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Bitcoin China

Bitcoin Mining Emissions In China Will Hit 130 Million Tons By 2024 (newscientist.com) 106

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
According to researchers in Beijing, China, the total carbon footprint of bitcoin mining in the country will peak in 2024, releasing around 130 million metric tons of carbon. This figure exceeds the annual carbon emissions of countries including Italy and the Czech Republic. New Scientist reports: By 2024, bitcoin mining in China will require 297 terawatt-hours of energy and account for approximately 5.4 per cent of the carbon emissions from generating electricity in the country. The researchers predicted the emissions peak in China in 2024 based on calculations of when the overall cost of mining -- the investment in computing equipment and the electricity costs -- outweighs the financial rewards of selling mined bitcoin. They used both financial projections and carbon emissions analysis to model the emissions footprint in China, taking into account factors such as location. Bitcoin miners in Beijing or other parts of northern China are very likely to be using electricity from coal-powered plants. Mining in southern provinces -- especially Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan -- is in large part powered by hydroelectricity, says Guan. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.
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Bitcoin Mining Emissions In China Will Hit 130 Million Tons By 2024 More

Bitcoin Mining Emissions In China Will Hit 130 Million Tons By 2024

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  • before they crack down and bitcoin is no more?

    • Articles like this - testing the waters for just such a move.

    • I was thinking several well-placed magnets somewhere in the world could cause a significant portion of bitcoins to become unrecoverable.

      Poof there it goes.

      No need to get governments involved.

  • Only if it's economically viable (Score:4, Informative)

    by njvack ( 646524 ) <njvack@freshforever.net> on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @06:05PM (#61244808)

    Okay, this should be obvious, but... this will only happen if it makes economic sense to mine the coin. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that 297 TWh of energy should run somewhere in the neighborhood of $29 billion (to within a factor of 3 or so), so it only makes sense if you can mine enough coin to cover that cost plus your time and other costs.

    That's... a lot of scratch. If the price of bitcoin falls, then this doesn't cost out for miners any more.

    I'm not saying the events in this paper can't happen (though I think it's ludicrous), but that predicting the economics of bitcoin in 2024 is ridiculous on its face.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      To be fair, there is no point in history where it has made any economic sense with regards to power consumption to mine bitcoin.

    • Re:Only if it's economically viable (Score:5, Insightful)

      by battingly ( 5065477 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @06:16PM (#61244852)
      Bitcoin mining relies on somebody else shouldering a significant part of the cost. Either by using a public utility which spreads the cost over all customers, or by making the rest us who use the atmosphere pay the price for the emissions in the form of climate change.

      • Not just climate change (Score:4, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @09:04PM (#61245322)
        China's grid is *dirty*. Their air quality will be noticeably worse as a result. That in turn will increase rates of cancer, brain damage (yep, bad air causes brain damage, especially in kids) and heart & lung disease.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Considering how much effort the Chinese are putting into cleaning up I can see them banning crypto mining soon.

          • Or at the very least, forcing Bitcoin mining operations in green-powered regions. China wants control of everything it can and for that reason I don't think they would want to let go of BTC mining.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kipsate ( 314423 )
        > Bitcoin mining relies on somebody else shouldering a significant part of the cost. Nope. Miners pay the local market price for the energy that they use.

        Mining is a race to the bottom in terms of cost. Only few miners having the lowest expenses will be profitable and survive in the long run. So, mining can only be profitable when done with very cheap electricity. That's why a significant amount of mining is performed near hydropower dams in Sichuan, China, that produce more electricity than the local

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Get rich quick scheme, FREE MONEY. Do you know what bitcoin would be worth in a sane society, NOTHING. Clearly insane is the problem, greed driven stupidity is the problem. No matter how pointless greed and free money will continue to drive the stupidity. If that were not the reality, then the value of bitcoin would already by zero. The value is currently driven by targeted manipulative marketing and greed driven stupidity.

      Wasting that much energy on that, clearly, active regulatory measures have to be tak

      • In a sane society, people would also not accept being paid in little rectangles of paper or numbers in a database.

    • because they're chasing Greater Fool theory. The Free Market doesn't always do rational things. If it did we wouldn't be burning 30 billion dollars of fossil fuel (it's China, don't kid yourself thinking it's solar) to make pretend money used primarily for buying drugs and laundering money...

  • China, and other countries are ramping up on use of nuclear power now - nuclear has also been approved in Europe for inclusion in green energy portfolios [neimagazine.com], and the U.S. is also saying that nuclear is a necessary part of a clean energy standard [arstechnica.com].

    China itself has huge plans for nuclear [worldpoliticsreview.com], which you have to think is partly based around the anticipated further rise of crypto currency everywhere. So numbers like the power use we are seeing for crypto in the end are not that alarming, because in just a few decades

    • China itself has huge plans for nuclear [worldpoliticsreview.com], which you have to think is partly based around the anticipated further rise of crypto currency everywhere.

      Not fucking hardly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Just like my lighting cuban cigars with $100 bills habit is not a problem because in just a few decades I'm going to be rich.

    • Re:Hence the move to nuclear power (Score:5, Informative)

      by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @06:35PM (#61244940) Homepage

      I admit I didn't check your links, just Wikipedia. It says China has 42 GW, with 10 GW more coming on-line soon, and 36 GW in plans after that. This would haul them up to 88GW out of 2200, or almost exactly 4% nuclear.

      China's coal consumption, for the 1190 GW of coal plants, on the other hand, speaks for itself:
      https://theatlas.com/charts/Ny... [theatlas.com]

      • That's all just near-term stuff, and just in China - you should read the whole article. China and nuclear power is also about other countries, and one recent development is that China is buying Uranium mines wholesale to ensure supply. That along with research into much more advanced reactor designs, they plan to power a wide swath of the world (which will then be under the control, at least indirectly of China).

      • That's capacity, not generation. Wikipedia says China was 4.9% nuclear in 2019 and I imagine that number is a bit higher today.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by edis ( 266347 )

      So what? Does this change the energy wasted in heat and nuclear waste to nurture ultimate speculative NOTHING? When planet is melting, it is obviously suicidal act. Mankind is shelling out on stupidity, crowning itself as forefront wisdom.

  • I'm sorry but it's well known that hardware getting sold for mining at "general public" is already outdated by a new one secretly used and more energy efficient. The manufacturer build the ASIC machines, run them for 2 years, develop a new one and resell them after. The estimate assume "recent" and old machines but never account for the never-released-to-public machine that make the bulk of the hashes. On a side note, a crypto currency limited to 3 transactions per seconds, required 10$+ per transaction a

    • develop a new one and resell them after.

      So they are resold and then continue to run. They don't magically stop using energy just because they are 2nd hand items...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JcMorin ( 930466 )
        Yes but but estimate assume that those second hand machines are the fastest while the new one consume twice les power for twice the speed (4x difference) so the total energy consumption and pollution is wrong. Also JPMorgan said 164 times that Bitcoin is dead, now they are reference to predict the global usage in 3 years for now? Source: https://venturebeat.com/2017/0... [venturebeat.com]

  • Build more coal plants, or dam off some more rivers.

    There are plenty of Uyghurs looking for work. /s

  • Maybe this is just providing a rationale for China to ban bitcoin and force people to use China's own centrally controlled digital currency. I am sure the CCP is not fond of bitcoin, given that it circumvents capital controls. I don't think the CCP really cares about carbon footprint.

  • 20 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crotron ( 7617930 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @06:29PM (#61244914)
    If you had told me that one day people would be exchanging virtual funny money, operating independently of any government, online via the Internet, and that it would be so valuable that its production would lead to electronics, energy, and pollution crises, I would have laughed right in your face.
    • Yes the problem is that normal people take the for-granted assumption that the whole thing wouldnt be set up to be as inefficient as possible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Poorcku ( 831174 )
      Yes, that is because you lack a) sound education in monetary history and b) imagination. I really don't have the time to educate you on the first one, and the second one is really your own fault.
    • This has echoes of diamond and gold mining - massive environmental damage, not to mention the corruption and crime...

  • Breaking Bitcoin Might Be Easy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HappySeafood ( 6184720 ) on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @06:39PM (#61244950)

    Bitcoin transactions are performed by the miners and validated by the nodes, and miners and nodes can try to hide but they seem easy to find.

    The IP's have to be known to the upstream bitcoin network to perform work, right? Couldn't law enforcement simply create a bitcoin node, and then similar to how the RCAA went after bittorrent users by suing the IP's that downloaded their fake torrents, discover the IPs of the miners and transaction nodes and have their country's ISPs block all those IP's? Bitcoin would be dead in the water.

    I don't see Bitcoin surviving a country-wide IP ban. It would be tough to enforce in the USA, but in less liberal countries it seems easy to kill off crypto. Is there something I'm not seeing?

    • What makes you think politicians care? Was it their actions or their words that did it?

    • You can spin up a new node in minutes on any IP anywhere. There aren't servers and clients. There are nodes. Only a few nodes are really needed if the hashing difficulty is relaxed (the hashing difficulty is automatically adjusted periodically). The hashing difficulty scales itself over many, many orders of magnitude. Even though the networks total hash rate right now is staggering, that would not be necessary for the system to work if the number of nodes were reduced.

      Taking over the network with bogus nod

  • That claims to care about the environment must be against BTC.

  • So it's win-win for bitcoin

  • Wrecking the environment to 'mine' a meme 'currency' that doesn't even actually exist, has no intrinsic value, and generally speaking costs more in electricity to 'mine' than you ever get out of it selling it to other fools who have fallen for the meme and believe it's actually worth something.
    THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS.

    • This is not all that dissimilar to gold, which is and has been mined primarily for exchange and bragging value, rather than usable value, and the mining caused much human suffering for the enrichment of few.

      • Yes, but mining gold isn't going to fuck the entire planets' environment from all the pointless CO2, and all for something that isn't even real.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kackle ( 910159 )

          Why is is ILLEGAL to give voters water?

          I assume it's to avoid influencing voters via bottle stickers, other gifts or political t-shirts on the person handing them out.

          (Okay folks, you can mod me "off-topic".)

          • You assume wrong. The GOP wants to make it as difficult as possible for non-Republicans to vote in future elections, and in Georgia they want to make sure that poor black voters never get the chance if they can at all manage it. Same in other Republican-controlled states that are crafting similar legislation to change their voting laws and procedures. It's nothing less than a return to Jim Crow era bullshit.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by kackle ( 910159 )

              The GOP wants to make it as difficult as possible for non-Republicans to vote in future elections

              Perhaps. But the point still stands: There should be no voter influence near any polling places. No "gifts". Isn't this a sound idea? People can bring their own water.

  • Consider bitcoin a lesson in the follies of conservation.

  • We should ban bitcoin, not because the centralised financial systems are being subverted but "because it's bad for the climate".

  • Satoshi Nakamoto did not understand the "Byzantine Generals Problem," as is evidenced by the following: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstit... [nakamotoinstitute.org] "The proof-of-work chain is a solution to the Byzantine Generals' Problem.** I'll try to rephrase it in that context." Let us first make it quite clear that, for 2n+1+m nodes (which vertices are simultaneously message-radiating "generals", message-reflecting or, in the case of faulty/malignant elements, transmitting or absorbing witnesses, and message-absorbing lieutena
    • Imagine a multitude of nodes and let one of them, x, ask a question to some other, say y. Now if x were endowed with simple and despised faith it would accept y's answer confining annoying solicitations to a singleton, but this age is a haughty and voluble one, we ask for proofs even of axioms, blind as we are to the fact that we still are giving our credence to authorities or, as is the case for Bitcoin, to the hardware, to the software, to the network supporting it, if only they belittle faith. Such a x
      • The belabored *digression* that follows S. Nakamoto's d'entrée de jeu conclusion, for such it proves to be as far as the object of the exchange is concerned, and which is purported to cast the Blockchain into the BG's framework, is not even coherent viz.: "It has been decided that anyone who feels like it will announce a time, and whatever time is heard first will be the official attack time. **The problem is that the network is not instantaneous, and if two generals announce different attack times a
        • The Blockchain is the work of a genius. It is evil, it devours real goods (GPUs, electricity hence coal, wood, rivers, rare earth el. etc.) for nothing. David Kleiman, its inventor I suspect, paid with his life. Worthy of death is him who invests in cryptocurrencies: https://www.pcmag.com/news/bit... [pcmag.com] The Blockchain is an altar, it sacrifices reality, the ascending smoke of which is its virtualization. The cloud. The Saint Covid vaccine means Smart Dust chain shackles: https://patentscope.wipo.int/s... [wipo.int] 6
          • As to the Blockchain's author, NSA? Perhaps the CIA, but I don't think so: too shallow an incrimination and the theory is likely above their metaphysical outlook. Dave Kleiman/Craig Wright are perhaps mere frontmen, but they who chose them, if flesh and and blood, would have to have received incorporeal suggestions (demons) because the scheme behind the Blockchain, how it views the world from the coins' perspective, the tree like structure of both the manifold of blocks (i.e., the Blockchain) and of each co

  • Yet another joke at the expense of the climate activist "serious people."

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