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Here's a good site on the environmental impacts of bitcoin and eth. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ The environmental impact and electronic waste is insane. And it will just get worse and worse if crypto is more widely used. And it's nice and all if someone is using solar for crypo but that doesn't change the fact you are putting the solar energy into the most inefficient thing imaginable.
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Mar 19, 2021 02:49
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I did an infographic for a uni course of bitcoin's carbon consumption, digiconomist is a well supported estimate based on hashrate - and as such is a constantly rolling figure - but is still an estimate. I wound up using this paper as a more academically robust figure (although obviously much less current as it covers 2017) it goes into the limitations of the digiconomist methodology while calculating a figure with more variables. tldr, lol more energy wasted than my entire (fairly large) city, four years ago. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435119302557
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Mar 19, 2021 03:05
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Hey on a whim the other day I did a quick calculation to determine the profitability of bitcoin proportional to the energy consumption - i.e. how many dollars per watt is a person making by mining bitcoins - and compared it to the energy consumption:profitability ratio of smelting aluminium (from a few google searches on prices and inputs). Can uh someone else do that calculation or a similar one? Because the comparative numbers I got were... frankly insane and essentially demonstrated that all environmental concerns aside that bitcoin is even a really lovely way to make money by using electricity compared to pretty much any activity.
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Mar 19, 2021 03:11
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Did you calculate for GPU mining for Bitcoin, maybe? That hasn't been feasible for a long time, it's all for purpose machines now. And it's becoming more apparent every day that ETH is the new (global) hotness in artisanal GPU mining and as such is representing an increasing share of the carbon footprint.
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Mar 19, 2021 03:17
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CoolCab posted:Did you calculate for GPU mining for Bitcoin, maybe? That hasn't been feasible for a long time, it's all for purpose machines now. And it's becoming more apparent every day that ETH is the new (global) hotness in artisanal GPU mining and as such is representing an increasing share of the carbon footprint. I just got info on how much electricity is necessary to produce a bitcoin and compared it to how much a bitcoin is worth, then did the same for aluminium minus the cost of the alumina, and then found a comparative ratio.
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Mar 19, 2021 03:19
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrKW58MS12g Mark Rober, Perogi, and Jim Browning all agree that Bitcoin is extra useful for transferring massive amounts of money scammed off of the elderly.
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Mar 19, 2021 03:25
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Yup. And if you mine you are helping the scamming empire. gently caress crypto.
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Mar 19, 2021 04:03
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CommonShore posted:Hey on a whim the other day I did a quick calculation to determine the profitability of bitcoin proportional to the energy consumption - i.e. how many dollars per watt is a person making by mining bitcoins - and compared it to the energy consumption:profitability ratio of smelting aluminium (from a few google searches on prices and inputs). Nah, you're pretty much right. Napkin math says with the BTC blockchain eating ~77TWh a year of power, at global average of .14 usd per KWh, and ~328500 coins per year at the current block rate, you're looking at just under $31k per BTC mined, ignoring hardware and cooling costs entirely. $10,780,000,000 worth of power. Hence people doing everything they can to pump the price, because a dip back to end of 2020 prices could very well make mining unprofitable and lead to a temporary frisbee on the roof scenario where block procesing just stops and the whole blockchain grinds to a halt until it re-estimates the available processing power.
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Mar 19, 2021 04:10
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Liquid Communism posted:Nah, you're pretty much right. Napkin math says with the BTC blockchain eating ~77TWh a year of power, at global average of .14 usd per KWh, and ~328500 coins per year at the current block rate, you're looking at just under $31k per BTC mined, ignoring hardware and cooling costs entirely. Right, but what are the USD/KWh of a few other activities, just for the sake of comparison. E.g. according to low-effort google search a cremation uses 285 KWh of electricity and costs about $3500 USD meaning it pays $12/KWh meaning it's almost 1000x as profitable for the energy used than BTC. You can make more money burning dead people than mining bitcoin!  Is this right? Did I screw up the math? I found that aluminium smelting is roughly 18000x as profitable per KWh and I just used yesterday's BTC price of 57k. With the number you cited above it's probably closer to 35000x as profitable. And I'm deliberately choosing comparative activities that are notorious for using lots of energy. e. I should actually be calculating revenue per KWh, not profit per, since's that simpler. CommonShore fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Mar 19, 2021 |
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Mar 19, 2021 04:18
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i mean there's a reason the large scale operations are in china oftentimes near hydro plants
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Mar 19, 2021 04:19
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For comparison as of early 2020, all datacenters in the world, both traditional and cloud computing combined, consumed ~200TWh for the year. https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-not-devouring-planet-electricity-yet/
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Mar 19, 2021 04:22
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Pour one out for all the child and sex slaves currently being traded for Bitcoin right at this very moment.
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Mar 19, 2021 04:30
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CommonShore posted:Right, but what are the USD/KWh of a few other activities, just for the sake of comparison. I'm not going to double check your math, but yeah, that doesn't sound unreasonable. Do keep in mind, though, that mining bitcoin is dead simple: you just buy the machines and hook them up to power and hope it doesn't burn down. How much overhead do you really have to keep a bunch of them running? It's not zero, but it's pretty low. In contrast, there are massive technical and operational requirements in metal processing or any other industry with actual products/services (i.e., any actual business.) Looking at energy use is only a piece of the puzzle: you'd have to factor in capital equipment, labor, overhead, etc to really judge. I bet BTC still really sucks, though.
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Mar 19, 2021 04:40
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Like any computing facility that's under load, you need spares, and cooling. Neither of which is cheap to maintain, between parts and labor.
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Mar 19, 2021 04:42
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Stanley Pain posted:Like I said. Not losing any sleep over mining some butts. Lots of people have managed to not lose sleep over some truly abhorrent poo poo, don't assume that your lack of guilty feelings must mean that what you're doing is fine. "Well at least it's not as bad as eating meat" is maybe the laziest counterargument imaginable for this. It's practically an admission that you know what you're doing is actually terrible but that you also just don't care
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Mar 19, 2021 05:05
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Liquid Communism posted:Napkin math says with the BTC blockchain eating ~77TWh a year of power, at global average of .14 usd per KWh, and ~328500 coins per year at the current block rate, you're looking at just under $31k per BTC mined, ignoring hardware and cooling costs entirely. This will (so far) be the first and only needed argument against crypto mining. Just wasting 77TWh of a finite resource for something that has no material value and is a fraction of the profit of the most basic resource indsutry. "buh buh buh we're mining with solar and geothermal etc" hook that power up to something useful and I might care. Flannelette fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Mar 19, 2021 |
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Mar 19, 2021 05:36
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How much energy does it take to craft a $20 bill and ship a stack of them to a local bank somewhere?
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Mar 19, 2021 05:42
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You can't make it rain bitcoins. Game set match.
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Mar 19, 2021 05:44
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Are you all saying that Cryptocurrency is OK if you build a Dyson Sphere?
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Mar 19, 2021 05:46
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Rooted Vegetable posted:Are you all saying that Cryptocurrency is OK if you build a Dyson Sphere? No
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Mar 19, 2021 06:35
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Of course this happened
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Mar 19, 2021 07:01
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Regardless of how much energy crypto uses it is still a scam. All arguing about the environmental cost does is give cryptocultists a tangent to argue about instead of the essential scammery of the crypto itself.
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Mar 19, 2021 07:07
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Regardless of how much energy crypto uses it is still a scam. All arguing about the environmental cost does is give cryptocultists a tangent to argue about instead of the essential scammery of the crypto itself. Crypto helps criminals move money, which makes it more possible to run scams all over the world. gently caress crypto.
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Mar 19, 2021 07:12
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Nah crypto is cool gently caress cryptocurrency though
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Mar 19, 2021 07:17
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What they said was technically true about cryptography in general, but they came to the wrong conclusion about both.
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Mar 19, 2021 07:24
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Rooted Vegetable posted:Are you all saying that Cryptocurrency is OK if you build a Dyson Sphere? long after humans are extinct our self-replicating robots keep on harvesting star systems to power the one true coin (bitcoin satoshi vision) until heat death claims the final ASIC
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Mar 19, 2021 07:28
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Is there some kind of use for bitcoin math, like can these puzzle solutions be used for something like calculating prime numbers and protein folding can be? Also I would like a mod for Civ games that just makes an accelerating part of your civ's output be eaten by a counter on the UI that just keeps going up but doesn't do anything else.
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Mar 19, 2021 07:40
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Vesi posted:long after humans are extinct our self-replicating robots keep on harvesting star systems to power the one true coin (bitcoin satoshi vision) until heat death claims the final ASIC What idiot called them satoshis and not paperclips?
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Mar 19, 2021 07:46
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Flannelette posted:Is there some kind of use for bitcoin math, like can these puzzle solutions be used for something like calculating prime numbers and protein folding can be? No. The math needs to be difficult to perform but trivial to verify, and ultimately any useful problem is going to be difficult to verify Solving a cryptocurrency puzzle can be though of as basically brute forcing a password, so you might then say "well what if we give it real passwords to crack", but doing that would basically surrender any semblance of control over transaction throughput to whatever the difficulty of the incoming passwords happens to be. Any password with even basic complexity requirements would be uncrackable by this kind of network, so encountering even just one of these suddenly grinds the entire network to a halt. The network itself generates the passwords that the miners are trying to guess, and it auto-scales the complexity of these passwords based on how fast the last N passwords were cracked to try and target a specific rate of guessing success.
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Mar 19, 2021 08:11
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QuarkJets posted:No. The math needs to be difficult to perform but trivial to verify, and ultimately any useful problem is going to be difficult to verify 7 transactions a second worth of guesses, specifically
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Mar 19, 2021 08:18
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The motivating factor behind ethereum is to replace dumb wasteful computations in bitcoin with programmable smart contracts. The mining network becomes a distributed computing network. In practice, their first attempt at this massively exploded.
xtal fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Mar 19, 2021 |
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Mar 19, 2021 08:19
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Karia posted:I'm not going to double check your math, but yeah, that doesn't sound unreasonable. Do keep in mind, though, that mining bitcoin is dead simple: you just buy the machines and hook them up to power and hope it doesn't burn down. How much overhead do you really have to keep a bunch of them running? It's not zero, but it's pretty low. In contrast, there are massive technical and operational requirements in metal processing or any other industry with actual products/services (i.e., any actual business.) Looking at energy use is only a piece of the puzzle: you'd have to factor in capital equipment, labor, overhead, etc to really judge. One, it is a lot easier to set up than a lot of things. Most of the people who are interested in doing it themselves have probably already built a PC and so on. While graphics cards are obviously quite costly they are things you can buy on a computer toucher's salary. Two, unlike having to do things like have laborers, and facilities, and generally run a business, that produces material goods that have to be moved around, you just own the thing! And you become Wealthy. It digs deep into the hind brains of the libertarian ethos. The only thing that could do so more clearly is - well - you know. slavery!
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Mar 19, 2021 08:28
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xtal posted:The motivating factor behind ethereum is to replace dumb wasteful computations in bitcoin with programmable smart contracts. The mining network becomes a distributed computing network. In practice, their first attempt at this massively exploded. No, the motivating factor is money from nothing. Cryptocurrency is a solution in search of a problem. Unless your problem is crime, and then I guess it is something of a solution.
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Mar 19, 2021 08:30
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 Considering the hashpower from already paid-for cards, this will pay for itself in a month, anyone claiming GPU mining is not worth it today has clearly not done the math. There is a reason it is so hard to buy them retail. ogarza fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Mar 19, 2021 |
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Mar 19, 2021 08:32
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xtal posted:It's true for bitcoin but not for cryptocurrency in general. This is actually the motivating factor behind ethereum, to replace dumb wasteful computations in bitcoin with programmable smart contracts. The mining network becomes a distributed computing network. In practice, their first attempt at this massively exploded. That's a common misconception; ethereum miners are still spending most of their compute time simply hashing guesses to a pointless problem for the sake of proving who can waste the most energy, but instead of just moving N buttcoins around between addresses the transaction can do more than that
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Mar 19, 2021 08:32
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ogarza posted:
NO1CURR
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Mar 19, 2021 08:34
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ogarza posted:
I’ve done the math I just don’t want to support a criminal empire?
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Mar 19, 2021 08:41
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CaptainSarcastic posted:No, the motivating factor is money from nothing. Cryptocurrency is a solution in search of a problem. Unless your problem is crime, and then I guess it is something of a solution. Yeah, that seems to be the sticking point here. The thing is that "crime" ranges from being gay to using drugs to exposing USA war crimes depending on the jurisdiction.
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Mar 19, 2021 08:44
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spunkshui posted:I’ve done the math I just don’t want to support a criminal empire? Ape Has Killed Ape posted:I'm hanging in a few GPU stock tracking discords, trying to get one to actually play games on, and there are still people trying to mine with a home setup. Just the dumbest people on the planet.
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Mar 19, 2021 08:44
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ogarza posted:
Guys guys guys I don't get it, I already paid for this gun and I can totally earn back those costs by robbing people at gunpoint! Hm what ethical arguments and environmental issues no but guuuuys I can earn money!!! Money! For meeeee
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Mar 19, 2021 08:47
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