Bitcoin consumes 111TWh annually, the power consumption of the Netherlands, and emits 62Mt of CO2 per year, the same as Belarus. It also yields 42kT of e-waste per year.
Each transaction produces 650kg of CO2, consumes 1160kWh of power (as much as 40 days consumption for the average American home) and produces 450g of e-waste (about the same as hucking your iPad into the garbage can each time you transact on-chain).
97% of all Bitcoin mining hardware will never successfully produce a single block in its entire useful life, going from factory, to space heater, to garbage can - while about 60% of all the power consumed comes from oil, natural gas and coal. So whoever sold producers the offsets I assume you must be alluding to better have replanted the entire Amazon rainforest by now. (Quick spoiler, carbon offsets are also a scam, generally speaking).
To say you're going to need to get some sources is an understatement about as large at Bitcoin's environmental footprint.
You can find all this in [1] or you can just reverse it yourself from the specs of the latest AntMiner and the current hash rate. Some napkin math is all you need.
I'm honestly amazed people still believe something so trivially falsifiable, but with everything else going on in 2022...
> 97% of all Bitcoin mining hardware will never successfully produce a single block in its entire useful life, going from factory, to space heater, to garbage can
This is a really disengenuous point. Mining works probabilistically, and mining pools payout based on smaller units of work that probably have some probability of finding a block for the pool. The fact that a block itself is a large parcel does not make the system less efficient.
The point is a centralized equivalent of bitcoin could run on a raspberry pi. Heck a proof of stake bitcoin could run on a raspberry pi. It’s a ridiculous system even Hal Finney thought was unsustainable 10 years ago.
Value judgement aside the question was “is it carbon neutral” and the answer is a resounding no.
That's an entirely different topic/point. I was responding to your ridiculous point that 97% of bitcoin miners never find a block. You didn't even try to defend that point.
What is your source around Hal Finney? I have not heard that.
The fact we have a system where 97% of all the equipment isn't used to ever do anything useful and instead "increase security" is an insanely wasteful system. Nobody has quantified what level of "security" is required. There's no feedback mechanism to pull back based on need because the need is fundamentally unquantified. It's a grey goo style uncontrolled positive feedback loop.
Each time more miners come online it's lauded as "more security is better" - but how much security do you need! The answer isn't "as much as you can afford period no follow-up questions."
You don't have 75 seatbelts in your car because "security." You don't use a dump truck to take your kids to school because "security." And you don't use a global army of computers consuming 100+TWh/yr to process 2-3 tx/sec because "security."
Ultimately it's a half-baked security model, and Bitcoin is a half-baked proof of concept that escaped the lab and gained a cult following.
> What is your source around Hal Finney? I have not heard that.
You didn't understand my point. If bitcoin had 1 minute blocks instead of 10 minute blocks, more than 3% of miners would find a block in their life time. But that change alone would not change any meaningful properties of bitcoin. You think bitcoin is a total waste, I get it. But that statistic doesn't help your argument.
> The answer isn't "as much as you can afford period no follow-up questions."
You are right, and this isn't how bitcoin works. The amount of mining should be determined by the block reward, market price, and fees per block. Mining in excess of this is not economically rational, and shouldn't happen. So it is not "unlimited security" at any cost"
Where in that tweet does Hal characterize bitcoin as ridiculous or unsustainable?
> But that change alone would not change any meaningful properties of bitcoin.
Sure it would, it would change that resource cost per transaction.
> You think bitcoin is a total waste, I get it. But that statistic doesn't help your argument.
I disagree, if 97% of servers at AWS were there for some hand-wavey notion of 'providing security' without quantification I think Amazon would be roundly mocked.
> You are right, and this isn't how bitcoin works.
Yes it is. You just re-stated my position with slightly different wording.
I said the security model was "as much as you can afford." You can afford block reward plus fees times price. The security model is "spend as much of that as you can without regard for what you need to achieve security." The issue is that block reward plus fees times price is not a function of how much security is required.
> Where in that tweet does Hal characterize bitcoin as ridiculous or unsustainable?
I never said 'ridiculous' - obviously I don't think Hal would make that claim, so let's stick to what I did say :) I think it is not unreasonable to extrapolate from his tweet that he believe that at the limit CO2 would be an issue. CO2 itself is an issue of sustainability. You can disagree with that interpretation, but I do not think that an average unbiased observer would find my reading unreasonable.
You seem to be trying to win an argument at all costs, putting words into my mouth, running with uncharitable interpretations and arguing in bad faith - in this thread and the other. If you read carefully you'll find I paid close attention not to move goalposts. I'm going to cut it off here. It's particularly silly because you've already admitted you agree to my premise that it is not carbon neutral.
> I disagree, if 97% of servers at AWS were there for some hand-wavey notion of 'providing security' without quantification I think Amazon would be roundly mocked.
Again, you fail to understand that the number of a machines that find a block could be changed by making the blocks smaller. You could do that by also reducing block size to keep the total number of transactions the same. But the larger point is that mining pools make it so that mining machines are paid for partial work, even without finding a block. This enables the utility of mining to be measured by hash rate, rather than by number of blocks solved.
You called it a gray goo style positive feedback loop. It is not, there is a upper bound on how much will be spent. There is no feedback loop as well, if the price goes up, more will be spent on mining, but that does not feedback to make the price go higher as required for a loop. Moreover, the block reward is exponentially decaying.
Your reading of the tweet is that a person saying a system should use less CO2 implies that person believes the system is unsustainable. I don't think that is reasonable, e.g. an Airline CEO launching an initiative to reduce the airlines CO2 usage would not believe that the airline is unsustainable. I did misread the other part of your statement-- you said bitcoin is ridiculous, not that Hal said that.
1) miners profit from energy surplus. They do not create new power plants. Nobody is firing up a new coal plant to mine bitcoin. That is absurd.
2) miners have incentives to find and use wasted energy. For ex, flare gas recycling. Which actually helps the environment.
3) miners can turn on/off at will, and produce energy loads on demand. Which means they balance out the energy grid. Especially from erratic energy sources like wind and solar. This is already being deployed in some states.
(1) They literally reopened a natural gas plant in New York, where were you? [1] the broader point is this fossil capacity can just be turned off if we stopped wasting it on a bitmask lottery. You don’t have to bring on new capacity to cause harm (although they are doing that too).
(2) burning flared methane is better than not but not flaring at all is best? There’s no such thing as stranded power, there’s only missing transmission infrastructure which is being incentivized not to come online through profitable waste at point of generation.
(3) raising the baseline usage level through waste then turning it off when there’s a brownout level crisis is just an asinine plan to manage load that costs everyone money. Active demand management is an actual solution. So is grid storage. Also, “some states” is Texas, famously the worst energy grid in the US, home of the blackout. Meanwhile New York is banning wasting fossil fuel energy on miners.
Anyways you seem to bring no data to the table other than a “nuh uh” and some obviously flawed apologism.
No word on the ewaste?
It appears to me you’re using the “facts u dislike” acronym expansion for FUD.
Fine, I disagree but even if I were to concede surely there’s a better solution we can think of than looking up a big resistor.
The question is how much so called stranded power is there, what percent of Bitcoin energy usage does this account for and is there really nothing useful we could do with it? Finally with “stranded coal” is it better to just not use it?
This is just a talking point used to distract from the actual issues. In reality the percentage of renewables wasted on bitcoin mining is at an all time low. The question at issue was whether all this is carbon neutral, and no, it’s definitely not.
The original comment that bitcoin is carbon negative is ridiculous, I agree. But you are posting empty/wrong rebuttals as well.
In the case of flare gas, it is a byproduct of gathering oil that is unavoidable. The oil is economically worth collecting, but the extra gas is not. I think this can be more finely split into natural gas vs methane-- sometimes the natural gas is worth collecting, but the methane never is.
You could argue that there should be laws to force the methane to be collected and used elsewhere as a condition of accessing the oil. That might be overall better. But prior to bitcoin, that perfect solution was not really implemented. In this sense, bitcoin mining of flare gas is a step forward.
Note that the argument is not just that economic value is created by mining bitcoin, but that running the gas through a generator leads to cleaner combustion and thus less greenhouse gas emission than simply lighting the gas on fire. In this sense, the bitcoin flare gas mining operation by itself could be considered carbon negative (again, surely all bitcoin mining is not). The bitcoin mining pays for the generator. So bitcoin mining is giving the industry a subsidy that enables reduction of environmental harm. It is not perfect, but it is an improvement.
> But prior to bitcoin, that perfect solution was not really implemented. In this sense, bitcoin mining of flare gas is a step forward.
Prior to bitcoin they flared it - or didn't. Now there's an economic incentive not to find another solution. Now the oil and gas companies are incentivized to prevent that better solution because there's something in it for them not to. So we make it harder to solve 100% of the problem because this gets us 5% of the way there and pays us not to.
Cool, so you moved the goal posts from saying "there is no such thing as stranded energy", to saying "yes, bitcoin is reducing the environmental impact of flare gas burning, but we should be doing something else instead (no concrete ideas) that can solve this problem even better". I have explained to you how bitcoin can have a net positive impact on the environment, given existing practices. You now say that since this is not a perfect solution, we should go back to harming the environment more, presumably since you have already made up your mind that bitcoin is evil?
> Bitcoin consumes 111TWh annually, the power consumption of the Netherlands, and emits 62Mt of CO2 per year, the same as Belarus. It also yields 42kT of e-waste per year.
it only consumes as much as the complexity required to roll out new blocks. As its price goes down so does the energy required to find new blocks. It is not static.
I gave current numbers. Surprisingly (and obviously unfortunately) the price change hasn't had an impact on energy consumption commensurate with the drop. There's a lot that goes into it - for instance cost basis of power: theft of power, graft, corruption, etc. If you're able to steal the power then it doesn't matter much so long as you can afford new miners.
tl;dr: price per coin represents something of a bounding function on consumption of resources (including mining hardware and electricity) but it's not as tightly correlated as hoped.
My point though is the idea all that consumption has been papered over by what I assume is buying some offsets - and now it's magically carbon neutral - is silly and obviously wrong.
