> Greenidge also said that the company plans to replicate its vertically integrated model — cryptocurrency mining at the source of energy production — at other power plants, with a goal of at least 500 megawatts of combined mining capacity by 2025.
This seems abjectly horrible from an environmental perspective.
Depends on your definition of "radioactive waste". From the figures I've seen, coal fly ash is pretty similar to say granite in terms of overall activity and isotopic composition. It doesn't seem to enhance the concentration to the same worrying levels that say rare earth mining does, probably because the radioisotopes and all the other unwanted non-carbon trash is heavily diluted by all the carbon.
I'm sure you know this because you read the article (lol) but the plant was shuttered due to lack of energy demand. So it isn't a question of coal vs. bitcoin, it's a question of beautiful lake frontage vs. bitcoin.
No, but it's an important distinction to make since NG produces half the emissions of coal for the same energy output. Using an NG plant to mine Bitcoin is stupid enough, no need to lie to make it seem even worse.
But the core problem is that dirty electricity is not (yet!) taxed for its CO2 emission. If the same plant would be used to power a data center for Netflix streaming it would be equally bad.
No it wouldn't. Netflix provides entertainment. Bitcoin provides the ability for speculators to make money, however there are ways to do so that do not incur the same costs.
You could argue that energy spent on entertainment is a waste, but it's been done since the dawn of civilization (the wasting of energy for entertainment - dance, art, fireworks, etc. etc.). As far as I know there's no way to entertain yourself without spending any more marginal energy compared to alternatives.
Presumably you, the reader, are reading this, on a computer that uses energy. Such energy could be said to have been "wasted", since reading the text I'm typing now isn't inherently productive.
> Netflix provides entertainment. Bitcoin provides the ability for speculators to make money
A.k.a gambling, a.k.a entertainment. It's essentially the same. Especially people that play a lot with altcoins and constantly buy and sell, it's basically a hobby for them, a game where the score is an amount of money.
I notice a common trend of nocoiners is minimizing the utility of the bitcoin network to make their job of criticizing it easier. It is intellectually dishonest and lazy and makes it impossible for people that have actually studied the tech to take you seriously.
But who are you to say what has negative value for society? Who gives anybody that right? If bitcoin truly is useless, like you say, it will peter out and be abandoned, because they won't be able to sustain it. That's how new ideas are tried out. It's what brings vitality and dynamism to an economy.
I would happily get rid of my Netflix account, but if people would take away my Bitcoin (good luck trying), it would be devastating to my life. Many don't understand it that at this point Bitcoin is a means of survival for tens or hundreds of millions of people, just like the stock market is a means of survival for billions of people in their pension funds.
The only reason I mention that you should mind your own energy uses is that you seem concerned about externalities and distraught bitcoin is doing the opposite of your thesis. Discuss away but it's not working. Your best bet is to regulate what you have influence on, your own uses of energy.
Right, I think the $721.5 billion that the US spends every year in weapons and war stuff is a waste. They should spend it to give their population some kind of decent healthcare.
It is really useful for some applications, and I think it is especially useful for keeping fiat money in check. Now, I can deflect from fiat (at some costs, obviously).
The "cryptocurrencies are really useful" argument is now equivalent to the "gold has intrinsic value" argument. Technically they are both right, but the current price is so out of line with the actual value generated by those use cases as to be basically irrelevant. Both derive the majority of their value from people purchasing it as an speculative investment.
Gold is (relatively) easy to store, transfer, hard to obtain, really limited supply -- the qualities that make commodity good money. Uselessness of gold is actually useful here -- transactions with it does not distort markets. Imagine if we used coffee beans as "gold" -- then changes in monetary velocity would impact consumers, who would be forced to stash it.
Sorry, the brevity of that comment apparently didn't convey my point well enough. Real estate is an example of what you theorized would happen with coffee beans. It is a useful resource that is also used for speculative investment. It is something everyone needs, but as a society we have decided its price should also always be increasing. This has a net negative impact on society.
Bitcoin existing doesn't stop people from speculatively investing in real estate, so I don't think people will just start speculating on coffee beans or something similar if Bitcoin goes away.
Would it be better if people poured loads of money into something useful as a speculative investment? Imagine if the price of, say, steel went up by a huge amount due to people hedging against currency. Or housing—I hear this has actually happened.
The problem isn't the resource that is being used for irritational speculative investment. It is that irrational speculative investment happening at all. And for the record, Bitcoin investment is much less rational than gold investment.
And do you think the people making those irrational speculative investments will just stop if one of their investment targets is removed? I suppose a few might, but are those few worth it?
Not completely, but to a certain extent, yes. Like that sibling comment stated, there are certain important qualities for a good speculative investment like being easy to store, transport, and hold. Remember the point early in the pandemic in which a barrel of oil actually had a negative price? That is because it was difficult and costly to actually have ownership over the speculative resource. Bitcoin being so easy to own and transport makes it a much more attractive speculative investment in comparison to gold, oil, or steel so more people participate in the speculation.
Most people on earth don't have the ability to just invest in traditional commodity markets as a hedge.
Most people on earth DO have a mobile device, which grants them permissionless and censorship resistant access to the bitcoin network. This access allows for an escape hatch against abusive regimes who debase their country's fiat currency.
You realize what that would entail? Imagine a horde of wallstreetbets people buying huge amounts of dry wheat, causing the price to go through the roof and/or wheat becoming unavailable in some areas. Or, when they sell, a bunch of farmers' revenues dropping and making them go bankrupt. You really want that? Isn't it better if the chaos is contained to goods that aren't really important?
I can't imagine why you would want to haha. I don't really want to own Apple, I just want price action to the upside. Owning shares in a commodity ETF is no less real than owning a bitcoin.
That's strange, how do you know it's real and you own it? With my bitcoin, I can verify that I received it and that no one except myself has access to that specific portion of the supply. And then I can even transact it whenever I like without the involvement of any custodian!
You can verify that you have a key that corresponds to a specific quantity of Bitcoin. What you cannot verify is how much you can exchange it for. This is no different than owning a share of a commodity ETF. Transacting via custodian has literally never once gotten in my way. Has it for you?
> What you cannot verify is how much you can exchange it for.
Yes the price of assets are decided in a free market. So what point are you making exactly? Clearly in every other aspect, bitcoin is superior. In fact, bitcoin is one of the only assets that can be traded in the most free market environments possible, next to cash.
> Transacting via custodian has literally never once gotten in my way. Has it for you?
Yes it has. And it has for hundreds of millions people around the world. I come from a country that's under heavy sanctions, banks will refuse to bank you or will shutdown your account for no apparent reason. You're marked as a risky client anywhere you go that touches money and have to put up with extra checks.
Whoever you bank with has never had outages? They've never kept funds on hold pending checks? You haven't had to chase up a every department because your wire transfer didn't arrive? The list goes on. If not then good for you, but you're in the absolute tiny minority.
Of course, but you are not actually owning those commodities, then. You are not buying them and this is the point -- with bitcoin you are really in control.
Encouraging Bitcoin mining to boost renewable deployments is like encouraging smoking to boost lung cancer research.
Proof of work is a grey goo in the nanotechnology way, it gets more and more energy intensive the more efficient technology gets. It also increases the budget for power and electronics the more expensive the token gets. This leads to the runaway power consumption you see now.
Renewables are green relative to coal, but they’re not zero footprint. To build a windmill with limited lifespan you need to mine rare earth metals in open air hellscapes in Mongolia [1]. You need to produce mountains of fiberglass. There’s no way to recycle fiberglass so once these fall apart you get your ores back, but have to bury the windmills [2].
Similarly for photovoltaics. The PV cells currently in use are made with cadmium and tellurium, heavy metals which again can’t really be recycled and end up buried in pits where they leech out into the environment. [3]
Bitcoin also generates 100g of ewaste per transaction which cannot be recycled meaningfully. The old ASIC miners can’t event be reused because they’re special purpose. So they’re shipped to poor countries where poor people dump toxic chemicals over it with inadequate safety gear to obtain what little metallics they can, and once again bury the rest. [4]
The only way forward is to reduce consumption by investing in efficient technology, not promote it with actively anti-efficient technology.
Setting aside what's more intrinsically beneficial, one of the big problems with bitcoin mining is that there's no real cap to the amount of electricity it can consume.
With Netflix, their electricity consumption roughly scales with their customer base. Netflix isn't going to double their electricity consumption, unless they double the amount of customers they have. Netflix is incentivized to consume the amount of electricity they need to serve their customers, and no more.
Bitcoin, however, has a completely different set of incentives. Since Bitcoin effectively converts electricity to money, Bitcoin miners will attempt to consume as much electricity as possible, to maximize their mining output. In addition, any efficiencies made doesn't really reduce the environmental impact, as any electricity saved can just be pumped into mining more Bitcoin.
the level of damage from bitcoin is...quite astonishing.
even if every single cycle was powered by renewable energy, in a world with any remaining fossil fuel power it is displacing more worthwhile loads and so directly causing emissions.
I used to think it was just a stupid idea but it's now far far beyond that.
let's see how long before someone posts a defence by comparing it to the power use of banks (!?!).
Okay the title is little bit bullshit. The plant was converted to natural gas and is no longer a coal plant. It’s still not great news which is likely why they went with the clickbait title but not as bad as expected. Actually if anything I think the author hurt their cause with that title because now I just feel relieved when I probably would of still been upset about hearing that we brought a natural gas plant online for the sole purpose of mining Bitcoin.
We could easily solve this BTC problem by hard forking to a pure proof of stake consensus protocol for BTC. Same security and decentralization guarantees. No environmental harm, and far more scalable so you can actually buy coffee with it. Ofc that's against the best interests of miners and BTC core devs.
The counterargument is people consider fiat proof of stake and don't want to introduce the problems that come with it (like centralization) into btc. I expect a fork like that would go right into the garbage as far as price action is concerned once the risks are understood but you are welcome to try.
''Greenidge Generation, a former coal power plant that converted to natural gas and began a Bitcoin mining operation, is positioning itself as part of the clean energy future.''
I know that it's against HN to say that people didn't read the article, but it's relevant, as it's clickbait: the power plant is converted to natural gas, which is still debatable/controversial, but it's not burning coal, as all other commenters wrote.
The sad part is actually that the article is interesting, and a lot of work went into it, and then the ,,main editor'' probably gave it a clickbait title. I have seen this myself when my girlfriend was interviewed for a magazine.
> There’s just one problem: If it weren’t for Bitcoin, there would almost certainly be no reason to run the power plant in Dresden at all. Without the revenue from mining, Greenidge would have no reason to spew hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from the plant’s stacks, discharge hundreds of billions of gallons of hot water into a nearby trout stream, or pipe in and burn billions of cubic feet of fracked natural gas.
Coal causes more radioactive contamination of the environment than nuclear, in addition to increasing CO2 and acid rain. The fact that it encourages damaging changes like the one in the article is another reason why Bitcoin needs to be banned.
that's not enough - until there is zero carbon emissions from power generation, bitcoin is creating additional carbon output by displacing something more useful.
if someone wants to mine bitcoin on an island with their own solar or tidal capacity, ok, I guess, but that's not the case anywhere afaik.
But sufficiently large tax on dirty energy could push out bitcoin out of fossil fuel energy and force it to invest into renewable energy sources.
And there's a lot of non-useful energy usage that is happening because fossil fuel energy is too cheap. Like heating pools and outdoor hot tubs or heating or cooling houses instead of properly insulating them.
I'd say that harsh tax on fossil fuels could do way more to limit carbon footprint and accelerate movement toward renewables than any one measure such as banning bitcoin mining.
Inform the market of the true cost and let it find the best solution.
a greenhouse gas tax isn't enough by itself - bitcoin's price may just rise high enough to justify (to bitcoin fans) mining even with the tax. the purpose of the tax isn't to change the economics of bitcoin, it is to slash emissions since no amount of bitcoin justifies further damage to the climate.
it needs to be banned (and other similar things) until the grid is ~100% greenhouse emission free.
Bitcoin price is not related at all with energy prices or fossil energy tax. If price of energy is high enough bitcoin mining will not be profitable for so many people and number of miners and their energy usage will scale down to the point where average reward for each miner covers energy cost.
But you don't want miners to disappear. You want them to use the money they got from financial markets to build their own renewable energy generation capacity vastly exceeding what people now build for ordinary use.
Same way they bought coal power plant they'd build a solar or wind farm and sell energy to the grid when price of energy is higher than mining reward.
Proof of stake solves this. Proof of work is basically proof of stake in foreign mining hardware and electricity bills. You've heard of small POW chains getting attacked (vechain, ethereum classic) but have you heard of any POS chains having such problems? Caveat: Crypto founder.
But people want Bitcoin. I'm not sure what a proof-of-stake migration would look like, especially with how much miners have invested in hardware.
One of the things about the current boom in cryptocurrency prices is that the underlying technology is irrelevant for most speculators, as long as the ledger is secure. So yes, there's a technical solution for this, but Bitcoin is still popular.
Would be funny (not actually funny, more darkly depressing) if coal generators were in fact a lot of the buyers of bitcoin in that they not only make money on their bitcoin holdings but also on the revenue from their coal generation facilities. Making money on both sides!
I wonder if there could be an "excess power coin" that could only be mined when there was an excess of green energy. I suppose the utilities would have to be in on it to validate power delivery. Even then can't think of a way you could prove a certain block was mined with a specific allotment of energy...
This seems abjectly horrible from an environmental perspective.