News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Mozilla Foundation pausing cryptocurrency donations by Imnimo on Thursday January 06, 2022 @04:25PM (#29830443)
It costs about $20 to buy the carbon offsets for a single bitcoin transaction (at least according to the first article I found on Google), so double that for the two transactions to receive and then sell. Carbon offsets in practice are often not as much as what you're paying for, so you would probably need to buy more of them to truly offset.

You would also have to factor in the pollution from e-waste generated by miners buying and replacing ASICs, although that's harder to quantify.

But we should also consider whether engaging in such a transaction is worthwhile as a matter of principle. If the organization's goals include environmentalism, does legitimizing Bitcoin by advertising their acceptance of it run counter to those goals?

Re:Mozilla Foundation pausing cryptocurrency donations by buildbuildbuild on Friday January 07, 2022 @12:08PM (#29841639)
There is a lot of game theory behind why people mine a PoW cryptocurrency. Attempts to quantify “CO2 per transaction” are fundamentally flawed in my opinion.

Bitcoin’s pollution is not strongly correlated with its transaction volume.

It’s a famous rare collectible. People will mine it whether there is a high volume of transactions or not.