[HN Gopher] Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin th...
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Tesla spent $1.5B in clean car credits on Bitcoin the filthiest
asset imaginable
Author : ForHackernews
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-02-08 21:57 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (amycastor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (amycastor.com)
| nickgrosvenor wrote:
| I always wondered what will happen when the environmentalists
| find out about the energy consumption requirements of Bitcoin.
| 1996 wrote:
| They will be super angry and look at all the details, including
| the past profits, then calmly decide to look the other way
| because they need a retirement account after all :)
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Hopefully everyone with move to Ethereum and other Proof of
| Stake coins.
|
| (Both for the environment, and my wallet since I'm already deep
| in Eth)
| freerobby wrote:
| They'll complain and then we'll show them the energy
| consumption of the finance industry.
| p1necone wrote:
| Controlling for transaction volume the energy consumption of
| bitcoin is _orders of magnitude_ higher than the rest of the
| finance industry.
| blhack wrote:
| How much energy does the rest of the finance industry use?
| floor2 wrote:
| Bit of an aside, but it's so wild that we label people as
| "environmentalists" and that anyone would place themselves NOT
| in that group.
|
| It seems like 100% of people should want air which is non-
| toxic, water which is non-toxic and food which is non-toxic.
|
| But of course, being an "abolitionist" was a political group in
| the 1800s but now it's just assumed that 100% of people are
| anti-slavery, so maybe the optimistic take is that
| "environmentalist" will undergo the same transformation as
| "abolitionist".
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| This black-and-white thinking ignores the spectrum of what
| constitutes non-toxic. There are those that accept nothing
| short of perfect purity in air, water and food, a condition
| which has never existed in a million years of human history.
| Others are less concerned about humans and more about
| ecology. Still others value the morals of human-animal
| relations above issues of nature.
|
| So no, we are not all 'ecologists', not in the same sense
| anyway. And not to the same degree.
| Craighead wrote:
| I'm curious why you would post such a blatant lie about the
| air quality post industrial revolution by framing the
| scenario as "million years of human history"
|
| Why are you posting in bad faith?
| pasabagi wrote:
| There's as wide a gulf between our enviroment[1] and
| 'complete purity' as there is between slavery and 'complete
| freedom'.
|
| [1](complete ecosystem collapse, widespread poisoning of
| populations worldwide, etc)
| nickgrosvenor wrote:
| So true.
| friedman23 wrote:
| >It seems like 100% of people should want air which is non-
| toxic, water which is non-toxic and food which is non-toxic.
|
| This is a really low bar for what it means to be an
| environmentalist.
| sky_rw wrote:
| The spectrum lies in what the proposed solution to any man-
| made ecological problem should be. Typically solutions to
| these proposed problems require increased cost burden on
| either individuals or businesses, sacrifices in lifestyle,
| increased regulation, etc. With anything like this politics
| comes into play almost immediately.
|
| The way I see it, your 'environmentalist' label generally
| applies to those who thing we should spend/sacrifice a lot.
| And the 'climate denier'/'anti-environmentalist' label
| applies to those at the opposite end of the spectrum who
| don't think we should sacrifice or spend anything.
|
| Also re: slavery, more people are enslaved now in the world
| than at any point in history. More black men are enslaved by
| the prison system in the USA than there were at the height of
| North American slavery. So things are never so boolean.
| loceng wrote:
| The counterargument is always that at some point in future the
| energy consumption problem will be solved, but isn't the rate
| of computation a or the main factor against 50%+ attacks? Else
| the solutions proposed seemed to relay on centralized services
| that don't actually play on the blockchain to reduce the actual
| amount of transactions and load, also then avoiding the delays
| - but then re-adding the supposed main issue of having a
| "trustless" blockchain.
| ece wrote:
| Or PoS Ethereum or other PoS crypto currencies can take the
| place of exponentially energy-hungry PoW. They explicitly
| deal with the 50%+ attacks in their governance too.
| loceng wrote:
| How so - by central authority changes?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| You can't "solve" the energy consumption of Bitcoin -
| deliberate waste is built into the Proof-of-work protocol by
| design.
| ghego1 wrote:
| Genuine question: what's the end game here for Musk? He's been
| tweeting about dogecoin, and then Tesla invests a non
| insignificant amount of money in BTC. I smell something fishy.
| marcinjachymiak wrote:
| Counterpoint: https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-
| energy-co...
| ForHackernews wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
| salary depends on his not understanding it."
| polote wrote:
| This article is a joke written by the co-founder of Coin
| Metrics, a blockchain analytics startup. How he is not biased?
|
| Explaining that we are lucky to have bitcoin because China is
| wasting unused electricity...
| kneel wrote:
| https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...
| falcolas wrote:
| I'm sorry, I had to stop reading at "Second, metrics like the
| "per-transaction energy cost" are misleading because
| transactions themselves do not cost energy".
|
| Yes, this is technically 100% accurate. However it's also 100%
| missing the point, since for the transaction to be globally
| accepted, a hash needs to be mined.
|
| To paraphrase a few memes, "they're technically right, but
| they're being an asshole about it."
| tanseydavid wrote:
| https://ark-invest.com/analyst-research/bitcoin-myths/
|
| <TL;DR>
|
| Claim: Bitcoin wastes too much energy.
|
| Counter-Claim: Bitcoin's energy consumption is more efficient
| than that of gold and traditional banks.
| dhnajsjdnd wrote:
| Counter-counter-claim: The existence of Bitcoin doesn't reduce
| the energy use of traditional banks - in fact, it increases it.
| Bitcoin is not just responsible for the energy used in mining,
| but also the energy used in its voluminous interactions with
| traditional finance.
| jlawer wrote:
| There is no effort to bring these to the same base. The global
| banking system is massive. The article is factoring retail
| banking, stock & bonds, finance, derivatives, payment
| processing and a lot more in to "Global Banking". Even if
| bitcoin was to replace the dollar and gold all at once, much of
| that infrastructure would still be needed.
|
| Add to this bitcoin does an infinitesimally small number of
| transactions compared to the global financial system and I am
| doubtful that on a per value or per transaction basis that it
| would be within an order of magnitude. A lot of this is
| inherent to the design, and while it may be able to be evolved
| or an alternative crypto may not have the caveats, Bitcoin as
| it stands now is VERY power inefficient.
| gargara wrote:
| When Starlink is going to be fully deployed the internet would be
| impossible to censor and the bitcoin will be way more valuable.
| api wrote:
| The Internet is already damn hard to censor if you're tech-
| savvy, and Bitcoin isn't really censored very many places.
| gargara wrote:
| you mean in China ?
| jude- wrote:
| Point of clarity:
|
| Bitcoin transactions take negligible energy to produce and
| validate. It's block production that's energy-intensive, and it's
| the same regardless of how big or full blocks are.
|
| Like any energy-intensive industry that could operate profitably
| via fossil fuel consumption, mining should be regulated to only
| use green energy. No different than power production and
| consumption today.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| What would it mean for a bitcoin transaction to exist without
| ever being included in a block?
| anm89 wrote:
| Yeah this narrative is played out. Yes bitcoin uses a lot of
| energy. Almost certainly less than the things it is competing
| against. And over time it has the potential to decrease that
| consumption drastically with other protocols, an option
| traditional banking doesn't possess.
|
| Bitcoin is already the greenest form of finance and will get much
| cleaner in the future.
| kd913 wrote:
| Bitcoin is the greenest form of finance that gets greener over
| time?
|
| What nonsense is this?
|
| Already ONE transaction consumes as much power as an entire
| American household uses for a week.That is 215 kwh of energy
| for one transaction.
|
| It's using the equivalent of 2.26 million American homes worth
| of energy for just 330k transactions.
|
| A significant chunk of that is wash trading, ie people buying
| and selling to themselves to manipulate the price. Is that
| worth it?
|
| A simple visa or mastercard transaction produces several orders
| of magnitude less CO2.
|
| For 330k transact
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(page generated 2021-02-08 23:00 UTC)