Bitcoin consumes 111TWh annually, the power consumption of the Netherlands, and emits 62Mt of CO2 per year, the same as Belarus. It also yields 42kT of e-waste per year.
Each transaction produces 650kg of CO2, consumes 1160kWh of power (as much as 40 days consumption for the average American home) and produces 450g of e-waste (about the same as hucking your iPad into the garbage can each time you transact on-chain).
97% of all Bitcoin mining hardware will never successfully produce a single block in its entire useful life, going from factory, to space heater, to garbage can - while about 60% of all the power consumed comes from oil, natural gas and coal. So whoever sold producers the offsets I assume you must be alluding to better have replanted the entire Amazon rainforest by now. (Quick spoiler, carbon offsets are also a scam, generally speaking).
To say you're going to need to get some sources is an understatement about as large at Bitcoin's environmental footprint.
You can find all this in [1] or you can just reverse it yourself from the specs of the latest AntMiner and the current hash rate. Some napkin math is all you need.
I'm honestly amazed people still believe something so trivially falsifiable, but with everything else going on in 2022...
This is a really disengenuous point. Mining works probabilistically, and mining pools payout based on smaller units of work that probably have some probability of finding a block for the pool. The fact that a block itself is a large parcel does not make the system less efficient.
Value judgement aside the question was “is it carbon neutral” and the answer is a resounding no.
What is your source around Hal Finney? I have not heard that.
1) miners profit from energy surplus. They do not create new power plants. Nobody is firing up a new coal plant to mine bitcoin. That is absurd.
2) miners have incentives to find and use wasted energy. For ex, flare gas recycling. Which actually helps the environment.
3) miners can turn on/off at will, and produce energy loads on demand. Which means they balance out the energy grid. Especially from erratic energy sources like wind and solar. This is already being deployed in some states.
You are fighting on the wrong side buddy.
(2) burning flared methane is better than not but not flaring at all is best? There’s no such thing as stranded power, there’s only missing transmission infrastructure which is being incentivized not to come online through profitable waste at point of generation.
(3) raising the baseline usage level through waste then turning it off when there’s a brownout level crisis is just an asinine plan to manage load that costs everyone money. Active demand management is an actual solution. So is grid storage. Also, “some states” is Texas, famously the worst energy grid in the US, home of the blackout. Meanwhile New York is banning wasting fossil fuel energy on miners.
Anyways you seem to bring no data to the table other than a “nuh uh” and some obviously flawed apologism.
No word on the ewaste?
It appears to me you’re using the “facts u dislike” acronym expansion for FUD.
[1] https://grist.org/technology/bitcoin-greenidge-seneca-lake-c...
Also he’s a central banker, so not exactly motivated to fix it.
it only consumes as much as the complexity required to roll out new blocks. As its price goes down so does the energy required to find new blocks. It is not static.
