Monetary Value Estimates of the Air Pollution and Human Health Impacts of Cryptocurrency Mining (sciencedirect.com) 71
Andrew L.Goodkind, Benjamin A. Jones, and Robert P. Berrens, writing in a paper: Cryptocurrency mining uses significant amounts of energy as part of the proof-of-work time-stamping scheme to add new blocks to the chain. Expanding upon previously calculated energy use patterns for mining four prominent cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero), we estimate the per coin economic damages of air pollution emissions and associated human mortality and climate impacts of mining these cryptocurrencies in the US and China. Results indicate that in 2018, each $1 of Bitcoin value created was responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in the US and $0.37 in China. The similar value in China relative to the US occurs despite the extremely large disparity between the value of a statistical life estimate for the US relative to that of China. Further, with each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefits, absent perpetual price increases. For example, in December 2018, our results illustrate a case (for Bitcoin) where the health and climate change "cryptodamages" roughly match each $1 of coin value created. We close with discussion of policy implications.
That is significantly lower than expected (Score:2)
Did they take into account the heat output of all those specialized mining cards? How about your infected phone burning your hand off as it bitcoin mines for whatever hacker infected you with malware?
the looming quantum crisis (Score:2)
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IBM link, nevermind Google's China lab research (Score:2)
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/rese... [ibm.com]
Google plans to steamroll IBM with Chinese CCP resources
I wonder... (Score:1)
I wonder what the footprint of the credit card/banking system is? I'm not really a fan of bitcoin, mainly it's pump and dump hucksterism, but if you add up all the compute, paper, plastic, human effort, etc.. consumed by the banking system I bet it's vastly, enormously higher.
Actually if you look at how it's enabled consumerism, modern payment processing is effectively the root of all our ills in terms of the environment. We'd probably have a pretty sweet planet if you had to swap gold coins with people for
Re: I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Crypto is the ultimate reduction of friction
Rate limits are friction
Need to move 10k to your uncle in Algeria? done in half a second
The rate limits preclude your "half a second" nonsense. Its almost like you are lying instead of just being wholly ignorant of crypto. The reason its almost like you are lying is because you came here acting liker the expert making absolute claims that are trivially false.
So here is my advice... stop being a dishonest fuck. Either you are knowingly dishonestly pretending to be knowledgeable, or you are knowingly saying untrue things with the intent to mislead. Stop being a dishonest fuck.
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What rate limits are you referring to? Are you talking about the rate blocks that are solved? If so then yes sending your uncle in Algeria $10k will take take 10 minutes if your uncle can assume his nephew is not trying to double spend on him. It will probably take your uncle an hour to transfer that money to someone else that presumably does not trust him.
That's assuming you are transferring money via transactions. If you've got a wallet with $10K already in it, you can email that to your uncle in half
Re: I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
10 minutes for a new type of transaction system versus nearly instantaneous with transaction systems that date back to the 70s.
That's pretty fucking shitty if you ask me. All this modernity, and yet the old system has a transaction time THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE lower than the new system.
If I need to wait ten fucking minutes for my transaction to clear before they begin making my cheeseburger, I'm just going to cancel the transaction, get real cash, and pay that way - instantly.
Oh, and just Shitcoin alone negated all progress made by all solar ever installed on the planet over the past 40 years, and did that in less than five.
Craptocurrency is literal shit. Bad for economies, bad for the environment, bad for consumers. It is plain and simple BAD.
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Lightning is a protocol ripe for abuse. My money literally comes out of the earth itself on my weekly mining excursions into the Mojave. It literally cannot get any 'ultra hard' than that. My monetary assets are literally hard enough to be used to bash your shitty machines to death, and varied enough to withstand pretty much any economic downturn. And people will still barter for pretty rocks. I've done it out in the desert for a bottle of vodka just to avoid spending cash meant for gas!
Got someone in the d
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Got someone in the desert that'll barter you bitcoin for a bottle? I thought so.
Actually I would "trust" any cryptocurrency more than I would you. You could be giving me something nice looking but worthless. Crypto I could validate on the spot. Sure for a bottle of vodka the risk is fine. But for anything of real value representing significant financial risk validating the value of your pretty rocks becomes a lot more of a hassle than most any cryptocurrency.
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The 10 minute block time was an intentional part of the design. It's not like they tried to make it shorter but couldn't design it well enough. Like I said, there are other cryptocurrencies with shorter block times that are probably better for buying cheeseburgers.
Also, the restaurant doesn't actually need to wait until the payment clears before starting to make the cheeseburger. Plenty of restaurants make your food before you pay.
Also, the point of cryptocurrencies is not to just be a competitor to cred
Broken window fallacy much? (Score:2)
Had you said digital payment systems, I would have agreed more.
But a system that exists solely to get people into debt by overspending, making up imaginary money, and and leeching off of people without working, isn't exactly the be-all end-all of trade.
More like a ball of cancer that is also a leech, around your neck.
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The credit card system is used for more than credit cards. Most debit cards are affiliated with one of the major credit card companies and able to be processed through the credit card systems.
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Re: I wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
It's hard to imagine anything more wasteful than a Bitcoin-style blockchain that requires mass hash reversal to add the next block, other than perhaps the same thing with longer/more expensive hashes. Remember that whole power plants have been brought online to power this bullshit. One cryptocurrency mining operation probably uses more power than one of the major credit cards' entire IT infrastructure.
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I'd bet that it's nowhere near as much per-dollar-transaction, since there's no requirement to brute-force a metric fuckton of hashes for a hilariously wasteful blockchain - just shift some values in a database to complete a transaction, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were even less overall.
Remember than in Australia a shuttered coal power plant was brought back online to power a cryptocurrency mining operation...and there were and still are many others like it around the world, guzzling electricity and
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The entirety of the banking and transaction system (ignoring stock market) pales in comparison to what bitcoin alone uses. Bitcoin alone has negated every bit of progress made by solar power over 40 years, and did it in less than half a decade. The entire banking system is nowhere close because they use more efficient databases and servers, and can process far more transactions per second than Shitcoin.
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During the 2017-2018 winter I heated my then-two room apartment through mining. My electricity bill was less than the sum of the same bill plus heating bill from the previous year.
It doesn't work for a larger house, though.
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I never mined BTC. I mined various other coins, dropped them into cold wallets and now I check CoinFolio every now and again. My whole virtual wealth sits at around 260 dollars :)
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Works just fine and is actually far more efficient than you think.
A single 50W COB LED puts out enough light and heat for a single bedroom if left on for a couple of hours.
Just leaving on the 45w worth of light in my bathroom brings the attached office temperature up ten degrees.
Perhaps you should actually work in this industry, doing literally exactly this kind of "stupidly inefficient" multi-purpose stuff which actually results in LOWER bills and nearly equal performance, before opening your fucking mouth
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"And... I don't know what kind of shitlord build your house but nowhere in america will 45w worth of heat raise an attached room a whole 10 degrees."
Yea, you don't live in a well-insulated LEED-Gold certified building. Do you even keep up with construction? I build hydroponics buildings across the globe.
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Any electricity use is exactly as efficient as an electric heater.
Gas heating isn't always available, has climate impacts and in some parts of Canada hydro electricity is cheap and plentiful.
Electric heat pumps aren't any more efficient when the temperature gradient is high enough.
The value of undermining the authority of the grea (Score:2)
Re: The value of undermining the authority of the (Score:2)
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Grid power users, which ironically include cryptocurrency miners?
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio... [epa.gov]
Yeah I guess pissing away a ton of energy on buttcoins does undermine them:
https://www.politico.com/magaz... [politico.com]
What?!? (Score:2)
ratio (Score:2)
Oh Americans . . . (Score:2)
Is there anything you won't reduce to a dollar value?
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Yes: dollars.
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What a load of BS (Score:4, Funny)
From the paper:
Mortality per million mined coins
Bitcoin 2018: USA: ~115
Now, in 2018 around 657 thousand of bitcoins were mined which ostensibly could cause 115*0,657 ~ 75 freaking deaths for the entire population of the US. Now, traffic accidents alone took the lives of almost 37 thousand people for the same year. A year earlier 40 thousand people died just from gun-shots.
I do understand that banks/payment systems do everything they can to discredit crypto-currencies but this "research" is kinda over the top.
There dozens of other dubious activities people are engaged in which consume dozens of times more energy than for all crypto-currencies mining combined. It would be great if /. could post less news-stories like this one.
Re: What a load of BS (Score:1)
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Now, in 2018 around 657 thousand of bitcoins were mined which ostensibly could cause 115*0,657 ~ 75 freaking deaths for the entire population of the US. Now, traffic accidents alone took the lives of almost 37 thousand people for the same year. A year earlier 40 thousand people died just from gun-shots.
Try that one in court. "Yes, my client did murder the victim, but come on, 37 thousand people a year die in traffic accidents! What difference does one more life make? He may have stabbed the victim several times, but 40,000 OTHER people died from gun shots just this year! Why don't you do something about those deaths, members of the jury, instead of hand wringing over my client's insignificant little homicide??"
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A year earlier 40 thousand people died just from gun-shots.
False equivalency. Bitcoin's effect isn't only on deaths. It also nicely consumes more power than the entire country of Austria at a time when energy consumption is something people should start caring about.
Though I agree guns bring nothing of value and their deaths are an everlasting documentation of national stupidity, bitcoin raises that to the global level.
Doesn't matter (Score:2)
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Onshore windmills, hydroelectric, nuclear fission (Score:2)
We should be using onshore windmills, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear fission power plants for our electricity. Do that and our electricity supply would be reliable, inexpensive, low in CO2, low in pollution, safe, plentiful, and use little land and natural resources.
Stop complaining about the problem and BUILD THINGS to solve it.
BUILD THINGS!
This isn't that hard, except the treehuggers don't want cheap and plentiful energy. They will admit this in rare moments of honesty. They don't want cheap and plent
no comment (Score:2)
They don't know where BTC is actually mined (Score:2)
The paper is remarkably coy on average or median values, so the numbers I'll cite are only ballpark estimates.
It appears that the external costs they estimate are about 3c/kwh for climate and 2c/kwh for health, totalling about 5c/kwh, based upon the median colors of the graphs of Figure 1. Electricity rates in the US range from about lowest of 7c, typical about 10c, California 19c, Hawaii 30c -> lets use a typical value of 10c/kwh. If the external costs are about 50% of the bitcoin value, that means tha
What are cryptocurrencies used for? (Score:2)
So far, two usages are quite obvious: money laundering and speculation. While there is no obvious proof that the former is happening - although it would be surprising if it is not - the latter is obviously happening, bearing mind the significant lack of stability so far endemic to all of the cryptocurrencies of any relevance.
What else are they being used for?
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Re:What are cryptocurrencies used for? (Score:4, Informative)
Direct use in criminal finance (payments for ransomware, child porn and other illegal goods), not quite the same thing as money laundering since they might not be possible at all without cryptocurrency. Also currency control evasion (Venezuela, Argentina) and tax evasion.
Also some tiny amount of positive uses: Smuggling money to activists in repressive countries and to women caught in abusive relationships.
We should tax NKorea and Russia for this (Score:2)
I'm thinking a customs duty on all oil and coal shipments to and from the respective countries, and if they don't pay, we sink the ships, safely storing the fossil fuels.
It's the only sane bitcoin solution.
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Just tax bitcoin transactions for their environmental impact. It's easy to track, so it will be easy to assess.
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Yes, perhaps the best way to implement taxation would be to institute UBI tied to inflation, and then just print money to pay for it. That taxes all people sitting on USD anywhere in the world, whether they earned the money legally or not, while shielding the citizenry from the negative effects (loss of buying power.) It also encourages rapid spending, which stimulates the economy.
So far nobody has come up with a good argument against this idea. The best argument has been that it makes it harder to borrow m
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Bitcoin is uncensorship money transfer too, you can't tax it without consent.Bitcoin is a way to be preserved of any 'Taxation without representation'.
Okay, btcwarriorhodlgang, tell us all about how a trivially traceable currency helps protect you against taxation.
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Bitcoin is cross-border;
Is there a currency that bursts into flames when you attempt to take it across a border?
and pseudo-anonymous, you can preserve your privacy if you want.
You can psuedo-preserve it, you mean.
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A new asset, with new properties. And people are interested for different reasons.
I'm not a person that says that BTC is useless, although it is evil since it's based on proof-of-work and involves wasting CPU cycles, which has environmental impact. I simply understand that it does not preserve or provide anonymity, and therefore people who promote it are jackholes on every level.
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Sound money is an improvement. (Score:1)
Isn't this just an energy pricing problem? (Score:2)
The authors ignore positive environmental impacts (Score:2)
I have visited the ruins of a fertilizer plant in Great Falls, South Carolina. It was built in the early 1900s at the same time that the falls were dammed and a hydroelectric facility built. Without the fertilizer plant that made use of cheap electricity to produce fertilizer the dam might never have been built, because there was no pre-existing market for electricity in the area and therefore no customers to pay for its construction - and of course without the dam the fertilizer plant could not have been b
This is simple (Score:2)
The problem is NOT bitcoin. (Score:2)
Bitcoin is an efficient allocation of resources, the problem is that the energy used to produce it does not include the externalities of its production.
Tax carbon correctly, and the market will price energy correctly, and therefore will not pass on its externalities to bitcoin.
Using untaxed carbon sources to power your heater for your home produce the same (dollar for dollar) social costs.
This is nothing to do with any problem of bitcoin, but the market will simply take advantage of these distortions.