
Bitcoin could be disastrous for climate change - fieldeffectt
https://www.greenism.com/bitcoin-mining-and-climate-change/
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sparkie
Bitcoin will drive innovation in cheaper energy sources faster than any amount
of carbon tax could hope to achieve.

Miners revenue can only decline as the block subsidy halves, as more miners
participate in the network and the difficulty increases. The miners themselves
have only one major expenditure, which is electricity used to run the mining
hardware and the cooling equipment.

This means that for miners to continue to increase their profits, the single
most effective solution for them is to invest some of their profits into the
creation of renewable, low maintenance energy solutions.

Since those miners will be able to run their equipment from renewable, cheaper
energy, the remaining miners who are using expensive biofuels will end up
unprofitable and be put out of business.

Eventually, the competition in mining will be driven _entirely_ by who can
generate the cheapest and most abundant source of renewable electricity, for
which they will want to acquire the intellectual property rights because they
don't want to hand it to their competition. A highly competing clean energy
market is what is needed to push innovation.

The main problem we have now is that clean energies are just not competitive
enough. They usually need subsidizing by governments. That practice is simply
not sustainable, because eventually the subsidies will dry up and they'll be
back to being more expensive than biofuels.

~~~
pizza
If I'm understanding you correctly, you seem to imply that miners will invent
wholly new energy technologies because they want to be first to market with a
no-brainer solution for cheap, and essentially passively-profitable, green AND
long-term-sustainable energy.

Don't you think that the need for that already exists not just in the bitcoin
world, but for anyone, anywhere who needs electricity? That if they could
develop such a product it would already be many times the value of all crypto
markets combined? Not to mention they'd probably decrease in value with
cheaper energy.

Your optimism is something to admire but I think energy seems to be an
industry that is not lacking in smart people already driven by the rush to be
first to market with a comparative advantage. Maybe I'm wrong, if so, I'd like
to know it!

~~~
sparkie
I'm not suggesting that miners will invent new solutions _themselves_. I'm
suggesting that they will put some of their profits towards research and
development of new solutions, and they will acquire promising startups to cut
out costs.

The need for cheaper electricity exists, but it's not clear where and when
investors can make money. People aren't going to put their money into
something that might bear fruit 10-20 years down the line, when there are many
other investment opportunities available which have more promise of larger, or
quicker profits.

The bulk of the investment into clean energies comes from (or is subsidized
by) governments who are notoriously bad with money. There's a limited market
and it is not very competitive because they're not even able to compete with
oil without subsidies. Having smart people is simply not enough. You need
smart people who are willing to risk _their own_ money to achieve their goals.
Most academics are risking _other people 's_ money, which is why socialism
does not work and capitalism produces the results.

~~~
andirk
Miners use energy for their ASICs and whatever else the algorithms of the
coins need. We are seeing innovations in chips. I can imagine there is or will
be innovation in decreasing energy usage of said chips. For example, a chip
that can't melt doesn't have a cooling cost. But a global solution to cheaper
and cleaner energy is probably the #1 way to rule the world if you can figure
out how.

~~~
sparkie
Chips will get better, but we're approaching the limit of Moore's Law in terms
of shrinking them to get the exponential gains we've seen over the past half
century. The improvements in Hash/W are going to continue to slow until
they're not worth the additional cost to fabricate. (Unless some radically new
transistor technologies arise)

My assumptions about the cost of mining were assuming that one can count the
cost of the mining chip as negligible, which is certainly not the case now,
but I believe will be the case in future as the chips get much cheaper, much
more abundant and the period between iterations of the chips increases.
Industrial miners will use the most efficient chips on the market, but their
primary cost will be the electricity.

------
prostoalex
> the process involved in a single bitcoin transaction could provide
> electricity for a home in Britain for an entire month

Perhaps British homeowners should then travel to remote regions of China and
set up a power line direct to their home.

The analogy is meaningless as electricity is not easily exportable and
transportable. A new power plant in Denmark does not affect electricity
pricing in Australia.

Bitcoin miners are opportunity buyers that rely on bottom-shelf pricing from
the source - as soon as any industry is ready to pay a penny more, miners’
margins are affected accordingly and they will move on elsewhere.

