Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Bitcoin Earth

Bitcoin Mining Alone Could Raise Global Temperatures Above Critical Limit By 2033 (vice.com) 287

dmoberhaus writes: Researchers have found that if Bitcoin is adopted at rates similar to technologies like credit cards, its energy consumption could increase global temperatures by 2C in just 16 years. This is well beyond the limit of catastrophic climate change proposed by the UN. Motherboard spoke to an expert on Bitcoin and energy about the study's implications.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Bitcoin Mining Alone Could Raise Global Temperatures Above Critical Limit By 2033

Comments Filter:
  • Some people need to back off from arithmetic for a sec and take a moment to critically think about what the math is telling you, and how stupid you have to be to believe the math.

  • by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @01:55PM (#57556763)

    Off the top of my head, cryptocurrencies that require proof of work seem to all suffer from this flaw. Work is energy, energy has the side effect of global warming with our current grid. Any proof-of-work system that doesn't require a large amount of energy is going to result in a massive influx of new coins being mined, causing a large amount of inflation.

    A few possible solutions would be:

    • Use a cryptocurrency system that (a) doesn't require proof of work and (b) whatever it does require is not energy intensive.
    • Technological advancements make carbon-neutral cheaper than fossil fuels, to the point that burning coal for electricity makes no more sense than burning whale blubber for electricity.

    Any other thoughts?

    • Use a cryptocurrency system that (a) doesn't require proof of work

            I hereby declare the existence of Twitcoin, for which I hold the entire stock, and is worth 17 trillion of your now obsolete US dollars!

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I hereby declare the existence of Twitcoin

        I get that cryptocurrencies typically have coin in their name, but in this instance, I think BrettBucks is more appropriate. ;)

    • One unit of work consists of converting 1 ton of carbon from our atmospheric CO2 into a solid form
    • Technological advancements make carbon-neutral cheaper than fossil fuels, to the point that burning coal for electricity makes no more sense than burning whale blubber for electricity.

      That's the point. As a society, our energy needs are going to continue to increase and it doesn't matter where that need comes from, per se. The point is to make energy production cleaner and less harmful to the planet. The major places where our energy is being used isn't the point, the point is to generate energy in a cleaner way. We aren't going to use less energy, we only need to generate it cleaner.

    • Off the top of my head, cryptocurrencies that require proof of work seem to all suffer from this flaw.

      Yes, this is intrinsic to proof of work. No, it is not a flaw. It's an intentional feature. People calling it a flaw are idiots or charlatans who want to get you to trust their proof of stake system, where the rich get richer simply because they're rich.

    • by dAzED1 ( 33635 )
      There's solutions in search of a problem, and then there's solutions which cause big problems, and didn't solve any original problem. How about we just use gov backed currencies - they're rate limited, and the production of them isn't resource intensive in the slightest.
  • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @02:04PM (#57556825)

    Bitcoin cannot be adopted at rates similar to credit cards, because the network is incapable of maintaining reasonable performance under such a load. It's struggling already.

    Bitcoin, from a technical perspective, actually rather sucks. It's one of the first blockchain currencies, and as such it does not incorporate the performance-boosting refinements that later currencies introduced. It's just like a lot of other technical standards: Once good-enough is established, it's very hard for even a superior technology to replace it. That's why we're still using MP3 and JPEG.

  • by galabar ( 518411 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @02:11PM (#57556881)
  • This makes me wonder what would happen if bitcoin were to become as common as credit cars AND electric vehicles were to become as common as ICEs.
  • by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @02:19PM (#57556937)

    We randomly sampled blocks mined in 2017 until their total number of transactions were equal to the projected number of transactions, then we added the CO2e emissions from computing such randomly selected blocks. The approach was repeated 1,000 times.

    They are assuming that The number of blocks mined in 2017 is efficient for the number of transactions and the
      Number of blocks to be mined is proportional to the number of transactions --- More transactions won't result in larger blocks,
    and they ignore innovations that are being adopted like SegWit and Lightning.

    Especially with the ongoing adoption of the Lightning Network; that is not the case --- 2017 of all years is a bad reference year for predicting future growth - expect more transactions with future blocks; If massive transaction volume increases occur again, expect those on the network to eventually agree that a larger block size and other scaling measures are appropriate --- which will result in greater efficiencies or economies of scale with higher transaction volumes.

    The projection the researchers are making is really an uninteresting one: the question their study answers is more like..... What if no changes occurred to the Bitcoin network/protocol for improved scaling, and the predominant way transactions were batched and pooled since 2017 continues indefinitely AND Bitcoin adoption accelerates as projected by the model.

    • by JesseMcDonald ( 536341 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @03:38PM (#57557461) Homepage

      They are assuming that The number of blocks mined in 2017 is efficient for the number of transactions and the Number of blocks to be mined is proportional to the number of transactions --- More transactions won't result in larger blocks

      It's clear that these researchers don't understand Bitcoin at all if they think that there is any relationship between the number of transactions and the number of blocks mined. The difficulty is adjusted to ensure that one new block is mined every 10 minutes, on average. That figure is independent of both the number of transactions and the size of the block. Larger blocks and out-of-band systems like the Lightning Network increase the number of transactions which can be processed without altering the total energy used for mining.

      The energy cost of mining is driven by competition over block rewards and transaction fees; of the two, fees are currently insignificant compared to the block rewards (<1% of mining revenues). The block rewards halve every four years. Right now the reward is at 12.5 BTC @ 6250 USD/BTC, so the breakeven point for mining is about $80k per block; any miner spending more than that amount per mined block on hardware and electricity is losing money. In 2020 the reward will drop to 6.25 BTC; in 2024 it will be reduced again, to $20k per block. The long-term trend is thus for the energy cost of (profitable) mining to decrease over time, at least until transaction fees start to exceed block rewards.

      • ... in 2024 it will be reduced again, to $20k per block*.

        (*) At current prices.

        If the value of BTC grows then the reward in USD may not fall quite that much. It's unrealistic, though, to expect the USD/BTC price to double every four years indefinitely (18.9% APY).

      • Yeah. One computer could run blockchain by itself if the difficulty was set to the least difficult setting. And once all the coins are mined, only transaction fees will incentivize "mining" (which won't really be mining at that point).

  • Geeks (Score:4, Funny)

    by kackle ( 910159 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @02:33PM (#57557019)
    The geeks shall incinerate the earth.
  • by surfcow ( 169572 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @03:34PM (#57557441) Homepage

    Imagine someone invented a method
    of converting Terawatts electricity and human intellect
    into a symbolic currency with no intrinsic value,
    with no link to any material asset,
    not backed by any government (except North Korea),
    and which you can not actually spend at the local store.

    Oh, wait ...

    Generates pollution without generating value.

    Exxon should love it.

  • What is the point of these stories, exactly? Beyond caterint to those who perpetuate in the sort of delusion that the environmental goals that need to be reached by certain dates to avoid catastrophe have even the smallest realistic chance of being reached? The planet is fubarred already... even if there were something we could do, it wouldn't matter because not enough people *will* actually do it to stop it.
  • Since bitcoin mining will increase heat, and heat dooms the planet by melting the ice shelf in Antartica - the solution is very obvious.

    But all bitcoin miners on top of the Antartic ice shelfs, to where they bore holes down into the water. The holes will allow cold air to flow in from above, keeping the ice shelf colder and also re-enforcing structural integrity to keep it from breaking away from land.

    When the bit coin miners sink to below water level just pull them up and repeat in a new hole. Eventually

    • except bit coin energy expenditure is negligible, comparable to a city (what the IEEE article on the subject says), never mind the alarmist nonsense claims of country-level amounts of energy being consumed. A moment of logic is all it takes to see that. it's a drop in the bucket

  • Bitcoins will be mined out in about 3 years. So difficult to mine them for 16. Once it drops back to only transaction fees, and no new coin awards, then there will be many fewer miners. And if they use solar, theyâ(TM)re intercepting heat and redistributing it. Maybe we can create giant thermocouple devices and turn the heat to microwave energy and beam it into space... yes I know it canâ(TM)t work that way... but bitcoin mining will end soon...
  • It's that the negative externalities of burning fossil fuels aren't included in the price. If we added pigovian taxes to the burning of coal/oil, this would be reflected in the price of energy, and we would see an appropriate adjustment in the amount of bitcoin mining.

    Pigovian taxes on fossil fuels are the answer here, and will return the market to free market efficient allocations of resources.

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

Working...