If Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, it would give a small reduction in energy use, but at best it buys you 6 months extra to decarbonize electricity production.
Also what does btc and crypto replace? The carbon footprint of traditional finance, banking and the military actions to preserve it are massive polluters. Even at its infancy, pow crypto is already a good direction to improve sustainability.
I think crypto has a lot of socially useful potential, beyond mere speculative gambling and Austrian-school value storage, but that's in addition to the centuries of momentum in our real-world political economy; crypto-currencies are unlikely to replace that entirely, anymore than the internet replaced the New York Times.
6 months can be a tipping point happening or not.
Additionally, each produced ton of green house gases is contributing to climate change right now
The more electricity to decarbonize the more difficult.
As OP mentioned this issue is already getting addressed and in process to become more debated
If anything, solving existing real problems ought be priority rather than such a niche thing
What you do is buy up the dirtiest plants, run them until they break, bribe or evade any authorities (if they even exist) who would stop you, and if the plant is being shut down because it's failing to comply with pollution regulation (again, if such even exists) that just puts it in a weaker negotiating position. As such they HAVE to deal with you at whatever price you're willing to pay because they can't go anywhere else because they have to run illegally. But they're powering bitcoin, so it stops mattering if they're running illegally, because bitcoin is the currency in which it doesn't matter if you're being paid for crimes, only that the coin exists.
I consider that powerful motivation to arbitrage the energy system and exploit cases where energy suppliers are running out of options because they are too dirty. And this can be happening anywhere. Climate's global. If all the dirtiest coal burners are huddled together on a secret island for warmth and to eke out the last pennies (of real money) they can earn, they'll do that for bitcoin if they can't operate any other way.
And it'll still matter. It'll just be happening in secret, because bitcoin don't care.
Why push around everyone to consume differently while distributing vast amount of tax money that immediately go into more wasteful crypto ? It will not stay at 1% and I agree with the OP that it's going to be difficulty to reduce electricity wastage on one end while ignore the elephant baby in the crib taking over the room.
I'm a random internet person in Hong Kong. I have a friend mining half his rent in a hotel room who decided that he doesn't need to pay rent the "normal way" anymore, he can just sleep next to a cluster of mining machines in a hotel room. Is he the stupid one, or am I, paying 3000 USD of my own money monthly ? I have another friend who lost half his saving in shitcoin speculation, I have colleagues who made a 10x profit this year, I mean it's all fucking around me and it's very hard to say it's just a 1% part of an important problem.
I feel sometimes it's going to become the main problem. I can't wait for a mega crash to calm down all this excess. I can't accept I'm the idiot working the traditional way to make traditional money paying for traditional things while the futuristic gamblers mine their hotel room fees on a bet I'm going to eventually be forced into using their tokens at whatever cost when it becomes legal tender, locking the future price into making them billionaires.
For your own sanity I suggest you stop taking the process of getting rich so seriously. It doesn't make sense, nor is the fact that it doesn't make sense a singularity in the grand scheme of time, it has been known since ancient days (I'm not religious, this is just evidence of it's timelessness): "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all"
I'm assuming the large nation states would attack these tokens before allowing this to happen and I don't think any token ecosystem could withstand a strong nation state attack
Reality matters :)
Bitcoin's electricity use (or the electricity use of any other single application) is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to addressing climate change. Proof:
• Too much of what we does depends on electricity and has no even remotely feasible substitutes for it to be plausible to give up on electricity. In fact, switching more things to electricity, such as transportation and heating, is a large part of what we will have to do to address climate change.
• Therefore to address climate change we are going to have to switch to sources of electricity that are climate neutral, which cleans up Bitcoin (and all the other uses of electricity) from a climate standpoint.
EDIT: to clarify, of course Bitcoin's electricity use now has a climate impact. My point is that this will eventually be taken care of by the necessary switch to clean electricity for all our electricity production.
Until that happens we of course should be trying to clean up current electricity uses, but there are currently bigger fish to fry on that end than Bitcoin. To dismiss taking climate change plans seriously because most conversation is about things with bigger impact is not sensible.
If we take too long on the supply side and Bitcoin continues to grow it may move up the list to where it is one of those uses that we will need to address before we clean up the electricity supply.
- electricity is the only part where Bitcoin produces emissions (emissions of mining hardware)
- wasting climate neutral energy does not matter (it does: it's harder, takes more time and resources to switch to climate neutral sources; iirc studies estimate Germany needs to cut 50% of energy consumption to achieve 1.5° conformity)
- Bitcoin miners don't bypass widely adopted regulations somehow
Even if BTC and every other POW cryptocurrency converted this afternoon to 100% renewable energy use (and we ignore the carbon cost of manufacturing the hardware), it is STILL a huge climate problem.
Why?
1) Because that ~1% of total energy consumption is being squandered on maintaining the cryptocurrency instead of any other use. Thus, it prevents those clean energy sources from displacing CO2-generating sources which would otherwise be taken offline.
2) Even if the BTC energy is entirely derived from some power source that could not be used by others, perhaps all geothermal generation on a remote volcanic island, it will still add net heat to the atmospheric system. and, of course, we still have the energy use and CO2 spewage of fabricating and moving the mining equipment into location.
So, no, this problem is NOT taking care of itself.
Obviously, if the mining is done off-earth anywhere, it will not contribute to the CO2 problem, =ASSUMING= that it does not require on-earth energy resources to put the power generation there.
Crypto mining also stops being a problem when 100% of on-Earth power generation is de-carbonized — in that situation, it is no longer diverting energy generation that could be used to displace/reduce remaining CO2-spewing energy generation.
The problem is: While CO2 power generation is still active, and especially when it dominates, every kW of electricity used for crypto mining either directly generates CO2, or it uses clean generation that could otherwise (but now does NOT) displace a kW of CO2-based generation capacity.
For example, if the Texas grid became ~100% wind and other clean-source-powered, then BTC mining in that grid would not in any practical sense consume clean power that could otherwise displace dirty power. The 100kW you use to feed your miners could in theory be used to reduce production from a nearby coal plan in Oklahoma, but in practice, since the grids are not connected, they aren't, so that is probably the right scale.
That said, if it gets big and the miners are consuming enough production of solar panels and wind turbines to slow clean energy buildout on other grids, that's the second order of the same problem.
So, maybe everyone with crypto should, instead of convening to buy the constitution or a basketball team, go fund the takeover and conversion of an entire grid to clean energy, and build all the miners there.
Agreed.
> That said, if it gets big and the miners are consuming enough production of solar panels and wind turbines to slow clean energy buildout on other grids, that's the second order of the same problem.
True, but even that's not zero-sum: demand drives investment in production which increases supply leading to commoditization. Commoditization, in turn, makes the solution (solar, wind components) more accessible to a broader range of the economy.
GPUs for machine learning wouldn't be where they are today if it wasn't for gamers creating a demand floor that subsidized the research into better hardware.
Even if 99% of the rest of the world is also running on renewables, Crypto is still diverting energy generation that could be decarbonized.
Once the world energy generation is fully de-carbonized, then it is a non-issue.
And this is the reason why I cannot take any climate change conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of cryptocurrencies.
Whatever the promises of cryptocurrencies were, now most (all?) degenerated into a mechanism for speculation, and effectively into a self-sustaining and self-promoting mechanism for transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. And, unfortunately, with the side effect of consuming vast amounts of energy.