I think the one positive thing is that BTC actually encourages miners to go where electricity is cheap (and bandwidth is still high) and a lot of those places are cool climates with geothermal energy, so there is a push for cheap renewables to power the mining. Now in China, energy is cheap but very dirty atm, so that’s no good. Don’t deny climate change it’s literally so silly. If you understand the insulating effects of CO2 and Methane and that the ocean absorbs it and acidifies the ocean water which affects phytoplankton and therefore the majority of the worlds Oxygen production but don’t believe in climate science, then you’re living in denial. The process of putting tons of this buried carbon into the atmosphere over such a short span of time is so completely unnatural and the carbon is meant to go down into the earth for a reason. Methane is a whole other story that may be even worse that is exacerbated by a warming climate, plus other human activities like large scale animal agriculture. The earth is it’s own organism with natural cycle that we actively disrupt. Earth would maintain homeostasis so much easier without us. We could at least attempt to understand our role and make the relationship symbiotic.
Or imagine this:
23 BTC transactions emit the same volume of CO2 as an average passenger car emits in a whole year.
Again, I respect the way Bitcoin kicked many doors open and it turned on the light bulbs above many smart heads, but when you look beyond the craze, it’s one of the least efficient technologies ever invented. It’s at the moment a very good store of value, but terrible technology.
It’s like chopping down a tree to make a single toothpick.
How about the Lightning Network? I understand that it can work for microtransactions, but for bigger 1 time transactions it seems at least a bit more complicated.
I find that astonishing. Unbelievable in fact.
If this were true, how on earth are they getting such cheap energy? 23 BTC transactions costs about $23 at the moment. At about 70c a litre of petrol without tax, that’s only about 30 litres or about. If you have a car that does about 5 km/l, that is only 150 km. Given a 20% efficiency, that would still only equate to about 750 km with 100% efficiency. That is still only about 5% of a conservative yearly mileage.
Something doesn’t add up.
It seems the answer is China and coal-based power plants:
Based on this article, we could in theory make it cleaner by moving the mining pools, but mining would also get way more expensive.
This is the issue really.
Denial in an individual point of view helps a lot when someone is facing really serious problems, but right now it is feeding back the CO2 problem for the community of us humans and non humans.
One of my great hopes with the safe network, is that ( at least until now ), it is not based on proof of work.
I don’t know how this result has been calculated but I don’t believe it because the cost of a bitcoin transaction is not linked to its amount but to its complexity (number of inputs, script size, …).
I am too lazy to do a search, but I have read in the past other reports that said that bitcoin is mostly powered by renewable energy.
Do you mean this?
Cryptocurrency investment products and research firm CoinShares estimates that 74.1% of bitcoin powered by renewable energy in its bi-annual mining report
https://coinshares.co.uk/bitcoin-mining-cost-june-2019/
They only require full name and email to download the full report.
So we have quite a conflicting set of views. One from ‘Coinshares’, the other from researchers at the Technical University of Munich and MIT. And both were released in quick succession.
Thing is, whether we deny it or not, renewable energies are … not renewable.
See : The Catch No One's Talking About: Renewable Energy Relies on Non-Renewable Resources
Or in french sorry , not sure if he was translated yet : Railroad engineer Philippe Bihouix details how rare metals availability negates hopes in renewable energies , specially “L’age des low-tech” and " Quel futur pour les métaux ?: Raréfaction des métaux : un nouveau défi pour la société" : here Philippe Bihouix (Author of L'Âge des low tech)
Sorry for spoiling the dream
I think the reason we have not heard from alien civilizations is because they all follow a pattern that shortly after the invention of the radio they always destroy all life on the planet with climate change and pulling an Elon Musk and making an artificial climate on another planet is just not feasible fast enough. sorry for FUDing like all hopes of life on earth 
→ ‘Destroy themselves’ it says. Maybe hope for nature that survives human civilization.
that’s true. Life is very resilient. There have been several massive extinctions on earth and always something survives that and seeds evolution for the next wave of diversity. But could a technologically advanced species evolve twice? I think it would be much harder the second time after the first had mined all the oil and coal near the surface.
There’s a lot of fear being shared here. I can understand the fearful POV, but I don’t expect to lose any sleep over Bitcoin’s defense spending.
- “each transaction creates a carbon footprint of xxx” is stretching it. Hashrate and number of transactions are independent of each-other. If today’s hashrate today was as small as it was in 2010, the same number of transactions would still be processed. (Yes, miners wouldn’t mine if nobody transacted - that’s addressed by #5).
- I’m seeing some politics of AGW. Those who disbelieve claims of impending doom are “in denial” (including people who believed in AGW claims decades ago and later reached a different understanding).
- The Bitcoin block reward will be cut in half soon, lessening the incentive to spend on mining hashrates.
- Each generation of hardware is more efficient than the previous. Yes, Bitcoin’s PoW algorithm itself is inefficient and wasteful but… (see #5).
- Bitcoin remains king of cryptocurrencies because no other cryptocurrency has yet been developed that provides a compelling enough alternative for users to switch to. This is a tremendous opportunity, and history is full of examples.
Technologies/platforms such as: BBS systems, Gopher, Telnet, FTP, Usenet, AOL, Myspace, etc - all used to be growing in usage. Superior technologies largely took their users away. Because of Bitcoin’s first-mover advantage, Bitcoin’s upcoming challenger must be more than slightly better in order to win. Altcoins including IOTA, EOS, Ethereum, Stellar, and others are vying to take Bitcoin’s crown. It’s too early to call the race. Others are yet to launch (including MAID and Libra). Sooner or later the market will recognize and adopt the next game-changing tech. When that happens, Bitcoin will be obsolete like a VHS cassette, and accordingly will be used by way fewer users.
Technically, yes. In reality, they correlate rather strongly.
Number of transactions correlates with use, use correlates with adoption, adoption correlates with market cap, market cap correlates with price, price creates the incentive to mine.
Of course, if it was you, me, and a dozen of people mining on our laptops, we could still artificially drive the number of transactions up to a couple of million a year – and it would be pretty modest on resources. With one exception. Time.