates a bunch of emissions that simply don't exist if you just flare the gas.
- There are non-emissive alternatives, e.g. gas re-injection. Note that the great majority of unwanted gas is already dealt with this way. This means that mining bitcoins using flare gas has a very good likelihood of increasing the share of unwanted gas that is effectively flared, again, increasing emissions.
Reducing the amount of flared gas (and putting it through a turbine to mine bitcoin is the same as flaring it as far as emissions go) is in fact an UN IEA goal.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.
> - It's approximately a 180° pivot to go from "unused renewable energy" to "flare gas for green bitcoins"
I wrote earlier to avoid this specific derailing. Renewable and captured are not synonymous but usually the same. This is one of the cases where it is not the same. To my knowledge, the only other captured sources are at hydroelectric plants, while some parties are interested in geothermal as well.
Noteworthy is that “captured” seems to be also called “rejected” energy in some circles.
> And overall, creating the equipment to mine bitcoins with flare gas, and deploying that to remote oil fields w/ no use for gas, creates a bunch of emissions that simply don't exist if you just flare the gas.
Once. I’m not sure how a one time event is remotely comparable to ongoing issues. Please elaborate?
> It doesn't reduce the emissions. Whether you flare it or burn it in a gas turbine / engine driving a generator to mine bitcoin, the CO2 released is exactly the same, as you are burning ~100 % of the hydrocarbons either way. The difference is that one generates bitcoins, the other does not.
Hmm. Is there anything we can do about that then? Like does that format allow for further processing towards sustainability? The generating of bitcoin making it economical to do more with the CO2 that the oil guys just threw their hands up on decades ago? If this issue has nothing to do with bitcoin mining and the alternative is just business as usual with it going directly to the atmosphere like it already was, then why point fingers at the bitcoin mining?
Thanks for chiming in! Nice to see a new account understanding this issue and joining the fray.
It has been fascinating to me to watch the disbelief evolve. One aspect of this is that negative reporting has been basically allowed and encouraged by miners because they didn't want competition on their cheaper renewable/captured energy sources.
So, for years, many investment groups would discourage their renewable or captured energy activity to be citable source of what is happening with bitcoin mining, because they didn't want others with deeper connections to make partnerships with sites faster.
Its really funny, to me, watching people have to redo their understanding but trying to make that understanding conform to the negative energy impact idea that they were intentionally led on with.
> OK, but those exact same places could power servers instead of miners, taking a load off of wherever the servers are currently hosted.
They don't have good internet. Which I wrote earlier. Crypto mining don't need good internet, it barely needs any good internet speed and barely needs decent latency - by design (blockchains allow anything from 2 seconds - 2000 milliseconds - to 10 minutes - 600000 milliseconds - for the majority of miners on the whole planet to reach the same state together, under the assumption that some nodes will have slow data and low latency. So a 500-900ms latency connection in the middle of nowhere is quite fine, not optimal but good enough for consistent average earnings). Other data heavy computational uses require the opposite of that, these remote sites are not going to get the plumbing for good internet or prioritize it. The main issue is that they won't prioritize it because they aren't interested in it, they are technophobic oil guys that are slowly being convinced by crypto investors to solve their pollution problem. The crypto people don't need anything except a little space.
The issue with imagining that everyone else could do it, is that everyone else doesn't need to do it. A data center can set up in the middle of the desert along any fiber line like they already do. Go ahead and tell them "hey instead of using this readily available property can you go set up at the oil refinery after making an unnecessary partnership with that unrelated business because I don't like that crypto people are doing it, you also need to invest in laying some pipes out there" if you really think that is practical or necessary, be my guest.
Yeah this shouldn’t have been flagged, this part of hackernews is very broken for them to inadvertently allow censorship like this
The stackexchange approach would be better here, where certain power users can vote on flagging and you can see who voted on flagging, other users can vote against flagging and even override it
Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn't really matter whether you A) use non-renewable energy for BS or B) use renewable energy for BS, displacing other energy users to non-renewables.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.