Industrial production of greenhouse gases is nearly an order of magnitude larger than consumer production, but often inordinately the "guilt" burden is pushed to the consumers: Do you have an EV? Have you changed all your light bulbs to more efficient LEDs? Are you Vegan enough?

Here too: Bitcoin alone has risen to an order (or three) of magnitude more energy consumption than Facebook could ever use/do ever use to track people. (Cumulative, the rest of cryptocurrencies only further dwarf Facebook's comparative energy costs.) We can be angry about two things, we can be angry at both, but why can't we discuss the bigger problem first without getting into the weeds of all the smaller problems?

(And of course, the two order of magnitude problems above are inextricably linked: Bitcoin is on track to make many industrial users of electricity look like chumps and dwarf them by an order of magnitude. Nearly all of the consumer-side gains from veganism, LED lightbulbs, EVs has been offset again, if not entirely dwarfed, by cryptocurrency mining.)

People are bad at reasoning things at large enough scales, have a hard time gut understanding order of magnitude problems, so the fallacies keep creeping up, and keep getting weaponized by bad agents (the consumer "green guilt", the consumer "recycling guilt", so many other "demand-side fallacies" that if consumers just bought "smarter", problems would just go away, when really it's the suppliers that are in control).

Gold mining uses something like 140 terawatt-hours of energy annually, and produces enormous pollution and environmental destruction in addition to that.

That's greater than Bitcoin's energy usage.

Since gold mining is so much more harmful to the environment, maybe we should outlaw that first before we work on smaller problems.

For now. Gold's been around for centuries, Bitcoin not even for two decades. It's got a momentum that Bitcoin may or may not match in the future.

The "other endeavors" category above was "digital endeavours" and specifically "Bitcoin versus Facebook", which is an order of magnitude difference.

You've introduced an entirely different category from the above discussion. It's maybe an interesting category [1] to discuss elsewhere, but is off topic from the fallacy we were discussing. Thanks for the non-sequitur, though.

[1] Personally, I'm not so sure it's a useful counter-comparison to Bitcoin: Gold is used in electronics and other industrial needs, beyond its service as a value store/commodity of interest to collectors. Gold is also increasingly rarely the "primary" focus of mines. Most of our Gold today comes from Copper mines and very few would argue we are mining Copper as a value store/solely for greed.

Gold mining isn't a fucking edge case if it uses more energy and produces far more environmental damage.

According to the principle you described, Bitcoin is the edge case we should ignore until we solve the gold mining problem.

It's not an edge case of the "electric waste of Digital Services", because it is an entirely different problem. So not only do we have "pedantry pageants" of edge cases, but we get to address the "pedantry pageants" of all the unrelated but seemingly related problems too?

The most apropos commentary in this entire thread yet.

People seem to be intentionally conflating some things. A carbon tax is nice precisely because it avoids getting into weeds and is a general approach that applies equally to everything. Some people are proposing this and others are saying "don't get caught up in the weeds." What? Makes no sense. It just reinforces the poster's point: that some people's real motivation doesn't seem to be environmental, there's a strange focus on crypto specifically that makes it seem like they want it to be reigned in for other reasons.

The raw statistics already tell a story that the difference between "BTC" and "Facebook" is greatly exponential. Wanting to focus first on the (much) bigger exponent isn't necessarily a sign that people's real motivation is "conspiratorial" against crypto.

It is orthogonal to the issue at hand that PoW is using far too much energy per transaction/per capita/per GDP/per most metrics you want to point to. Not using the energy in the first place is always going to be greener, no matter how much PoW systems invest in renewables and their R&D! I can't see that as "misguided". An outright ban would get immediate results versus a carbon output tax would incentivize eventual results, maybe. That's not misguided, that's just a different perspective, and a different preference on an ideal time window to address the situation versus wishful thinking and "golly gee, sure hope the market eventually figures it out someday".

It seems like you implicitly draw the 'fair' line between FB and BTC.

BTC's market cap is roughly equal to Facebooks. If a POW coin used facebook levels of energy at the same value, would you find that acceptable?

To your point, though, I'm willing to wager that most of the people whose biggest problem with crypto is energy consumption would happily also support other harsh measures against all manner of pollution generating entities. I know I would.

So long as pollution and carbon are free or cheap, people will find wasteful ways to generate it.

Incentives work, and taxing carbon and pollution will incentive green alternatives.

Yah that's the point and business with less environmental impact will be more competitive. Industries/products with more of an impact will be more expensive, reflecting their true cost.

> Even worse, it just gives more capital to inefficient governments

Most pollution/carbon taxes are proposed to be revenue neutral, i.e. all the proceeds are returned to the tax base. This is also important because like other (non-luxury) consumption taxes, a carbon tax is regressive.

Solar is taking off not because we banned coal, but because it's cheaper than coal. If coal and natural gas were taxed according to their carbon output, solar would be even more ahead, nuclear may become more attractive as well.

Aluminum is heavily recycled not because it's green, but because it's significantly cheaper than mining new.

Incentives work. The free market responds to incentives, and works around regulations.

And what are those? District heating?

Have you observed this, or are you simply speculating?

Personally speaking I find it just as irritating of a pattern here that knee-jerk calls for "regulation" (i.e. bring in the coercive power of the state) or outright banning are so often floated as a/the solution to every problem. When legal coercion is suggested, it is entirely proper to bring up the existence of the dragons that lay down that road.

If cryptocurrencies didn't have the energy footprint, I would find them pretty uninteresting and/or ridiculous for various reasons, but ultimately it wouldn't bother me that people do what they do with them. When they start adding seriously to the global energy load in a time of climate crisis that makes them pretty offensive.

Best i found for Bitcoin was 40-100 TWh per year: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

And for Facebook it appeared that they used 5140 GWh in 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-fac...

So essentially:

  Entity    Consumption (GWh)
  Facebook   5 140
  Bitcoin   40 000 - 100 000

Attacking the motive or whatever is not said out loud is responding to a weaker interpretation

I don't think that's correct. I think that it's possible to care about both, but to be dismissive of misdirecting subject changes, i.e. "whataboutism".

Nicely done, nicely done.