That site makes only a back of the hand assumption about how much energy use is a renewable or clean source.

My work with large miners - who all rely on clean or reducing pollution by using unused energy - and the economics of all miners would say that 75% of all mining is renewable energy.

You would therefore have to divide all their problem metrics by 50-60%.

Regarding "e-waste as much as Luxembough", is that really a lot? I don't actually know what to compare that to, all I see is "gasp a country!" and no quantitive metric compared to say any other industry or even other jurisdiction's use. With that in mind, I also am not sure it is accurate. Bitcoin e-waste doesn't really result in more machines, it results in the same amount of machines being replaced and doing more. This is because the economics has already pushed people to renewable energy sources, and the people that can already have. People that are just catching on are using people's "wasted" machines and mining with those.

Ah the source you ask? All the private details about my clients. Hm, yeah not going to happen, there might be a few press releases, and there might be a few court documents that have nothing to do with mining but normal business disagreements in companies that do mine.

The balanced answer is that this is something to remain vigilant about. Nations mining at a loss and printing currency to do so will absolutely not care about the power cost or source, and this is where we are headed. The private sector is not capable of doing this as uneconomically as that site suggests, pay attention as that site's assumptions are intertwined with facts. Just notice where they don't have any facts and be willing to balance that with other accounts like mine.

What is "unused" energy and why is crypto a better use for it than charging a battery or pumping some water up a hill?

> You would therefore have to divide all their problem metrics by 50-60%.

Do you mean the metrics would be doubled or halved?

> Bitcoin e-waste doesn't really result in more machines, it results in the same amount of machines being replaced and doing more.

I don't follow. If hardware is being used for crypto it isn't being used for something else. This must either push up the cost of hardware or simply add more to the total amount in the world.

Hardware has a limited life so crypto must contribute to e-waste. Why is it appropriate to attribute the hardware usage to non-crypto workloads but not crypto? What's the difference?

There is a lot of energy that is at the source of generation which looses efficiency to getting to residential or commercial areas. This energy is wasted. In many forms of energy generation the result is pollution. Crypto mining is unique because it is the first thing that requires no infrastructure. These are heavy computational services that don't need heavy internet infrastructure as mining is not bandwidth intensive and even satellite latency is good enough to submit the hashes. Its better than other use cases because those other use cases were more expensive than throwing pollution into the atmosphere simple as that.

The entire story that crypto is “taking away” is wrong when it is giving in more cases than not because its the only economical way to mine.

This goes hand in hand with the e-waste fallacy. The hardware doesn't go obsolete if the power costs are low enough, and at the remote power source it is low enough. There is a robust trade of “obsolete” hardware from people that have higher power costs to people that have lower power costs.

Is new single purpose hardware being created for a purpose you don't respect even when confronted with new information? Yes. Is the impact overblown and oversimplified? Yes. Should you make sure the reality doesn't turn into the imagined nightmare? Yes. Remain vigilant, just have more accurate arguments so you know what to watch out for.

> Crypto mining is unique because it is the first thing that requires no infrastructure.

That could not be more wrong. It requires piles of infrastructure: energy generation, transmission, cooling for miners, miners themselves, and so on.

> The entire story that crypto is “taking away” is wrong when it is giving in more cases than not because its the only economical way to mine.

Literally if people stopped wasting a country of power, generating stations would go offline.

> This goes hand in hand with the e-waste fallacy. The hardware doesn't go obsolete if the power costs are low enough, and at the remote power source it is low enough. There is a robust trade of “obsolete” hardware from people that have higher power costs to people that have lower power costs.

Absolutely not a fallacy. People literally throw out old miners and replace them with new miners to get a leg up on their peers. This is the waste. You can't pretend this away. 107 grams worth per transaction.

Are you suggesting crypto mines are colocated with power plants and make up for their energy use with gains in transmission loss? Couldn't a DC in a power plant do some other low bandwidth task instead? Why is crypto a unique "low bandwidth" application?

Again, even if the hardware has a longer life due to "cheaper" energy why is crypto uniquely suited to take advantage of this?

> Is new single purpose hardware being created for a purpose you don't respect even when confronted with new information? Yes. Is the impact overblown and oversimplified? Yes. Should you make sure the reality doesn't turn into the imagined nightmare? Yes. Remain vigilant, just have more accurate arguments so you know what to watch out for.

This kind of cryptic condescension raises red flags for me. If you have information please share it. I am capable of making up my own mind without being talked down to.

Its unique in that it is profitable and all the infrastructure is right there, yes, they are co-located with the energy sources and this will increase. The only roadblock has just been old energy and commodities decision makers being confused about the word bitcoin until they see revenue and sustainability graphs.

Other things just aren't profitable and didnt satisfy anything for the energy provider.

And again, nobody is looking for other things just for the sake of proving that something else can use less energy because there isn't a problem. Computers with no* emissions are reducing emissions and adding a use for energy that was not otherwise going to be used. It is literally the opposite of the story being peddled by pointing at the amount of power being used. This wasn't available beforehand, it isn't important to anyone if “unique” is too strong of a word or not.

*its annoying that I can perceive someone will argue that instead of the rest of the point.

There’s no such thing as magical unused energy that for the first time in history can only be harnessed thanks to the magic of blockchain. You can colocate so many useful things with power supplies, like electric metalworks.

The mining incentive structure and automatic deoptimization of the algorithm mean that there’s a constant arms race to build faster hashing hardware that lasts a few months and then gets thrown out without improving the performance characteristics of the underlying system. 7 transactions per second costs 620kWh and yields 107g of garbage. Each pair of transactions is like chucking your phone out the window and powering a home for 45 days. Do you see how shameful that is?

A Tesla gets 4 miles per kWh, so each pair of transactions - where you scribbled down an IOU into a big multiplayer excel sheet - consumes as much resources as driving round-trip across the United States and throwing your iPhone out when you get back.

The crazy thing is there's frequently a big overlap between the crypto enthusiasts and people who you know, believe in global warming and recycling.

> And again, nobody is looking for other things just for the sake of proving that something else can use less energy because there isn't a problem.

And I bet global warming isn't real either huh? I mean those oil companies aren't looking for alternative sources of energy because there isn't a problem.

The reality is economic incentives beat rationality pretty much every time hands down.

Transactions doesnt mean “transfers”, it means “database operations”, one type of which is a transfer. Other types of which can include a transfer. So these systems are facilitating many more transfers within their transaction limit.

Just a nuance.

Mining does reduce pollution for oil companies. Its low infrastructure demands and longer than you expect shelf life does utilize power that was being unused or wasted. This is the crux of your argument and it is not accurate. You got here because you decided you dont like how that power is now being used after misunderstanding that it wasn't being used, and I dont care.

> Mining does reduce pollution for oil companies.

It is 100% additive. It doesn't reduce pollution for oil companies, at all, in any way. Certainly not when you take into account all the oil consumed to build and deliver all the mining hardware that's turned over to the tune of 12.31kT per year.

Fine say you're right. Show me a single study, a single article, a single write-up from a reputable source that shows bitcoin reduces pollution for oil companies.

> Its low infrastructure demands...

12.3kT of waste per year means a lot of infrastructure relative to what it provides which is basically nothing.

> ...and longer than you expect shelf life

Shelf life?

> ...does utilize power that was being unused or wasted.

No. If that power wasn't being squandered on a multiplayer excel game, it would be used for productive things. The same power cannot be used twice.

> This is the crux of your argument and it is not accurate. You got here because you decided you dont like how that power is now being used after misunderstanding that it wasn't being used, and I dont care.

It is massively, overwhelmingly less efficient than traditional banking and the generated waste and wasted power is purely incremental. If that entire transaction volume moved to traditional rails, the incremental power required to support it would probably be ~one guy on a stationary bike's worth.

VisaNet alone can handle 65,000 transactions per second. 7 is 0.01% of that.

For perspective, bitcoin would require, if scaled linearly, 123 Megatons of e-waste (triple the entire world today put together). It would require 700,000TWh or 23X the entire world's output of electricity. It would also emit 333,000 megatons of CO2. More than 10X the entire world's current output. Just to replace VisaNet. Of course it's physically incapable since even wasting that quantity of resources, the total transaction count would still be 7.

There's no world in which you can rationalize away that it's drastically, overwhelmingly, mind-blowingly less efficient.

Reputable enough article? There are alot of miners doing the same thing and most don’t talk about it for good reason. This allows your view of the world to continue unimpeded

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitco...

In case you can’t access bloomberg here it is over amp

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...

One of your other points that I choose to respond to: The energy use doesn’t scale linearly to transaction activity and is not a prerequisite to the function of a proof of work network

I think there is enough information here to alter your lecture so I’ll wait and see. The rebuttal that I predict will be based on the size is the mining operation in the article, so just assume there are bigger ones doing the same thing.

The solution is to stop gas flaring -- that carbon is still getting emitted into the atmosphere, that solves nothing. If it gets turned into power it could be used for something productive, at least.

> The energy use doesn’t scale linearly to transaction activity and is not a prerequisite to the function of a proof of work network

That's just a nice way of saying the bitcoin network cannot scale, intentionally so. Scaling is antithetical to proof-of-waste. At some point you run out of resources to waste.

Can you elaborate on the carbon hitting the atmosphere part?

It is being converted to power for the onsite computers instead of being flared away. How is that not better than the immediate flaring

> Regarding "e-waste as much as Luxembough", is that really a lot?

Yes.

One global industry having as much output as one of the tiniest countries in the world? Not even a tech heavy or very dense tiny country?

There are simply stronger arguments to lean into...

It's not a global industry, its a 7 tps data store. You can replace it all with a single DynamoDB table.

Do the major crypto runners work towards being more energy efficient, or do they not care at all? Maybe they already sponsor the development of new nuclear power plants.

They work toward making it more energy efficient (by using more optimized miners), but it only results in faster miners, not less electricity consumption. Kind of like how processors of today are several times more efficient than processors a few years ago, but they still have the same TDP.

They cannot make it more efficient because the algorithm adapts to become less efficient. Miners design new hardware and throw out their old hardware as quickly as they can to try and stay one step ahead of their peers, but their peers catch up, the algorithm de-optimizes and the game begins again.

CPUs are able to do more with the same TDP each revision, Bitcoin can only perform the exact same 7 transactions per second no matter how much faster the underlying hardware gets.