I do believe there are many better proof systems available at the moment, and I thought its emissions would be higher than 0.2%. Though if fossil fuels account for the majority of global carbon emissions, and banks providing the majority of fossil fuel investments, banks should surely account for a much larger portion of global emissions.

There is an argument to be made that Bitcoin could end up producing more carbon emissions if it already produces this much with a much lower transaction capacity than most banking systems. However, systems like the Lightning Network <https://wiki2.org/en/Lightning_Network> build on top of Bitcoin by settling transactions before they ever reach the blockchain, slashing fees and bundling possibly hundreds or thousands of transactions into one, so the number of payments that actually occur could be much greater than it seems.

Ignoring banks for a moment, consider the US military which some claim protects the value of the dollar.

According to The Atlantic, the US military alone counts for 5.5% of global carbon emissions.

https://archive.is/DVWZs

Whats the total market cap of the economic value protected by the US military?

Lightning Network design is horrible, and it's literally impossible to onboard millions of users without increasing the L1 blocksize to an absurd amount.

The world will likely move onto using rollups on other chains like Ethereum instead, which scale better, and pays gas to validators to get included into the blocks.

Seems like the Bitcoin community is looking into rollups on Bitcoin, but it'll be impossible to get trustless Bitcoin on them, even with BitVM, without a hardfork.

You are wrong!

Okay, the banks might cause more carbon emission than blockchains. But, the banking system serves the whole world, providing services for 8 billion people. But Blockchain is still a niche thing.

You might say, no, Bitcoin is not niche, Blockchain is used by a lot of people! Then, you are wrong again. The media is talking about Blockchain all the time, but it is indeed a niche thing. No one is using, say Bitcoin, to buy real physical stuff, cryptocurrency is not taking part in the people's real life.

So, my point is, if Blockchain is adopted by the world and replace the banking systems, it will definitely emit much much much more carbon, I am saying orders of magnitudes more.

Computer chips do not need to use energy useful to humans, BTC and also deep learning algos just to name a few.

Sam Altman should go to Saudis and plug GPUs directly as petroleum gets out of the ground, and then transfer the trained bits to any country he likes. Blockchain mining was a favorite for Icelanders who have in excess geothermal energy.

Energy is expensive or not cheap, only on places in the world in which it is not abundant. Factories of robots (see Jeff Bezos), or computers mining numbers, or computers training statistics can be located anywhere we like.

Also BTC is a blockchain, which support less than 1.000.000 tps, so not very useful.

As soon as we want to put identities on a blockchain, thousands of identities per person or even millions, legal agreements hundreds and thousands per person every day, property transactions in the magnitude of a grain of sand, millions of property transactions per person every day, then 2 transactions per second on the whole blockchain does not cut it.

>Blockchain mining was a favorite for Icelanders who have in excess geothermal energy.

Icelander here, our main power generation is from hydroelectric not geothermal, it's a common misconception.

Also most of the mining here has moved on to easier places like Sweden and Norway. And for cooling / humidity reasons not solely electrical prices.

It was also just foreign owned companies most Icelandic folk don't like it here (I think it makes good use of our remoteness and shit latency however)

Interesting, one question i had, was hydroelectric due to mountains/hills glaciation or in the sea like the UK. I googled it, it seems like the former.

Geothermal always seemed to me, it's a pretty difficult source of energy to extract for factories n stuff. Like, a factory can melt steel, but no one wants the ground he stands on to melt as well.

Hydroelectric is a much easier source to work with. Humans have used rivers as a source of energy for thousands of years.

>Computer chips do not need to use energy useful to humans, BTC and also deep learning algos just to name a few. >Sam Altman should go to Saudis and plug GPUs directly as petroleum gets out of the ground

Hows that help carbon emissions?

It reduces it. Instead of taking a barrel of oil, moving it to a different place and burning 10% of it in the process, or even 20%, it can be easily be used right there use 20% less, and cheaper as well. No need for ships to be built, sailors to sail and so on. Less emissions, not zero but a reduction, and cheaper.

Just moving bits around seems like a lot easier, efficient and cheaper than moving physical stuff around.

Edit: bad calculation fix

So not "energy not useful to humans" its "a slight discount from information having lower shipping costs than fuel."

Most datacenters are not powered in a significant way by fuel shipped overseas from the Middle East.

but but but layer 2s!

This event does reduce the incentive to expend that compute power, which is generally good thing.

And what percentages do videogames or movies add?

Or gold mining?

I suppose one could say video games are a net positive as they entertain humans.

Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.

Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it. The mining provides no value, it is not a good usage of the compute power. Evening finding ET would be better than what it’s currently doing. That power could be used for all kinds of things, versus solving a block of data with trial and error.

Gold mining, which is primarily open pit strip mining, is massively more polluting than just measuring its carbon footprint.

Gold mining completely destroys large tracts of land, poisons enormous water supplies and leaves huge areas completely uninhabitable for basically ever.

Gold mining has polluted 40% of US rivers and 50% of lakes.

If Bitcoin could replace gold’s store of value use case and environmental footprint, it would be a massive win for the environment.

https://www.gao.gov/blog/gold-rush-rot-lasting-environmental...

> Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.

Most use of gold is speculative as a store of value, some is decorative, and a little bit is actually used to build products.

> Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it.

Of course, for transactions. But people don't want to use national currencies as a store of value. For good reasons.

If we could replace gold with bitcoin as the store of value, it'd be a net positive.

Any energy usage seems like a waste if you don't understand the benefits.

Bitcoins energy input is used to protect the monetary energy it contains from being stolen, by anyone. The value in the monetary units of fiat currencies is continuously being stolen through supply inflation which dilutes the same value across more units, halving the value every decade. This is what always happens when money is proof-of-work for most, but not for a select few who can create it effortlessly (the banking system).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

What is money if it's not proof of work?

> Abraham broadly estimates the gaming industry produced between 3 million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020 to create video games. That includes energy bought from local grids and used to keep the lights on and computers powered as developers make games.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/features/video-games-are-fi...

Compare this to the linked wiki article:

> A 2022 non-peer-reviewed commentary published in Joule estimated that bitcoin mining resulted in annual carbon emission of 65 Mt CO2, representing 0.2% of global emissions, which is comparable to the level of emissions of Greece.

So, bitcoin mining results in CO2 emissions comparable to twice that of the entire video game and movie industries combined.

That's just the energy that goes into making them, what about the energy that goes into playing them? Has to be at least an order of magnitude greater

That's a good point, but I'm not sure it's quite as drastic as you think.

There are about 400 million current and last-gen consoles that have been sold, all-time. I'd wager most of them spend 95% or more of their time unused.

Steam shows about 20-30 million players online at any given point. Let's pretend this represents 50% of the PC gaming population (a vast underestimate of Steam's market share in the US and EU, not sure about other markets like China). What fraction of those are gaming PCs? Gaming laptops? Laptops with integrated graphics that really aren't meant for gaming?

Let's say that your typical PC gamer uses 300W when playing video games. That's probably on the low end for a gaming PC, but an overestimate for any laptop. 300W * 24 * 365 * 60 million is about 160 billion kWh. That translates to, um, 33000 tons of CO2? So like 3 orders of magnitude smaller?

I'm not even going to bother with the mobile game population because the power draw on those is like single-digit watts so even if there are 100x more players, the numbers are around the same order of magnitude.

Even if my estimates of number of PC gamers at any moment and the wattage of the typical device are both off by 10x, that's still way smaller than the estimate of how carbon-intensive it is to make games.

Isn't it how electricity is produced that's causing the problem you describe?

I think you would be shocked to know how that compares to the emissions of the US military which some argue forms the security backing the US dollar. [1]

“There are no solutions, only trade offs - Thomas Sowell”

[1] https://archive.is/DVWZs

Sure, the US$ is backed by a large military-industrial complex (as well as the power to tax and the productivity of the people and companies of the US), but if we switched from the US$ to BTC as the national currency we'd still need a US military - it's not like the only utility a military has is to keep the currency afloat.

Can’t imagine we would still need 1000 bases in 80 countries around the world if we didn’t have to protect the petrodollar and reserve status.

The same goes for gold. If only used for jewelry and industrial applications we wouldn’t need to strip mine so much of it.

Could it be that they protect more than just the value of the US dollar?

Always strikes me as a weird take.

There’s nothing anyone can do about it. As long as someone somewhere in the world keeps mining it will continue to exist.

It would take the equivalent of a world war effort to, maybe, get enough people to stop mining, that a 51% attack could be successfully carried out. At which point the community would just fork and continue on.

The only realistic option is to outcompete it. Build something better, where even the most greedy bad actors want in on the new thing, not because it’s better for the environment, but because it’s better for them (and happens to also be better for the environment).

What people can do though, is try to get gas-powered leaf blowers banned in your neighborhood, and expand from there.

Would you be surprised to learn that a lot of people live in a neighborhood where there is not a central broker with a power to ban anything?

Yes. And I think anywhere that leaf blowers are noticeable is almost certain to have a central authority with that power.

You’re very wrong.

There’s not enough detail here for this to be a compelling argument.

Ugh this guy was trying to argue that only HOAs can control leaf blowers. Only an American would forget the existence of actual government when talking about central authorities who can enforce rules.

Only a non-American feels constantly compelled to point stupid things like that out.

The problem is how energy is produced. You're offering solutions at what I think is the wrong end. Pigouvian tax things causing the problems at the point of extraction and let the free market respond to that. The negative externalities have to be realized by the market.

You’re right. But I think we’d need a world where we don’t have people who would pollute a lake to pocket a million dollars.

At some point you’re fighting human nature.

I was with you up until the last paragraph. Thinking small isn't going to help much imo.

Unless you are a person capable of bringing about systemic change, thinking small is the limit of what most individuals can contribute.

Instead, people typically dismiss the small change they could bring into reality, and take the easier route, like talking about how big change is needed, and change nothing.

0.2% is one in five hundred. That's just not a lot.

Yes, better off without it, but it really makes no difference whatsoever...

Maybe we can just get rid of Greece and keep bitcoin?

What is money if it's not proof of work?