“The worldwide BTC mining network consumed 173.42 TWh of electricity during the 2020–2021 period, bigger than the electricity consumption of most nations. The mining process emitted over 85.89 Mt of CO2eq in the same timeframe, equivalent to the emission caused by burning [42 million tons] of coal or running 190 natural gas‐fired power plants.”
Bitcoin mining produces as much carbon emissions as Greece, and as much waste from small IT equipment as the Netherlands.
It is a prime example of how economic growth is only possible through the use of more energy and resources, and how this growth is increasingly disconnected from what people actually need.
I get a lot of people calling out my #Bitcoin skepticism (as in: Bitcoin is a worthless piece of hot garbage trying to kill our planet) because number is again going up. This time it's real, now that the scamers have been caught and all.
But if you want to know why Bitcoin goes up you just need to look at one curve: Tether has printed 4 billion USD from thin air in the last week.
While it's great to see the crypto scam artists SBF and CZ been caught and punished (sadly without making their victims whole) the actual rock that whole scam economy is built on is Tether. Has been Tether for years.
And I really don't get why US regulators let some weird company print fake USD.
It seems to me the key sentence in the SEC’s #bitcoin ruling today is this:
“Bitcoin is primarily a speculative, volatile asset that’s also used for illicit activity including ransomware,[4] money laundering,[5] sanction evasion,[6] and terrorist financing.[7]” https://journa.host/@w7voa/111734109726584015
Just in case you wanted data on the carbon footprint of that bloody Bitcoin here is an analysis that suggests that Bitcoin's footprint is between 4 and 5 times the sum of all other forms of conventional currency put together. And this analysis doesn't cover all the other bloody cryptocurrencies that techbros have invented. #bitcoinhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221282712300094X
This week: the aftermath of the #Bitcoin ETF approval, #Coinbase tells a judge that crypto's kind of like beanie babies, and an e-pastor says the Lord told him to run a crypto scam.
If a #cryptocurrency was more, not less energy efficient than the incumbents, faster and able to handle transactions at scale with less cost, would that make it desirable?
Another way of asking this is whether you see any other significant problems, with the principle rather than the #Bitcoin implementation?
I have long criticised Blockchain but am not opposed to decentralised electronic cash, and interested to learn if those critical of #Blockchain are fundamentally opposed.
I think it is important to specify that it's not "cryptocurrency" (who mostly adapted other consensus systems). It's specifically #Bitcoin that keeps burning the planet for its supporters' libertarian fantasies.
The other cryptocurrencies are just financial fraud with less significant environmental impact.
Meanwhile, it burns up vast amounts of power and uses a lot of water. Both scarcities. And this is not only allowed, but also encouraged. It is a speculative instrument only and of no value to man nor beast. The future is being sold of cheaply by the speculators, the ‘miners' and governments around the world.
"with no intrinsic value, huge price volatility and no discernible social good, consumer trading of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin more closely resembles gambling than a financial service, and should be regulated as such."
The fact that you see very little presence of the larger cryptocurrency community on the Fediverse shows the actual interest in distributed systems compared to their interest in making money. A large part of the cryptocurrency community are just VCs or wannabe VCs.
So yeah, currently #Bitcoin mining is taking about the #energy consumption of the people of Australia with some of the bigger ones originating in #Texas, #Georgia & #NewYork
Previously this was mainly from #China but even they have banned it since the worry about energy consumption (and other reasons ofc)
Perhaps the US should take an example from China on this..
While ordinary citizens are increasingly asked to save energy both during heatwaves and blizzards, #Bitcoin miners won’t give up a single inch when it comes to their alleged right of burning energy to figure out which string has a hash with a certain number of leading zeros - just because a perverse system of financial incentives disguised as a cryptocurrency has decided that this inefficient waste of resources matters more than people consuming energy to heat/light their homes.
When Bratcher talks, you can immediately recognize the sociopath redneck cowboy talking points. The plan for measuring how much energy miners consume is part of a “politically motivated campaign“ from Biden and his administration (not a legitimate attempt of getting transparency into the consumption of shared resources), “an attack against legitimate American businesses seeking to make the lives of bitcoin miners, their employees, and their communities too difficult“ (if they feel like their consumption of energy is justified and proportionate then why measuring it would threaten businesses and those who work there?) and an “attack against personal freedom“ (what about the principle that your freedom ends where somebody else’s freedom begins?).
Proof-of-work has no place in a world with limited resources. It was a good proof-of-concept 15 years ago, and we should have never allowed a whole business model to be built around it. Unfortunately, a tiny but very loud minority who has built their fortunes around this unsustainable business model are now trying to convince us that it’s their right to waste everybody’s energy, and that we should thank them for defending everybody’s freedom.
Remember the names of these folks next time you are asked to reduce your consumption of electricity. And tell your kids about them too - they’ll probably outlive us and inherit a planet that will be more hostile towards life, and they need to know whose fault it was if our planet ended up like that.