Topic: [2018-01-29] IMF’s Lagarde Says That Bitcoin Mining Consumes Too Much Electricit (Read 294 times)

Wasting what? Answer: their own money. What makes you think you can tell others what to do with their own money? It's not affecting you, you have no cause for complaint.


The pair of you have not gone to the trouble of finding out why proof of work is used in Bitcoin. Don't be surprised if there's little sympathy for your ill-informed views.

Read this sentence: Bitcoin Proof of Work is providing a valuable service. More is better. See if you can figure out why that's true before you waste everyone's time again (ironically, you wasting everyone's time is a waste that is affecting other people)

By any metric that wouldn't be true. The misconception that mining becomes harder as more bitcoins are mined is simply untrue. The bitcoin network is designed to adjust the computing difficulty if the number of people mining bitcoin is more or less. And since mining per 10 minute will be halved to 6.25 bitcoin mining will become less profitable with time. Yes, the incentives will increase if bitcoin prices increase but still it's bound to be less profitable, less competitive and less of a burden on the environment.

Load balancing comes into play at that time.
In my country we have them all, nuclear, hydro,gas, sun and wind.
When there is simply too much power generated from free sources gas and coal are turned off.
Then pump storage starts.

Besides, there is nothing "local", and certainly not at that scale. You don't build a 4000 MW hydroelectric plant for the neighborhood, that thing is connected to the grid and might deliver power to god knows what town a thousands miles ways.

Well, I heard about these pump&dump power stations as a purely theoretical possibility but I didn't know that someone has actually built one of this scale. To me, it is kind of proof of concept. I'm interested in such things so if anyone feels interested too, here's a simple chart which basically outlines the operation of such power station:




You are right. The turbine continues to rotate when they just "unplug" it if I can say so. But I still maintain that it doesn't justify mining as mostly a waste of electricity even if there are spare capacities. Miners pay for the electricity they consume and from purely economic point of view it's okay but not so as far as efficiency is concerned.

I have seen many known bitcoiners who are considered oracles that have made the wrong arguments concerning proof of work's wasteful use of a limited resource.

Some of their arguments are bitcoin is pushing for the use of renewable energy. What? If there was one that matters then please tell us about it.

Another argument is but the banking system uses more electricity. Ok turn off the whole banking system now. Let us see if bitcoin can handle everything.

Very stupid arguments from supposed to be smart people.

Imagine that you have a hydroelectric power plant that produces 1000 MW (has 4 250 MW) turbines and the whole thing is supposed to supply neighboring cities and small towns. The combined use of power during the day is 800 MW, which is the load the power plant constantly working under. Since turning off one turbine would make it drop to 750 it's forced to run all of them constantly, which means that it is producing 1000 MW anyway, even if nobody is using it. It's a common thing worldwide there's always some margin of power that is being supplied but not used. If somebody starts to it will only mean more money for the power company.

Directly yes, it's almost impossible not because of the technical aspect but the financial one.

But it is done as industrial scale with PSH, (pumped storage hydroelectricity).
We have batteries like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station
14 GWh  .


As long as China is still burning coal to produce energy it simply means that for each 1000kwh green energy a miner is consuming in some other part of the country something consumes 1000kwh of "dirty" energy.

If the miner stops, then the green energy is distributed to that other consumer and there is no need for the dirty energy. 

But how is this ever possible? How can we produce more power than we consume? As far as I know, it is impossible to store electricity directly. You can of course use some processes like electrolysis to decompose, for example, water into oxygen and hydrogen and then store hydrogen but it is more of a sci-fi movie than reality yet. If you actually mean that we can produce more than we now consume, I don't think it justifies mining because it would still be a waste of resources.

I wasn't even thinking about CO2 as we have many different sources of power with a lot of it being generated by dams and nuclear plants that don't emit it. What i'm talking about is the fact that we are producing more power than we're using. There's no scare of shortages, especially in countries like Canada that are producing far more than they need. All this power is going to waste  because we don't have plants meant to store it. If it's wasted why not allow miners to use it? Why cry about them taking it if they're buying it on the market and paying for it like everybody else?

They're just using more and more argument against bitcoins to keep their monopoly on the financial system. It doesnt matter if bitcoin is power intensive, because the only way they're making a profit is by using cheap renewable energy. This is no environmental concern because once they use more energy than their renewable facilities can generate then they wouldnt profit.

Their next argument regarding the dark side of BTC seems compelling. It is true it has been used to do illegal activities, but the current banking system is no different. Aside from the mentioned irresponsible printing, fraudulent loans and manipulation there is also this case where HSBC has been caught helping drug cartels in mexico. And because they are too big to fail all they got was a slap on the wrist. There was zero accountability. Unlike what happened to the CEO of Mt Gox who was jailed for losing millions.

Link on HSBC
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/business/dealbook/hsbc-us-charges.html

The world has a surplus of electricity. If mining stop something to do with the surplus? Will stop production? Lol. The purpose of the IMF to destroy economies of poor countries so that they always remain a raw material appendage and a source of cheap labor. The IMF is part piatogo market. Let give advice on the use of Fiat. But I don't know of any state which helped their recommendations.

Well, this is what choice looks like.

I choose a system where my money cannot be inflated away, or stolen from me without my consent. If that comes with downsides, then that's a compromise I'm happy with.

For the bitcoin to be your own bank, the electricity consumption is worth it. How much power does the world's bank consume every day?  Much more than Bitcoin.

Well, in fact there is nothing wrong in that, and personally I'm totally fine with it, with imposing absolute discipline on inflating the money supply. But this is not what I meant. It looked like you suggested substituting one system for another just because the first has this financial discipline built-in while the other hasn't, at the same time completely discarding their other deficiencies and advantages. This is what I call a reckless or irrational thing (if you are not happy with the frivolous part).

What is reckless or frivolous about imposing absolute discipline on inflating the money supply?

And I think you've been reading too much central bank friendly sources of information; the means by which the money supply can be expanded are many, and there is rarely any discipline as a consequence.



There is a dispute between scientists as to whether increases in CO₂ is the reason for climate change anyway. The climate has changed far more dramatically in the past without 0.01% increases in atmospheric CO₂.



There is a dispute between climate scientists as to whether increases in CO₂ is the reason for climate change anyway. The climate has changed far more dramatically in the past without 0.01% increases in atmospheric CO₂.



There is a dispute between climate scientists as to whether increases in CO₂ is the reason for climate change anyway. The climate has changed far more dramatically in the past without 0.01% increases in atmospheric CO₂.


"The bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe it"


Sorry to have to repeat this, but the whole world appears to be a victim of the constant repetition of this unproven CO₂ climate change theory. Scientists are in dispute about the veracity of the claims, but politicians love the idea, because it gives them and their corporate cronies more power over us. The carbon trading scheme being pushed as the solution to this problem puts the big villains of this piece very much in control; big CO₂ producers (i.e. corporate energy giants) can offset their CO₂ production by larger factors than anyone else, meaning they can accumulate the largest number of carbon credits. This gives them the power to set the prices of carbon credits, and therefore the price of the carbon taxes.

It might seem like righteous crusading now, when all you need to do to "be green" is ride a bicycle or buy local seasonal vegetables. But when your already very high tax burden gets increased even closer to 99% (it's typically above 50% now), let's see how you feel about this disputed science then. I'm not convinced, especially when politicians are the only ones that are unanimously in agreement.

I think she means something else, though it is hard to say since she doesn't say it directly. It seems she talks about the amount of electricity required to process transactions, and, honestly speaking, she has a point. If we removed the speculative part from Bitcoin, Bitcoin transactions would be very expensive in terms of electricity consumed. To put it differently, we could do the same with less, and this is what POS coins do. In this regard Bitcoin is very inefficient.

They are so stupid. Why doesn't the director say something about the electricity being wasted by appliances on standby? Why doesn't she mention the amount of electricity wasted by bank servers processing transactions? What about the computers run by clerks in every single bank branch? Bitcoin eliminates the need for branches, clerks and their computers. If you have people buying electricity and they want more get more them and profit from it instead of complaining!

I think I'm just going to quote myself here because I've made the same point too my times now.


These guys shouldn't be worrying too much about the power consumption of bitcoin. Because as we speak the world is being polluted right left and center but you don't hear a word. Just look up the Canadian tar sands. It's a disgrace.

Let me interrupt you here. As kind of first, I'm gonna tell you that I agree that the lack of discipline may lead and in many cases, like in Zimbabwe and Venezuela, actually leads to heavy abuse of the system built on printing money at will. Then the logic of your thought seems to suggest a rather frivolous and reckless thing. It is fixing the deficiency of one system, in this case the system which involves unrestricted money printing, with the strength of another, in this case the system based on monetary supply limited by a finite resource. But you seem not to care that the second system, despite its self-imposed monetary discipline, is a lot worse in and by itself than the first system whenever the latter has proper monetary discipline in place.

Do you understand how erroneous this approach is?

Nice clear reasoning.



Let's leave aside the fact that finding difficult hashes of block headers (i.e. mining) keeps your money safe from rogue miners attempting to re-write the blockchain (i.e. this is what makes Bitcoin uncensorable, so more mining is better, not worse). Let's just park that issue, despite how much more honest and transparent Bitcoin is than central banking fiat as a result.

So, Christine Lagarde doesn't like that Bitcoin costs energy to produce. After all, the IMF and other fiat printing central banks can produce new money supply for a disappearingly small fraction of what that new fiat money is valued at.

But that's essentially the problem underlying the entire world financial system: the privileged ability to create money (and debt) at will has, unsurprisingly, led to a severe lack of discipline amongst those privileged to do so. Anyone familiar with the history of such abuses of monetary levers of power knows how this story ends: badly, and in many flavours of badly. And the current abuses (in fairness, only sanctioned by IMF hubris so they're only indirectly responsible) are probably the greatest ever seen. It's prudent to expect the economic fallout to be on a similar scale.

So no Christine Lagarde, forcing discipline on the monetary supply using a finite and tangible resource is not a problem, it is a virtue. Your practice of approving fiat money printing at essentially zero cost (with correspondingly zero discipline) is a serious threat to the world economy, and the lives of the people who constitute it.