Topic: Debunking the "Bitcoin is an environmental disaster" argument. - page 14. (Read 5036 times)

--snip--
That being said I don't know why some people are so focused on trying to portrait bitcoin as running on unicorn farts, so it's coal, good, what's the problem? The hospital I was born in ran on coal, from it to the school and kindergarten to which my child goes the hypermarket and the mall in our region everything powered by coal, should I run to a cave and commit suicide because of it?

Mining is business, you go for the cheap thing available, miners don't move their gear a thousand miles because hydropower is good for the environment they do it for $. Bitmain didn't set its main farm in Ordos to help the people by providing jobs, they did it because they could get power ar 2 cents.

In a white paper released today, financial services company Square outlines the opportunity that Bitcoin presents to facilitate a transition to a cleaner and more resilient electricity grid.

The research report, titled “Bitcoin Is Key To An Abundant, Clean Energy Future,” was released as part of Square’s Bitcoin Clean Energy Initiative, an ongoing effort to support companies working to integrate green energy technologies within bitcoin mining. Square also supports Bitcoin projects financially through its Square Crypto arm and offers BTC for sale through its payments app Cash App.

The research paper highlighted the opportunity that Bitcoin presents to accelerate a global transition to renewable energy sources, as Bitcoin miners are uniquely positioned to capitalize and make the most of these sources.

“Bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers in that they offer highly flexible and easily interruptible load, provide payout in a globally liquid cryptocurrency, and are completely location agnostic, requiring only an internet connection,” per the report.

In this memo, we aim to explain how the Bitcoin network functions as a unique energy buyer that could enable society to deploy substantially more solar and wind generation capacity. This deployment, along with energy storage, aims to facilitate the transition to a cleaner and more resilient electricity grid. We believe that the energy asset owners of today can become the essential bitcoin miners of tomorrow.

Recent studies show that bitcoin mining uses 39% energy from renewable sources (solar, hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, etc.) and 25% from energy derived from nuclear power and, to a minimum, fossil fuels. This percentage is steadily increasing, especially in China, where the transition to low carbon footprint production is happening more rapidly.

The energy sector is seeing a complete paradigm shift:

• Bitcoin’s monetary network effect
• Monetization of energy
• Leads to an arms race of energy tech becoming more and more efficient and productive
• Cheap energy production allows for cheap energy utilization
• Cheap energy utilization allows for cheap manufacturing, mineral mining and product R&D

We already pointed the fact that Bitcoin is one of the few industries where the total consumption is accounted and scrutinised.
What about the Christmas Light  industry?

Compared to many other areas of our lives, bitcoin is the greenest industry possible.

The problem is that it won't be able to get through the thick heads of the people that are advocating that bitcoin as a whole is a contributor to the pollution. Maybe the only way to stop all this nonsense is to continue educating people and ignoring all the FUDs.

Very well said. I'm honestly getting tired of people being very misinformed about bitcoin telling things like it's polluting the environment when millions of dollars are being spent into burning fossil fuels, mining oil, mining gold and basically all other non renewable energy resources that are much more polluting to the environment than bitcoin. Plastics, the food industry, phone production, I can literally go all day here talking about industries that are much more damaging to the environment than bitcoin mining.

Abstract
The growing energy consumption and associated carbon emission of Bitcoin mining could potentially undermine global sustainable efforts. By investigating carbon emission flows of Bitcoin blockchain operation in China with a simulation-based Bitcoin blockchain carbon emission model, we find that without any policy interventions, the annual energy consumption of the Bitcoin blockchain in China is expected to peak in 2024 at 296.59 Twh and generate 130.50 million metric tons of carbon emission correspondingly. Internationally, this emission output would exceed the total annualized greenhouse gas emission output of the Czech Republic and Qatar. Domestically, it ranks in the top 10 among 182 cities and 42 industrial sectors in China. In this work, we show that moving away from the current punitive carbon tax policy to a site regulation policy which induces changes in the energy consumption structure of the mining activities is more effective in limiting carbon emission of Bitcoin blockchain operation.

Bitcoin is a settlement system, not a payments aggregator

First things first. What is Bitcoin[1] and what is it not?

Bitcoin is a settlement system like FedWire, it is not a payments aggregator like Visa. I constantly see Bitcoin compared to Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal, and this is the main source of mathematical atrocities whereby Bitcoin’s overall electricity cost is divided by its transactions and then compared to something it’s not. Energy use per settlement transaction is a nonsensical metric by which to judge Bitcoin’s energy use.

Just like the 800,000 or so daily FedWire transactions are not a good measure of the total amount of daily Dollar (USD) transactions, Bitcoin’s 325,000[2] or so daily transactions are not a good measure of the total amount of daily bitcoin (BTC/XBT) transactions. Most bitcoin transactions are not visible. They take place inside the payment aggregation systems of exchanges, on the Lightning network, and yes, even inside of actual aggregators like PayPal, Square, or MasterCard. Only periodically are they settled onto the Bitcoin blockchain as visible transactions.

Solutions like this are referred to as network layering. This is a tried and tested approach to separating casual retail transactions from heavier settlement transactions and it is exactly how we already do things in the fiat monetary and payment systems. In such a system, the base layer, like FedWire (or Bitcoin), only acts as the final arbitrator of settlement transactions, everything else, and that is the vast majority of all transactions, happen in higher payment aggregation layers, which are often entirely different systems.

In other words, Bitcoin is not a competitor to Visa, MasterCard or Paypal. Bitcoin is an independent monetary system that aggregators can make use of.

Presenting Bitcoin’s electricity consumption in terms of its daily number of settlement transactions is a red herring.

As it turns out, the way foundries like TSMC (the foundry Bitmain relies on) operate, is that they tier their customers. They don’t optimize just for revenue, but consistent demand. They treat their Tier I customers much better, and give them privileged allocations to foundry space. Bitmain, the largest ASIC manufacturer, is not a Tier I customer. They have to settle for scraps. According to Big Al, the chip shortages are mainly due to a skyrocketing demand for consumer electronics and cloud during Covid (as everyone was stuck at home with nothing to do). Ultimately, Bitcoin miners represent a small fraction of TSMC revenue — around 1% according to Bernstein. The notion of a marginal, Tier II industry being responsible for chip shortages is fanciful.

The Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith has a lot of thoughts on Bitcoin. Some of them are really solid and engage with the reality of the protocol itself, which is rare for a member of the mainstream media circuit. He also discloses that he owns Bitcoin, which is impressive for an economist and a member of the establishment. So I’m pretty happy with him overall. I don’t want this piece to be interpreted as a blanket critique of Noah’s stance on Bitcoin. However, Noah’s recent column in Bloomberg, Bitcoin Miners are on a Path to Self-Destruction, makes a few claims that warrant a response.
Noah’s basic premise is that Bitcoin miners are effectively hogging the grid in the various places where they operate and risk getting banned entirely. Not only is the notion of a global coordinated ban on mining far fetched, but Noah relies on a few claims that are dubious at best. Let’s investigate.

In general, I think this problem is completely contrived. The question is raised about the consumption of energy when mining bitcoin, as if there is an acute problem in us. The use of solar panels can very quickly solve this problem, because the energy reserves of the sun are practically inexhaustible. In any case, you can oblige the miners to use the energy of the sun and wind.