US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.
      • remotelove@lemmy.ca
        1·
        7 months ago

        We shall see. Meta, Google and Microsoft aren’t exactly spending billions of dollars on AI to make the world a better place…

  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    To those that say this is a waste and has no good purpose, you should know that most energy used by miners is renewables because renewables (especially during off-peak hours) are the cheapest source of energy.

    Bitcoin’s value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There’s a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it’s actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that’s bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it’s a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you’d be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it’s available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are “unbanked” and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.

    Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That’s to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it’s 1910. You just don’t see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it’s not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.

    The energy used by miners is needed to secure the Bitcoin network. Historically, we have built currencies of incredibly inequitably distributed resources: precious metals, stable governments, etc. Bitcoin was the first one to build an economy based on pure energy. This stuff literally falls from the sky. While it is not perfectly equitably distributed, it is the most equitably distributed resource on earth that can be used for this purpose.

    • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      7 months ago

      and if bitcoin wasn’t wasting all that energy, we could be powering actually useful stuff with that renewable energy. It’s not ok that energy is being wasted. It coming from renewable sources does not make wasting it on useless hash calculations is good. That energy could be used elsewhere, for useful work.

  • Lifecoach5000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    Does someone feel like giving me an ELI5 why Bitcoin mining eats up so much electricity these days? Is it just because the problems the machines need to solve have gotten more complex? Do other cryptos tax the resources as bad? Is there a viable crypto that would be considered “green” at this point?

    Sorry for overboarding my questions if anyone even attempts to answer this lol

    • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      7 months ago

      It is the cost of securing the network. It is intentional as if it was low power and easy to mine, 1 person or organization could take over the network and thus it would loose its decentralization. Nothing wrong with using power as long as it is green. No one is complaining about how much energy social media uses, or electric cars, or the fiat banking systems or all the lights left on etc etc. Power usage is not the issue here, it is power generation. You best believe that big money is spinning Bitcoin as negative as possible as it is a threat to their establishment. Don’t be a sucker for the BS.

      • assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world
        0·
        7 months ago

        It still a problem if it’s using green power as it’s preventing that green power from replacing fossil fuels in more useful and essential parts of the economy. Therefore essentially increasing demand for fossil fuels. Additionally by increasing the nations total energy use it’s making the task of decarbonising energy just that little bit harder.

        • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works
          01·
          7 months ago

          Energy use is going up with or without crypto. It is a solvable problem. We just have to have the will. The focus should be on more green power, not restricting those who use it already.

          • assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world
            0·
            7 months ago

            Yeah, but the problem is that the green energy could have gone to powering a hospital or a factory, something actually useful. But instead it’s going to crypto. The hospital and the factory still need power and they are likely to pull it from a fossil fuel source. Essentially ’green’ crypto mining is creating demand for fossil fuels making it not actually green. Also we don’t have the time for our energy transition to be slowed down by crypto. Especially considering how utterly useless it is.

            • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works
              01·
              7 months ago

              You can make this argument with anything that demands electricity. This is how we generate full stop. Anything else is a distraction that propaganda has placed in your mind.

  • PugJesus@kbin.social
    0·
    7 months ago

    Such a stupid fucking idea. The idea of cryptocurrencies aside, Bitcoin’s system of mining is peak waste.

    • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 months ago

      It’s great that the idea got implemented in ways that don’t have the ecological footprint Bitcoin has!
      I’m glad Bitcoin brought this idea to life. But it’s about time for Bitcoin to resign.

      • assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world
        0·
        7 months ago

        Bitcoin isn’t a good idea. It’s based on assumptions about how the world works that don’t actually exist and, the costs for finding a solution to these assumptions are so large that they make the product bad.

        • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
          1·
          7 months ago

          it is now provably not secure. Because pos is provably not objective. Making the whole thing moot. Also, it is literally a system explicitly designed around “the rich get richer”.

        • hark@lemmy.world
          1·
          7 months ago

          That those with more have more control. It’s a reinvention of fiat currency. PoW also had that problem since people with more money could afford better mining hardware, but PoS is even more direct. That’s not even getting into tether printing and other bullshit. The claim is that cryptocurrency is a move away from our existing financial system, but the reality is that it’s just another arm of it.

  • Chozo@kbin.social
    01·
    7 months ago

    What an absolutely absurd waste of resources. There should be some sort of enforcement/restrictions of energy usage from these clowns.