Another major error they made, is that they assume that Bitcoin mining uses grid energy and assume that it follows the CO2 emissions of electricity generation in that country.

This is completely wrong. Most mining happens currently on underutilized hydropower stations, because grid energy or fossil fuels wouldn't be as profitable. Because of the mining difficulty adjustment and diminishing returns in improving ASIC hardware, the only way to profit is to find cheaper energy sources than all other miners.

In the long term, Bitcoin mining accelerates the development of abundant and cheap energy, which is not fossil fuels.

> In the long term, Bitcoin mining accelerates the development of abundant and cheap energy, which is not fossil fuels.

Yes, but does it reduce the total reliance on fossil fuels? If we start with X coal plants and build a Y hydro plants to support btc mining, we're still running the original X coal plants.

I suspect by "develop" the parent comment did not refer to the construction of power plants but to the improvement of the technology. Like in "Research & Development".

Have you got any non-trivial examples/plans of that happening beyond btc mining speeding up the existing "we need to solve this so fewer people die" process?

Bitcoin mining can possibly finance the building of new solar / wind farms without government subsidies. In time, mining will become less profitable and it makes sense to sell the energy to grid. Obviously, fossil fuel energy should be taxed more heavily to get rid of it faster.

That sounds like trickle down economics idea. It's possible of course... But is it more likely than people taking out their btc gains and buying a yacht instead?

>In the long term, Bitcoin mining accelerates the development of abundant and cheap energy, which is not fossil fuels.

It incentivises stealing electricity because you can't beat free.

Not sure why this is downvoted. I have a friend whose primary reason for mining was that he shared his electricity bill with the restaurant downstairs so it was very profitable for him.

Same reason why goldbugs votedown Gresham's law. It's not comfortable for someone to call out your world view, especially with centuries worth of observation to back it up.

>This is completely wrong. Most mining happens currently on underutilized hydropower stations, because grid energy or fossil fuels wouldn't be as profitable.

Could you provide a source for this?

This is really interesting. I wonder if we could invent a coin that can only be mined through renewable energy. This could be the incentive people need to move off of carbon.

The good thing is that renewable is the cheapest source of energy, which means that Bitcoin is that coin. However, it depends on location, and currently hydropower is the most lucrative if you can find an already built, but underutilized plant. Bitcoin gives away $250,000 to miners every 10 minutes, which is a good incentive for new energy developments.

That is only really accurate if the electricity used would somehow disappear were it not for the mining. Electricity (minus the energy lost in transport etc etc) is zero-sum. If the miner uses hydro, that means someone further from the dam is using coal, methane etc as the hydro company isn't selling excess on the grid.

Energy is finite on the grid, so yes mining takes energy which could have been used for (arguably) better purposes

Not here in Iceland we have more electricity than we have use for, it goes to bitcoin mining or it goes to aluminum smelting. No connection to the outside world grid.

Could go to H2 production and export.

That's just bitcoin mining with extra steps.

If you thought your comment made sense, I have to tell you that it does not.

Furthermore, they assume that Bitcoin will follow "the adoption trends of other broadly used technologies", which is unlikely to happen. Even the cryptocommunity is starting to accept that Bitcoin has effectively failed as a payment network.

> Even the cryptocommunity is starting to accept that Bitcoin has effectively failed as a payment network.

It’s got that sweet hype-commodity power though.

Although what can I say, when I saw my non-tech family talking about it I assumed it was dead. That was at $3000. I know nothing.

Bitcoin has value because people want it. People want it because they predict it will increase in value. They predict it will increase in value because it increased in the past.

I have no idea if or when that circle will break but I can't believe that it will last I definitely.

I'd assume at this point people want it as a hedge against inflation tbh. So people want it so their fiat money won't decrease in value is more accurate.

I thought it was more of a crypto lottery frankly. A whole bunch of people started buying it and it's become like this gigantic game of chicken, where you don't want to be left holding worthless BTC.

If we hadn't just had lots of institutional money moving into Bitcoin within the last year (see https://bitcointreasuries.org) I'd be inclined to agree.

However I don't think institutions of this size and nature buy millions of dollars worth without some sort of analysis and strategy.

I thought you were going to say: JPMC, Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, etc. The vast bulk of it are crypto currency companies.

Instead it's basically $186 million from Square and $5 billion from a questionable Microstategery investment decision.

JPMC has trillions under management, seems like they would want to invest, right? Or are they worried that Tether is currently untethered to reality?

who knows what those biggies do, I'm sure they don't publish their moves out in the open like this nor do I think they hold actual coin. They're probably just holding option positions on CBOE and CME.

Fuck tether though.

> Bitcoin has effectively failed as a payment network.

To fail, all of the 2nd layer networks have to fail, and it has to keep its position of a store of value, keeping transaction costs out of reach of regular folk.

If tomorrow there was a big price crash back to $1, and all transactions dried up, it would have a 2nd shot at being a payment network.

I agree with that, but then with that the case, it seems like madness that Bitcoin has any value at all.

> Even the cryptocommunity is starting to accept that Bitcoin has effectively failed as a payment network.

Where are you seeing evidence of this?

I don't have proof for the larger community but I was very interested in bitcoin at 2012-2015 and it really did seem like it was going to be a real alternative, all the big companies were starting to accept bitcoin but now its all gone.

Almost nowhere accepts bitcoin anymore because they failed to solve the issue that transactions cost on the level of dollars to process so its only useful as a speculative investment and not a practical currency.

In hindsight it makes a lot of sense. The cost of a transaction for Bitcoin is always going to be higher than just updating a value in Visa’s database. Visa may have some increased costs due to consumer protections, but consumers are pretty clearly willing to shoulder the cost.

Weren't Ethereum and Cardano supposed to solve some of those problems?

I have never heard of Cardano and Ethereum seemed to market itself as a way to run the internet and government inside of blockchain while the reality was it was never used for anything but speculative investment.

Cryptos have basically burned the idea and the general public will probably not care of any future solution since all of the previous ones were scams or not very useful.

These cryptos all promise the world and deliver nothing.

Ethereum is producing insane value.

For example, Uniswap is a decentralized exchange living on top of Ethereum that frequently has volume higher than Coinbase. A couple years ago that was the "end vision". Now it's an everyday reality.

Loans, mutual fund like assets, lending etc. The ecosystem is booming.

Ethereum is absolutely fulfilling it's mission.

https://defipulse.com

If everyone else is getting the same dozen daily scam emails related to Ethereum that I am, I'd have to assume that it has irreparably harmed the currency's reputation.

The price surge we're seeing and have seen. More and more people are holding BTC like gold, so when the value rises their pockets get fatter. Not for any payment, just investment.

I even see it myself, and I don't speak for anyone in that community. I bought some BTC ~4 years ago to buy something and did the math on current value. It's kind of shocking.

The number of transactions are limited by block size though so each completed block has a maximum number of transactions it can include.. also securing the blockchain isn't an end unto itself it's only really useful when it includes transactions.

The true statement is "We consumed this amount of power and were able to process this amount of transactions" but the power usage does not scale with transactions. You could increase the block size and get far more transactions without changing the power usage because the power is not used to process transactions.

> You could increase the block size

It's not that simple. As I recall the last time a block size change was proposed it fractured the entire community and produced a splinter "currency".

Its technically very simple but politically very difficult. The point I am making is that the power usage is not directly tied to transactions. Not making a transaction on the blockchain will not save X watts because that power is burned regardless of what transactions are going through.

An example would be that me not driving to the beach saves some fuel but bitcoin is just a train constantly driving to the beach and back regardless of how much I use it. You could grab the number of trips and the power usage and calculate a power usage per trip but its not an entirely useful metric since the power usage does not scale up as more people use the service.

The splinter fractured and has his own little splinter too now!

Without a backlog of high fee paying transactions, Bitcoin mining becomes unstable, as discussed at [1].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5306354.0

Segregated Witness (SegWit) was activated in July 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit And overlays like the Lightning network have been in use for even less time.

The amount of energy spent does not depend on number of transactions nor how much is needed to secure the blockchain, it's purely determined by how much miners are willing to spend, which is mostly determined by the bitcoin price. So, if you would expect the amount of energy spent on mining to scale with any variable, it would be trading price and price alone.

This is it. Amount of energy spent = profits from mining / cost of energy.

While price is the main factor affecting profits, fees/volume and the constantly decreasing block reward also play a part.

You mean peer reviewers of Nature did a bad job?

This was a Comment (dated October 2018), not a paper.

Also, it was not published in "Nature", it was published in "Nature Climate Change".

Now "Nature" (the publisher) has many journals, and many of them has a name that starts with "Nature", but they are different journals, with different teams and different qualities. https://www.nature.com/siteindex#journals-N

So Nature publishes comments without reviewing them?

It very much seems like they do, doesn't it?

That assumption is wrong. Take it as a single data point about the reliability of their peer review process. EDIT: I really mean that is a single data point. A usually reputable publisher can make mistake sometimes.

If you are suggesting to make inference from a single data point, you kind of proving the necessity of peer review.

I was suggesting the opposite.

Yes, see, here we have respect for science only if a) it is our specific field, or b) fits average tech bro sensibilities. Obviously, we are completely objective and not emotional or biased, because we know JavaScript.

Not only is peer review not some omniscient god, Nature isn't exactly flawless either. Plenty of top tier journals fuck up all the time.

peer review is not infallible. Stop worshipping it.

Nobody was "worshipping" it, and nobody has asserted that it's infallible; that being the case, your comment is entirely content-free.

Implying that they cannot do a bad job is an assertion in infallibility.

Who implied that? I didn't.

Do you have a better concept?

I think their implication is that you'd simply make use of peer review without treating it as infallible.

Treating something or someone as infallible contradicts the basic principles of science.

So then you must agree, "Peer reviewers of Nature did a bad job" is a poor dismissal of their criticisms

That was my question; glad you saw it; it's still unanswered; providing testable evidence for a claim is another basic principle of science; if the article or the reviewers are wrong, the top commenter has to give them a chance to recognise that by providing evidence for review.

I'm not following your point anymore. I wish you would just explain your criticism instead of making these snarky comments.

What snarky comments? I asked a question. You even quoted it. There is no reason to become aggressive.

All your comments are snarky!

If you're polite and respectful to people, they respond better. Give it a try. :-)

And your comment could be taken as condescending. I don't see how that adds anything to the discussion.

A wiki

Then anyone can correct mistakes

I wouldn't publish the results of my multi year scientific effort on a platform "anyone" could make changes. Reviewer are expected to have a suitable qualification and experience and no bias. The publisher knows the reviewers and can select suitable ones. In a wiki, where anyone can publish or change anything without control, the scientific level - at least in certain areas - will inevitably level down. There is no perfect system, but there are many worse than we already have.

> no bias.

Is that a joke? Have you ever been in academia? Bias is everywhere. Bias towards certain hypotheses, political outlooks, methods, etc. The more senior someone is in a field, the more biased they tend to be! I've seen the founder of a field vote to reject a paper because it was "already known" because he skimmed the paper and misread it. There are entire fields of Alzheimer's research that are suppressed because they don't work with the Field's Favorite Aggregating Protein. I've witnessed people add spin to the conclusion section of a paper so that it looks less politically incorrect, and I've also witnessed that this step is both necessary and effective for getting a "dicey" paper published. Get out of here if you're going to assert that scientists are these objective Vulcan types that are "above the fray". They are some of the most "biased" and opinionated people in existence!!

> Have you ever been in academia?

Yes, did several studies and also a PhD with a Nobel laureat and some publications. I don't claim our present system is perfect; it's far from it; but I don't know a better one; thus my question: Do you have a better concept?

There are plenty of other options, the one I'll focus on is already is in widespread use: science seems to progress fine using only preprints. It is the norm in physics and becoming the norm for biology to read the preprint of a paper long before it is published in a journal. Official peer review adds very little value over this system.

But it cannot always remain a preprint; at some point the author must decide on the definitive version and publish it; citing a preprint is also problematic if it is in fact a "moving target"; preprints, however, have a decisive advantage: one has published more quickly and can make subsequent corrections.

EDIT: Preprints are actually not a replacement, but essentially loosen the submission deadline and increase the number of (potential) reviewers. But even with this, many disadvantages you criticise still exist; the public reviewers not appointed by the publisher can also be wrong, and the outcry of indignation can be so loud that the author's superiors enforce a withdrawal of the publication.

>I wouldn't publish the results of my multi year scientific effort on a platform "anyone" could make changes.

Publishing is taken far too importantly in academia

>Reviewer are expected to have a suitable qualification and experience and no bias

But they do not. My last paper was rejected when the reviewers hardly understood the basics of the topic. And I have been assigned papers to review about topics I have never worked on

>In a wiki, where anyone can publish or change anything without control, the scientific level - at least in certain areas - will inevitably level down.

Not every edit needs to be approved

Open source with pull requests was not so bad for software quality

>There is no perfect system, but there are many worse than we already have.

The current system is especially bad. It takes to much time to find the papers, read the papers, write the papers, and review the papers

That’s a terrible response.

Why?

You can criticize something without having a replacement.

And how is that supposed to help us in this case? It doesn't have to be a "replacement", but at least some suggestions for improvement; just rejecting without any suggestions is not constructive.

So “no”.

Yeah “per transaction” cost is calculated by taking total energy expenditure rate divided by the transaction rate.

It’s a mistake to assume that the ratio is the thing that’s fixed. Energy expenditure is related to fees and the blockchain reward.

It's a mistake to assume energy source composition too. I would guess that a majority of mining is renewable right now (mining is a perfect sink of intermittent excess energy, and because its profitability is related to energy cost, renewables win). More so in the future.

The capital expenditure is sufficient that it still makes sense to run the miners 24/7 and not try to take advantage of cheap electricity - although that does matter somewhat when deciding where to place the data center.

This is true of pretty much every industrial process. The idea of running production only when the sun is shining to absorb excess solar seems like a universally poor idea.

Rarely industrial process can switch on and off randomly and still scale revenue linearly.

The capital expenditure argument makes sense when mining is the primary business. Using old and otherwise unprofitable (but cheap) hardware makes sense where there is intermittent excess energy.

Having cheap energy 50% of the time is still better than 0% of the time.

Of course, that goes without saying.

The amount of energy wasted depends on how high the block reward and the transaction fees are. The block reward is going down over time and transaction fees are unlikely to grow beyond a practical maximum.

Transaction fees will have to go up to compensate, else Bitcoin will become insecure as its resistance to 51% attacks falls below critical levels. See discussion at [1].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5306354.0

It's worse than that. The assumption is that Bitcoin transactions eventually become the world's payment system. Then this is multiplied by Bitcoin's very inefficient work per transaction.

ok, but I can't help but think there must be some relatively negligible energy cost per transaction that nonetheless might be not so negligible when total number of transactions added together - what that energy cost is I wouldn't be able to say.

It really is negligible compared to mining, like a factor of a million or billion.

Welcome to progressive politics. Science and logic do not matter. They will use climate change to take your chosen store of value. Because your chosen store of value reduces their power over you. Pretty simple, really.