Use a proof-of-stake NFT!

Done! Here you go:

https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a...

Suraurwanda, meaning “visit Rwanda” in honor of the growing tourism sector in Rwanda, was born into Mafunzo’s group on Nov. 30, 2018. His mother is Taraja, and because Mafunzo is the only adult male of the group, we do not need genetic testing to prove he is the father.

Just make a NFT with pen and paper

"Buy this sticky note it'll save the whales"

It's basically trading cards to save the whales, yeah. Nothing wrong with abusing the collector attitude to raise money for charity.

Right, but then it actually does (or meaningfully helps), which is, I guess, the prestige.

Not that much compared to other direct or indirect causes.

Uh... Selling a single token? 8.7MWh[1]

That's slightly less than the average US household consumes in a year.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-hot-effect-earth-climate/

This assumes that climate change/ CO2 is a significant impact on the gorilla populations.

In reality, bushmeat consumption, logging, farming, and mining are the main drivers or gorilla population losses.

Creating a token does not consume any additional energy. Transaction volume does _not_ scale with mining so it's a really bad comparison.

The energy is spent to secure the network regardless of how many transactions are processed (in practice, transaction volume is pretty much fixed in terms of "bytes of transactions")

Bitcoin alone currently pollutes about the same as half the global airline industry. If cryptos really are the future, I weep for the planet.

The thing is, it doesn't have to.

Bitcoin (and all other Proof-of-Work cryptos, which is basically all the major ones) only consume tons of power because the incentive to mine creates an arms race where whoever has the most hashing power makes the most money.

Bitcoin could be run on a single computer mining on a 10 year old CPU, but then it would be highly centralized, and decentralization is touted as one of the greatest features of Bitcoin. But with the incentive to run your own miner(s), and make it/them as powerful as you can to get the largest piece of the block reward pie, it ends up being a massive energy sink.

That's why people are pushing for the change to Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum. By taking away the incentive to waste tons of power on mining, it drastically reduces the carbon footprint of it.

Luckily mining with renewables is much less difficult technically than flying with renewables.

Energy is fungible. Bitcoin using renewables just means that other electricity consumers are using fossil fuels.

Energy is extremely difficult and expensive to store, it's not fungible over a time period. This is why energy rates fluctuate during the day. It's also not fungible between consumers not connected to the same grid.

When generating energy (either with fossil fuels or renewables) energy is often wasted because there is no immediate consumer or way to store it.

What you say _can_ be true, for example additional consumers of energy on the national grid, during times of high demand, will likely result in more energy production. It is not true as a rule though.

Also much less useful.

How is that lucky?

Lucky for Bitcoin, there's a clear path to reducing environmental impact.

Or we could use that power for something a little more practical which we can’t do without.

Are you advocating for some sort of central authority who regulates what individuals use power for?

We already have that for large classes of equipment.

And you want to extend that to any device that plugs into an outlet?

Just trying to get your position straight here.

It already does, if a particular regulated activity involves plugging devices into outlets.

> Just trying to get your position straight here.

What else might we think you were doing?

> It already does, if a particular regulated activity involves plugging devices into outlets.

Can you be more specific about the existing regulated activities you're talking about? I don't get your point but I might just be missing something here. AFAIK, the reasons for existing regulations on "activities or devices" are not related to electrical usage..

What we? These are individuals, each with their own goals. Give them some other business opportunity and I'm sure they'll jump on it - it just needs to be as good as Bitcoin.

My (and others) livelihood depends on the existence of crypto currency. Seems pretty practical to me.

Is that true? That's shockingly more than I would have imagined

The network is not secured if you just offload the externality to the international electrical grid. You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.

Not sure I understand your argument, because there are externalities the network is not secured? All consumption of power created by fossil fuels has negative externalities. Also, there's no requirement that miners are on the grid (lots of mining operations use off-grid excess power that cannot be stored).

> You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.

What? I'm not sure what models you're referring to

Has there been any movement in the crypto world (that isn’t just creating new coins) towards switching algorithms such that BTC et al don’t use proof of work anymore?

Stellar (https://stellar.org/) uses a novel Byzantine agreement protocol (https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol?lo...) which practically eliminates it in comparison.

It is also insanely cheap (like $1... and even that is just "held" in the account and can be released later) to "mint" a new coin and thus is practically perfect for NFTs.

It's seen as sort of a joke in the crypto world by those who are only trying to make a buck (price of XLM, used for paying transaction fees, is relatively stable compared to others) but I think it's one of the few cryptos out there that has a chance of making a real difference in the world long term.

Stellar is centralized though, so it completely misses the point.

Anyone can participate in consensus, but you do have to be trusted by someone else who already participates in the trusted consensus, so you're right that it's not completely decentralized (but is also not strictly centralized either).

Here's a current visualization of how many participants there are: https://stellarbeat.io/

Ethereum is switching to proof of stake. AFAIK (not a crypto guy) it's the second largest blockchain.

More relevant to the question at hand, Ethereum is also where all the NFTs are.

Bitcoin is extremely resistant to change.

Ethereum is what all the articles about costly NFTs are written about. The proof of stake (low energy consumption) chain is already live and the proof of work chain will is scheduled to be shut down in 2 years. Faster if the miners try to revolt

Tezos using PoS has been up and running for more than a year i think. You can mint NFTs here: http://nftz.fun/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/

Cardano – the 3rd largest currency by marketcap[1], after Bitcoin and Ethereum – uses proof of stake.

[1] - https://coinmarketcap.com/

That's like saying that if my lamp uses 3W when I'm at my desk, surely it'll use 6W when I call someone over.

Blockchain energy usage is not really proportional to transaction volume, they're only connected in very indirect ways (more usage -> more adoption -> higher price? -> reward for mining a block increases in value -> miners can pay for more energy while still turning a profit)

I think that was for 6 and for running the auction.

Etherum will be PoS in like 2 years.

Just in time for fusion power.

Fwiw the PoS network is already running, with $6 billion staked and 100,000 validators. Migrating the rest of the network is relatively simple, they're just being really careful with it.

Curious how that works? Parallel blockchain? But how do you “migrate”? Incremental migration?

Yep it's another blockchain running in parallel, called the "beacon chain." Anyone can deposit ETH in a particular contract on the main chain, and the beacon chain will read that and credit them ETH on the beacon chain.

The quickest migration is basically to upgrade both clients to talk to each other, and for the old client, instead of choosing blocks with the highest hashpower, choose blocks whose hashes are chosen by the beacon chain. Details here: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/B1mUf6DXO

The next step is a more integrated system, described here: https://ethresear.ch/t/executable-beacon-chain/8271

Thanks for the description and links. It’s a neat approach

Seems like I heard this 2 years ago.

Energy usage is a recognised issue and while it offers challenges they are understood and developers are keen to address this. If you want to start deconstruction of the industrial military complex that would be just fine and might really start to change things, until then I argue there are more worthy targets for your ire than the energy use of an emerging technology.

This is like saying that pollution is a recognized issue with fossil fuels and while it offers challenges they are understood and engineers are keen to address this.

There aren't always easy solutions and you can't hand wave aside a massive problem because 'our best people are on it'

If fossil fuels producers had had the same level of awareness of environmental issues when that industry began we might not have the issues we have now, I think it's a poor comparison, my comment was acknowledging the issue and positing that an iteration of the technology could mitigate the problem.

Are you also opposed to EVs which also have the problem of high initial costs for early iterations of the tech?

Costs (of EVs) are passed onto the consumer and thus self-regulate, whereas many of the costs of crypto's wasteful energy usage are distributed among society.

Which token, which platform, there are more than 1

GorillaCoin (tm).

Humans - that is problem number one. Like agent smith said in the Matrix. "Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet.." - Advocating for this cure will solve all the problems..

The whole reason we care about the environment is so we can keep living in it. What should we do instead, leave the turtles to inherit the earth and yeet ourselves into the sun?

Exactly that. We destroy our tourist destinations, beaches, food sources, areas where to live, landscapes for desktop backgrounds, the air and the water. Lost in useless economic abstractions.

A purely rhetorical, not-implying anything-in-any-way: if you believe people should kill themselves for the sake of other beings, why haven't you?

Sorry, I kind of misread the second sentence of the post above. I thought the whole point is that: why would you destroy your own habitat? That's just so incredibly unreasonable.

Useless? Sounds like you're using it.

You realize he was an antagonist, right? He's not someone to model.

I think the fan theory that Smith is The One is more compelling than casual narrative.

Physician, heal thyself, and thus preserve us from having to listen to your drivel.

I don't think that cryptocurrency energy consumption is as big a problem as it's been recently painted in the media. Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are, potentially, self-contained, almost complete, final, financial systems.

Using a VISA card (for instance to make the same contribution to wild-life preservation) would use a fraction of the energy that's used to sustain cryptocurrencies, sure, but that's not a fair comparison. Using VISA requires a working settlement layer (because VISA transactions are reversable), banks, bank employees, bank buildings, international transfer support, international settlement layer, people handling those settlements, regulation, regulation enforcement etc. If you include all that then the energy usage of Bitcoin doesn't look all that bad.

The estimated energy consumption of BTC is between the electricity consumption of Ukraine and Argentina.

It's as if everyone would be a banker in Ukraine and every building would be a bank.

Seems excessive.

Thank you - I heard the 'if you add the costs of Visa / banking it evens out' and was not sure how to tackle it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina - 44 Million people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine - 41 M (handwaving around bits that got invaded etc)

So is the global population of the banking industry comparable to 41 M ?

UK employees: 1.1M US Employees: 8.3M

So I went round a few houses and there is a lack of solid stats. But I think I can go with a decent indicator.

The USA has about 7.5 % of GDP (1.5tn) in Finance Services, and 6.3M employees (2018). Now translate that up to the global GDP of 87TRN, and say the global finance sector is as large globally as in USA (generous assumption) and that give 7.5 % of 87TRN - 6.5TRN. At 4.2M employees per Trillion that gives us 27 M global employees.

Now there can be lots of hand waving, but if bitcoin uses same amount of electricity as Argentina, and Argentina has around 1.5 many people as the global finance sector, then bitcoins electrical use does seem very excessive.

https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united... -> 6.3 M employees, 1.5 Tn (USA), 7.5% of GDP

Bibliography:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/298370/uk-financial-sect....

https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag50.htm

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030515/what-percent...

https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united... -> 6.3 M employees, 1.5 Tn (USA), 7.5% of GDP

But here you are comparing apple and oranges.

The energy one technical component uses versus the energy that all the people that use another technology uses.

Bitcoin also have support systems around it, hardware production lines, and a lot of people who use it that you don't include in your comparison.

I think I am replying to the oft-heard crypto argument that because bitcoin is self contained we need to bring in the whole costs of the current financial system to compare it.

This was my first attempt at it - and it seems bitcoin loses badly - the current bitcoin energy use is easily comparable or greater than the energy use of the people, buildings etc of the global finance industry.

And bitcoin still cannot buy me a latte at starbucks.

So it's a weird speculative / money controls avoidance thing that happens to subsidise dubious global activity to the tune of Argentina's electrical usage.

It has always seemed BS - it still seems BS. And speculators have grown rich not on a technology that will replace currency but on massive migration of dubious activity (Chinese currency outflows). That Tesla was paid for by Chinese billionaires securing their gains.

:-(

Edit: so dissing bitcoin and Tesla is probably a bad idea on HN.

But to be fair I am not dissing Tesla - it's a genuine company making genuine product. It just seems to be marketing towards a ... marketing archetype that got lucky with their Crypto.

You see, to make cash from Chinese money laundering, one would previously have had to be a lawyer in the City or a real estate agent selling central London flats. But we democratised access to this flood of grey market cash via Bitcoin.

Maybe I would feel differently with a couple of coins in a wallet somewhere. But from a regulatory point of view, it's still taking cash from the poorest globally.

> the current bitcoin energy use is easily comparable or greater than the energy use of the people, buildings etc of the global finance industry

But energy consumption behavior of all people who are deployed in the global finance industry ≠ energy consumption of the median of Argentinan/Ukrankian people. I think you can agree that most people who work in finance are generally in at least low middle-class to super wealthy. If you compare the mobility/consumption index of such a class to median income level of countries where wealth is generally much lower, the equation changes drastically in favor of computers doing the job without having the urge to fly to fiji over the WE, up to 4x between poor and lower middle-class already [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region

And it’s estimated that there area only around 1 million active Bitcoin wallets.

And how many countries of energy does the other financial system use, for comparison?

That wouldn't be a valid comparison. There's a lot more to the other financial system than just currency and payments. Even if hypothetically the whole world adopted Bitcoin we would still need most parts of the other financial system.

Sure, but rather than a vertical slice, do a horizontal slice. How much energy does every country in the world’s mints, bank vaults, etc. use up, including their whole logistical pipelines that wouldn’t be needed if countries didn’t mint+store physical currency?

what would be a valid comparison?

my conclusion so far is that a lot of things use as much power as entire countries, but this unit of measure is a higher standard created specifically for bitcoin, and I'm waiting to see otherwise.

What about the costs of military and lives and environment of the efforts spent in maintaining the USD hegemony?

If you think the USA would stop asserting its hegemony if the world used Bitcoin instead of USD, I don't know what to tell you.

I don't mean to imply that switching to bitcoin will stop wars, but rather just remind that the true cost (and value) of USD isn't in it's infrastructure, but in the efforts taken to enforce it's dominance.

If we imagine the ideal future 100 years from now, with a more balanced world order and economic justice for all, then we have to experiment with radically different systems at some point in between. Not saying that bitcoin is the solution or even a good one, but I think it's important to experiment with new ideas, and not just technologies but systems like UBI too.

Of course, getting climate change under control is a much more pressing issue, so bitcoin is untenable, but I don't think it's as frivolous as a lot people make it out to be. It's a valuable experiment, and there's a lot to learn from its failure and success. My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.

> If we imagine the ideal future 100 years from now, with a more balanced world order and economic justice for all, then we have to experiment with radically different systems at some point in between.

Sure, but I think for any effect a bitcoin-like system has any chance to have on the US's ability to wage war, it will have the same effect on the US government's ability to fund massive social programs. That is, bitcoin is going in the opposite direction from what is needed for achieving the world we hope for.

> My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.

While I agree with you that this is how things are looking, and it is also the most important long-term goal, I personally don't believe that we have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate failure if we don't focus on drastically reducing consumption in the short term. To me bitcoin has proved exactly how chasing free economic growth will always drink up any electricity we can produce.

Basically they think that deflationary assets irreparably cripple the debt market, and therefore the government bonds market, and therefore wars will be harder to fund and less arbitrary.

There is some accuracy to that. Would raise the stakes and the resources involved in funding a war. The last 70-80 years of US hegemony have been based off of the market tolerance for US debt and slowly being paid their money back, in US dollartoken. And before then, US hegemony was not a thing.

So there is nothing to say that the market won't find a way to have fractional speculation on bitcoin/crypto asset backed securities, and there is nothing to say that a governing body won't find a way to sustain itself and gain compliance with its peers through it. But there is also not a history of US hegemony supporting it either. Not a panacea because the world was much more of a tinderbox before US debt based hegemony.

This really needs to be the top comment about alternative tokens and pollution.

US military has been estimated between the world's largest polluter and as much as 140 countries.

That Dollar, that "Freedom" isn't free, and it's the world paying the bill.

[Note: American here. Ashamed about our imperialist impact ]

https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter...

As long as the top reply to that comment explains that replacing dollar with a cryptocurrency would change absolutely nothing about the size and activities of the US military.

How many orders of magnitude more transactions are handled by the financial system compared to bitcoin?

Is that relevant?

Neither of those systems have an energy usage that is directly proportional to transaction count, _especially_ Bitcoin.

It's also Bitcoin _right now_. It's still growing!

I'm not sure if I'm being down-voted for being pro-Bitcoin or anti-Bitcoin at the moment, but to clarify: My point is that the Bitcoin energy consumption problem has been and is getting worse over time.

That's incorrect because electricity is only one form of energy consumed. Oil/gasoline for cars/heat and natural gas for heat are other forms

I didn't do the math on this one, but it seems to me that the whole financial system (and all that's needed to ensure it's reliability and security) uses a bit more energy than Ukraine or Argentina.

The infrastructure supporting hundreds of national currencies, hundreds of stock exchanges, thousands of banks, hundreds of payment providers and cryptocurrency exchanges vs a single distributed ledger (basically a piece of paper). Bitcoin has 200 million users at most if you are really generous. It's really not a fair comparison. You would have to combine all cryptocurrencies and their energy consumption to even approach a fair comparison.

The energy usage is only used for mining, it's not even used to secure and ensure its reliability on exchanges whose energy consumption is actually counted against the mining energy. The energy consumption will grow simply because Bitcoin is going up, not because Bitcoin is processing more transactions or providing value in any form. Yes bigger banks need more energy but they can also provide more services thanks to their increased size.

Bitcoin doesn't even compete with Banks because Banks offer loans, consolidate small deposits into large capital reserves, etc. Bitcoin doesn't compete with stocks because Bitcoin ownership doesn't represent an ownership stake in the Bitcoin industry or any other industry. Bitcoin doesn't compete with payment providers because it is too slow and expensive. Bitcoin doesn't compete against cryptocurrency exchanges. Ethereum with its uniswap protocol may do so but that's not Bitcoin. Ethereum provides more value for less energy consumption than bitcoin. The only thing Bitcoin really competes against is gold because of the proof of ownership. You own your Bitcoin in your wallet the same way you own your car or house (after paying your mortgage or car loan off of course).

Bonus:

Why did I compare Bitcoin to a piece of paper? Because the people working in finance are part of the finance system. In Bitcoin only the miners are part of the system. So ultimately you just have a fancy piece of paper on which you cannot write lies on. With the finance system it is closer to bodyguards guarding the paper and making sure nobody can write on it. Again, people are part of the system. It's not just the paper that is important.

The whole financial system actually has some usefulness: you can pay for things with it. Anywhere in the world. Without paying $30 in fees, without waiting for 3 days to clear. It's also not likely to run on 60% coal.

Since bitcoin zealots have moved to pretending that it's a "store of value", you can compare Bitcoin to the energy used to secure the gold in the world. Hint: it's much more worse.

Not only that, but if you look at the energy usage per transaction, bitcoin is probably many orders of magnitude more expensive than the financial system

And mining Bitcoin requires chip makers (including rare earth materials), the tech industry and the whole internet. If you include side channels in visa, you'll need to do the same for Bitcoin.

Yes, Bitcoin has advantages, but low energy consumption is not one of them.

I never said it's energy usage is low. I said (more or less) that for what it is it's energy usage is low.

Bitcoin, at best, does what SWIFT does for the financial system. Comparing it with the entire global financial system is laughable.

For what it is, it consumes ENORMOUS amounts of energy.

What sort of calculation is that? Let's for a moment disregard the fact that banks do much more than just transactions, let's also ignore that there is more then the transaction energy in bitcoin (there are also people working for the miners, producing the hardware etc). Just the comparison between the number of transactions of the banking system (including credit cards) to the number of bitcoin transactions should tell you how different the scales are. There were around daily 400k bitcoin transactions. There were 100 Million credit card transactions per day in the US alone. That would mean if we were to transition to use crypto currencies as our main financial system we'd use more than all the energy we produce worldwide just for bitcoin. So bitcoin looks even worse after doing a bit more of a comparison.

> Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are, potentially, self-contained, almost complete, final, financial systems.

...for a small village of maybe 1000 people? At the current transaction rate, they could barely handle that. And of course they don't handle disputes, loans, insurance, tech support, legal compliance, KYC and AML, or any other part of a financial system (you're even forgetting that someone needs to design and print the physical cards).

Bitcoin in particular does nothing more than verifying a handful of transactions per second (5? 7?) while consuming more electrical energy than all of the world's regular transaction processing hardware combined, perhaps with the exception of ATMs - which amounts to hundreds of millions of transactions per second, all over the world, in a truly decentralized system.