crypto, especially bitcoin, is an intentional environmental disaster. I don't want to invest 1% of my money into an intentional environmental disaster.
Worrying about today's Bitcoin mining is as silly as worrying about plastic straws. Maybe in the future Bitcoin mining could become an environmental disaster, but today it's insignificant.
Further details in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443 and https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall....
If I'm following this right, the only evidence for Bitcoin being mostly based on renewable energy is because people believe it's uneconomical to not be renewable, and not based on any actual attempt to figure out what energy types are actually being used by large mining groups?
Because, especially when you compare across international countries, retail prices are only vaguely correlated with production prices. Many places subsidize the crap out of energy prices, and electricity in a subsidized place could well be much cheaper than in a non-subsidized place, even if the first plant is burning coal and other plant is using wind.
For some specific data points, I believe a large clutch of miners operated out of Inner Mongolia, whose electricity capacity increases in recent years has been dominated by coal-fired power plants (because it's a coal-rich region that doesn't give two whits about environmental effects). I'll also note that there was a story a few weeks back about a coal powered plant being recommissioned solely for mining bitcoin.
Nope, sounds like you didn't look at the references I linked at all. If you want to follow something right, try reading the references, or at least casually skimming them. https://coinshares.com/insights/beware-of-lazy-research-bitc... is one of the sources for the percentages cited in the Harvard Business Review article explaining their methodology (in 02018). It's the polar opposite of what you're saying.
It's also true that there are fundamental economic reasons that Bitcoin mining is mostly done with renewable energy; it's not just a weird coincidence. But it's not just a theoretical prediction.
> retail prices are only vaguely correlated with production prices. Many places subsidize the crap out of energy prices
Yeah, that does happen. Also, outright theft happens; the cheapest energy is energy that you steal. But it turns out that unprofitable subsidies and stolen energy aren't very scalable, because places where the government pays for most of the energy ① tend to have strict oversight of industrial-scale operations, ② don't generate much electricity in the first place, and ③ tend to consider entrepreneurs criminals by default because they increase wealth inequality, so they shut them down when they get found out. When Bitcoin mining (or, say, Litecoin mining) starts to scale up in such places, as it did here in Argentina some years back, the energy subsidies have a way of evaporating.
> I'll also note that there was a story a few weeks back about a coal powered plant being recommissioned solely for mining bitcoin
No, that was gas; my comments on it are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27450889.
You're right that there are a variety of unusual circumstances that can make fossil-fueled Bitcoin mining profitable at small scales in one or another place, so it's easy to find anecdotes of it. But it's not the majority of the network.
Really now?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...:
> Private-equity firm revives zombie fossil-fuel power plant to mine bitcoin
> Few bitcoin projects illustrate the cryptocurrency’s enormous climate impact better than the Greenidge power plant in upstate New York. The once-abandoned power plant was bought by private equity firm Atlas Holdings and retasked. A significant portion of Greenidge's electricity no longer powers nearby homes or businesses; rather, the plant's smokestacks are increasingly pouring pollutants into the atmosphere in the service of mining bitcoin.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-26/china-s-c...:
> China’s Crypto Mining Crackdown Followed Deadly Coal Accidents
> China’s escalating push to rein in cryptocurrency mining was triggered in part by concern that the practice has stoked a surge in illicit coal extraction, endangering lives and undermining Xi Jinping’s ambitious environmental goals.
> Authorities decided to act after concluding the spike in electricity consumption from server farms underpinning Bitcoin and other tokens was a key factor behind rising demand for coal in certain parts of China, according to a person who participated in high-level government meetings on the issue and asked not to be identified discussing private information.
Yeah, my comments on this are at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27450889. Either they're dumb or they're pulling some scam I'm not wise to.
> illicit coal extraction
Yeah, if you steal your energy it can even be cheaper than any energy you have to pay for. But then you get "authorities deciding to act," which really limits your scalability.
Did you mean to say "international environmental disaster"? I don't know in which way it's intentional that Bitcoin destroys the environment. The damage seems incidental.
If, for example, it were possible to create steel alloy in a way that took 1% less energy or made less waste (and thus was presumably cheaper at scale), the trucks would use this slightly more efficient steel.
On the other hand, Bitcoin relies on wasting a certain monetary value of energy for the security of the network. Its waste is adversarial. If we manage to produce 2x the electricity tomorrow and it becomes significantly cheaper, that just means a 51% attack also became much cheaper so people need to waste even more energy mining.
I can't think of any other uses of energy offhand that so actively resist any improvements. I can think of other intentional forms of waste (like dumping toxic waste, "rolling coal", etc), but I can't think of any that are aligned such that making upstream production of a resource more efficient then requires producing even more waste and environmental damage.
It's not like energy use in the world has gone down. If it's cheaper or more efficient it will go up or at best stay the same. Bitcoin has made the transition to more efficient ASICs because that increases profits, it just didn't result in less energy use because now you make more profit.
I don't think you can neglect the price of a new ASIC in a real situation though, those things are very expensive. Where it was first possible to attack the network using regular hardware, it now requires a much bigger capital investment. When ASICs were first released they had a bigger advantage than they have now, it seems unlikely a 2x improvement over the previous generation is still possible (assuming it was possible before, I didn't check).
Right, I'm not saying there will be a new ASIC; just that there will be no innovation in the Bitcoin space (unless they switch out of PoW) that leads to less energy being used.
Bitcoin mining does respond to market pressure, if the price goes down, or you wait until the subsidy halves, there will be less incentive to mine.
So, now we're at two things I don't do because they're bad for the environment.
I don't understand what argument you tried to make. Other than a far fetched attempt at whattaboutism... Is bitcoin's astronomical power drain ok because some hypothetical person might drive a big car or goods are shipped with trucks? That does not follow. I mean, aren't there alternatives to bitcoin that have far lower energy needs? Why stick with absurd non-sequiturs to insist that bitcoin's astronomical power drain is somehow ok?
We’re opining about a system that finally, for the first time in the history of man, might accurately price the cost of the electricity consumed to power the system.
It’s pretty mind boggling but that’s the internet for you.
I agree about cleaning the inputs, but I think the parallelism implicit in your phrasing is misleading.
Bitcoin uses about 12 GW. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/pdf/transportation.pdf says freight trucks use 23% of global transportation energy use, which seems to be about 110 quads/year (figure 8-2), so that's 25 quads/year or about 850 GW. (And all of that is fossil fuel, while most Bitcoin energy consumption is from renewables.)
You could say that an 850-kg rhinoceros has a lot of weight and so does a lot of damage when it runs into things, and a 12-kg poodle also has a lot of weight, but there is a noticeable difference when they accidentally crash into your garage door.
Just because I walked by a Chase bank right now... I mean, wouldn't it safe more energy if banks would start turning off their lights from 5pm to 8am and on weekends also?
Investment in environmental disasters? I'd suggest the developed world stop trading with China but we all know people can't live without cheap consumer products, including the computers we're using to post our opinions. How about we drop the USD instead? It's literally backed by petroleum and the US military. Hard to think of anything with a bigger environmental impact. It should be easy, right? Just quote petroleum prices in cryptocurrency. Simple... The hard part is surving the inevitable US invasion and destruction of your country.
If you actually cared about the environment, you would be attempting to invest money into disruptive technologies like BTC that can move money away from traditional banks that have literally funded global corruption, wars, genocide and (surprise surprise), ecocide.
It makes no sense whatsoever and what it tells me is that you're just regurgitating the same dribble that you heard with no critical thought of your own
If they succeed on the other hand at becoming world reserve currency, then that energy usage will be justified since it's replacing something that takes even more energy (current fiat system). In this scenario, your 1% investment has probably grown to be a much larger % of your portfolio.
Note I've had similar debates with my kids: "Why don't we just replace the entire economy and political system with X?"
I really doubt that, at least with proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, since a competitive waste of resources is at the very core of their design (e.g. he who can waste the most, wins). The equivalent part of the fiat network is far more efficient (e.g. a basic money transfer probably takes as much power as a couple of HTTPS web requests to a dynamic website).
Is the development of bitcoin ASICs actually driving any general purpose advances? My understanding is they were just applying existing advanced technology to Bitcoin. The idea of an ASIC isn't new, and Bitcoin mining is niche compared to other areas (e.g. cell phone processors, desktop CPUs & GPUs)
Isn't that called keeping the economy going? There are people and physical capital that need something to do today. You can't save today's time for tomorrow, no matter what kind of money you have.
> Thereby massively misallocating investment in the world simply because people don't have a sound money which they can save for the future.
That sounds a lot like a depression, which probably wouldn't be too painful of an experience to the few people sitting on hoards of money, waiting for the choicest investment opportunities. Everyone else on the other hand...
Yes, saving is impossible. The shiny gold rock doesn't wither. It will be long there after your death.
A shiny rock isn't meaningfully different from fiat either. It's just a token that represents an entry in a ledger. That rock represents that someone else owes you a debt but that debt continues to exist after your death. The only way that debt can be repaid is if someone completely unrelated is born in the future and works to repay the debt of a long dead person. This can't work because that person also has to work for himself to pay for food and shelter. The only reason it works today is because population and productivity growth has exploded and can take care of that debt and even pay above and beyond the original debt.
The reason why fiat rots (inflation) is that the rest of the world rots as well. Gold is the exception, it doesn't rot, therefore it lets you pretend that the rest of the world doesn't rot.
Second, the problem with fiat is that people are saving too much to the point where we have underemployment and in some countries extreme amounts of youth unemployment.
The gold standard failed because the supply of gold was not growing fast enough. The constraints of money creation under a gold standard constrained the maximum size of the economy.
The underlying reasoning behind fiat is that money creation should be driven by demand so that the money supply grows with the economy. A good approximation is that private debt creation follows demand. A growing economy needs loans to finance expansion, therefore creating loans will ensure the money supply catches up with economic growth.
However, the obvious problem is that loans have to be paid back and paying back loans contracts the money supply. If the economy needs $4 trillion and growth ceases then we will actually fall short of the $4 trillion and we will enter deflation and deflation is a self reinforcing cycle that prevents further growth. We are running into the same problem as the gold standard. The money in circulation is not adjusting to the level needed for the economy. The private banking sector as the sole source of money simply isn't enough as it requires lowering the interest rates until you hit 0%. Without negative interest rates the system just stops there. This isn't surprising. Tally sticks [0] function the exact same way as fiat does. There isn't enough silver/gold in circulation so people create a ledger on top of it. When the ledger has served its purpose the two sticks (each representing credit and debit) are united and then destroyed together. A short term fall in growth doesn't imply that we have reached the end of growth. Ending the economy today is obviously a mistake.
What is needed is a secondary method of money issuance in the hand of the public. Direct issuance of money by the government generally suffers from discipline problems. Politicians just can't get enough money and when there is too much of it they refuse to stop, often there are legitimate reasons to not stop. What we'd need is an independent organization whose sole function is money issuance based on a macroeconomic measure that is important even if we don't have real growth right now.
Turns out, what the fiat system needs isn't real growth to begin with. It only needs nominal growth. That is, nominal growth caused by inflation is just as good as real growth as it still stimulates organic debt creation and therefore a demand driven increase in the money supply. As we are merely fighting off a contraction in the money supply, the destination of the issued money is not important, as long as it drives inflation. You can hand the money to unemployed people if that helps to drive inflation.
One unique difference between private banks and public government is that banks require you to return the money via monthly payments. Governments require you to return the money via taxation. This difference means that publicly issued money doesn't have to disappear on a schedule, it only has to disappear when there is too much of it, e.g. you are suffering from too high inflation. An inflation based tax policy could solve this problem.
If we went back to the gold standard we would run in the same not enough money for the economy problem except it would be even worse. Interest rates would have to be very negative. -10% interest probably wouldn't be an exaggeration but then people just withdraw their gold for risk free gains and we'd have no economy to speak of whatsoever.
How does the lighting network obviate the need for mining, which is the deliberately wasteful part?
(a) the energy of the Army/Navy/Air-force supports nothing other than US currency
(b) no force would be necessary to back compliance with entries in a crypto ledger
It's kind of amusing and baffling watching all these people speak with such certainty and conviction. If crypto currencies collapse, meh, oh well. If they spike another order of magnitude, nice, I'll just sell to keep my allocation on target. Like you, it just seems prudent to have limited downside (ie a crypto collapse won't ruin you.. at all) but also having some exposure to big positive swings, and never basing ones hopes and dreams on it. Anyway, here's to enjoying the show.
Edit: when you disclose something like this, and people get viciously defensive about it, it usually means you're on course (see comments below).
If you allocate 1% to every longshot you will be broke. Should I allocate 1% of my portfolio to Dentacoin in case dentists on the blockchain become the future of dental work?
Especially knowing that 80% of all trading volume is against Tether, which is 3% backed by money. 95% of all trading volume in the space is fictitious, according to an ETF that tried to list a few years ago.
By all means, continue grinding your axe if you really got to get it out, it's all very baffling and amusing.
I disagree with your bolstering the thesis that you should invest 1% or more of your portfolio in any given long-shot simply because you won't go broke if it went down. That's bad investment advice. Longshots aren't bad, but they should be backed by thesis.
Certainly when there's evidence of rampant market manipulation in your target asset class. That there's plenty of evidence for.
Primarily however, I'm responding to your counter that it's surprising people react with certainty. I'm saying I have evidence to back the claims I make. That's where my certainty comes from. I was offering citations.
Because past performance isn't indicative of future performance. The XLF has dramatically outperformed Bitcoin in the last few months hasn't it? Really puts a damper on the "long bitcoin short banks" narrative.
> Given that you have been wrong about it’s performance so consistently would you consider checking your assumptions?
Who says I've been wrong about its performance?
I'm saying it's driven by fraud and manipulation. Frauds go up until they don't. I'm not confident in catching the top before the music stops. I don't think I've ever said the price is guaranteed to go down on any particular time horizon.
I obviously don’t agree with your assessment but I am intellectually curious enough to want to understand where this conviction comes from.
Edited: to add Tether fraud risk, as I misinterpreted OPs comment to be about Bitcoin when it was actually about Tether.
Trading BTC is almost exclusively conducted not against USD but against USDT, on the order of 80%. [2]
Tether is by their own admission (or I should say pie chart) 3% backed by USD. [3] That 65% "commercial paper" would make them the second largest global holder of commercial paper after JP Morgan, but nobody on Wall Street has heard of them. By their own terms of service, they never have to redeem a single one for USD, on any timeline - not for you, not for anyone else - and even if they chose to out of good will, they could redeem it for any "backing" they so choose. [4]
Tether is, by and large, a fraudulent enterprise. [5]
So, my conviction is based on the idea that if $60B worth of dollars (not market cap, dollars) and 80% of trading volume against BTC is these chuck-e-cheese tokens - and they were to suddenly disintegrate, that yes, the market price would utterly collapse.
There are no good players in this space. Even Coinbase, widely regarded as the "best" of the exchanges, had to settle with the CFTC because at one point they allowed 99% of the entire Litecoin trading pair (globally) to exist as wash trading between two bots at Coinbase HQ. [6] That's the best of the best.
tl;dr: The market is overwhelmingly manipulated, wash traded, spoofed, and trading is conducted in a currency that's backed by chewing gum and baling twine.
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitwise-calls-out-to-sec-95-o...
[2] https://coinlib.io/coin/BTC/Bitcoin
[3] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/05/13/tether-publi...
[4] https://tether.to/legal/ section (3)
[5] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
I thank you for the links. I will look into them further.
Pray tell, how do you explain thaf fantastic performance of Bitcoin to those who bought in while it was at 54k and right now they look at the market and see btc at around 30k?
How does losing half the value fare against any conservative investment strategy?
We remind them how many times Bitcoin has been declared dead before. We remind them that that anyone who has held Bitcoin as a long term investment has made money.
Even today after the recent dip anyone who held for 12 months is up 300% y/y.
If in doubt zoom out.
Strike is, in the US, a custodial US dollar wallet. You give them dollars and they keep them as dollars. You send them to another person in the US and they just amend their internal ledger.
When you try and send them to El Salvador things go pear shaped. They:
(1) Buy Bitcoin with those dollars.
(2) Use a private LN network that they don't let anyone else onto because it made it totally un-workable according to their CEO.
(3) To send those Bitcoin between their own two accounts.
(4) And then buy Tether with them in El Salvador. You remember, the dollars that are actually 3% dollars.
Strike is somehow the absolute worst case for the people of El Salvador. Centralized, permissioned, censorable (it's not available in Hawaii or New York) and backed by Tether. Not a coin that's likely to have the money (USDC) but Tether, who admits they don't.
El Salvador by the way, is a dictatorship mandating their citizens use of Bitcoin.
Where's the win exactly?
[1] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/06/11/el-salvador-...
This is a strange statement to make. It still runs on the same LN network as everyone else, it's just that they won't peer with anyone. I wouldn't exactly call that a "private LN network" in the same way I wouldn't characterize verizon as operating a "private internet" because they don't have an open peering policy.
As for the bit about using tether, I wholeheartedly agree that something like USDC would be much more suited. The only explanation I can come up with is that USDC has orders of magnitude less volume than USDT. According to cryptowatch USDT has 24hr volume of 73.3B whereas USDC only has 0.60B.
[edit] Complete speculation, but if I had to guess, Tether's ability to create ersatz dollars is really important to the Salvadoran scheme. After all El Salvador cannot print currency, because it's a USD economy. I know someone who's got an unlimited wildcat money printer (and the reckless abandon to use it) - his name is Paolo.
If I were a criminal mastermind operating in plain sight with about $60B shortfall on my books due to counterfeiting, the best way I could think of to keep myself out of trouble would be to make a poor nation dependent on its continued existence. Literally too big to fail. Again, purely speculative.
Remember, frauds have to keep getting bigger out of necessity.
1. Bitcoin mining will eventually halvening away and all security will be funded by transaction fees.
2. Most transactions will move to the Lightning Network and be practically free.
As the LN will remove the need to pay fees with it combining so many transactions, the Bitcoin network will thus not be worth mining on, and will thus be able to be easily attacked. As the security of the network is diminished, it will quickly become worthless.
I don't see how this works long-term.
The 1MB limit makes it highly likely that there will always be a backlog of transactions even post reward world.
Currently block fees are 5% of the block reward. In 2024 when the next halvening occurs, either Bitcoin needs to double in price by then or the block fee will have to make up 45% of the gap, which is an increase in almost 10x, from $4.5/transaction to $40. If it fails to do this miners on the margin will stop mining and the security of the network will diminish.
Bitcoin now is basically too big to fail.
That phrase, are you really going to use that without a /s ?
This isn’t a great heuristic. It green lights every high-gain proposal, irrespective of the risks, actual rewards and odds of success.
sure if you like to gamble
> I know many here are stridently anti-crypto, but there is some not very likely but plausible future where Bitcoin or Ethereum become the global reserve asset. Much the same way gold was in the 19th century or IMF drawing rights have operated at certain points post Breton Woods.
not very plausible at all. As for a gold standard it was abandoned for good reason. You don't want a standard that is artificially limited and artificially limiting the economy, that's how you get a Great Depression
Reserve status results in an artificially high bid on exchange rates, which decimates the export industries of the host country and results in perpetual trade deficits. The US is in a relatively unique position by being a big enough economy to absorb this impact, and by having an advanced enough financial system to sustain perpetual trade deficits by converting low yield liabilities to high yield assets.
But if for some reason or another the dollar loses reserve status, expect the central bank of any other contender to fight tooth and nail to protect their exchange rates. Just witness how the Swiss National Bank defended an arbitrary ceiling when global markets started piling en masse to the franc after the GFC. Or look at how China continuously manipulates a cheap yuan to keep exports competitive and its manufacturing based economy humming.
Without the dollar, the only long term sustainable fiat reserve I can imagine is something like the IMF SDRs. Basically the major currencies creating a basket weighted blend to make sure no single economy is burdened with reserve status.
If you have reasoning to back your claim that gold was an awful reserve currency, I would love to hear it.
Have you read a fair share of other schools of Economics, or did you just focus on Austrian?
Here is former Fed chair Alan Greenspan’s bullish case for the Gold standard for example [1]
[1] http://www.altavra.com/docs/thirdparty/gold-and-economic-fre...
This is a common myth used to support a gold standard and it's wrong. Barter was rarely practiced because it is too impractical and theoretical. Ledgers and debt existed as soon as imbalanced trade existed.
Paying later is a form of debt. Paying too much is a form of debt. In tribal communities people simply kept the ledger in their head. Some of them used physical objects to remind them of their debts but that is not any different from writing numbers into a notebook.
Common ledgers were tally sticks [0]. You just take a long object and use a knife to mark how much debt you have. They even had a resurgence in medieval Europe because of a shortage of precious metal coins.
Market cap for crypto can go up by 100x but crypto overall could still be inflationary by adding new niche crypto asset classes.
The much larger than 1% probability of the current mainstream crypto being replaced by whatever new crypto is hyped in the future. Or the chance of "crypto" simply debasing itself out of existence with an infinite supply of new tokens.
1: https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/136350447853262438...
These people flat out don't understand how currency works. They don't understand where it comes from, how it's created, how it's destroyed, or what gives it intrinsic value.
I broadly agree that there's no great reason not to allocate 1-5% (I'd go higher on the range, depending on personal context) to crypto.
However there's no scenario where Bitcoin can increase in value by two orders of magnitude. Literally, there is no scenario that can actually occur that will get it there. You're talking about ~$75-$100 trillion in value depending on where Bitcoin is at in a given week or month.
You know what compares well to that? All the public stock holdings on planet Earth, which is just under that line.
Bitcoin is going to be worth more than every publicly traded company in existence, from the US to China and everything inbetween. Not a chance that can ever happen. The odds are zero.
This will never happen. Governments won’t allow loss of control and the planet can’t support it either. If Bitcoin is not banned in all western nations within 10 years I will be very surprised.
Science fiction has explored the idea of transnational, nation-like organizations that have more real importance than an actual country. If nations reject bitcoin I suspect that is where we're going to go.
Governments will likely start to buy/mine large amounts... that's seems more likely at this point.
I'd be surprised if the US government isn't doing this very soon (or has already)
I know many here are stridently anti-crypto, but there is some not very likely but plausible future where Bitcoin or Ethereum become the global reserve asset. Much the same way gold was in the 19th century or IMF drawing rights have operated at certain points post Breton Woods.
This is entirely different than the scalability limits that stand in the way of Bitcoin becoming a consumer currency. In this future, only major central banks and financial institutions would hold physical Bitcoin. Consumers would use either Bitcoin backed scrip issued by a bank. Or fiat currency where global confidence largely stems from the central bank’s BTC reserves.
I’d give this future a 1% of happening in the next 15 years. And conditional on it occurring, I’d estimate the price of BTC would likely increase by two orders of magnitude. From a pure expected value standpoint that makes crypto one of the most compelling asset classes around.