This all reminds me, didn’t someone put up an art installation with a crank that would spit out pennies at the rate of minimum wage?
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I vote for making the official energy per Bitcoin unit to be BTU/BTC. It just the logical consequence of Brexit. 
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Bitcoin strives to be a alternative to the current financial system so to be fair you should compare it’s energy usage to the energy use of the financial system. Are all banks CO2 neutral? Do those high-speed trading super computers run only on solar energy?
Sure there is room for improvement with the mining process, there are lots of coins experimenting with that. And sure banks currently have more utility, and reach, then bitcoin but bitcoin shows a lot of promise for reaching people that have traditionally been under served by banks, and there are a lot of those.
I think shutting down the bitcoin experiment because of it’s energy use would be really short-sighted.
Of course I do. Gold is a pointless material in this day and age. It’s value derives as much from the whims of the Fox News-watching goldbugs and Chinese 1%ers as as anything else.
And gold mining is utterly terrible for the environment, not just in the destruction of the local ecosystem, with millions of tons of rock pulverized every day, but in the hundreds of millions of tons of cyanide- and mercury-laden waste dumped into rivers and oceans each year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/world/behind-golds-glitter-torn-lands-and-pointed-questions.html
We already have a perfectly good way of deriving value from money, and that is simply paying people to do work, and paying for goods, and letting the prices even themselves out. We don’t need to be destroying the world in “mining,” either real or virtual.
Who, specifically, has been “better served” by BTC than they would have been using paper money?
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Ok, so to mine 51% of the market, starting from scratch, they’d need to slightly exceed the current mining level, right? And that’s currently 32TWh/y, apparently.
Trying to figure out the energy consumption of China, World Bank says it’s 2,236.73 kg of oil equivalent per capita, which that times 1.379 billion people is 3x10^12 kg of oil/year. 1kg oil is 11630 Wh, so 3.6x10^16 Wh, or 3,600 TWh/year.
So it would represent about a 1% increase in their total energy expenditure. Seems reasonable.
Poor working people sending money back to their parents/family in their country of origin.
Rich Chinese people trying to get their wealth out from under the control of their government.
Huh? But that’s what they do do. If it’s currently profitable to mine BTC on one computer farm, then it’s also profitable to mine it on two computer farms. You’re doubling both the cost and the profit.
That will only break down when the price of BTC falls, which is not dependent on supply (which is constant) but on speculation.
That’s not true, the amount of bitcoin that is mined at any given moment is constant. If you buy that second computer farm you will get a bigger share of the total bitcoin mining pie, not exactly twice as much but depending on how big your slice was before you doubled it could be close to twice as much. If your share was 100% before you doubled you would gain no extra coins for your investment.
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& @SamSam , thanks for the clarification.
The most usable development network for Ethereum, Kovan, has a new-block-rate of one every 10 seconds, if I’m not mistaken. Don’t know what their plans are if it’s ever used in production.
It’s my understanding that the kovan network controls the ether through trusted parties, and that would never fly with the bitcoin crowd (and probably never fly with the ethereum crowd).
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As opposed to who, exactly?
No one takes their externalities into account, present company included. Hell, when the computer I type on finally dies, it’ll do its little part in degrading the environment. It’s a pretty good bet that if you can even see the internet, your living a life that is not supportable or sustainable.
One of the main issues the environment is facing is the utter depth of denial that we’re all in.
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You are going to have to update your calculation as the math just got a whole lot “better” in the last day…
$25/MWh.
This is still much lower than the power price in nearly every jurisdiction without even factoring in the capital investment in “mining” hardware. In the end every bitcoin “miner” is speculating on future coin price increases to cover the cost of “mining” the coins today.
Externalities really mean “causing problems I don’t fully understand and letting others deal with the consequences later”.
We all do that to some degree or another and we are morally culpable for it.
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Your examples are of people converting the BTC they receive on the other end back as paper money. After all, the family of a Mexican worker is going to want Pesos or Dollars, not BTC. So this “use case” is entirely that of Western Union. Do we really need to consume the energy of Denmark to create a better Western Union? I agree that Western Union is a problematic business, charging high fees, but this is in no way the most efficient replacement we could design for it.
Are you suggesting that the family of the Mexican worker would prefer to spend BTC directly? This is very unlikely, as its price is currently far higher than its buying power. From a recent article, the Velocity of BTC (the amount that’s actually spent, not just traded back and forth) implies a value of around $1100/BTC, far below the $16,000 it’s trading at today (up $1000 since yesterday…,.). People are spending very little BitCoin on actual goods and services.
So I don’t think that’s a great reason for why all this incredible amount of energy and carbon is being spent on this.
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I’m unsure about a currency that can be almost completely blocked by the rise of a cat trading game…
As profiled by CoinDesk, the cat-trading game had grown so popular earlier this week that it was clogging the ethereum network, slowing down transaction times. Now, however, congestion is reaching unprecedented levels, with a record-breaking 30,000 transactions stuck and waiting to be processed at press time.
Poor working people sending money back to their parents/family in their country of origin.
Because if there is one thing that the poor really could use, it would be a “currency” that can drop 25% in value over a couple of days, is convertible only through shady-as-fuck exchanges, cannot be insured or recovered if stolen, and is lost forever if a password or virtual wallet are lost. Brilliant.
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Why do you think it is there is no more efficient alternative to Western Union yet? Honest question.
On a related note, why are vast swaths of the world going without access to banking?
I’m not saying Bitcoin is without it’s problems, I agree with the fact that it’s very wasteful, I agree that it’s adoption is nowhere near high enough for it to be useful as a currency. I just think you should at the very least compare it to the thing it’s trying to replace. You don’t write off solar panels because the production of solar panels produces CO2, that would be ridiculous. But in this debate I’ve heard nobody mention the greenhouse gasses produced by the financial sector. Who knows, maybe Bitcoin is vastly more polluting per unit-of-agreed-upon-fictional-value tracked. I haven’t seen any data on that, it’s all compared in a vacuum.
And even if it is more polluting, it could still be worth it. It’s the first decentralised digital currency. It’s like digital cash. It could do so much to equalise the playing field for people that are locked out of banking now.
You could say all of those things about paper money.
Once adoption climbs we may finally see a relatively open and fair alternative to the convoluted bloodsucking mess that our current financial systems offer us now. What would that be worth to you?
These are also the beginning days of the crypto currency world. There are more coins then you can count, and a lot of them are a lot less volatile, there are also quite a few that are tackling the energy use problems.
I’m sure they will work out the problems and scale it up so it can handle more and more traffic. And if they don’t someone else will create a alternative currency that can handle it.
You could say all of those things about paper money
You could, but you’d be lying.
Once adoption climbs we may finally see a relatively open and fair alternative to the convoluted bloodsucking mess that our current financial systems offer us now. What would that be worth to you?
Opaque and unregulated DOES NOT mean open and fair. It’s the opposite fer Chrissakes. But hey, keep fucking that chicken.
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The current bloodsucking mess needs more regulation, not less. The ideal BitCoin might be an “open” system, but it will only ever be fair in the same way as other unregulated markets. It’s fair if you believe that the person with the most capital “deserves” to profit most.
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As much as our supermarkets are full of thin pieces of AL used for packaging, I think things like Ford pickup trucks, Fire engines, etc use up way more AL. Ever see a new dump truck made of thick AL plate? There are enough places where the weight savings of AL vs steel make it financially attractive. And those things won’t rust like traditional steel. And I think the war machine is already running on carbon fiber and traditional lead.
I lived in Spokane during Enron’s electricity market manipulations. Kaiser Aluminum had both a smelting and rolling operation there. They purchased their electricity ahead of time in contracts. The price rose so fast that the electricity futures they owned were worth more than AL. So they closed down and just sold electricity for a while. Of course all of this was due to market manipulation, not the actual cost of producing AL or electricity. If someone has found a market that can’t be manipulated I’d love to hear about it.
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