We care about both. All the major cloud platforms are putting a lot of work into powering their data centers with as much renewable energy as possible, and surfacing carbon information to engineers using the platforms. See the feature Google just released, for example: https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint. It's even a somewhat mainstream topic - I'm pretty sure I've seen NYT articles about the carbon footprint of Zoom calls and Netflix streaming.

It's something I personally think about a lot, and I know many others do. Here's a community of people that discuss this topic a lot if you're interested: https://climateaction.tech/

Because power spent on mining is effectively 100% wasted for no useful computation.

This is not strictly correct.

When you game on your 3080 GTX at max graphics in VR, you wouldn't call that wasted computation because it provided utility to a human in the form of entertainment.

Proof of work provides utility in the form of trustless proof, allowing a decentralized network to actually work. The computational work carries meaning which is valued by network participants.

I guess you can make the argument that crypto is useful as a form of entertainment, but that's one hell of a polluting casino you got there.

Crypto provides utility by being decentralized, permissionless to participate in, and censorship resistance.

The reason mining consumes so much aggregate energy is because it is the most profitable use of energy at the moment. Part of this is because the cost of energy for fossil fuels in not accurately represented in its price.

Tax payers / governments subsidize the fossil fuel industry in billions every year, including coal which is used in coal power plants. A carbon tax is also not implemented. So externalities are not captured in price.

It should fairly obvious how energy sources change once those issues are addressed.

Yeah, the utility is obvious. We just need to internalize GHG mitigation costs and then prices will hit the correct place. It’s unfortunate, but the most effective way to do this would be to actually tax power sources and power generation at source, which means fuel taxes.

It will be hella regressive, but that’s the reality. Most poor people are polluting the planet disproportionately to their output.

Crypto today is like e-commerce in 2000. Or the internet in 1995. It has enormous potential to change the world.

I bet if the internet was invented today we would hear the same energy arguments.

Except, ya know, it powers the decentralized currency with a market cap of $1T.

In a disgustingly inefficient way.

Global Financial System: 263.72TWh

Bitcoin: 113.89TWh

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GFS deposits: US$404.1 trillion

Bitcoin: US$1.1 trillion

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GFS energy per US$: 0.65 Wh

Bitcoin energy per US$: 103.53 Wh

And this is calculated just for the value of deposits, if we do it again for number of transactions it's even more scathing.

https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but this doesn't seem to include the daily commute for bank employees, the waste from each bank, and the collective volume of mail delivered.

Ok cool. Let's double the energy used by banks then, still 100x as efficient as Bitcoin.

That's a fair statement. I'm not really even sure what the $404 trillion is after trying to look up where you were going with that (all assets globally).

We should do an attempt with just US dollars. It looks like there is about $40 trillion in actual physical/digital circulation (i.e. not investments in things like crypto, buildings, stocks).

Driving even an electric vehicle uses ~250-300 Wh per mile (we can round down to 250Wh).

Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup have about 738k (we can round down to 700k) employees and the average US commute is 32 miles (we can round down to 25). We'll assume ~235 days of work a year.

25 * 0.250 * 700000 * 235 = 1,028.1 TWh to commute for bank employees of the top four US banks per year

Which is about 25.7 Wh / $. We can safely assume this is significantly lower than reality already since we only counted the top four US banks and rounded all of our figures down. This also doesn't count any other industry required to keep USD working (like datacenters, as referenced in the paper you linked).

Edit: I'm not trying to prove you wrong or anything, I'm just genuinely curious if this "bitcoin is worse" statement is correct.

Thanks for working this one out, unfortunately you're off by a factor of 1000.

Your calculation comes out to 1.028 TWh

1 TWh = 1,000,000,000 KWh

Yep, my bad! So commutes aren't as significant a contributor as I thought. I ran through some more calculations trying to only use the US, and it looks like the Wh / $ is somewhere around 3.51. Is there any other category of use that isn't being included? This is a pretty stark difference, even being many times more than the first calculation.

Commute: 1.028 TWh

Data centers: ~3.3TWh per trillion (for USD) = 132 TWh

ATMs: 470,135 independent in the US (1.27MWh each per year) = 0.597TWh

Banks: ~98,000 in the US (PDF wasn't clear, using 60MWh each per year) = 5.88 TWh

Card networks: ~1TWh/yr (just assuming "half" of global)

Total: 140.5TWh/yr

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FB.CBK.BRCH.P5?location...

https://blog.sfgate.com/lifestyle/2020/08/31/its-electric-ho....

OK the main discrepancy is from the Data center calculation. The Galaxy PDF lists the top 100 banks as owning $70Tn of deposits. I calculated using the galaxy energy number but divided by total deposits wheras I should have only used the data for the top 100 banks as they did.

I think your calculation of 3.5 Wh/$ is closer to the real number. When I put $70Tn instead of $404Tn in I get 3.71Wh/$

Perhaps the definition of value goes beyond dollars, and into what is valuable or not for society (even if it makes people money, or not!)

A currency that is practically impossible to use as such...

Perhaps that’s the part they think is not useful?

> not towards the enormous mountain of power required to power non crypto servers as part of normal professional software business

The incentives are very different, I don't think you can compare them like that.

Miners and companies like Google both make more money the less power they use. However, in the case of Google power consumption is a side effect of their business.

To put it another way: if you overnight doubled Google's datacenter capacity you would not double their revenues. But if you doubled a bitcoin miner's capacity there would be an immediate change in the amount of revenue being made.

This means that for miners there's a very clear incentive to use whatever resources you can at your disposal, because the more power and hardware you have the more profit you can make.

Because crypto isn't usable and never will be. It isn't built to handle processing charges of $0.30 plus 3% on a $10 transaction and that it what it is competing with. Instead it is simply speculation and gambling and pump & dump. BTC already uses more power than several countries. Visa uses a fraction of that for a better and more functional system.

And please don't say PoS. PoS is centralized by default. If you are going to be centralized, why do crypto at all?

Second layer technologies are the solution to that problem. We can build systems on top of bitcoin that have some tradeoffs but allow for exponentially more transactions at lower fees. Lightning is one example of these second layer systems. Custodial wallets like Coinbase and others are a poor, but simple and easy example.

From a physical or a regulatory perspective, any of those second-order systems are going to be subject to the same money-transmitting laws in place across the world. So you can reimplement the existing money-moving tools with no significant benefits to anybody except the creators of the money-moving tools, who can take a vig instead of a bank or Visa.

Let's burn the planet down for that, hell yeah.

There is not only PoS. Open Representative Voting (ORV) is a working solution: https://docs.nano.org/what-is-nano/overview/

How is PoS centralized by default? You think ETH mining is less concentrated than ETH holding?

I know scores of people who hold ETH. I know like 2 people that have tried mining it.

Why can we not be critical of new inventions? Should we not be trying to make things better? To me thats like making the argument that because we have coal plants today means we should have no problem generating XY new plant because it's not worse than what we have now.

BTC is old, the possibilities have been proven but I think it's totally fair that we try to get somewhere more efficient than what we have now.

Because mining bitcoin alone consumes more power than the entirety of the Netherlands. And all that for a very low amount of transactions.

A single aluminium smelter consumes more power than the entirety of the Netherlands. It's not a very useful comparison.

> A single aluminium smelter consumes more power than the entirety of the Netherlands. It's not a very useful comparison.

This is patently false. The Netherlands has an aluminium smelting plant[1].

Why would you say something so obviously disproven?

[1]:https://aldel.nl

Seemed like hyperbole in order to put forth the point that NL is the size of a German neighborhood.

No I got the Netherlands confused with Denmark, which was a comparison from when bitcoin was much smaller.

That’s wildly incorrect, why would you think it’s true?

Netherlands uses 108,800 GWh per yer. Global aluminum smelting is 8x that, but no single smelter comes close to producing 1/8th the worlds aluminimum.

Yes and that is useful work. Unlike bitcoin.

If you’re concerned with high energy requirements for a low number of transactions, just wait until you learn about FedWire!

efficiency

Exactly: Bitcoin is using as much energy as the entire country of Sweden in order to do work that could be done by a single desktop PC from 2004.

If the work Bitcoin is doing could be done by a single desktop PC from 2004 then... the work would be being done by a single desktop PC from 2004. But clearly it is not.

Every time I see a thread on HN about crypto it makes me want to buy BTC or w/e because people are so unbelievably disingenuous on here that it probably still has a lot of steam left. The side that needs to be misleading to make their point is rarely the correct side to be on in my experience.

Bitcoin processes, as a maximum dictated by technological choices, 2-3 transactions per second. Each transaction is around a few hundred bytes.

Luckily Bitcoin has second layer systems being built on top of it, which allow it to leverage that 2-3 on-chain transactions per second to process thousands of millions more transactions off chain either through decentralized systems like Lightning or centralized custodial wallets.

Second layer solutions that do not actually work and that rely on solving unsolved problems in computer science to actually get working at scale.

Lightning is being used right now. In what way does it not work?

And sadly both sides are misleading.

Honestly, even though I don't like the insane power usage of PoW cryptos, I don't like the waste of the normal economy either. There's so much waste ... but anyways that would require its own thread I guess.

The important difference is, normal economy[0] profits off efficiency. There's waste, but that waste means companies are making less money than they could be. Everyone is incentivized to eliminate the waste. In aggregate, the market strives towards minimizing waste[1].

In contract, PoW cryptocurrencies have pure waste built in as a necessary component. They're literally waste incarnate, made into code and used to provide trustless consensus. It's a feature, that has to scale with the size of the network, and participants are encouraged to create more waste.

--

[0] - Let's for the moment ignore the negative-sum game cancer the advertising industry is. But even advertising tries to be efficient at micro level.

[1] - In fact, it's a major source of modern problems with the market economy. Companies optimize way past the point it makes sense, because the consequences are borne by someone else (e.g. customers). See e.g. the whole field of value engineering.

I have a weird opinion on this. Markets and industries are complex multilayered systems. Each subsystem tries to be somehow efficient but actually it's not. People are slow, the tools they use are often slow (unless you have serious knowledge and resources on optimizing logistics, throughput, management), their partners are too, and asking optimizations from them will cause friction.

Market might be a minimizing function of some sort but it's a blind one. Very often groups could do 4x more for 4x less just with a change of mindset alone.

I don't disagree. I'm not claiming the market achieves total efficiency, just that it tries. Much like a submarine is a bubble of air at pressure of 1 atmosphere resisting much higher pressure outside, it is possible (and even common) for low-efficiency areas to remain stable under market pressure, but the overall gradient is still clear. In contrast, PoW schemes use inefficiency as a fundamental component; they're wasteful by design, and it's considered a feature.

Yeah there's waste everywhere, the amount of energy wasted by the over-reliance on cars in the US could probably power the entire planet.

It's telling that the bitcoin defense is 99% whattaboutism – but have no fear readers, I scream into the void about those other things too.

I don't think it's only whattaboutism, it's mostly that crypto is becoming a meme complaint and even whattaboutism is thrown as reflex "what about you".

ps: I'm trying to go from screamer to proactive these days. I was already frugal and dropped car use, I'm also thinking into starting clubs to make more walk/bike use, recycling/upcycling repair shops and the likes. Do you have similar ideas ?

I already do things like you mention... walk most places, reuse/repair when feasible, buying less packaged food, avoiding leisure flying (I used to travel often)... but individual impact is fairly minimal, so I've been putting more effort into supporting local political candidates who prioritize the climate.

I also complain a lot at community meetings for new development in my immediate area (things like reducing parking in new buildings, including bike storage, EV charging, better public transit infrastructure)... I've found some of this stuff more fulfilling in that the impact tends to extend beyond what I'd be capable of doing alone... sometimes it's fruitless, but sometimes it works.

I'm trying to skip politics because I think it's fluff and too laggy. But I'm still at theory level. Ideally I'd find a few open warehouses to set up stuff. Tools, materials, gather smart / knowledgeable people, teach and viral spread the new habits. Hopefully it will cost next to nothing and happen faster than politically impeded initiatives.

Yeah, advertisement generates a lot of waste by making people buy stuff they do not want or need.

Sure, let's stop most of that too.

...that's a joke, right?

Have you seen the average enterprise's stack?

The worst enterprise stack you have ever seen is most likely at least a million times more efficient than bitcoin.

That is not an exaggeration, and is more likely to be a severe understatement.

I can't claim numbers but even if you have the fastest and leanest information system, the rest of the economy might be problematic, the human layer is really bad. I stopped counting how many time we asked people to come back another day (more car use) because the old paper+digital system is not made for high throughput. Our servers are probably super fast.. but the apps are not useful, the system is not useful, thus lots of waste above.

I'm not sure I see what this has to do with what I said?