This is incorrect. Bitcoin is incredibly bad for the environment.
A quick fact check shows BTC currently produces an estimated 121TWH per year. And of course this will be increasingly drastically as miners rush to increase production with the recent price increases.
Global electricity consumption is 23,400TWH per year according to wikipedia. So bitcoin is using 0.5% of the world’s electricity production.
Even if you account for other emissions (heat, transport, etc.) there is no way the banking system producers 650x as much CO2 as btc mining…
Also btc mining using renewables during off-peak? Keep dreaming. All btc mining is done with asic machines these days (100x more electricity efficient than your cpus/gpus) and run 24/7 before their hashing capacity is rendered obsolete. Oh and all in China/Russia. Very green.
Not gonna get into the nonsense around TSLA shilling but will post this to think about.
Microsoft was a great company but if you invested at its peak in 1999 you would not have seen returns till 2016.
You mean consumes. And that converts to a cost of $6 billion dollars. Other methods of payment/value storage include other activity than just energy consumption.
I agree this amount of energy is too much, but I hope they fix it. Ethereum 2.0 already entered the first phase in December 2020. Let’s see how it goes.
Right, who doesn’t like wall street and your good ol banker, they always have people best interest in mind. The creation of btc in 2009 as nothing to do with a financial crash in 2008.
China is using more renewable energy than countries like the US, France, Netherlands, Japan, Korea, Australia, etc. And the migration of Chinese miners during the wet season to take advantage of hydro power is well known. So no, energy consumption is not immediately co2 production.
Obviously they don’t, a bank is not a charity…it’s also the one who gives you a mortgage at less than 1% interest to buy a new house for example, a service for which they’re providing much better value than the crowdsourced solution of peer to peer lending afaik. Banks are no saints but “the people” aren’t as well.
It’s all fun and game, but for btc to replace the whole financial system there would need to be tons of stuff on top (fractional banking, lending, credit checks, financing for companies, derivatives, etc.)
Gold is pretty useless for finance besides being a store of value, we still need a financial system even if somehow bitcoin replaces gold or some currencies.
(unless the future your envision is some kind of unregulated mad max world, going back to a “simpler” economy? in which case not sure how much using btc will help, we’d all experience a massive wealth/economic loss )
Forget about it, I think many people in this forum are spoon fed by mainstream media. They have a preconceived opinion, they want to hate bitcoin, so they cling to any negative info about it. I read about taxing bitcoin for environmental impact, SMH!
Btw I find it retarded to post a long analysis in 10 tweets. Really hard to read.
Also, in 1999 Microsoft was already (or about to) dominating markets for desktop operating systems and office software.
Tesla is anything but dominating. They don’t even have a large market share in the car market (they’re just using an innovative “kernel” to drive their cars, if you will).
There’s at least room to grow.
Since you asked about it: No, it’s not worth it.
It’s apologetic bullshit. Though somewhat carefully crafted.
“Even so, Bitcoin’s energy consumption is trivial compared to legacy financial systems”
Please contrast to how societies are making use of the systems - for example the amount of assets held and transactions processed in legacy systems.
“As measured by electricity costs alone, Bitcoin is much more efficient than traditional banking and gold mining on a global scale”
Leaving gold mining aside, please provide figures and numbers that allow for a relative comparison substantiating that supposed efficiency advantage.
“Traditional banking consumes 2.34 B GJ/yr and gold mining 500 M GJ/yr, while Bitcoin consumes 184 M GJ/yr.”
Absolute comparisons between a nascent technology or system and ones that’s been in pratical use for decades is pointless. Posting a graph of total energy expenditure does not prove that point. Whatsoever.
“Another common mistake energy detractors make is to naively extrapolate Bitcoin’s energy consumption to the equivalent CO2 emissions. What matters is the type of energy source being used to generate electricity.”
The traditional banking and finance system doesn’t run on steam power.
“In reality, renewables account for the largest percentage of bitcoin’s energy mix. In the search for the cheapest form of electricity, miners flock to regions offering a glut of renewable electricity, unlocking stranded energy assets.”
Stop bullshitting and provide numbers. Otherwise I’m going to look them up myself. Top 6 mining countries? China, USA, Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Iran. As improving as China may be, that’s not exactly a world ranking of the world’s greenest (electricity producing) countries.
“In some instances, Bitcoin mining is even helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by consuming methane that would have been leaked into the atmosphere via flaring.”
Incidental examples don’t prove a point. Even less so, if a sweeping, generalising point has been made.
“…”
“In summary, Bitcoin does not waste energy.”
Jumping to conclusions without having made a coherent argument.
It’s a huge country.
It’s the world’s largest country by population.
It’s no surprise that they have a higher capacity of electricity production (from renewable sources) than smaller countries.
I’m not disputing the veracity of your point “that China has by far the highest capacity when it comes to renewable”.
I’m disputing the relevance of that claim and its underlying comparison of absolute (renewably sourced) electricity production figures with regards to the issue of environmental impact.
Most Bitcoins are mined in China
China produces more electricity from renewable sources (higher capacity) than Iceland Therefore, Bitcoin mining in China is relatively “green” compared to Iceland?
A significant portion of bitcoin’s energy consumption is generated from renewable resources
Some renewable are used for bitcoin yes. But the renewable energy could be used for other things.
Bitcoin consumes energy that is otherwise wasted
I find it very hard to believe this is true at all. Let me explain why.
All bitcoin mining is done on ASIC hardware. Bitmain (a Chinese company) produces most these days.
These machines are incredibly in demand because there is way more demand than supply when bitcoin price jumps. Look at the 8-K filings of $RIOT and $MARA (bitcoin mining companies). You will see they have spent $100ms and are still unable to take delivery of machines till Q4 2021 / Q1-2 2022.
The ASIC miners are over 100x as efficient electricity wise compared to standard hardware. This means you lose money these days if you try and mine bitcoin on your computer (spend more on electricity than get in bitcoin).
Summary: All bitcoin mining is done on ASIC miners.
Economics of mining on these things.
The machines depreciate within 2 years of use (see 10-Q/10-K filings)
Even if they didn’t, bitcoin network total hash rate increases so much right now you will want to run these 24/7 as soon as you have them or you will lose a LOT of profit
The best S19 Pro miners have a hash rate of 110 TH for 3500W
In China you can get maybe $0.08/kWh so
$2.5k in electricity costs per year
$2.5k cost for the hardware if buying in bulk
$20k a yr in btc mined + ~15% in fees at current prices (insanely good vs historical)
So over 2 yrs if price is stable and no increase in hash rate (unrealistic) you would make $33k in profit per machine
The second a company takes delivery of this machine they will be plugging it in to whatever electricity they can find and milking it for all it is worth. They will not exclusively be running these overnight on under-used electricity.
Bitcoin will spur innovation in the development of renewables
Funny joke. We are in a climate crisis and look at the pace of progress.
Bitcoin consumes only the energy that the free market will bear at the free market rate
Currently 0.5% of the entire world’s electricity consumption and rapidly rising. This will be proportional to bitcoin’s price. $20k = 0.5%, $40k = 1%, $100k = 2.5%? Very sustainable…
Bitcoin consumes energy resources that would otherwise not be economic to develop
The nature of bitcoin energy demand will improve the efficiency of energy grids
Neither true - see my earlier point.
ARKK’s arguments are full of holes. Don’t get your information from a fund which benefits financially from selling you their narrative. Do your own research.
I think that bitcoin is an incredibly cool concept and I spent a long time delving into the cryptography and protocols behind it back in 2017/2018. I even worked for a blockchain start-up for some time.
But there is so much misinformation and misunderstanding of how it works, the feasibility of scaling it up, and proof of work.
Bitcoin will never be mass adopted for payments. At best it finds value from the current narrative & institutional demand as a “digital store of value” with value derived from the huge amount of energy used to run the ecosystem. But let’s be clear that that would be incredibly counterproductive to addressing the world’s climate crisis. Hence why I think it is very ironic for Tesla to engage with it.
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Please contrast to how societies are making use of the systems - for example the amount of assets held and transactions processed in legacy systems.