For context, this is in reaction to Private-equity firm revives zombie fossil-fuel power plant to mine bitcoin | Ars Technica
(they bought and restarted a coal/gas converted plant that was meant to be dismantled to mine bitcoin instead)
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May be some use coal but it’s not the majority of miners and probably the most stupid miners.
Coal, Oil even uranium price increase day after day. Coal miner will shutdown mining and resell their ASIC to other green miner who can keep a low priced energy. Refinery methane isn’t green power but it’s better than partially burn this methane for nothing because refinery not need this power but miner yes.
Just stop to write bitcoin isn’t green or clean is just wrong. If we replace worthless fiat by BTC we can shutdown a lot of power plant resell building for other usage.
What? The current system is order of magnitude more energy efficient… How much transactions does bitcoin process vs. the payment and banking systems? (and the current financial system provides a lot more services than bitcoin does).
(the graph you had above compares apples to oranges, it’s basically the costs of retail branches and atms… for comparison it should compare visa + bank clearing since that’s most of the thing BTC can currently replicate)
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Keep bullshitting yourself.
About half, probably a bit more of the world’s most of the world’s hashing capacity is in China.
A country that generates two thirds of its electricity from coal. In doing so, “China accounted for over half of all coal-powered electricity generation in the world”. And Bitcoin has been highest in provinces with cheap coal (and labour).
In China, they do shutdown because the government is taking active steps at curbing usage for crypto mining purposes.
A simple look at where most of it is mined makes it obvious it isn’t very green or clean.
So no, I won’t, until someone presents solid arguments and/r evidence that’s relevant today.
Anecdotal press clippings about company XY or gas flaring aren’t. Neither are the fairy tales about the future that ARK and other crypto Kool-Aid drinkers keep on fantasising about.
Yeah, these comparisons between crypto and banking system are suspicious. It’s hard to tell, what should be counted: front office, back office, banknote printing & distribution, payment terminals, ATMs? If there is only crypto, won’t we need credit cards, mortgage loans, collaterals, appraisals, safe deposit boxes etc?
The lack of efficiency could be fixed by writing better code, though. ETH 2.0 aims to solve this with sharding and what not.
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That graph is from an article on ARK’s web site. Their in-house “cryptoasset analyst” (whose Twitter ramblings we’ve had the pleasure with before) probably did a quick Google, took the first and most convenient table he could find and called it a day.
Because… let’s look at the “data source” they provide: Some guy’s blog post (well, ok, seems to be director of growth marketing at Kraken) on Medium. Indeed, the numbers seem to have been pulled directly from the table provided there:
And… that’s it, basically. There’s no details given, the figures are based on other research that’s only very briefly mentioned and linked to in the notes. ARK couldn’t even be arsed to quote the original “research” as the data source. Not that I am surprised.
So what underlying research is referenced in the notes then, as source for the energy consumption of the banking system? No problem, I’ll directly provide you link to the “initial research” here (page 20-22), provided by Hass McCook, self-proclaimed “Bitcoin Evangelist”
His initial assumptions in calculating the carbon footprint of the banking system (revenue, numbers of employees and branches, office/facility space per employee) indeed seem relatively reasonable. The author then proceeds to enter the data into the CoolClimate Network’s carbon footprint calculator provided by the respected University of California, Berkeley, to calculate an estimated carbon footprint for the banking system in terms of CO2.
And indeed, entering his numbers into the online calculator, I am ending up with very similar figures for carbon footprint of approximately or slightly below 400 million tonnes of CO2.
Now, here’s where it gets “funny” though:
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The "initial research on which ARK’s graph is based does not actually calculate the energy expenditure for bank branches. He merely seems to apply the same ratio as the one between carbon footprint electricity generation with regards to ATMs (whose carbon footprint is pretty negligible). However, as we are going to see, the assumed carbon footprint for bank facilities doesn’t mainly depend on electricity.
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Quote: “the governing factor of the model appears to be the amount of yearly revenue generated, as significant changes to number of employees and branches have little effect on the model output.”
Let that sink in: The carbon footprint of the banking system allegedly does not (according to the “research”) depend on the size of their operations!
If banks double their revenue, their carbon footprint would roughly double as well - and if they closed half of their branches, it would have only a small to negligible effect. So the assumptioon. -
So why is that? Well, of the 387 million tonnes of CO2 I am getting as a result, only 50 million are attributable to facilities (7 million) and procurement (43 million). 337 million - or 87% of the carbon footprint of the banking system is attributed to travel alone (air travel, public transit and commute):
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And now the hashrate of China has fallen so less and less coal used until China go to Nuclear if they rectors not explode before…
Blockchain is a better system than banking system even if I never buy any bitcoin.
Next years will show us the future of money if banks and/or some country collapse due to huge amount of debts.
I was wondering what you guys are planning to mine with your GPUs when ETH will be proof of stake only? Looks like ETC is an alternative not too far from ETH from the profit aspect…
Also if anyone has older GPU cards to sell such as GTX 1060/1080/1660/2080/… for a reasonable price, please PM me. It should simply have at least 5GB of RAM.
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Just a quick update on my mining. 5 months have passed now since I started.
Currently I have 0.515 ETH and 0.016 BTC, which is worth CHF 2’550. I spent around CHF 450 for electricity, which gives me a net yield of CHF 2’100 in 5 months, or CHF 420 per month.
Graphics card are still hard to get and all the new ones with LHR have 25-30% of the mining performance. So I’ll by able to sell the equippment for a profit once I stop mining in May/June 2022. I expect something around CHF 5’000 in return for that year including selling the GPU.
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Nice figures 
Interesting also to hear that there are still people mining BTC on GPUs… which mining software do you use for and on which pool for BTC if I may ask?
I’m mining ETH on the Ethermine pool with Gminer. I transfer everything to Coinbase and rebalance there with BTC so get 2/3 ETH 1/3 BTC exposure for diversification.
I see so you convert ETH to BTC. For what it’s worth I just read that PhoenixMiner is supposed to be the “best” software for mining ETH, but I can’t back that as I don’t have much experience yet.
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You mentioned here using coinbase for your BTC, so I assume you also store your BTC with them, if yes, do you consider them “safe” enough? or do you transfer your BC somewhere else?
And do you know if from coinbase it is possible to exchange BTC or ETH to CHF and transfer it to your bank account easily?
I use Coinbase because they are a listed company and thus more regulated. There are way cheaper options, but I don’t trust them.
Exchanging ETH or BTC to another crypto currency or real money is easy. But I never tried to transfer anything.
Right, I use Kraken for now but not sure if this is the safest one, also they miss support for quite a lot of coins. I might open an account with Coinbase at least to try them out.
For now my plan is to payout in CHF to my bank account my mining costs and keep the rest, hopefully safe, on one of these crypto exchanges.
Coinbase seems to be pretty good. But I should change to Coinbase Pro:
Thanks for the interesting articles. I also found this one which compares Kraken to Coinbase
And finally it looks like the cheapest crypto exchange is binance. I might open both biance and coinbase just to see which one suits my specific case best (not buying crypto) just hodling and/or paying out in fiat.
Why not just mine BTC? I know nothing about Crypto though, please excuse my ignorance.
I just switched to Coinbase Pro. It was extremely easy and fast!
- Login into Coinbase Pro, same account name and password.
- Deposit ETH/BTC and chose the option “Transfer from Coinbase to Coinbase Pro”. It’s instantly done and for free.
- Edit flightsheet with new mining address.
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Nice job, you should now in theory have better fees based on a percentage as far as I understand. I should open my Coinbase account this week as soon as I have a moment…
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