"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Perhaps you don't owe this article or its headline better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here.

In layman's terms:

Bitcoin's borderline-fraudulent use of energy will be able to /fix/ the energy that was spent in mining new coins, and the dirty deed can be forgotten.

Except you can't so easily forget damage to the environment!!

All this vitriol for Bitcoin and how terrible it is for the environment. Honestly it is just the latest stick people want to beat it with. Its hardly the first and it wont be the last thing that damages our environment. And it is also far from the biggest causes of pollution.

Cargo ships cause more pollution than all the cars on earth, yet we are told to drive less but the cargo ships keep coming, keep getting bigger and keep polluting. Stopping/Reducing them would mean we can't consume cheap goods so a blind eye is turned, to an easier target, Bitcoin.

If everyone who I heard complain about the inefficency of bitcoin were also protesting Mcdonalds, Shell, Texaco, Amazon etc it might actually have some merit but until then I feel free to ignore the green virtue signalling.

This is a fairly common fallacy, though I'm not sure if it's formalized enough to have a name.

I have enough time and energy to criticize both mega cargo ships and Bitcoin for their unnecessary pollution.

Also, if we banned Bitcoin tomorrow, the only people who would really notice are those who have bet their shirts on a risky investment. If we banned large cargo ships tomorrow, everyone would feel it as delivery times (and possibly prices) for things increased. Personally, I'd be willing to pay those higher prices in exchange for less pollution.

Sure but I think GP’s point is that the amount of criticism & headlines Bitcoin gets for its energy use, fairly or unfairly, appears orders of magnitude more than other areas, like online gaming (or dozens of other industries).

Probably because, as you point out, there’s a lot of money and companies in those other industries. And those industries would rather not make headlines for negative environmental, or other, reasons. (Legal apparatus, lobbyists, etc etc)

Are people that cannot tell CO2 and local air pollution apart the same who cannot see the difference between gambling and investment?

All investment is gambling. Investments have different risk profiles, sure. But unless you can perfectly predict the future then the uncertainty is non-zero and it is a gamble.

But when investing how much an investment makes absolutely isn't very interesting. All that matters is opportunity cost, or how one investment compares to all of the others. You want to make the best investment for the right amount of risk - and this is going to always be a gamble because it is highly uncertain.

So you want to talk about how much energy casinos around the world waste?

I'm a bleeding heart hippie but agree 100%.. and when you dig deeper, you may find that those propagating the fud around crypto are actually speculators trying to drive prices.. which makes the fake outrage even more sick.

I don't blame you. Here's the abstract that goes with that clickbait headline, which is as far as I could get:

> In this memo, we aim to explain how the Bitcoin network functions as a unique energy buyer that could enable society to deploy substantially more solar and wind generation capacity. This deployment, along with energy storage, aims to facilitate the transition to a cleaner and more resilient electricity grid. We believe that the energy asset owners of today can become the essential bitcoin miners of tomorrow.

Ugh. It's such a facile argument.

"You know the problem with electricity? People don't buy enough of it! If we double the amount of electricity used on the planet, people will need to spend more on solar panels. And more solar panels are good, right?"

You clearly don't understand the economics of the situation. Renewable power generation from wind and solar has a much higher ratio of wasted power because they have such high variability in output. Because of this, in cases where the power generally can't be cost effectively stored or supplemented (by dynamic increase of dirtier energy), wind and solar simply won't be built in favor of coal plants. Bitcoin mining can use this wasted energy, which increases the revenue that can be generated by renewable sources, thus making it more likely that areas will choose renewable over coal.

So please don't get all disgusted when you didn't actually read through what's going on. Your biases are blinding you.

And if you simply removed all the bitcoin miners, that would be the equivalent of saving 120 terawatt-hours per year. Or the equivalent of installing 20,000 large offshore wind turbines [1], for free, without any materials or construction or grid costs.

Does this proposal suggest that increasing BitCoin production could economically lead to the funding of anywhere near that many wind turbines? (Or, rather, many more, since much of that energy would be cannibalized by the mining.)

1. Average offshore wind turbine output ~6 million kWh/yr

How I am reading your comment:

Higher demand will decrease prices for renewable sources, because of bitcoin mining, and such feedback eventually will lead to decrease prices in supply of renewable sources material.

I see a few false assumption, to say the least:

1. Material for renewable sources are not scares and there's production is cheap.

2. It is cheaper to mine from renewables sources then from non-renewable sources. (infrastructure cost)

3. There is no trend in replacing existing energy sources with renewables sources, without bitcoin.

You are reading my comment wrong. Those false assumptions are your own. I am not claiming that higher demand for renewables will lower prices. That may be true, but it is not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that bitcoin can use energy that would otherwise be wasted.

On your point 2, what are you saying? That it is cheaper to mind from renewable source than non renewable? I agree so not sure why you're saying otherwise. Renewable energy often produces more unusable energy than coal. You can control how much coal you put in the fire, you can't control how much sun or wind hits your panels or wind turbines. Energy that would otherwise be wasted is cheap energy. That's my point.

Fixed point 2.

I am not sure I agree with this, not much energy is wasted, grid off demand prices from renewable sources might be good options for miners, but net is still negative, simple I can't see use case where miner will be I am only making money for 2 hours a day, for only few unknown amount of days a week/month.

> not much energy is wasted

There are two situations:

1. Current solar and wind generation that wastes energy (known as "curtailment"). In Texas, about 17% of wind energy is curtailed. In California, about 25% of solar energy is curtailed. https://slate.com/business/2016/07/how-energy-waste-in-solar... https://www.caiso.com/documents/curtailmentfastfacts.pdf

2. Potential renewable energy production that doesn't happen because of cost effectiveness in areas where curtailment would be high. In places that are poorly connected to agacent energy grids, curtailment might be quite a bit higher than existing production, especially if the goal is to power a larger fraction of an area's electricity with solar and wind. It wouldn't be unreasonable to imagine renewable power production with 50% curtailment.

Another example of wasted energy is natural gas flare offs. People are starting to utilize these for bitcoin mining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkeZVcGsva8

> I can't see use case where miner will be I am only making money for 2 hours a day

Well, it wouldn't be for just 2 hours a day. 25% curtailment simply mean that only 1/4th of the day has usable excess energy. It could mean 26% excess energy for 23 hours a day, or it could mean 85% excess energy for 1 hour a day. If you have a location with 25% excess energy, you could be running on excess energy for the majority of the day. Also, power storage could help a lot. There are types of power storage that do very well for short period of time, but poorly for long periods of time. So by storing some of that energy for an hour or two, you can use that energy to mine when there is 0% excess but no extra energy is needed by the grid. Electric generation isn't as simple as people think.

> You know the problem with electricity? People don't buy enough of it!

Personally, I want humanity to climb the kardashev scale. Bitcoin reduces petrodollar seigniorage profits and turns them into subsidies on power infrastructure.

It is even worse, then I thought.

didn't Square purchase $50million of bitcoin recently?

then you thought.......what?

Next in the news: Why proof-of-space cryptocurrencies do not waste disk space, even though you can't use it anymore.

Why can't we stop pretending it is not just an unregulated investment? It's good at that. Market it as such and stop portraying it as anything else.

You're letting you biases blind you. The headline is correct, there are a lot of merits that you aren't thinking of because your head is so far in the sand you can't even be bothered to read and educate yourself.