[HN Gopher] Elon Musk wants clean power. But Tesla's carrying Bi...
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       Elon Musk wants clean power. But Tesla's carrying Bitcoin's dirty
       baggage
        
       Author : laurex
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2021-02-10 20:22 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
        
       | randompwd wrote:
       | All these articles and yet none of them have articulated the
       | carbon cost of the current financial system.
        
         | BlueTemplar wrote:
         | What exactly do you mean about "articulated" ? They certainly
         | mentioned it...
        
         | kerng wrote:
         | I argued the same earlier today and got downvoted by HN.
         | 
         | I agree with you.
        
       | jjk166 wrote:
       | The electricity cost of processing a bitcoin transaction on a
       | dedicated ASIC mining rig is, at the moment, 308 kwh. This is
       | roughly equivalent to the energy content of 100 gallons of
       | gasoline. Assuming electricity is produced at the local power
       | plant from fossil fuels at 40% overall efficiency, that electric
       | vehicles have a powerplant to road efficiency of 30% while
       | internal combustion car averages 20 mpg, if you drive for 100,000
       | miles over the course of a car's lifetime, you will save the
       | equivalent of 8,750 gallons of gasoline. Paying for your tesla
       | with bitcoin will decrease those lifetime carbon savings by 2.8%.
       | 
       | If for every 35 people who pay for their tesla in bitcoin, 1 is
       | someone who wouldn't have bought an electric vehicle otherwise,
       | there is still a net overall decrease in CO2 emissions.
        
       | jude- wrote:
       | There's lots of misdirected anger these last few days towards
       | Bitcoin.
       | 
       | First, the only thing that's energy-intensive about Bitcoin is
       | block production. Making transactions, relaying them, validating
       | them and storing them have negligible energy cost.
       | 
       | Second, nothing about the Bitcoin protocol requires block
       | production to use fossil fuels. Just like with _every other
       | energy-intensive industry_ , the problem isn't the industry. The
       | problem is the fossil fuel use.
       | 
       | Therefore, if you want to get mad about the high energy use of
       | block production leading to environmental pollution, you should
       | direct that anger at the appropriate target: miners who use
       | fossil fuels to mine.
       | 
       | How do we fix this? The same way we fixed it in _every other
       | energy-intensive industry_ : through taxes and regulation. Let's
       | get some laws passed to _require_ miners in your area to use
       | _only_ renewable energy, and to _require_ exchanges to impose a
       | carbon tax on coins whose miners rely on fossil fuels to mine.
       | Properly applied, these laws would make fossil-fuel mining
       | unprofitable, which is exactly what we want.
       | 
       | Bitcoin and PoW aren't going anywhere at this point. So let's
       | make sure it's continued existence doesn't make the world worse.
       | Sound good?
        
       | BlueTemplar wrote:
       | Why would bitcoin miners care about intermittent power ?
       | 
       | Wouldn't those windy German days when electric energy prices turn
       | negative be very attractive to them ?
       | 
       | Or is bitcoin mining hardware _still_ quickly getting obsolete ?
        
         | emteycz wrote:
         | Of course yes, similarly in China with hydro power and in
         | Iceland with geothermals, but that's impossible to explain to
         | these 'critics', they don't even accept the concept of waste
         | electricity - in their world electricity can easily beam
         | anywhere across the Earth without any costs and infrastructure
         | and/or be stored for however long in whatever amount, for free.
         | Even the fact that ordinary electricity costs 3 times the
         | earnings from mining doesn't stop them.
         | 
         | Anecdotes about a brother of their friend's cousin mining using
         | GPUs will be invoked to argue people are mining in their
         | basements using grid electricity and thus the Bitcoin network
         | uses fossil fuels, even though mining with GPUs is impossible
         | for many years now.
         | 
         | The benefits of Bitcoin will be handwaved away even though they
         | criticize the "high cost" of transactions - who the hell uses
         | these costly transactions if Bitcoin is so useless and can be
         | replaced by cheaper and better methods?
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-10 23:02 UTC)