Topic: Bitcoin uses energy and does not need to be renewable. (Read 259 times)

It does not necessarily have to be renewable, however. Why does bitcoin need more energy than entire countries? Well, this happens because the process of "mining" the cryptocurrency uses gigantic servers that do not stop working, which consumes a lot of energy.

You can see in the following image an index of bitcoin energy consumption by Digiconomist.

Image: https://static.dw.com/image/56591385_7.png

There's much need for bitcoiners to understand why energy is the main area that needed high concentration of interest on miners, but the role of a renewable energy over this sector can not be taken with a levity hand, renewable energy is what can bring a change to the current challenges facing the bitcoin mining section, i don't think OP that created this thread really understand the need for more utilization of renewable energy, because at the end it will safe the stress from government regulations through energy supply.

You have a point about Greenpeace people who want the atmosphere conducive as much as possible but I was talking about the people that use the concept of the Greenpeace people to manipulate the Bitcoin miners scheme for their own selfish interest and I am sure if you read a lot of negative articles writing about Bitcoin miners injecting CO2 into the atmosphere you'll agree with my point.

When the energy used is renewable, automatically the network will be more eco friendly and serves to be more energy efficient. Forever the network requires energy source, when the renewable energy is being used it'll last long as well as doesn't care of the oil issues that is happening around due to war and other economic factors. Governments might claim that the printing cost is very minimal against the computing power, when renewable energy is used such statement gets outlawed.

I think that fighting climate change is important, and a significant part of it is turning to greener sources of energy. So I would actually support the tightening policies if there's research to support that it will make a difference. That being said, I think it's unfair that miners are targeted specifically when others can do business as usual. The measures should set requirements to all big energy consumers, not to crypto miners in particular. That would both make a bigger difference and be more fair. And, once again, all this should be done if there's strong evidence to support that it will be a big improvement in terms of the climate change.

Apart from bitcoin, every aspect of the economy is glamouring for renewable energy, so bitcoin should not be an exception. We have found ways to recycle the human waste, we re-use water and more. It is better to be renewable so as to preserve the nature.
My stand is that we should not always engage in the debate of renewable and non renewable energy usage, we should encourage miners to go green so that we could rest and the enemies of bitcoin will also rest.

I highly doubt that, there is absolutely no substantial proof of such thing at all. There are Greenpeace people who are just in love with the world more than any bitcoin miner, and they just want the world to be a better place. Just because they want bitcoin miners to use renewable energy doesn't mean that they need to be excused for asking such a thing, or doesn't mean they hate bitcoin neither.

Using energy is not the thing that they go against here, using badly created ones are the reason, and if you use solar or wind or something like that then there is no problem in bitcoin hence they can't possibly have any problems with bitcoin itself if renewable makes bitcoin ok.

The people and organizations that claim Bitcoin mining does more harm to the atmosphere than how it helps people financially will always continue with this fight because their major purpose was the stop Bitcoin miners which will literally lead to the shutdown of Bitcoin.

We both know that the toxicity injected into the atmosphere by automobile and companies are much way bigger than the CO2 released into the air through Bitcoin mining. Besides, remember their first claim was Bitcoin being used for illicit transactions and they never suicide
It is easy to know their intention and the last time I checked the government has been battling with the issue of Ozone and CO2 before the creation of Bitcoin why put all the blame on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin doesn't incentivize green energy, it incentivizes all energy, the more and cheaper - the better. And its no secret that fossil fuel energy is usually cheaper than green and already available. So Bitcoin creates reasons to not close existing coal or gas plants and even operate them at full capacity in certain places.

You could argue that Bitcoin's footprint is small compared to other industries, but saying that Bitcoin is green is just straight up not true.

If we keep ignoring people who want better world then we are going to end up with a horrible world where everything is in ruins. This means that we need to be better treating the world in order to have a better world that doesn't die in the future. Sure there are MANY industries that ignores these calls and they only focus on profit, but that is not an idol that we need to look at, that is not a good example, killing the world doesn't mean that it will be a better place in the future just because we have bitcoin. When everything dies, having 21 million bitcoins will mean nothing in the end. So focus on making the world a better place.

It would really be better if the energy is renewable, the pressure on bitcoin miners will reduce. See the bills that was just passed in New York recently about ban on miners that are not using green energy. But I still believe that there will always be critics though, even there could still be a time when they do not have anything valid to say if almost all miners are using green energy, but hey may come to saying bitcoin consumes energy. It is perfectly clear that they do not want to favour miners and that is wrong if others aspect of life are using energy from fossil fuel which is not environmentally friendly.

I already saw some other topics about this case and this discussion. The point is when you are talking about the renewable energy sources like using sun and heat or producing the energy and known and green energy everyone will be happy because they will think how incredible is it to have a clean and apparently free energy but the whole point is the cost of using these energy sources, because building the solar panels and using them is not suitable and reasonable in many cases because these are not cheap at all, same for the other cases, but from what we can see bitcoin doesn't even need these kinds of renewable energy sources

Honestly building ships and rockets and cars and electric kettle all year around use more electricity than what it takes for bitcoin mining. Poor bitcoin has been overrated for the electricity consumption and hate to break that there are even worst problems in this world rather than arguing upon bitcoin and it’s electricity consumption.

Have those stupid critics ever thought about how much pollution does the current war is making? Have they ever considered how much energy did that cost to build that much weapons. Lolz. It’s pity how they go around the clock and find bitcoin to target.

Once renewable sources of energy become disponible in the market for an affordable price, not only bitcoin miners, but everyone will make the replacement from fossil fuel to renewable ones. Unfortunatelly I don't see environmental organizations focusing their protests and manifestations regard this point. They just want people to go green, without putting themselves on others' shoes to understand those people don't have financial conditions to make this change or to understand this change isn't a profitable investment yet for companies.

I guess that happens due to the fact environmental organizations aren't about the environment itself, but about politics, more precisely. They attend to personal interests of big corporations and governments and don't go against the real powerful lords who are destroying the world. And since bitcoin is decentralized, without any lobby or tyrant behind (actually it's a threat to lobbies and tyrants), it becomes an easy target for lacays of the establishment, masked as environmental guardians in this case.

Someone influential enough dictating what to do. Elon once demanding this one where he won't be accepting BTC anymore because mining adds to heat boiling the ocean. And then there is the Bitcoin Mining Council created after it.

But if anyone has to keep mining BTC using coal power plant or nuclear power plant they can,there is never a law that is making it illegal. If China does it or Russia do have mining farms using their power plant, nothing could stop them and so are the other countries.

I have long been of the belief that blaming Bitcoin on  speeding up the energy crisis we are experiencing is definitely a good argument but even if we were to give humanity more time by not mining Bitcoin (therefore not using energy), we would still fail to recognize the real problem. We need a new energy source, one which is clean and viable on the scale of humanity. If we do not discover/invent a new source of energy then its only a matter of time until humanity is doomed.

Then it won't matter if we had 50 years or 55 years to solve the problem.

We need to protect Earth's ability to sustain life. Nature is a delicate balance, lets not tip the scales.

Oh god, I got tired of telling people this!
Stop with the green renewables non-sense before you finally manage to get the whole planet even more f* than it is!

Sri Lanka tried to get eco, but they are facing famine, California went solar, the highest price per kwh in the US and guess what, hitting exactly the ones who didn't have the money to buy solar panels or didn't have the house for it, let's not even mention the biggest fail of the century the Germany solar panels that see as much sun as Anchorage! The whole thing about going green for the industry is as stupid as possible, a company gives money for planting 1000 trees and suddenly steel smelters are carbon-free,  of course ignoring the 4th year in school about the carbon cycle and what happens to all that carbon when leaves and the tree itself dies.

Bitcoin mining consumes energy, but it consumes as much energy as the faith and the need of the people who trust it, just how energy is consumed because I want my room at 18C in the summer and because I want to play games all night with a 400W video card, just how the chainstore spends energy to keep the whole place lights up and not ask you to go in with a 2w lantern, and just how those damn econ nazi are waving a polyester flag at they march but god forbid that I use plastic straw!

All this madness would have ended with nuclear energy, but some people would lose their comfy "jobs" that pay only to protest, imagine the wave of people who would have to get a real job if we would save all the endangered species on this planet?  That paragraph in Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case where the nun is so sad the leprosy will close because of lack of patients is the exact picture of what all those NGO's are thinking.


My company has some of their offices in a new zero-emission green building in the city center, on paper! Do you know how this is possible without solar panels or wind turbines?
The company buys 10 MW (example number) from a solar farm, they have a contract with the energy distributor, they resell that promise of
producing that energy for a year to him and in turn, they get 10 MW from whatever source they can in the normal network. If the solar farm doesn't produce that 10 MW we're simply paying for the rest.
And we're emission-free! Google does the same, Apple does the same.

Do you think that's bad? Wait for it! Due to crappy legislation, the actual customer who gets that energy can also label this as excess power, feed it back into the grid, and wow, on paper you have doubled green energy production. You basically have two guys that somehow just by spending money they've managed to double the green energy produced by this farm. A green Perpetuum mobile.

I made a post in relation to this topic and no, it is not necessary that it be renewable, but if you have to find a sustainable way in which they can mine without damaging the environment so much, since it does seriously affect the ambient energy... but In my humble opinion these people are right on the one hand they are applying measures to be able to control this problem in time, but I am sure that there are others who see it from the side of power since, as you know, they cannot control Bitcoin and even if it came to be the most renewable mining in the world, they will look for a way to mortify it again.

I don't agree with the quote per say, seems a little hostile for no reason. Sounds more like a quote to try, and be a quote basically, if you get me. The way to go about it is being diplomatic. However, for that to happen we need the Bitcoin community to admit where we could be better, and the ones that are currently attacking Bitcoin need to take a step back, talk about the actual facts of the matter, and not be so biased.

That's the only way anything will get sorted. Even then, it isn't as simple as flicking a switch.

Which I think a lot of users here need to start owning up to, we get so defensive as a community when anything negative is said about Bitcoin. Although, there's some merit in the energy debate. However, unfortunately for us its being pushed the wrong way, and instead of just saying Bitcoin would be better with renewable energy, it's being claimed that we are one of the worst contributors to the environment, which is simply not true.

The fact is, as you put it; everything would benefit from renewable energy. However, I just said something like this in another post actually; there isn't going to be enough motivation to change the entire grid to renewable energy, since at the moment I see the energy debate as a bit of a buzz word. Companies know they can get good PR if they pretend to care about the environment, look all around you everyone know is using recyclable materials etc. It's just one of those phases we go through. Now, don't get me wrong I'm not trying to push it to one side, and say "Ah! It's but a phase! It shall soon pass!" because I genuinely believe we should be doing everything in our power to assure to be as good as possible. I think that's the right motto for a lot of walks of life, and not just Bitcoin related.

Although, the reality is once so much is done, and everyone appears to be energy, and green friendly it loses it's influence, and companies will begin to not care about it as much any more. I don't think our entire grid will convert, and if it does we aren't anywhere near it. We as people absolutely rely on fossil fuels, and it's going to take years for us to even consider replacing it. We simply have become reliant on it too much to say otherwise.

It does not need to be renewable, just like how the energy we use for our computers and other stuff like Christmas lights and stuff doesn't necessarily need to be renewable. But, it would be better if it was.