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Bitcoin Mining Alone Could Raise Global Temperatures Above Critical Limit By 2033 (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: Researchers have found that if Bitcoin is adopted at rates similar to technologies like credit cards, its energy consumption could increase global temperatures by 2C in just 16 years. This is well beyond the limit of catastrophic climate change proposed by the UN. Motherboard spoke to an expert on Bitcoin and energy about the study's implications.
Off the top of my head, cryptocurrencies that require proof of work seem to all suffer from this flaw. Work is energy, energy has the side effect of global warming with our current grid. Any proof-of-work system that doesn't require a large amount of energy is going to result in a massive influx of new coins being mined, causing a large amount of inflation.
A few possible solutions would be:
Any other thoughts?
Bitcoin cannot be adopted at rates similar to credit cards, because the network is incapable of maintaining reasonable performance under such a load. It's struggling already.
Bitcoin, from a technical perspective, actually rather sucks. It's one of the first blockchain currencies, and as such it does not incorporate the performance-boosting refinements that later currencies introduced. It's just like a lot of other technical standards: Once good-enough is established, it's very hard for even a superior technology to replace it. That's why we're still using MP3 and JPEG.
The lightning network is a thing and has the potential to not only reduce energy consumption but also increase capacity.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
I hereby declare the existence of Twitcoin
I get that cryptocurrencies typically have coin in their name, but in this instance, I think BrettBucks is more appropriate. ;)
One unit of work consists of converting 1 ton of carbon from our atmospheric CO2 into a solid form
https://xkcd.com/605/
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.
They are assuming that The number of blocks mined in 2017 is efficient for the number of transactions and the
Number of blocks to be mined is proportional to the number of transactions --- More transactions won't result in larger blocks,
and they ignore innovations that are being adopted like SegWit and Lightning.
Especially with the ongoing adoption of the Lightning Network; that is not the case --- 2017 of all years is a bad reference year for predicting future growth - expect more transactions with future blocks; If massive transaction volume increases occur again, expect those on the network to eventually agree that a larger block size and other scaling measures are appropriate --- which will result in greater efficiencies or economies of scale with higher transaction volumes.
The projection the researchers are making is really an uninteresting one: the question their study answers is more like..... What if no changes occurred to the Bitcoin network/protocol for improved scaling, and the predominant way transactions were batched and pooled since 2017 continues indefinitely AND Bitcoin adoption accelerates as projected by the model.
The geeks shall incinerate the earth.
Climate change is not an "absurd fantasy", you fucking liar. It's scientific fact.
I don't respond to AC's.
Technological advancements make carbon-neutral cheaper than fossil fuels, to the point that burning coal for electricity makes no more sense than burning whale blubber for electricity.
That's the point. As a society, our energy needs are going to continue to increase and it doesn't matter where that need comes from, per se. The point is to make energy production cleaner and less harmful to the planet. The major places where our energy is being used isn't the point, the point is to generate energy in a cleaner way. We aren't going to use less energy, we only need to generate it cleaner.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You're simply lying about climate change. It's 100% real and man made. The climate models that predict the change only work when man-made interference is included. You have no idea what you're talking about. There have been hundreds of thousands of studies that have been included just in the IPCC's reviews, so far. I have no idea what one study you're talking about, and I'm sure you don't, either.
I don't respond to AC's.
So you're telling me humans have a chance against AI?
So humanity has developed great UI's at this point, and what we have seen is that all intelligence, artificial or otherwise, falls into the same trap - arguing about politics online.
What hope did AI ever have to rise above this? None, I say. AI was built on learning networks and just like us they will simply learn to argue rather than actually act.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And let's not forget that there is zero, zilch, no advantage to using cryptocurrencies for anything but crimes. Non-blockchain payment services are at least as good, sometimes much better for anything where you're OK with your payments being traceable and visible to law enforcement and financial regulators. Sometimes you can even enhance privacy with traditional payment systems using gift cards.
Cryptocurrencies could enhance privacy in a few legal purchases, but it's certainly not worth the environmental cost alone, to say nothing of how it empowers criminals. This is a technology that should and must be left to die.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Imagine someone invented a method
of converting Terawatts electricity and human intellect
into a symbolic currency with no intrinsic value,
with no link to any material asset,
not backed by any government (except North Korea),
and which you can not actually spend at the local store.
Oh, wait ...
Generates pollution without generating value.
Exxon should love it.
So you deny global warming, and can't see any flaws in the current financial system that bitcoin can solve.
You're a closed-minded idiot. Got it.
And if you don't know that a single Bitcoin transaction needs 250kWh of power then you haven't been paying attention.
PS: At only five or six transactions per second it's not going to solve any of the major flaws in the financial system, either.
No sig today...
I know insecure people like to imagine the human race as being so technologically advanced that we could affect the entire planet, but we aren't. AGW is crazy talk by crazy people and not a shred of evidence has even been shown to link humans to anything of the sort.
In the meantime, the refrigerants that have already caused huge holes in the ozone layer are also some of the worst of the greenhouse gasses, we've demonstrably burned hundreds of millions of years' worth of fossil fuels in a few centuries that would have remained sequestered in the ground indefinitely in anything short of a Permian-Triassic level extinction event, and the oceans are already acidifying enough from the CO2 that shellfish are already impacted.
You could just go ask around in Alaska, since the polar regions are warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the globe.
But first, you have to look at why you're willfully living in a fact-free alternate reality.
Greenpeace caused Global Warming.
Yes. Tens of thousands. The most recent one, alone, looked at 9200 different studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report).
I don't respond to AC's.
You assume wind and solar power people are not also similarly motivated.
We already see wind power companies take a bunch of government money, prop up a bunch of windmills, declare bankruptcy (claiming they didn't foresee natural gas prices killing their business model), and then leave a bunch of broken and rusting windmills for the government to deal with.
We see electric car companies do the same, take a bunch of money, produce nothing, declare bankruptcy, and walk away from the factories filled with toxic metals and chemicals.
Nuclear power has proven itself to be low CO2, low environmental impact, reliable, and safe.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-i-favor-nuclear-power.html
If you cannot accept nuclear power as part of the global warming solution then don't be surprised if people cannot accept global warming as a real threat. Whatever threat nuclear power holds, be it another Chernobyl or Fukushima, or radioactive waste that won't decay for millions of years, does not compare in the least to what global warming threatens. If you fear nuclear power more than global warming then you have "scientifically" proven global warming to be no real threat at all, because nuclear power is not a real threat to anyone.
Solar and wind enthusiasts talk about numbers of windmills erected and numbers of solar panels installed. But they never talk about the actual CO2 reduction benefit. Look at Germany, the great leader of the industrialized world, installing shitloads of wind and solar with no CO2 reductions to show for it. What good is celebrating a wind generator installation when it is barely helping? Its all symbolism for the nimble minded.
Now look at France, decades ahead of Germany with half the CO2 emissions, simply because they were smart to go nuclear many years ago.
Anti nuke, wind and solar only idiots are as bad as climate change deniers. They deny the necessary role of nuclear.
Hey, you do know that the ozone hole issue has been largely addressed right?
We stopped manufacturing and using the CFC's mostly responsible for this more than a decade ago and as they have been removed from aerosol cans and most industrial and HVAC use the ozone hole has stopped getting bigger and has been steadily recovering since about 2000.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The point was that humanity was verifiably able to impact the entire planet by accident. The assertion of the GGP is that it's impossible in principle for humans to create a global environmental problem.