Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone(blog.yannev.es) |
Buying a Bitcoin emits 195x as much CO₂ as buying an iPhone(blog.yannev.es) |
An iPhone on the other hand produces around 100kg of CO2 to manufacture according to https://www.compareandrecycle.co.uk/blog/iphone-lifecycle-wh...
So in summary it's actually only 3 to 4 times.
I completely agree that using arbitrary numerology to cast shade on a technology you would rather not exist is not very good reasoning, but some folks respond to it so it persists.
Even that would be misleading, because the number of transactions is a constant that has little bearing on the amount of work performed. Most of the revenue still comes from block reward, which disappears over time. Transactions fees would not support current levels of work.
If anything the cost of creating a Bitcoin has a carbon footprint, but most Bitcoins haven't been created at current prices and difficulty levels.
Given that creation of a Bitcoin is historically unique event that is certain to cease, it's not really worth losing sleep over in terms of CO2 emissions.
Because, with all the remaining dollars, you’re not going to destroy them, you’re going to consume other services/products, and if they are heavier in CO2 emissions per dollars in average, we’re not in a better position.
A bitcoin transaction is virtual. Some bits have to be flipped. That it is such an energy intensive and environmentally bad clusterfuck is a tragedy.
Mining energy is not just used to process a transaction. Miners really do it to generate more BTC. It is the energy of the whole network. You're not including all related activities like the energy used in Apples banking and advertising, flying their employees around etc
Less BTC is generated over time, eventually none at all. The energy usage has no relation to actually performing a transaction. All of the 'BTC energy usage' calculations that talk about future climate change estimations and come up with 'per transaction' values are completely invalid.
The headline made it sound like 195x a single iPhone...
But he got 195 by multiplying 29 by 6.7. And 6.7 is the ratio between bitcoin and Apple CO2 emissions.
I'm not convinced that any of this computation is meaningful. We don't need this to prove that bitcoin is a waste of energy.
This is a massive assumption, and likely wrong. From Ethereum to Cardano and beyond, NFT's are almost exclusively being created on smart contract platforms that either already utilize PoS or are transitioning to it quickly. So the idea that PoW will take precedent in the NFT space.. how?
Regarding fraud, is that to suggest PoS is not secure? Also a massive assumption and likely wrong.
Exactly. Everyone that matters is putting their energy towards creating incentives and software that allows for similar security and confidence of crypto networks, while using less energy.
Let's talk when covid is over. It wouldn't be the first time it drops 80%
2. With billions of institutional money and billions more waiting until ETFs in the US are approved, Bitcoin has something it didn’t have back in the day: a floor.
The days of 80% drops are over.
I still don’t know how much incremental CO2 is emitted from buying a Bitcoin or an iPhone after reading it. All I see is a weird CO2 divided by market cap calculation...
Does anyone else have good data on the incremental CO2 emissions from either of these?
Virtually none. Bitcoins get mined with or without transactions, as long as the expected block reward exceeds operating costs, work will be performed. The amount of transactions is fixed (or rather capped), transaction fees are a fraction of block rewards. By performing a transaction, you are bidding up the price for a transaction. Therefore, in aggregate, you are helping keep those miners in the game that are just about to become unprofitable.
One component would be reasonably straightforward, take the fee paid for the transaction and divide it by the block reward it appears in, it's arguably directly responsible for that percentage of the emissions related to that block.
The other potential component would be any impact on the value of bitcoin due to the transaction. It's likely close enough to zero most of the time, but when it isn't zero it's gonna be a doozy.
Nobody ever talks about what is around fiat, ATMs, money counting machines, heavy armoured vehicles moving them around, etc.
1. Less energy is available for other demands. They have to be filled up with other energy sources. (Assuming, that they do not use their own panels for mining.)
2. Producing solar panels produces CO2
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
This comparison is just for fun, but there seems to be some buzz about Bitcoin not being environmentally friendly I don't know why people are all grumpy about Bitcoin, there are a lot of things that we waste energy on.
Maybe if the world governments were a bit more responsible with their currencies then there wouldn't be a need for Bitcoin. It was a direct response to the outrageous actions taken after the '07 crisis.
That's the only thing I have learned from this forum, by far the best counter-indicator.
The upper limit of the amount of power a country’s financial system could use is the power footprint of that country. Likely the real usage is a small percentage of that, but that’s the upper limit.
Now, given Bitcoin uses more power than countries of millions, but supports the transaction load of a few hundred thousand, do you think it is the slightest bit possible your comparison would come out favourable to Bitcoin?
Dollars are backed and secured by the USA. How much energy does the USA military use?
> 778,988 - The number of VISA transactions that could be powered by the energy consumed for a single Bitcoin transaction on average (1157.81 kWh).
Obviously bank transactions would also come out way ahead, those are essentially a DB update built on trust and for speed, whereas proof-of-work is severely inefficient by design.
Current block reward is 6.25 and it will be half that by 2025.
Another easy thing to measure about Bitcoin is its economic value. You can readily assess the market capitalization, and you can also examine the blockchain to see precisely how much it cost users to conduct the transactions in recent blocks. The bottom line for me is that the miners aren't working for charity; they are taking fees+reward >= their electricity cost, and this is paid for by the users of Bitcoin. So those who criticize Bitcoin as an environmental catastrophe might as well say the same thing about YouTube, Aluminum production, or modern industry more generally.
It's just a particularly easy target because many people find the economic importance of Bitcoin and the recent development of the same mystifying.
A comparison I found recently is that Bitcoin uses 10x as much electricity as Google.
Why is this? Well, you can think of Bitcoin as giving away prize money to miners who win a contest. Currently they are giving away over $50 million in Bitcoin every day. [1] The electricity spend by miners is capped by the amount of prize money.
Why so much? It wasn't planned. The bug in Bitcoin's algorithm is that energy usage is proportional to market price, and the amount it went up wasn't anticipated. If Bitcoin crashed to a tenth of its current market value, it would be about even with Google. That's still way too much for what it does. Maybe it should crash to 1% its current price, to be reasonable?
Besides a market crash, the other way to fix it would be speeding up the schedule for lowering miner awards. It's going to drop in half this month, but there's no principled reason to wait another four years for the reward to drop in half again. But good luck getting consensus for that. More revenue is better than less revenue and miners don't want the prize money to drop.
Another comparison: Musk sponsored a $100 million X Prize for inventing carbon capture technology. That's a very big prize for an important cause, and it's only 2 days of Bitcoin prize money.
The Bitcoin prizes are too damn high.
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_miners_revenue_per_da... [2] https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk
That doesn't really fix it, because transaction fees will start to dominate the block subsidy within 4 halvings or so.
That's a reasonable premise, but the price of gold is flat YoY. Gold actually peaked in Aug. 2020. You'd think that at least some of the bitcoin interest would have gone to gold, but it hasn't. Maybe people are selling gold to buy bitcoin, but again, they don't act similarly. Bitcoin is a speculative asset that has so far gone to the moon. Gold has maintained its value for centuries. You buy them for different reasons.
> The question is still what would be actually good investments
Not bitcoin. It's a speculative asset. It might still 10x, but it has no fundamentals; it's entirely a bet on what other people will do with bitcoin. You could say buying AAPL is the same, but it makes $90B per year. If bitcoin goes to zero, you're out of luck. If AAPL goes to 0 for no apparent reason, you just found an asset that makes you $90B per year.
Bitcoin dropped from 20k to 4k until covid hit over multiple years.
Bitcoin isn't gold. That was already debunked.
>That's not just to secure the value of dollars, your comparison is meaningless.
Yes the calculation is not complete, but it demonstrates that the other calculations are completely invalid too because it doesn't consider those factors either
The total market cap of a cryptocurrency is a somewhat meaningless statistic, it certainly doesn't directly translate to value.
I suppose the NASDAQ only lost 75% from Feb 2000 to Sept 2002. Granted, it got back to its 2000 peak 15 years later. My point is that even normal companies traded publicly, held by institutional investors, with government oversight, see large drops after an asset bubble. I see no reason why bitcoin ETFs establish a floor price.
The days of 80% "over night" drops may be over, but a bear market to wipe 80% off the market cap is not out of the question.
We aren't dealing with cs hobbyists, retail investors, and small nest eggs anymore, billionaire adoption is a game changer as Michael Saylor constantly points out...
Welcome to BTC cantillonaires with access to ~unlimited leverage courtesy of central banks.
All the billionaires in the world are worth 11 trillion dollars. How much are they realistically going to allocate to Bitcoin, to support a >1 trillion market cap?
Bitcoin is like gold in that it just "sits there", it doesn't do any work. If gold can drop 30% over a few months, despite all the pandemic fears, then Bitcoin can drop 80% for just not being that interesting anymore, compared to other assets.
If you can't see that crypto only raised because of covid and things related to that, you should really check the timelines.
We've been through this story already in 2017, when stores tried to adopt crypto payments and it was unsuccessfull ( square, steam, woocommerce, ... ). It went from 20 k to ~4 k.
Nothing fundamentally changed, payments with crypto are practically zero offline and online.
Some people just have some percentage in it, because they think of it as value store.
And if digital currency would be adopted by countries, they are not going to take any of the excisting ones, but their own variant.
Change my mind with logic reasoning :), not emotionally because you want to protect your assets.
Yes and the calculations are all completely invalid. Not sure what you are missing.
You need a whole infrastructure to power a transaction. That means an asset with value, a secure way to broadcast it, for other people to see it, etc. Running the infrastructure and securing it is absurdly expensive for the traditional system; they are even employing perhaps millions of people to run the worldwide network. The human cost is extreme but you are limiting the discussion to energy expended. Unless you consider all this how can you put the energy usage of BTC in context? This is especially true since a system like BTC, the energy used is not even proportional to the number of transactions that are processed. Extrapolations don't even consider that the mining reward is motivating miners but it will disappear completely in future - i.e. the energy is being used to build a system and distribute assets that can exist for endless years. All the logic is a joke
It's like saying it's cheaper to solve an equation by hand than to build software that can do it automatically. But doing it by hand requires human intervention, while that one-time cost of building the software can automate the work, be adapted for myriad usecases and run for the next 1000 years
The consequences of expending the energy to create and distribute this 'unit of account' is profound and incalculable, even if one wants to argue that a decentralised financial system with mass surveillance like BTC will have a negative impact on society
The hardest, most inflation protected and liquid asset wins. Bitcoin.
>How much are they realistically going to allocate to Bitcoin, to support a >1 trillion market cap?
Bitcoins adoption example = make BTC just 1% of your portfolio, wait, that 1% is now worth more than the other 50% of your portfolio...you can guess what happens next if trend continuation is expected. Two words, "Ape In".
>Bitcoin is like gold in that it just "sits there", it doesn't do any work.
Lossless store of value is "work"...if your billion dollar nest egg in fiat is losing 10-20% per year due to currency debasement, assets that result in not losing that $200M aren't doing valuable work?
Bitcoin has a Number Go Up monetary policy and other properties that are unrivaled. Losing interest really isn't in the cards since this network is scheduled to start demolishing larger and larger central banks around the world and hoovering up value...
Bitcoin realistically isn't any more liquid than an ETF, you need to go through similar on/off ramps, and the tax considerations are also comparable.
> Two words, "Ape In".
"Ape in" can lead to "chimp out".
> Lossless store of value is "work"...if your billion dollar nest egg in fiat is losing 10-20% per year due to currency debasement, assets that result in not losing that $200M aren't doing valuable work?
What I mean by "not doing work" is that one Bitcoin stays one Bitcoin over time. A company can grow and pay dividend. Real estate has people working to pay for its rent. Currency debasement affects all asset classes, including stock and real estate.
Then the question becomes: Why would you put money in an asset that doesn't do any work? The answer is that you want to be decorrelated from certain risk. This is a fair argument for Bitcoin (or gold) in terms of portfolio diversification, but it's not a good argument for a large allocation.
The on and off ramps are heavily limited in ETFs. Bitcoin can be purchased/sold P2P without counterparty or exchange custody risk. Many ETFs regularly miss the inflation hurdle, all ETFs are not permissionless, and can go bankrupt. Also, have you ever tried selling an ETF at 2am on a Saturday?
>A company can grow and pay dividend. Real estate has people working to pay for its rent. Currency debasement affects all asset classes, including stock and real estate.
Real estate/company resale market isn't as liquid as bitcoin's and they are not immune from catastrophic failure, degradation over time, or agency related downside risks. Also, ever tried selling a $200M home/company on a Saturday at 2am?
For comparison, anyone can liquidate $200M of Bitcoin in 10-20 minutes and top exchange order books are thick enough to absorb that volume with little price slippage.
You are trying to separate the unique combination of properties bitcoin has and individually address them with an alternate asset. The real work you have to do is find an asset with all of the valuable properties mentioned, working in unison, that also wins the hardest money contest. Unfortunately, you can't and that's why bitcoin wins as a store of value, especially over a long time horizon.
TLDR Every asset is a shitcoin compared to "Energy Money" aka Bitcoin. Price action and growing depth of market proves that.
By definition, you can't exchange Bitcoin for dollars without counterparty risk. Technically you can exchange it over-the-counter or with some guy in a shady alley, but few are willing to do this.
> Real estate/company resale market isn't as liquid as bitcoin's and they are not immune from catastrophic failure, degradation over time, or agency related downside risks. Also, ever tried selling a $200M home/company on a Saturday at 2am?
True, real estate isn't as liquid, but compared to stock, you can live in it and may have some tax advantages. You can have stocks and real estate, you don't really need Bitcoin in the picture.
> You are trying to separate the unique combination of properties bitcoin has and individually address them with an alternate asset. The real work you have to do is find an asset with all of the valuable properties mentioned, working in unison, that also wins the hardest money contest. Unfortunately, you can't and that's why bitcoin wins as a store of value, especially over a long time horizon.
I'm looking at it from an investment perspective, because you are arguing that all the billionaires are going to "ape in". Bitcoin may have all these properties and still be not interesting as a large allocation. The "hardest money contest" doesn't matter, because holding money is not the point of investment.
> Price action and growing depth of market proves that.
Price action doesn't prove anything. Bitcoin can still drop 10+% in a single day.
To add to this discussion, gold traded range bound for 20 years from 1980 to 2000, across many different economic realities, across several different Federal Reserve money supply increasing policies, in slow bleeding downtrends for half a decade or more, over and over again.
Gold as a perma-bull meme mostly culminates with a Gold ETF being approved. Which took a long time for the SEC to approve as well. The SEC just doesn't like commodity trusts split into shares, and they still don't like digital commodity trusts.
Gold perma-bull's latch on to that as price correction and returning to an arbitrary correlation, and that's what they will say 20 years from now too, even though the point wasn't to live your entire life not making any money. Pick your battles wisely. Are you part of the market that just wants exposure to the price of something to preserve your generational wealth, are you part of the market that wants something that's harder to seize, or are you part of the market that really is here to wait around for gold to rally to $5,000 two decades after your favorite youtuber said it was supposed to while its price ignored every macroeconomic reality that was supposed to be relevant.
It also seems true that hedging against inflation (and socialism and so on) would also be expected to rise the price of gold - but a peak in August 2020 seems consistent with the hedging theory. Also, Bitcoin is easier to smuggle across borders than gold. Maybe it really is taking over. Or maybe the big fish already have so much gold that they want to diversify a bit.
AAPL actually produces stuff, but it probably isn't completely risk free, either? People could become too poor to afford their asking prices, and while it may not crash to zero, it could crash enough to hurt (given that it probably is also quite expensive atm).
I don't disagree with your point, but I also wouldn't read much into what the 420-pedoguy-not-a-flamethrower-autopilot-manchild does.