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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.
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.
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.
coloration
Say what now?
In the interest of answering this as if it were serious, it is true that the gold standard of scientific endeavor is full-scale experiments with controls and variables. However there are plenty of scientific efforts that have to make due with at best reduced scale experiments (geology, astronomy, psychology, probably most scientific efforts). We do know at small scale the products of combustion constitute a gas that insulates heat but allows for light. We also know that the increase of this reaction correlates quite nicely with the retention of thermal energy. While the scale is such that we can't *prove* it, the simplest explanation is that there is a causative relationship.
Now let's weigh the theories by consequence of acting *incorrectly* given the two scenarios:
-Global warming is not man made, but we curtail emissions anyway: We reduce our consumption of a non-renewable resource that we needed to reduce anyway.
-Global warming turns out to be man made, but we fail to curtail emissions and make it exponentially worse: Massive famine and violent storms destroy so much of our society and even potentially kill us off completely.
So not only is man-made global warming the simplest explanation that fits the data, it's also the one that is by *far* the safest bet.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
Science doesn't depend on anything in particular to be true. That's how science works. We try to figure out what is true. Nobody is paying scientists to prove something or another.
That's not how scientific models work. If models can fit the facts, then the models are effective. Climate models absolutely do fit the facts.
Did you not learn what "science" is in grade school? How can somebody be so clueless about something as fundamental as what science is?
I don't respond to AC's.
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.