You could argue that energy spent on entertainment is a waste, but it's been done since the dawn of civilization (the wasting of energy for entertainment - dance, art, fireworks, etc. etc.). As far as I know there's no way to entertain yourself without spending any more marginal energy compared to alternatives.
Presumably you, the reader, are reading this, on a computer that uses energy. Such energy could be said to have been "wasted", since reading the text I'm typing now isn't inherently productive.
A.k.a gambling, a.k.a entertainment. It's essentially the same. Especially people that play a lot with altcoins and constantly buy and sell, it's basically a hobby for them, a game where the score is an amount of money.
>there are ways to do so that do not incur the same costs.
What are the other ways to make censorship resistant financial transactions globally?
One of these products/services is orders of magnitude more valuable than the other.
If/once the environmental cost is priced in, all will be fine.
Once that is done, nobody would use this coal plant for mining bitcoins anyway, because it will be too expensive.
Proof of work is a grey goo in the nanotechnology way, it gets more and more energy intensive the more efficient technology gets. It also increases the budget for power and electronics the more expensive the token gets. This leads to the runaway power consumption you see now.
Renewables are green relative to coal, but they’re not zero footprint. To build a windmill with limited lifespan you need to mine rare earth metals in open air hellscapes in Mongolia [1]. You need to produce mountains of fiberglass. There’s no way to recycle fiberglass so once these fall apart you get your ores back, but have to bury the windmills [2].
Similarly for photovoltaics. The PV cells currently in use are made with cadmium and tellurium, heavy metals which again can’t really be recycled and end up buried in pits where they leech out into the environment. [3]
Bitcoin also generates 100g of ewaste per transaction which cannot be recycled meaningfully. The old ASIC miners can’t event be reused because they’re special purpose. So they’re shipped to poor countries where poor people dump toxic chemicals over it with inadequate safety gear to obtain what little metallics they can, and once again bury the rest. [4]
The only way forward is to reduce consumption by investing in efficient technology, not promote it with actively anti-efficient technology.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
[3] https://grist.org/energy/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-wh...
[4] https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/toxic-e-waste-dumped-in-poor-nat...
With Netflix, their electricity consumption roughly scales with their customer base. Netflix isn't going to double their electricity consumption, unless they double the amount of customers they have. Netflix is incentivized to consume the amount of electricity they need to serve their customers, and no more.
Bitcoin, however, has a completely different set of incentives. Since Bitcoin effectively converts electricity to money, Bitcoin miners will attempt to consume as much electricity as possible, to maximize their mining output. In addition, any efficiencies made doesn't really reduce the environmental impact, as any electricity saved can just be pumped into mining more Bitcoin.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/reliance-...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
One of the things about the current boom in cryptocurrency prices is that the underlying technology is irrelevant for most speculators, as long as the ledger is secure. So yes, there's a technical solution for this, but Bitcoin is still popular.
Jokes aside, I think the current ETA is Q3. I've got it marked in my calendar as "graphics card availability day."
if someone wants to mine bitcoin on an island with their own solar or tidal capacity, ok, I guess, but that's not the case anywhere afaik.
And there's a lot of non-useful energy usage that is happening because fossil fuel energy is too cheap. Like heating pools and outdoor hot tubs or heating or cooling houses instead of properly insulating them.
I'd say that harsh tax on fossil fuels could do way more to limit carbon footprint and accelerate movement toward renewables than any one measure such as banning bitcoin mining.
Inform the market of the true cost and let it find the best solution.
This seems abjectly horrible from an environmental perspective.
I have not felt this defeated in a long ducking time.
> There’s just one problem: If it weren’t for Bitcoin, there would almost certainly be no reason to run the power plant in Dresden at all. Without the revenue from mining, Greenidge would have no reason to spew hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from the plant’s stacks, discharge hundreds of billions of gallons of hot water into a nearby trout stream, or pipe in and burn billions of cubic feet of fracked natural gas.
even if every single cycle was powered by renewable energy, in a world with any remaining fossil fuel power it is displacing more worthwhile loads and so directly causing emissions.
I used to think it was just a stupid idea but it's now far far beyond that.
let's see how long before someone posts a defence by comparing it to the power use of banks (!?!).
I know that it's against HN to say that people didn't read the article, but it's relevant, as it's clickbait: the power plant is converted to natural gas, which is still debatable/controversial, but it's not burning coal, as all other commenters wrote.
The sad part is actually that the article is interesting, and a lot of work went into it, and then the ,,main editor'' probably gave it a clickbait title. I have seen this myself when my girlfriend was interviewed for a magazine.
