> How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That’s a whole lot of data centres.

About 40000 times less I think? That's the figure I saw for a SEPA transfer or Mastercard transaction vs the bitcoin equivalent

The dollar is backed by the petro-dollar, the fact that Saudi Arabia and friends only accept dollars when selling oil is one of the reason the dollar is strong. When you factor in that the US military protects the petro-dollar while at the same time being the biggest consumer on earth of oil, it starts adding up. Europe and therefore the Euro is also protected by the US army. All of a sudden, your fiat's energy consumption is probably much bigger than bitcoin ever will be.

It's not like we'd stop protecting our oil supply if we converted to Bitcoin. We'd still need oil for cars and planes and so on. If we manage to stop using oil, we won't need the military to protect it anymore, even if we haven't converted to Bitcoin.

So I don't think we can lay the military's oil consumption at fiat's feet.

It has nothing to do with protecting the oil supply. The U.S. military is deployed to ensure that oil producing countries don't go and sell their oil for anything other than dollars. Protecting the oil is completely orthogonal.

The dollar being strong or not doesn't change the fact that a transaction in any currency is several orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than with bitcoin.

Source?

It is estimated that the carbon footprint of a single Bitcoin transaction is 660 lbs of CO2 (not a typo), equivalent to that of 670,000 VISA transactions.

The vast majority of BTC mining is done in facilities that are colocated with hydro dams in China, so the CO2 emission is not what you might expect just hearing the number of KWH being used.

You think China is in the habit of building hydroelectric plants in places where no one needs electricity?

Also, a minute with Wikipedia and a calculator will show you that transmission losses for the longest possible straight distance in China are <5%.

I think that the bitcoin mining companies that run in China have a pretty good handle on how to get very low cost electricity, and hydro doesn't produce the CO2 emissions you're so concerned about.

So what's your point?

His point is that crypto mining isn't using some carbon neutral electricity that was just lying around unused. If crypto minors didn't exist that hydro electricity would have been used for something useful. So by mining crypto unless you actually build extra hydro power stations for them you are 100% adding to CO2 emissions.

Hydro dams actually incur significant greenhouse gas emissions especially during the initial fill where all the material that's now submerged rots and produces methane.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06...

I don't think that point is accurate. At best, it makes a ton of assumptions that aren't warranted.

As does the statement that because hydro dams are being used mining is not doing environmental damage.

But that’s not what I said. I said the amount of CO2 being generated was probably not as high as you might expect from a naive reading of the kWh consumed.

Sure, but to truly avoid all naive readings would be to analyse the total impact of constructing the hydro plant in such an out of the way place for the purpose of mining.

There's an emissions cost to producing the equipment required to construct the hydro plant.

There's an emissions cost associated with constructing the hydro plant.

This is multiplied if you are building it in an area without heavy industry (no existing demand, remember?) - because you have to construct your own support infrastructure and road network to build and service the plant.

Not to mention the impact of the now flooded 'wilderness' (which is highly likely to contain carbon sinks).

Or the impact to forestation and vegetation downstream.

All of that may be true. But none of it invalidates my initial statement.

You're arguing with a discussion that didn't happen.

The wider discussion (and this particular thread) was on the environmental cost caused by bitcoin.

And I gave you some input on a specific portion of that.

You then proceeded to excoriate me for not addressing everything in every discussion that has ever happened in your mind about bitcoin.

How many orders of magnitude in the Bitcoin CO2 footprint estimates do you think this vague theory can account for?

Ignoring the masses of people who mine in their own homes - e.g. pool miners on places like nicehash.

If you're talking about bitcoin, most btc is mined in China by Bitmain and one other company.

Right, which is a major problem for the decentralized currency narrative. It also creates a massive incentive for market manipulation to continue keeping prices high enough for them to get ROI on the mining investment.

Yes, that's a huge issue for btc. BTC isn't really a decentralized cryptocurrency anymore.

There are others that are.

No, not bitcoin, other crypto currencies, including monero, eth etc.

Which is a quite different discussion.

not to mention the humans involved in clearing dollar transactions...