> Most of this electricity comes from the cheapest source of power, which is hydro.

This has become almost a religious belief amongst cryptocurrency acolytes, but it's simply not true.

--

Edit: please see my comment¹ and piplikoc's comment² below for more detail on this.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342411

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342366

There are different articles which claim different things. I think the first article is the best.

> The CCAF’s research finds that 76% of ‘hashers’ use renewable energy to power their activities, with hydropower the number one source at 62%. Wind and solar energy meanwhile are used by 17% and 15% respectively. This would appear to be consistent with previous research which estimates that 74% of bitcoins are mined using renewable energy. However, the CCAF’s report specifies that the 76% refers to the share of hashers who use renewable energy at any point. It estimates that only 39% of hashing’s total energy consumption comes from renewables. [1]

> Bitcoin, which is mostly mined with electricity from coal.[2]

> But most bitcoin mining facilities are located in China, which is still heavily reliant on coal-based power. Though the Chinese province of Sichuan is known to attract miners due to its cheap electricity and rich hydropower resources, the level of power generation capacity fluctuates depending on the season. [3]

[1] https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#piano-inline3:~....

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor....

OK, now shutdown the miners and how much of that energy can go to replacing things running off of coal or other non renewable?

Do you deny that hydro is cheap or do you claim that miners choose to use power in more expensive locations?

Cheap is not necessarily renewable, but is often just a cheaper country which in turn tend to be more lenient.

Also, it is wrong to assume that consuming 1GW near a hydroplant is fine. That 1GW would have been sold to someone else, and unless the net has an abundance of renewable energy, a non-renewable plant is going to have to cover for that.

Energy is not fully fungible. Local cheap energy can't be transported for use elsewhere, or else it would already have been.

Which might be a good reason why not every single Bitcoin miner is using hydro. If the expected payoff of mining is big enough to outweigh the increased prices of GPUs and nonrenewable energy, then I might choose not to move my setup to be next to a dam.

The same market effects that apply to factories, research facilities, server farms, etc... also apply to cryptocurrency mining. We can't have our cake and eat it too -- if energy isn't fungible, then not every mining rig is going to be set up using the most efficient power source in the world. Not every miner is going to have the ability to just "choose" to use cheap renewable power, and if mining is still profitable where they are using the power sources available to them, then they're still going to do it.

It's better and cheaper to use locally, but unless you find a plant that is unable to sell capacity, you're taking it from something else.

True, it doesn't make sense to move the power all the way around the world, but that's also not really how things like the synchronous grid of Continental Europe works, where power is traded across 24 countries on a single grid.

If your have cheap renewable energy, when you start selling, excess non-renewable capacity and more expensive plants in general powers down in nearby areas and countries.

Any power taken from a renewable plant there when power price is positive means increased non-renewable output.

> or do you claim that miners choose to use power in more expensive locations?

Both scenarios are very plausible, because if everyone within the market was perfectly efficient in choosing to use the cheapest power sources available, and if hydro was clearly the cheapest way to generate power, then it wouldn't just be being used for Bitcoin, it would be being used for every single portable, power-intensive task in general. We wouldn't be having a conversation about the environment in nearly any manufacturing field.

Given that this isn't happening, given that some things in the world still use coal power, and given that people are still worried about the environmnetal impacts of energy use in general, even though hydro exists -- the obvious conclusion is one of the following:

A) hydro isn't universally the cheapest power source.

B) there are other factors that determine where people will set up operations (taxes, living situation and preferred environment, costs beyond power generation, market saturation to the point that its still profitable to use expensive sources of power).

C) there are still environmental impacts of using a ton of power, even if it came from hydro, and hydro power doesn't just have zero environmental impact.

But obviously something is going on here, because bitcoin isn't special. If hydro power was the savior of power generation, then every single factory in the world would already be using it. But they're not, and it's reasonable to assume that the same market constraints and environmental situations also apply to bitcoin mining.

The fact that we are having an energy debate at all about any industry implies that something about the energy market, it's pricing, and its environmental impacts is more complicated than you're making it sound.

Miners don't care/get a choice. They plug their machines into the nearest wall socket.

Not true. We have actively sought the cheapest electricity sources for our rigs. I guess it depends on the scale you're operating at, but you're not going to be too profitable plugging into your apartment wall socket here in Central London @ 20p/kWh!

People still do it in California with power rates as high as $0.40/kWh or more.

This is not true. Miners are sophisticated business enterprises that select mining farm locations carefully based on access to cheap power and natural cooling. People signing their gaming rig into the network aren't a factor.

> This is not true. Miners are sophisticated business enterprises that select mining farm locations carefully based on access to cheap power and natural cooling.

Miners were supposed to be everyday Joe’s.

Patently false. I do a lot of contracting work for miners, they specifically tune their operations to the power cost of an area and in variable rate loads will switch off miners during peak costs. $/kWh is a big concern for actual mining operations, maybe not for people with one or two rigs in their basement.

For some reason I imagine that you are not managing e.g. Chinese mining operations.

Everyone will look for cheapest power, but that on its own does not make it renewable.

Plus, regardless of your source, as long as you haven't built your own plant, the grid has to cover for the loss. If there isn't an abundance of renewable energy on the grid, then the operation wasn't neutral at all.

You're correct, I'm dealing with exclusively American operations or American operations run by foreign entities. Most have relocated to explicitly get onto hydro. YMMV, but that's been my experience.

> I do a lot of contracting work for miners

Selection bias. I don't doubt that the miners who are investing god knows how much is necessary to _require a contractor_ will have scaled enough to need to concern themselves with cost of electricity, but the _majority_ of miners are not going to be those people, surely?

Requiring a contractor isn't a big ask. All it takes is not knowing someone who has networking chops. I work regularly with around 10 mining operations, 8 of them explicitly relocated to get on hydro because of how inexpensive it is. These guys care deeply about getting the most kWh for their money, because they still have to deal with turning a profit, and anyone who doesn't understand that has not actually dealt with real Bitcoin mining operations.

Majority of miners are companies trying to make a profit. Every variable is a consideration, like location, energy source, cost and so on.

The small mining operations run by the common person has almost no impact in the scale of the network.

Maybe in the beginning but today miners make lots of choices about where to build/expand their operations based on energy costs, government policies, energy source and more.

Maybe not individuals, but large one must think economy.

Bitcoiners use the cheapest energy they can find in place where they can cheaply install hash power.

Some of that may be hydro. A lot is coal.

Even when they do use green energy, the effect of doing that is to displace other users onto dirtier forms of energy, thus creating just as much pollution anyway.

Bitcoin is not green in any way whatsoever. Bitcoin specifically wastes energy, by design. This is never green. The first principle of green energy is to use less energy, as no energy is clean.

There's no one to displace. That's why the energy is cheap. Supply and demand.

This is just not true in the vast majority of cases.

"Surplus energy" is another lie bitcoiners like to spread about this. Sure, there might be a few occasions where bitcoin mining might use surplus energy.

In the vast majority of cases, no, they are not doing that. That is just not a thing.

If you're going to question the validity of an assertion please provide more than just a counterassertion.

You could say that to GP who just dismissed a published study without actually taking on any of the claims made therein.

They questioned the methodology specifically. So it's not just an assertion.

...of a published study. The only reason people are defending GP now is because the subject is BTC.

Just because it's a published study does not mean it's infallible. Please see my reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342411

Your counter is just as flawed as you have no way to verify any miners are using renewables. Power transmission is a thing (California does it) and if we weren’t using the power to mine BTC it could be used to power other things. Again, people are only arguing for BTC on this site because it’s hacker news, nothing else.

> Your counter is just as flawed as you have no way to verify any miners are using renewables.

Then any "published study" on this topic is automatically going to be flawed as well?

More like since renewables are not commonplace and it costs money to move its easier to believe they are not using renewables.

You can of course believe whatever seems easy to you, but you do realize that I linked to a published study that says miners are using renewables far more than the US does on average, don't you?

32% of miners use renewables. That’s not even a majority amongst miners.

Good point, thanks - I'm using CCAF's 3rd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study as the source for my assertion: https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternati...

Their research indicates that a minority of mining is done using renewable resources:

> The survey findings estimate that on average 39% of proof-of-work mining is powered by renewable energy, primarily hydroelectric energy.

It also specifically addresses this popular claim of mining being powered mostly by renewables:

> China’s oversupply of hydroelectric energy during the rainy season has often been used as evidence in claims that a vast majority of mining is powered by environment-friendly power sources. While it is true that the Chinese government’s strategy to ensure energy self-sufficiency has led to the development of massive hydropower capacity, the same strategy has driven public investments in the construction of large-scale coal mines. Like hydroelectric power plants, these coal power plants often generate surpluses. It should not come as a surprise then that a significant share of hashers in the region equally report using both hydropower and coal energy to power their operations.

The article seems to use the country average emissions per kWh for the US and China (it's hard to tell because the first reference is a 404, the other is 400+ pages, the final one is definitely country average numbers).

A cursory Google search says the percentage of renewable energy in the US and China is ~11% and ~23% respectively. The disparity between that and an average of 39% for crypto mining specifically does not seem to be factored in.

I think you're right, they do note this as a limitation of their study due to insufficient data:

> The great unanswered question faced when exploring cryptodamages is that while we can identify select geographic hotspots of production we currently do not know in the aggregate where the electricity used in cryptocurrency mining is physically produced. This is because we, like Krause and Tolaymat, do not know the physical locations of cryptocurrency miners, whether individuals, groups or aggregates in, say, a region or country. There is considerable evidence of concentration of mining operations in particular locations, typically where reliable electricity is cheaply available, though, precise data are lacking. In the US, perhaps the most well-known concentration is the Mid-Columbia Basin area in central and eastern Washington State, where cheap electricity is produced by hydropower along the Columbia River, however, mining in other US locations also occurs. There is also evidence of large mining camps in China. With time and emergent research there may be improved information about the amounts of electricity devoted to mining cryptocurrencies for particular locations or regions, but it is currently not available.

It would be interesting to see the results of their analysis if recalculated using the more granular CCAF survey data.

Is the responsibility not on the person making the assertion to provide evidence?

Onus probandi

Otherwise nonsense claims can easily destroy the discussion by DoSing the opposition.

That's not how it works. If I claim the moon is made of cheese and someone says he doesn't believe me, the onus is on me to prove it is, not on them that it isn't.

The burden is on both people making statements/claims.

Isn’t that exactly what the original comment was doing?

I see that claim about hydro all the time but I've never seen a quantitative study, can you link one?

According to the BBC, a recent survey found that Bitcoin is powered by two-thirds fossil: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56215787

Inner Mongolia just announced it will shut down Bitcoin miners, apparently on climate grounds: https://news.bitcoin.com/chinas-inner-mongolia-plans-to-shut...

Without BTC miners using this cheap power, it could be used to replace coal and gas plants.

No, without those miners, the energy supply wouldn't have increased in the first place. In the energy market, demand drives supply, not the other way around. It's very uncommon to spend money on converting energy supply from coal/gas to other sources, as it doesn't make sense in terms of money for the companies. Instead they focus on creating new supply with renewables.

So we built hydro plants and disrupted the local ecosystems to run bitcoin miners?

No, organizations built hydro plants for whatever reason in places where supply ended up higher than demand, driving down the prices. With that move, Bitcoin miners saw the opportunity and placed themselves within that ecosystem.

Bitcoin miners don't put their operations in the middle of nowhere and then ask someone to build hydro plants...

> without those miners, the energy supply wouldn't have increased in the first place.

> So we built hydro plants [...] to run bitcoin miners?

> No, organizations built hydro plants for whatever reason in places where supply ended up higher than demand

So... by that logic, it seems that Bitcoin didn't increase the energy supply then.

> In the energy market, demand drives supply

> Bitcoin miners don't put their operations in the middle of nowhere and then ask someone to build hydro plants...

So now the demand follows the supply?

Bitcoin mining demand is a small subset of energy demand.

Energy is not an infinite resource. The energy used to mine bitcoin could have been used for something else instead.

That’s not true at all. There is a huge amount of stranded power. Electricity is not fungible across large distances. Otherwise people in Texas wouldn’t be paying $9,000 per mwh during the storm— power certainly didn’t cost that much in other states then.

That’s a function of the rather peculiar decision of Texas not to connect to the rest of the grid.

Every neighboring state is connected to the eastern power grid, which can transfer power from the Mexican border to Vermont.

WRT Texas, that was a deliberate political choice rather than physics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmi...

Texas is a pretty disingenuous and cherry picked example considering they deliberately siloed themselves off from the other two major power grids of the country. Energy within a power grid is fairly fungible.

That was a political decision. Having your own grid means that you also have your own power frequency regulation, and importing power from a different network is not as simple as connecting wires - you need to connect them using DC instead of AC. These transfer points (interchanges) are sized just for temporary power import or export, you cannot use them to power the whole Texas grid. You can see more details about the interconnects here: https://www.eia.gov/realtime_grid/#/status

lol yes it is, texas is huge btw, but also has no interconnects with the rest of the grid, hence the price rise at a time of zero supply and high demand

My initial reaction was skepticism. So the numbers I found were 121 TWhs consumed by Bitcoin annually. Hydro power produces 4200 TWhs annually of a total electricity production of 25,000 TWhs. Assuming all Bitcoin mining is powered by hydro, a 97% untilization for hydro doesn't seem far-fetched.

So what do you propose we do? Do we create the energy police and tell people what you can and cannot do with energy? Do we stop people from mindlessly browsing the internet?

This argument really annoys me because, bitcoin has a purpose, I can buy things with bitcoin, just take a walk in Huaqiangbei and see how many shops accept bitcoin, talk to the people who's governments failed their national currency and they will agree the energy we spend on bitcoin helps them.

Until btc is replaced with a POS crypto currency like cardano[1] the energy we spend on btc is worth it for the people using it.

[1]https://ucarecdn.com/8673f817-d83b-441a-8281-45e8ae68bbec/-/...

Sounds like a naïve view.

There's a limit of how far you can transport electricity, the majority of methane gas burnt and wasted.

Mining gold could be used on other things, energy going into dropping bombs could be used for other things... sadly it's just idealism.

Not fully necessarily given how local energy is. There's only so many things you can do in cheap-energy places, especially without much bigger and less potentially temporary investments.

All of humanity uses the energy equivalent of ~50 lbs of matter each day.

There's way more energy available to us than biological humans will ever use.

Energy is not an infinite resource. If you use up that energy to <insert activity>, it could have been used for something else instead.

Ugh this is such a tired argument. Energy used to watch TV could be used for something else instead. What is this mystical “something else” which couldn’t be powered because Bitcoin was using up all the electricity, and what good fortune would it have brought us?

Well this something else is usually just nothing. Demand drives electricity production.

Yes this discussion has happened hundreds of times on HN at this point.

> "Bitcoin uses too much energy[1]"

> "It's only using surplus energy which would go to waste anyway[2][3]"

> "But it still has an environmental impact [4]"

I guess I'm just tired of seeing the same things repeated on every single thread about Bitcoin. When I saw a lazy comment like OPs, I overreacted, sorry.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#:~:text=Cambrid.... [2] https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-in-the-wilderness-11553... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor....

Your articles don't support your stance. I work with people who handle surplus electricity with mobile mining operations -- they're few and far between.

The use of bitcoin, a speculative good, as a sink for electricity creates less pressure for grids to manage electricity production (especially as the acceptable spot price trends towards the commercial price of electricity). It also ignores the innovative ideas that are geographically bound like storing potential energy by pumping water into dams.

The idea that bitcoin only uses surplus energy is disprovable just by looking at the regularity of block completion. If it were dependent on an irregular source like surplus electricity, you wouldn't see that.

If you are arguing that bitcoin is using a significant amount of overflow hydro power, I'd like to check your sources.

First Law of Thermodynamics anyone?

Yes there is a lot of power being used to mine crypto, I mine but it is done on a system that I would normally have running 24/7 regardless of mining. Yes large mining specific "server" or "ASIC" farms use alot of energy but so does every other serverfarm. Maybe we should be talking about the energy cost of watching Pr0n, or TikTok videos both of whic IMHO provide far less benifit to society.

Did you read the article, or just the abstract? Do you have any specific points to refute or insights to add? Or is your comment not constructive and just sensationalist propaganda? And I ask this as someone who would benefit from BTC going up relative to USD.

They clearly didn't, since the study acknowledged that issue:

"The survey findings estimate that on average 39 per cent of proof-of-work mining is powered by renewable energy" according to https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternati...

Even if this were true, hydro also has an environmental cost, doubly so if the demand from crypto is causing hydro to be constructed in places where it cannot be used for other purposes (which is often a linked claim).

Hydro may be clean, but it still has environmental costs.

Concrete and destruction of ecosystems and changes in water systems can all have negative impacts on the planet.

And that is the best case scenario

Why is such as a man-made change necessarily net negative impact on the planet? It may have both negative and positive impacts. Maybe the new dam allows other species to migrate in and increase diversity. It is complicated, depends on circumstances etc.

> Most of this electricity comes from the cheapest source of power, which is hydro.

This is not actually true. And even if it were, it is irrelevant. If crypto uses green energy, it displaces other users to use more dirty energy.

The environmental cost of crypto is not that of the energy it uses, it is that of the dirtiest energy it displaces other users onto.

(Crypto also uses massive amounts of dirty energy directly. The idea that crypto uses green energy is basically a lie.)

> If crypto uses green energy, it displaces other users to use more dirty energy.

"I bought a solar panel and AC converter to consume less from the grid. Oops, because of that now I am displacing my neighbours to use more dirty energy. How silly of me."

Seriously your argument makes no sense. How does one minor consumer of green energy displace you from doing the same?

Bitcoin mining facilities do not install their own solar panels. They use energy from the grid, that would otherwise go to other users if bitcoin miners did not destroy it.

Lets not forget opportunity cost. That may be hydro power but it's offsetting green power consumption.

How much damage is the current financial system responsible for?

Whataboutism has no place in any intelligent discourse.

If you think this “scientific” study qualifies as a contributor to intelligent discourse think again.

Pray tell, which part is it that you find fault with?

It assumes the value of Bitcoin is in the mining of new coins. The network also has value as a ledger to record transfers of Bitcoin (billions per day) which contributes to the value of the network

The analysis can be generalized to say anything that uses 0.05 electricity creates these large harms. Perhaps true, but it’s not going to be unique to Bitcoin

This. This bad argument about value of cryptocurrencies being mining, lack of perspective and policy proposals in the paper are the most obvious signs of bias.

I love how most of the criticisms of this study amount to saying putting the word scientific in quotes and calling it a day.

For every dollar spent building a train station there are $50 dollars of health and climate damages.

This ignores the USE of the train station, and just focuses on energy costs to build it.

This study is only focused on mining new coins. Heads up, some of the (wildly inflated) value of bitcoin is tied to (arguable) uses and the ability of the blockchain to operate as a non-repudiation public ledger that allows global transfer of value with strong guarantees totally independent of any other central party.

Some quick math.

1 bitcoin is lets say worth $50,000. Let's assume $10K in electricity to mine this. So for every $1 in bitcoin, you need 20 cents of electricity.

Reduced to it's simplest, the claim here is that for every 20 cents of electricity, there is another 50 cents of health impacts.

Fair enough, but if you believe this, then a lot of other things have huge damages.

Right, other things have huge damages too.

Pointing out other things also have an environmental impact just dilutes the discussion about Bitcoin and doesn't add anything to it.

And neither is highlighting bitcoin, especially by focusing ONLY on the mining aspect of it. The use of the network is also part of the bitcoin story. If instead of using new bitcoins mined they did transaction value per day (ie, $20B+) the math would be totally different.

If you applied this same damage model to something people had fondness for (ie, driving an electric car) you'd realize we should be working as HARD as we can to kill EV cars dead, because there is a MASSIVE unaccounted for cost to charging them (using this model).

Reality though is bitcoin chases low cost power, and that is currently often actually green (hydro, excess solar during day when their is curtailment and negative pricing etc). I can't imagine the economics making sense to mine using coal power.

What good would transaction value per day be? This is like counting your salary twice, once when you earn it, once when you spend it, lol.

Because the transactional ledger of bitcoin is what is driving electricity use, and another statement might be, for every $1 transacted on the bitcoin ledger, 0.0005 dollars in health damage is caused. (it's roughly a factor of 1000 more volume then new mining, and over time new mining is going to get smaller and smaller)

You mean the mining isn't driving electricity use?

Ordinarily I would agree, but in this case there are two potential systems and “which of these two uses the least energy” is a relevant question.

(I’m extremely skeptical about PoW crypto of all types, BTC included; this is just about the reasonableness of this specific argument).

The question is valid - it would be interesting to see the comparison. To get some perspective as to how big of a problem cryptocurrency consumption really is.

Please compare and contrast the status quo with the crypto alternative.

I hate this blanket method of dismissing when someone points out that all available alternatives to something are also bad

What about intelligent discourse about whataboutism?

Actually, more of -that- would be grand ...

(Imagine! Politics! ...)

a "Whataboutism" is just a comparison the reader doesn't like

This isn't whataboutism, it's a valid question considering BTC is touted as a replacement for the financial system and ostensibly performs a similar function with an alternative infrastructure. If the premise is that we should stop BTC mining and processing simply because it costs $X dollars (code pun intended) per transaction, then the price of alternatives is germane to the discussion.