Re:It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cry...
by kragen on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @08:40PM
(#27455355)
It's disappointing that you felt the need to post such an aggressive and poorly informed comment, without, as you admit, even bothering to read the comment you were ostensibly responding to. There is a great deal more information about most of the points you touch on in my comments from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443
I don't think bitcoin is "causing tons of new renewable capacity", if by that you mean inducing people to bring up many new power plants; its overall power usage is estimated at only about 12 GW. By comparison, PRC installed 71.7 GW of new wind power in 02020; at China's historical wind capacity factor of 22% that'll be 15.8 GW, more than the entire bitcoin network. Including the parts that are running off hydropower and the parts that are outside China.
> We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy)
I wasn't talking about implicit subsidies, which aren't enough to make fossil-fuel power price-competitive with renewables. I was talking about explicit subsidies. Like when I was in Venezuela you could fill up the 20-gallon gas tank on an old car for 19¢, because the gasoline was subsidized. That's the kind of subsidy that can make fossil fuels cheaper than renewables: you can run your bitcoin farm off a gas generator. It's not just "failing to tax them".
> 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.
Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about.
> those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find.
Not really. I mean, a little? That 01967 Buick swilling that 1¢ per gallon gasoline is producing almost exactly the same amount of CO₂ as if the gasoline were getting burned by a nice new Honda motorcycle (or generator), and it's also producing a fair amount of unburned hydrocarbons and even methane. That matters a lot to the kids with asthma who live next door, and the global warming potential of the total horrific exhaust cocktail is a bit higher than if it were cleanly burned to CO₂ and H₂O. But, from a climate-change point of view, the high-order bit of the problem is that the government was subsidizing the burning of fossil fuels, which results in a lot more fossil fuels getting burned.
So the real problem is not what the energy is getting used for, but that the subsidies make it attractive to get that energy from fossil fuels instead of solar, because you pay for solar but the government pays for gasoline. If bitcoin mining could bring those subsidies to an end by making them suddenly much more costly, which I doubt, then so much the better.
But really, zooming out a bit, Venezuela is not the main culprit in climate change. Whatever happens there isn't going to have a big effect on climate change, one way or the other, until things chang a lot. Europe and the US are the main culprits.
> Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe.
12 GW is about 0.07% of total world marketed energy consumption. There's an ongoing real-time climate catastrophe, but at the moment Bitcoin is almost as much of a distraction as plastic straws. Not that it couldn't get bigger.
I don't think bitcoin is "causing tons of new renewable capacity", if by that you mean inducing people to bring up many new power plants; its overall power usage is estimated at only about 12 GW. By comparison, PRC installed 71.7 GW of new wind power in 02020; at China's historical wind capacity factor of 22% that'll be 15.8 GW, more than the entire bitcoin network. Including the parts that are running off hydropower and the parts that are outside China.
> We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy)
I wasn't talking about implicit subsidies, which aren't enough to make fossil-fuel power price-competitive with renewables. I was talking about explicit subsidies. Like when I was in Venezuela you could fill up the 20-gallon gas tank on an old car for 19¢, because the gasoline was subsidized. That's the kind of subsidy that can make fossil fuels cheaper than renewables: you can run your bitcoin farm off a gas generator. It's not just "failing to tax them".
> 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.
Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about.
> those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find.
Not really. I mean, a little? That 01967 Buick swilling that 1¢ per gallon gasoline is producing almost exactly the same amount of CO₂ as if the gasoline were getting burned by a nice new Honda motorcycle (or generator), and it's also producing a fair amount of unburned hydrocarbons and even methane. That matters a lot to the kids with asthma who live next door, and the global warming potential of the total horrific exhaust cocktail is a bit higher than if it were cleanly burned to CO₂ and H₂O. But, from a climate-change point of view, the high-order bit of the problem is that the government was subsidizing the burning of fossil fuels, which results in a lot more fossil fuels getting burned.
So the real problem is not what the energy is getting used for, but that the subsidies make it attractive to get that energy from fossil fuels instead of solar, because you pay for solar but the government pays for gasoline. If bitcoin mining could bring those subsidies to an end by making them suddenly much more costly, which I doubt, then so much the better.
But really, zooming out a bit, Venezuela is not the main culprit in climate change. Whatever happens there isn't going to have a big effect on climate change, one way or the other, until things chang a lot. Europe and the US are the main culprits.
> Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe.
12 GW is about 0.07% of total world marketed energy consumption. There's an ongoing real-time climate catastrophe, but at the moment Bitcoin is almost as much of a distraction as plastic straws. Not that it couldn't get bigger.