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Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C

Camilo Mora, Randi L. Rollins, Katie Taladay

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Michael B. Kantar, Mason K. Chock, Mio Shimada, Erik C. Franklin

2018 · Nature Climate Change

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Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels

7 selected excerpts · 7 total mentions

dfabulich
Neutral mention · rule
If they were just trading cards, then they'd be bad, a Ponzi scheme where everybody's trying to convince everybody that their trading cards will be worth more in the future. (One way the scammers promote the Ponzi scheme is by saying "these trading cards are so much more than trading cards," in deliberately confusing ways. That's why "people can't wrap their heads around the simple concept." The scammers are trying to conceal it.) But NFTs are way worse than trading cards, because every time you transfer one, it wastes more electricity than an ordinary person uses in a year. So this Ponzi scheme is damaging the planet, too. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 "Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C"
Original comment Web3 is centralized and inefficient
dataflow
Neutral mention · rule
Everyone needs to ban Bitcoin... and likely other cryptocurrencies. Not only are they by far the biggest enablers of ransomware (which we're supposedly taking seriously now), but Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C. [1] Bitcoin already consumes 0.55% of energy produced globally. [2] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [2] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
Original comment CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
atmosx
Neutral mention · rule
A CPU is one of the few dozens of components that you need to get a tangible result out of a CPU. You need hard disks, screens, antennas, batteries and so on and so forth. So you need, copper, lithium and God knows what else. All these materials get transformed and many of them in the process get transformed to toxic material for humans. Do you really believe that computing comes cheap and is unrelated to climate change? I find that line of thinking extremely naive. Let me share a few links: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/apr/30/cloud-co... etc.
Original comment Banks, QE, and Money-Printing
ForHackernews
Neutral mention · rule
I hate proof-of-work cryptocurrencies because they're literally killing the great barrier reef to run an extremely slow database. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/18/602995137... As far as I'm concerned, the vitriol is more than justified. If I had my way, PoW cryptocurrencies would be illegal.
Original comment The Ethereum Price Drop: A Fundamental Analysis
Cypher
Neutral mention · rule
It's a 3 page document that makes a number of false assumptions. They extrapolate bitcoin to having 300 billion transactions and means no lightening or L2 solution and the block size would be 3gigs. Nor do they even factor in the halving. Wasn't even researched properly, just utter nonsense for the papers. And Joe Rogan was showing how easy it is to publish fake papers in journals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg here is the paper by the way behind a shitty paywall. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8
Original comment Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C [pdf]
phiresky
Neutral mention · rule
Actual source since this is almost impossible to find from the link above: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://github.com/moracamilo/Bitcoin/ Edit: The study seems to have a major flaw in that it ignores the effect of the block subsidy in its calculations: Though it mentions the block reward halvenings, it ignores them in the CO2e calculations. They basically calculate the CO2e emissions per transaction in 2017, then multiply that by a predicted number of transactions that will be made in future years [1]. Currently, transaction fees only account for 1-2% of the miner reward - (in 2017 on average 17% of profit was the fees, in 2018 6% and in the past…
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6 months only 1.5% [2] ) The study makes predictions in a very long term (15+ years) - but they ignore that what is currently 95+% of the reward (and thus 95% of the energy used) automatically halves every four years. This ratio will forcibly change over time - in 20 years bitcoin is either dead or fees will account for almost all of the reward - which means you have to divide the predicted emissions in the paper by at least 5. In the long term the amount of energy one BTC transaction burns is pretty much the same as the fee paid for that transaction times the cheapest electricity in the world. [1] "The CO2e emissions of projected Bitcoin usage were estimated using the CO2e emissions for Bitcoin transactions in 2017 as a reference. We randomly sampled blocks mined in 2017 until their total number of transactions were equal to the projected number of transactions, then we added the CO2e emissions from computing such randomly selected blocks. The approach was repeated 1,000 times." [2]: https://gist.github.com/phiresky/a6755c650b3bbb340c4d641f89f...
Original comment Bitcoin can push global warming above 2 C in a couple decades

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