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Bitcoin mining could form symbiotic partnerships with green energy or carbon neutral plans but right now it isn't because there's no incentive.
Isn't the incentive to use green energy pretty huge? Green, renewable or 'free' energy significantly lowers cost of production.
Anyway, I still think PoW needs to go. Proof of stake definitely seems the way forward. That's one of the reasons I'm a fan of the Cardano project, currently. They recently signed a deal with the government of Ethiopia to track student performance on the blockchain.
Heldring-
Yes, a lot of mining is concentrated in countries that the US would rather not have control the production of emerging asset classes. As a result you are starting to see incentives to onshore mining with places like Texas with a supply of cheap wind and grid balancing issues encouraging miners to move. Same in Canada and Scandanvia.
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Isn't the incentive to use green energy pretty huge?
Not to miners. For them, the only incentive is to find the cheapest (also has to be reasonably reliable and available in the desired quantity). All the miner needs to care about is the price. Why should they care about how it is produced? Why would a miner want to be tied to one particular form of energy production when they could have the freedom to shop around? Why would they want (big one this) to make their business more complicated?
Bitcoin miners do not have to care. The current financial rewards mean that business is attracting those who really don't care.
In any case, the biggest problem is the sheer volume of energy being consumed. The share of the world's energy coming from Green and renewable energy sources is slowly increasing. Even in their current status as an experimental niche, PoW cryptocurrencies have the potential to completely outstrip that growth and increase the demand for fossil fuels. If they actually replaced fiat currencies, the amount of energy required to run the world's economies would be several times larger than the entire energy demand of the world today.
There's no such thing as free or even totally green energy. Setting aside land or water for energy production, construction, maintenance, even the significant waste heat generated (because no mechanical or electrical process is 100% efficient), it all adds up. And it would add up to a really big figure if BTC ruled the world.
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They recently signed a deal with the government of Ethiopia to track student performance on the blockchain.
How is this useful?
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Isn't the incentive to use green energy pretty huge?
Private-equity firm revives zombie fossil-fuel power plant to mine bitcoin
Power plant was left for dead until the cryptocurrency boom came along.
Part of the controversy stems from the fact that Greenidge was once destined for the scrap heap. Its owner had gone bankrupt a decade ago, and the coal-fired power plant was retired and its operating permits abandoned. But then Atlas Holdings bought the plant in 2014 and spent $65 million to convert it to natural gas and get it running again. Greenidge restarted in 2017 and spent the next two years testing its bitcoin-mining strategy. Over time, it sold less electricity to the grid, devoting more and more power to its mining operations.
greentricky
itsbruce
Mickie_Cricket
So, you kicked this off by wondering how much it costs to get gold out of the ground and counting the cost of the lights being left on in offices as part of the cost of fiat currency. But you followed it up with an article in which the second of the two arguments is titled
and claims that the energy cost of Bitcoin is almost all used to create coins and has nothing do with transactions.
Because that's a hugely hypocritical argument for you to be endorsing. It's also bullshit.
The other argument in the article is also crap but not such blatantly, delusionally wrong crap. Bitcoin mining could form symbiotic partnerships with green energy or carbon neutral plans but right now it isn't because there's no incentive. Even if they did, most of the energy would be going on mining an not to the rest of the world. BTC would be massively increasing the energy requirements of the world economy and the whole of the rest of the economy using the smallest portion. It's not a good thing to pair BTC mining with carbon capture/offset schemes either - it creates an ongoing incentive for the damaging energy creation technologies (e.g. coal mining) to continue, when the existing climate change conventions are based on phasing them out.
Not to say that there might not be a way to make BTC a useful rather than a damaging energy client, but all that article does is repeat the same vague, hand-wavy hopes that Bitcoin bros spout every day to try and evade the argument.