
Energy cost of mining Bitcoin more than twice that of copper or gold - TimTheTinker
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/05/energy-cost-of-mining-bitcoin-more-than-twice-that-of-copper-or-gold
======
everybodyknows
>Any cryptocurrency mined in China would generate four times the amount of CO2
compared to the amount generated in Canada

Metal mining has a comparably wide variation in energy intensity, though not
mentioned in article. The headline's broad-brush claim deserves skepticism.

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cwkoss
Bitcoin is a practically insignificant part of the climate change puzzle.

All of these "We must stop Bitcoin to save the environment" articles that have
been popping up kind of seem like sour grapes.

Also, amount of energy expended is directly proportional to price (x block
reward) - if you want to reduce Bitcoin's emissions, short it hard!

~~~
SilasX
If you want to limit Bitcoin's CO2 impact, you should do the same thing as for
every energy using activity: ensure, through international agreement, that CO2
emission is taxed or capped in a way that reflects its future impact.

Like with every other good in existence, such a tax will affect the amount --
and by which energy source -- it is profitable to produce [1].

If there is a place where it is possible to avoid such an imposition, then
production will leak to that location, just like for every other good in
existence.

If you think that bitcoin is somehow "different" than all other trivial things
that people spend energy to produce, because you think it's stupid, you're
opening a can of worms I'm sure you don't want to deal with (deciding how much
people "really should like things" compared to their energy cost).

[1] Technically, it will affect the production of hash computations, not
bitcoins themselves.

