Hi LoyceV, I disagree with your assessment of the usefulness and validity of carbon offsets.
It's okay to disagree, but I'd love to see an example to convince me that carbon offsets are useful.
If I had to hazard a guess I would say that you are not really open to being convinced and if I post an informative link perhaps you won't even read it. Maybe I'm wrong but your mind seems kind of closed.
In any event maybe others who stumble upon this might find it useful so here goes.
This is a good report showing the enormous additional benefits to local communities in developing countries.
https://www.goldstandard.org/sites/default/files/documents/goldstandard_impactinvestment.pdfJust to give an example. If an efficient cookstove distribution project in rural Ethiopia is audited and approved for the issuance of certified offsets, there are huge
additional benefits to the local community which can be measured in actual dollars saved and time saved. Less time spent collecting firewood, reduced respiratory diseases, decreased forestation, more time for productive economic activity.
I have eliminated plastic from my life.
That must be a lie, it's virtually impossible to use the internet without using plastic.
I don't buy or use plastic bottles, cups, bags, etc., but yes there are some plastic components in my phone and in my internet cables. I put my hands in the air. Ya got me!
If we take the low end of that, which is 22 MtCO2, i.e. 22,000,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions, then it becomes easy to calculate the CO2 footprint per transaction.
I've seen those studies before, but like I said: I disagree that you can blame only the transactions for it. It's the total profit miners make that's responsible for all emissions they cause. If they make more profit, they spend more on hardware to compete with other miners.
Just yesterday, I spent about a dollar on a 8 kB Bitcoin transaction that filled less than 1% of a block. Based on your data, that would make me responsible for 3000 kg CO2 emissions. There's no way my $1 in fees is enough produce that much CO2 emissions by producing electricity. However, if you include the block reward, the miner suddenly has about $500 available to include my transaction, and that is indeed enough to emit a few tonnes of CO2. But the same miner would have gotten that $500 with or without my transaction, I just add $1 to it.
Another argument why you can't just divide total emissions by total number of transactions: if blocks would be 100 times bigger, mining would take just as much energy. If Satoshi would have been the only one mining since the start of Bitcoin, his 50W desktop computer would be enough to process all transactions.
It's not the transactions that cause energy use, it's the value of newly generated Bitcoins that causes it. And that keeps the entire network secure.
Wow! So much to unpack here. I'm not sure where to begin.
First of all, I listed several rigorous academic studies, including one by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. You did not challenge one single methodology or calculation in the studies. How come?
Secondly, for someone who posts so much on a bitcoin forum it appears that there are worrying gaps in your fundamental understanding of how bitcoin works and especially of how mining works. The block reward is not a
function of mining it is a
consequence of it. You clearly don't understand the difference.
Your $1 in fees is irrelevant. Just as the fiat value of the amount of BTC you sent is irrelevant too. It doesn't matter if you sent 55 BTC to your partner or 0.001 BTC to your sister.
22,000,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions / 109,500,000 transactions = 200.9 kgs of CO2 per transaction.
Again: dividing by transactions is arbitrary. You could just as well calculate the CO2 emission per Bitcoin user or per traded satoshi. None of those are the direct cause of the energy emissions, just like transactions. However, all of those together are the cause of the high value of Bitcoin, which is the real reason for high emissions. If Bitcoin is worth 10 times more next year, emissions will follow the same growth.
"Arbitrary"? If in your dictionary "arbitrary" means staring you right in the face then let's call it arbitrary.
I don't want to stop people using bitcoin. I just want to find a voluntary way to make it more sustainable.
Please give an example
An increase in the usage of voluntary offsets, by mining pools, by exchanges, by traders and by casual users. This would go along way to helping reduce the total global carbon footprint in a verifiable manner.
I've seen many examples of "carbon offset", and it's almost exclusively based on selective assumptions.
