r/science • u/shiruken PhD | Biomedical Engineering | Optics • 2d ago
Epidemiology New research estimates that the 34 largest Bitcoin mining operations in the United States consumed more electricity in 2022 than all of Los Angeles combined. 85% of the electricity came from fossil fuels and exposed 1.9 million Americans to more than 0.1 μg/m3 of additional PM2.5 pollution.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58287-3350
u/ArchaicBrainWorms 2d ago
Jevon's Paradox: gains in efficiency of utilizing a resource lead to increased consumption of said resource.
It's why strides in solar technology haven't reduced fossil fuel consumption. As the price of new, cleaner, tech gets competitive with the old, dirtier, tech we seldom replace the old with the new; we simply use both as cost effective options unless coerced via regulation.
We've made great strides environmentally since I was a kid. I grew up in the sticks of northern appalachia and 40 years ago was a it was a very different place. Everybody burned all their burnable trash. People heated with coal. Every chunk of land had a garbage dump dating to the original land grant and used oil was burned or buried.
We've done a remarkable job of addressing the visible stuff, but I fear the less apparent externalities of our consumption is going to be what does us in
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u/farfromelite 2d ago
It's why strides in solar technology haven't reduced fossil fuel consumption. As the price of new, cleaner, tech gets competitive with the old, dirtier, tech we seldom replace the old with the new; we simply use both as cost effective options unless coerced via regulation.
China hit peak oil this year or last year.
I get this, but it is starting to. Solar and renewables are growing massively especially in China. They're using oil and coal as a backup for vastly electrifying their economy.
We're doing that in the west as well, just more slowly.
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u/grundar 1d ago
China hit peak oil this year or last year.
To add to this, US oil consumption peaked in 2004 and EU oil consumption peaked in 1979.
Both of those were before EVs, which are one of the major factors driving China's oil peak (half of new cars in China are EV/PHEV). This new factor is likely to speed up the oil consumption decline in the West, and potentially result in a faster decline in China than the West saw after its peak.
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u/ArchaicBrainWorms 2d ago
Long term investments with delayed benefits aren't really our thing in the West. We're capable of moving mountains out of spite or retribution, but every 4-10 years we reshake the etch a sketch of national priorities and start over.
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u/_BlackDove 1d ago
we reshake the etch a sketch of national priorities and start over
What a tragically apt analogy.
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u/debacol 1d ago
This isn't necessarily true. For example, over the past 20 years, California's population has increased by 17% and the state economy grew by 56%. But instead of going up, our energy use decreased 12% and CO2 emissions went down 20%. This was primarily driven by massive gains in energy efficiency across all sectors.
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u/hornswoggled111 2d ago
Jevons Paradox with energy seems to happen but only up to the point we reach saturation. Beef is half price! We buy more.
And one of the other interesting factors with energy is that we got more energy efficient. We have generally been using less energy per capita in developed countries.
I say this because naysayers use the paradox as a lazy argument not to finish the transition.
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u/grundar 1d ago
Jevon's Paradox: gains in efficiency of utilizing a resource CAN lead to increased consumption of said resource.
Increased resource consumption only happens under specific circumstances:
"as the cost of using the resource drops, if the price is highly elastic, this results in overall demand increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise."
i.e., it's mostly just normal price elasticity, but in unusual cases where there's a huge amount of unmet demand for the resource then increasing the efficiency with which it's used can increase its utility enough to make it cost-effective to many more use cases and lead to an overall increase in resource consumption.
However, that's not relevant here, since replacing fossil-fuel-fired electricity with renewable electricity is not increasing the efficiency of a resource, it's just replacing one source of that resource with another source.
It's why strides in solar technology haven't reduced fossil fuel consumption.
No, that's just because the world power grid is massive and it takes time for any technology to grow to that scale, even solar which has grown much faster than any electricity source in history), with annual production growing from 100TWh to 1,000TWh in 8 years (vs. 12 for wind and nuclear and 28 for gas) and growing from 1,000TWh to 2,000TWh in just 3 years.
IEA forecasts now expect clean energy to supply all new electricity demand over the period 2025-2027 (p.66), so it looks like solar (and also wind, nuclear, and hydro) have at long last reached the scale of the global grid.
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u/watduhdamhell 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm not sure if you have ever operated a utility or globe scale asset, but it's not nearly that complicated why we don't switch unless there is new regulation- money. And not just "we won't make quite as much," it's more like once you build a large asset you operate it until it falls apart and you decide to stop repairing it. To do otherwise would be very, very expensive. Imagine buying an insanely expensive machine for your business, just to tear it apart while it still works perfectly fine long before the end of its service life, and while the damage it causes is very real, it's hard to see or feel in quarterly reports.
So as new solar plants come online, they WILL replace the old gas plants not being built new. But that will take a lot longer than an act of regulation saying "you can no longer operate and must now strand all assets of this type."
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u/vAltyR47 1d ago
The only way to correct for an externality is to internalize the cost via taxing it.
It's like everyone is contorting themselves instead of doing the one thing we know works.
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u/mhornberger 1d ago
It's why strides in solar technology haven't reduced fossil fuel consumption.
But fossil-fuel consumption has gone down in some markets.
I would content that global fossil-fuel consumption has failed to decline (yet) due to a) increases in population, and b) China, India, and other developing regions pulling masses of people from poverty.
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u/VVynn 2d ago
What a colossal waste of time and energy with a brutally damaging impact on the environment. All for some invisible bits that some people pretend is money.
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u/shawnisboring 1d ago
They don't even pretend it's money anymore.
- It was a white paper that got spun up for real without exploring the concept fully
- Then it was a side project some nerds did as proof of concept
- Then it was a 'currency', except it turns out nobody wants to spend 'money' that is worth $1 one day and $35,000 the next
- Now it's a commodity propped up entirely by... itself? There's nothing behind it, it's just a paper tiger. Except people have decided that this paper tiger is valuable for some reason.
- It's mostly used now to legitimize upstart coins that people can still grift others with.
From the drop it's been a solution in search of a problem that has entirely failed to materialize and now we're just kinda stuck with this wasteful, resource intensive, useless thing that people keep holding out hope for.
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u/JPHero16 1d ago
At the risk of sounding like a complete cryptovro but since this is a r/science comment I feel like I should at least try to address your comment:
A white paper that got spun up for real without exploring fully
The original paper as posted by Satoshi Nakamoto is 9 pages long and can be found here.
I won’t pretend to be a bitcoin or banking expert, but to me it seems that the goals and structures as described in the white paper have been explored fully and expanded upon. I’d like if you could point out in what way the white paper is not realized exactly. My best guess is the intended use as electronic cash is mostly not how it’s used today, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to use it as electronic cash.
A side project some nerds did as proof of concept Besides calling people who are advancing technology just because they hate the economic system (reminder this was post-2008) “some nerds” I would say that this is pretty accurate description of what usually happens when a good idea is implemented.
Then it was a ‘currency’ It was always a currency from the moment the first pizza was bought using bitcoin in 2010. Furthermore, it possesses the same principles that give fiat worth: acceptability, divisibility, durability, fungibility (interchangeability), portability, and scarcity.
The argument that people don’t want to spend money that is fluctuating in value doesn’t make sense to me. Since you can divide Bitcoin in parts, you can simply buy anything you need by using a fraction of a Bitcoin, nobody is forced to spend whole coins on anything. You still spend fiat for groceries even though you’re spending more fiat every month due to price fluctuations.
It costing 1$ one day and 35000$ is a gross exaggeration. Bitcoin hasn’t been worth less than 1$ since 2011, and has consistently been worth more than 35000$ since late 2023.
commodity propped up by itself
What defines a commodity is in fact that the market decides to treat instances of this good as equivalent. So in a more literal sense of the word, every commodity is propped up by itself. I would even argue that Bitcoin has more worth as a currency than Dollars/Euro’s, because it isn’t dependent on governments or banks to declare it be worth anything. You can make the same arguments you’re making against fiat money, and you would be more right than by making them against Bitcoin.
It’s used to legitimize upstart coins that people use to grift others with
This is just wrong. Bitcoin has nothing to do with memecoins and the like. Bitcoin has legitimate uses (electronic money, store of value). Either you’re misinformed and you believe that Bitcoin is in some way connected to alternative cryptocurrencies, or you’re actively trying to misinform people by saying that it is. Either way, you’re in the wrong. Bitcoin is bigger than every other cryptocurrency combined for a good reason, and its use case is not “providing legitimacy for coins to scam people with”.
from the drop it’s been a solution in search of a problem
This is incorrect, as Bitcoin was created in part as a solution to a very specific problem; “We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.” Quoted from the bitcoin whitepaper. There are other problems it addresses, such as:
- the system (referring to financial institutions being used to process electronic payments) suffers from the inherent weakness of the trust based model.
- completely non-reversible transactions were not really possible
- A certain percentage of fraud being deemed unavoidable in their system
- no mechanism existing to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party
- etc.
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u/MissionCreeper 1h ago
I still dont understand it fully. But isnt electricity the commodity here? It's literally electricity being organized into money?
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u/Fantastic-Newt-9844 1d ago
Bitcoin wasn't just spun up without thinking
The idea of digital cash isn't new, DigiCash was proposed in the 1980s
Cryptography goes back even further
The building blocks to the technology have been in the works for 50+ years
Also - what props the network up is the people using the infrastructure. The btc network has been targeted 24/7 since inception to break it and it hasn't happened (yet...?)
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u/Areshian 15h ago
Math goes even further than cryptography. But we don’t include it because it doesn’t really make sense. Although cryptocurrency uses math, is not really an evolution of it, or supersedes it. Same with cryptography. Cryptography use is widespread today, and only a tiny bit amount, almost insignificant, of that usage is for cryptocurrency. It’s not like the DigiCash example, where you really can consider DigiCash a precursor
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u/Fantastic-Newt-9844 15h ago
Hey thanks for the response guy
I agree with your points. Was trying to point out that it wasn't developed in a vacuum and you have to take into account the natural progression of technology
Got a reference where I can learn more about the math and hashing alorigithms? Ideally with ASIC design in mind :)
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u/Areshian 15h ago
I guess Wikipedia first, then more specialized papers. If you mention hashing and ASIC I assume you’re more interested in the mining part (SHA-256) than the signature part (ECDSA). Personally, I’m more experienced with the latter (and not due to anything cryptocurrency related, just work), I have zero experience (and tbh, interest) in the ASIC stuff. But in fairness, I’ve been in computer security decades, my only interest now is to retire, get a farm, grow some plants, do some carpentry… the usual
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u/squirrelgator 1d ago
I compare cryptocurrency to baseball cards. Someone is going to think that piece of cardstock with some ink on it is worth a lot of money.
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u/OpenBorders69 1d ago
imagine explaining to aliens why we do this despite the negative impact on our environment
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nonsense. While a POS blockchain would be preferred, bitcoin is still facilitating a worldwide transaction system without the need of a state-backed military. Look how much pollution militaries around the world produce. Comparatively, bitcoin is killing it.
Edit: none of you are addressing my point: you need to take into account the energy and cost of the current system if you want to contrast the overhead of bitcoin, otherwise you are arguing in bad faith.
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u/onan 1d ago
Edit: none of you are addressing my point: you need to take into account the energy and cost of the current system
Only if you can support a claim that that current system would be reduced or eliminated, which you have most certainly not done.
You're claiming that if more people used bitcoin, the world would just collectively decided that it didn't need militaries anymore? Given the obvious absurdity of such a claim, obviously you must have some stunningly convincing evidence for it, yes?
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
No, I'm claiming that you need to compare apples to apples otherwise you're being intellectually dishonest. Certainly militaries won't disappear, but certain lawyers and bankers may.
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u/onan 1d ago
If militaries aren't going away, then what part do they have in this conversation?
Are we also not being intellectually honest if we don't bring up the number of banana trees or the number of moons of Saturn, even though those things also wouldn't be changed by the presence of absence of bitcoin?
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
Militaries aren't going away, that isn't the point; they are still necessary for the current system to operate. But even that point is moot, there are still plenty of bankers and lawyers and a number of other assets that our current monetary system requires and whose function would be obsolete under a blockchain-based system.
'Well just look at how much energy this washing machine uses! This river isn't going away, I'm still going to have to spend my day doing manual labor, so what really is the benefit?!'
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u/onan 1d ago
Okay, so you've given up on the idea of militaries going away, and have now moved the goalposts to "plenty of" bankers and lawyers.
But I'm afraid that that doesn't change the onus of providing evidence that these things would actually go away in your proposed world. Bankers and lawyers exist to serve functions related to the concepts of ownership, currency, investment, and so forth. That doesn't automatically go away if your money changes from being a field in your bank's database to being a field in a blockchain database.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
I'm not moving goal posts; if you're going to compare two things you better take account of the full picture. The current monetary system is immensely expensive; just because the military and bankers and lawyers also do other stuff does not mean they aren't necessary for the current monetary system. And just because a system is already in place does not mean you can negate it when comparing the pros and cons of said system.
If I come up with a communications system that could communicate with anyone anywhere in the world, you wouldn't dismiss it just because satellites exist, right? And if we were going to compare my new system to the legacy one, you wouldn't ignore the cost of launching and servicing all those satellites right? Why is this any different?
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u/onan 1d ago
I'm not moving goal posts; if you're going to compare two things you better take account of the full picture.
Okay. So the two pictures we're comparing:
1) A world with militaries and bankers and lawyers in which people use governmental currencies.
2) A world with militaries and bankers and lawyers in which people use cryptocurrencies.
Given that the first three items on our list are the same, we don't need to consider them in any comparison beyond just noting that there is no change.
If I come up with a communications system that could communicate with anyone anywhere in the world, you wouldn't dismiss it just because satellites exist, right? And if we were going to compare my new system to the legacy one, you wouldn't ignore the cost of launching and servicing all those satellites right?
If your new system resulted in people no longer launching or servicing satellites, that would be an important feature.
Why is this any different?
Because cryptocurrencies would not result in people no longer having militaries, bankers, lawyers, or anything else that you have pointed out the existence of.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
Are you suggesting cryptocurrencies would not decrease the amount of work lawyers, politicians, and militaries perform protecting and maintaining the current system? If a transaction is secured using cryptography instead of an institution, that certainly suggests a savings in institutional labor, no?
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u/greiton 1d ago
no military, but $2.2 Billion stolen last year alone. there is a reason that fraud and scams are rampant on the blockchain.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
And 0% was stolen via hacking the blockchain; 100% of that was idiots giving scammers the password to their wallet.
Meanwhile 99% of illegal transaction use cash since, you know, there's no immutable ledger attached to it...
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u/greiton 1d ago
well if someone steals the password to my bank account, I can dispute it with my bank and launch an investigation and get my money back.
a ton of large scale illegal transactions today rely on the block chain. they use coin washers to clean the transaction and prevent tracking.
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u/AnoniMiner 1d ago
Apples to oranges. You could do the same with a Bitcoin bank. How about I hit you on the head and take the fat envelope with cash you're carrying around? How are you going to get those back? Before you start the argument, remember cash is a bearer asset and, in law, possession is 90% of ownership. In other words, you either have some kind of evidence I took your money or it's just your word against mine. That is, pooof, money's gone.
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u/PsyOmega 1d ago
The feds have long since defeated coin tumblers. It's trivial to trace a transaction through them.
On top of that, parent is right. 99% of illegal activity is done via cash. Crypto is largely avoided because of the public ledger. Monero might have have some use there, but its transaction volume isn't very high as a whole.
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u/greiton 1d ago
they have defeated tumblers through great effort on a small number of cases that involved massive highly unique transactions. your run of the mill small scale drug, sex trafficking, and smuggling/fencing deals are still rampant with crypto, and routinely clean and tumble funds into distributed wallets.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
hopefully get your money back. And yeah, that's the trade off; transactions backed by cryptography versus transactions backed by banking and state institutions; bitcoin facilitates transactions without needing all those bodies. You need to account for that when discussing the pros and cons of bitcoin's usage overhead.
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u/greiton 1d ago
there really aren't many "bodies" involved when I make a debit card transaction online. it isn't like it is going to guys in a room with an abacus to check. for the majority of transactions, the number of operation overhead bodies are the same. the bodies as you call them, are why I can get my money back from thieves in the normal banking system, but never will in the crypto system.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
There are still servers to maintain, customer service providers, lawyers, bank CEOs, etc. There's plenty to argue against crypto; I don't understand why people chose to ignore the overhead of the current system and just argue in bad faith.
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u/greiton 1d ago
because of the scale difference, crypto has very very few transactions every day compared to the general banking system, by multiple orders of magnitude. but is outpacing regular banks in energy usage. they are using more energy than entire major metropolitan regions. it isn't even close to the same level of energy usage.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
Let's be careful with our words; proof of work cryptos are outpacing banks, but not Proof of Stake cryptos. I fully agree bitcoin will never be a daily transaction facilitator in its current form, thus why I allude to layer two solutions (which will likely be POS for all the reasons we've mentioned).
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
? People using Bitcoin as a store of value is still people using bitcoin, this whole currency hang up is obsolete. It's true the network can't handle everyday transactions (though that's why they're developing layer 2 solutions) but it can still be used for transactions that can take the hour to settle, and easily. It's no more volatile than tesla stock at this point.
Governments holding reserves is irrelevant; the technology is not reliant on any state-backed resource beyond the internet. And no, the US can't regulate it beyond what they can regulate at the bank level, that's the point of the decentralization.
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u/CheesypoofExtreme 1d ago
though that's why they're developing layer 2 solutions
Looking forward to seeing these solutions when theyre released.
It's no more volatile than tesla stock at this point.
That's not helping your argument the way you think it does.
And no, the US can't regulate it beyond what they can regulate at the bank level, that's the point of the decentralization.
I'm having a hard to understanding a meaningful distinction here. If the US (the most powerful and wealthy country on planet earth) decided to hold enough Bitcoin to set a floor for the value (which it very well can afford to do) and ultimately help with the volatility of the currency, they have control of the market.
In addition to that, the vast majority of your average consumer are trading their Bitcoin on exchanges. The US has the power to regulate the exchanges. They will also have the power to regulate how Bitcoin transactions are tracked across major exchanges, through retail transactions, or even Bitcoin ATMs.
While the US can't print infinite Bitcoin, I'd argue the inherent scarcity actually works in favor of a government attempting to sieze control over a crypto currency market. It buys up enough of it, and then it gets to control how the market operates.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
Right, the US government can't regulate bitcoin any further than it can regulate banks. Considering most people use crypto as a store of value for the US dollar, there is considerable regulatory force. But if people used crypto for a store of value with no intention of converting it to USD, that regulatory power goes out the door. The US could attempt to acquire so much bitcoin that it sets the price, but they'd be battling China and a whole host of other large BTC holders who also have vested interests, and that seems like a losing proposition.
As far as layer two solutions go, people have been using smaller cryptos for daily transactions in countries like Ecuador and Argentina for nearly a decade now, and there's no real technical showstoppers so I'm optimistic. And yes, the asset is still volatile, but the volatility has consistently decreased over the years and will continue to do so with further adoption (no one speculates on a technology already adopted).
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u/JM00000001 1d ago
Or brick and mortar banks. How much electricity is consumed by the infrastructure that supports global trade? You can easily argue that with wider adoption this would be a more efficient way for the world to transact.
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u/Oh_ffs_seriously 1d ago
Use cases for physical banking and Bitcoin are completely different, so this comparison doesn't make sense. If physical banking is to be replaced, it will be replaced by digital banking, which is already significantly more efficient than Bitcoin.
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u/JM00000001 1d ago
Digital banking doesn't run itself.
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u/Oh_ffs_seriously 1d ago edited 1d ago
It doesn't have to. EDIT: Even though it mostly does. You know about servers, right?
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u/JM00000001 1d ago
How many people are employed full time maintaining the whole operation? How many buildings? What are their electric costs? They're not carbon neutral either. And it's more than just the cost of running a server. They also have to convince you that they're credible and responsible enough to handle your money and all your transactions. How do they do that? With giant offices and thousands of people making executive salaries. The costs are astronomical all to make you think that they are smart and responsible and you need them. It's basically a religion except you get office towers in Manhattan instead of churches and ceos instead of priests. But that end of it doesn't count right?
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u/CheesypoofExtreme 1d ago
You can easily argue that with wider adoption this would be a more efficient way for the world to transact.
If it's easy to argue, Im sure many of us would be very interested in you making that argument with actual numbers.
We know crypto mining is extremely inefficient in regards to energy use, so it would seem that on its face, it'd be ludicrous to leave that out when calculating the overall energy impact of global trade with fiat currencies vs crypto.
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u/PsyOmega 1d ago edited 1d ago
Most global crypto mining is now done powered by renewables. B&M banks are mostly sitting on grids powered by CO2 makers. The trucks that move cash are all extremely dirty diesel burners, and the armored ones get like 2mpg because of the armor weight.
These numbers have been run. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/research:-bitcoin-consumes-less-than-half-the-energy-of-the-banking-or-gold-industries
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u/grundar 1d ago
These numbers have been run. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/research:-bitcoin-consumes-less-than-half-the-energy-of-the-banking-or-gold-industries
From the underlying report:
"In 2019, VISA processed 185.5 billion transactions"
By contrast, bitcoin processes about 500k transactions per day, or about 0.18 billion transactions per year.
In other words, your link demonstrates that bitcoin consumes half of the energy of traditional banking while processing 0.1% as many transactions as just one credit card network.
Compelling data indeed regarding bitcoin's energy efficiency.
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u/CheesypoofExtreme 1d ago
You originally argued for efficiency, not clean energy.
The only argument you are currently making is that 1) We need to move our power grids to more renewable and 2) More digital currency and less physical currency.
These numbers have been run. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/research:-bitcoin-consumes-less-than-half-the-energy-of-the-banking-or-gold-industries
I actually do appreciate you coming with numbers. I don't have time to dig into this deeply right now, but off the topmof my head... the NASDAQ page is hosting an article from Bitcoin Magazine, which hardly sounds like a neutral party. The study was carried out by Galaxy Digital which
engages in the digital asset and blockchain businesses. It operates through three segments: Global Markets, Asset Management, and Digital Infrastructure Solutions.
Also seems a bit biased...
I opened the study directly, and the first table is trying to compare energy usage of things that are generally considered vital to modern society, making the argument "Bitcoin isn't inefficient! It uses less energy than all idle electronic devices!", but then what do you consider an idle electronic device? What is that device doing?
But sure, Bitcoin today uses less energy than the entire traditional banking sector, I'll give you that, (Im not positive thats true - but for the sake of argument its yours), but we're talking about a crypto currency that on a global scale is niche compared to straight up fiat currency transactions. If Bitcoin were a global standard currency, would the energy impact not be exponentially greater?
A more important distinction than overall energy usage is: for transacting the equivalent to $1 USD, what is the energy cost between traditional banking and Bitcoin?
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u/shiruken PhD | Biomedical Engineering | Optics 2d ago edited 2d ago
The primary investigator, Scott Delaney, has a thread summarizing the research over on Bluesky.
For reference, the current EPA annual standard for PM2.5 exposure is 9.0 µg/m3. However, the Trump administration has announced they will be revising the air quality standard to "undo [the] red tape holding back American exceptionalism."
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u/carpentersound41 1d ago
I guarantee you the costs and damages as a result of mining bitcoin outweigh what is actually gained.
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u/Human-Location-7277 2d ago
There really is unlimited resources that we are so close attaining in space. The greed! As a species could be our downfall, we should eliminate money planet wide and just have resource management.
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u/cutegolpnik 2d ago
Planet earth is DONE with us and will rightfully be wiping our species out of existence via climate change
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u/SoggyGrayDuck 23h ago
Have they done any comparison against any other large power consumption sources/industries? For example AI or gene folding or supercomputing?
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u/efstajas 2d ago edited 1d ago
It's important to note that Bitcoin soaks up as much energy as it does primarily because it relies on proof-of-work to secure itself. The second largest public blockchain, Ethereum, successfully transitioned to proof-of-stake in 2022, which slashed its energy consumption by over 99.99%, and it now consumes comparatively negligible amounts of power. That's because unlike PoW, PoS does not rely on expensive computation to secure the chain. Instead, it relies (greatly simplified) on validators (the actors in the network watching the chain for validity) staking significant value, which will get slashed if the validator is found to misbehave by the rest of the network. In return, validators receive rewards according to the size of their stake.
While there are risks with PoS, given how battle-tested it is at this point, Bitcoin could (and in my humble opinion eventually must) go through this same transition.
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u/greiton 1d ago
it is still a bad idea economically to have a speculative currency. no one should be getting rich or losing everything by having money in their pocket so to speak. actual currency transactions require stability and security. and no block chain product has emerged on a large scale that meets these fundamental requirements.
until it does, they are still just digital beanie babies.
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u/PsyOmega 1d ago
BTC has long since proven itself as a non-speculative currency. It does have variance in value, but as USD fiat crashed after the 2020 federal reserve printing run, and is crashing under the new trump admin, BTC is holding its value.
Every non-BTC cryptocurrency can be seen as speculative, however. There is a reason the BTC community dubbed them all "shitcoins". As well, 99% of non-BTC crypto's are just rugpull scams.
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u/camisado84 1d ago
BTC was 100k in November of last year, its at 85K this year. The USD index in the same range has changed less than ~3%.
Literally everything you said does not seem to be true outsdie of BTC having variance, as with anything that is traded.
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u/Cautious_Parsley_898 1d ago
It will likely become more stable in 2140, when the last Bitcoin is mines. But it might also lose interest and drop at that point (if it makes it to that point in the first place)
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u/Areshian 15h ago
2140? I’m not sure if Bitcoin would really be a thing then, who knows what can replace it. I’m not even sure if society/civilization as we know it will be there. That being said, there is a good chance there is a baby alive today that may survive until 2140 if the situation is right (no WW3 stuff)
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u/sammog 1d ago
It can be argued that the value of bitcoin is tied to its energy usage. It costs some amount of electricity to farm, that's a real world value attached to the otherwise purely speculative currency - if the coin was worth less than the electricity needed to mine it, people wouldn't mine it.
Since the creator of the coin also has at least a million coins themselves, it seems unlikely they would transition to a lower cost model and risk devaluing their coins.
It's dumb and it sucks, but it seems like the only people who could actually change it so people aren't just burning away piles of fuel on nothing, are the same people with an incentive to not change it.
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u/Harfatum 1d ago
I get the framing but I think even that is a bit of a non sequitur.
I've seen someone say that BTC is "stored energy" in the same way as feces is "stored food".
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u/Areshian 15h ago
Even when using POS, it is still terrible inefficient compared to traditional computing systems, by several orders of magnitude. Sure, it is many orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin, but there is still a level of replication that is completely overkill. There are thousands of nodes and millions of of validators all of them basically doing the same operations
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u/GreenGorilla8232 1d ago edited 1d ago
As much as people don't like this, we live in a world where companies are free to use energy for whatever they want as long as it's legal.
The government doesn't get to pick and choose how much energy various companies or industries get to use.
Companies are choosing to spend energy on Bitcoin because there's a strong demand for the network. If the demand didn't exist, they wouldn't be spending so much energy on it.
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u/HotterRod 19h ago
Mostly this is evidence that we're not correctly pricing the negative externalities of energy generation.
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u/raulbloodwurth 17h ago
In general, bitcoin mining companies can’t make a profit unless their electricity is <$0.05 per KWh. This is why these miners tend to be co-located next to large-scale renewable energy projects with minimal demand.
If we want to stop them from using energy we could make better policy decisions and not overbuild resources where no one needs it.
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u/torukmakto4 2d ago
Ban crypto.
Ban AI (except research institutions).
Or else mandatory 100% renewable or nuclear energy and waste heat recovery.
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u/Devilnaht 2d ago
Forcing them to use renewable energy wouldn’t help, unfortunately, unless you obligated them to construct their own power plants as well. If all the energy referenced in the article had been connected to renewable energy sources, it would have still resulted in a similar amount of fossil fuels burned. Think of it in terms of a kind of power grid budget. Let’s say we have 20 units of renewable generation and 100 units of total demand. To make up the gap, we use 80 units of fossil fuels.
Now, someone hooks up their crypto/ AI farm to the renewable sources. They’re “environmentally conscious”, so they just use the 20 units of renewable capacity. But the grid already had 100 units of demand, so we have 120 total demand, and we have to kick on 100 units of fossil fuel power (20 more than in the first scenario). Comparing the two situations, even though the crypto / AI farms are on “100%” renewable power, they’ve caused just as much fossil fuel usage as if they weren’t.
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u/JustDiveInTimberLake 2d ago
Not all crypto uses proof of work there are plenty of energy saving options like proof of stake
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u/Mynsare 1d ago
Consuming more than 0 is still wasteful for something that serves no purpose at all.
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u/JustDiveInTimberLake 1d ago
Banks and payment providers like visa are using crypto like visa using solana
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u/Harfatum 1d ago
If you napkin-math the economic gains of having most assets tokenized (and thus interoperable and automatable), you will probably find gains in the tens of trillions of dollars GDP.
The first light bulb sucked, but what we do with light-producing technology now is much more useful.
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u/Wyvernz 1d ago
If you napkin-math the economic gains of having most assets tokenized (and thus interoperable and automatable), you will probably find gains in the tens of trillions of dollars GDP.
Where are any of these supposed gains coming from? I can transfer money to and from my bank effortlessly land with a lot of protections against fraud. Crypto is slow, expensive, volatile, and has no protection against fraud.
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u/Harfatum 1d ago
Better capital efficiency, increased investment, reduced costs, capital velocity. I tried asking all the major AIs and they independently came to similar figures, please try yourself and let me know if you get something different!
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u/grundar 1d ago
I tried asking all the major AIs and they independently
There's nothing independent about that, they're all the same general technology and trained on broadly the same corpus of data. It's like saying you searched with Google, Bing, and Ask Jeeves and got similar results -- it's entirely expected.
There's also no indication it's correct, as LLMs just piece together their input data, so you're going to get back whatever sentiment is common in their input corpus. If there's a lot of pro-crypto writing online, that's what they'll parrot back to you.
"I asked an LLM" is not persuasive evidence in a scientific context.
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u/Harfatum 1d ago
It's just napkin math, but the core idea is convincing to me - it allows for greater access to automation of assets, capital efficiency, equity availability for smaller enterprises, interoperability, integration with identity services, automation of taxation and legal compliance, ease of proving solvency, the list goes on.
A parallel to the fantastic value that we enjoy having the internet vs. just intranets or paper documents.
BTW, I think you'll eventually see that LLMs are smarter than that. The new research out of Anthropic recently showed how they actually plan rather than just "finding the next word", for example.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
Lmao 'ban crypto'
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u/Disig 2d ago
It amazes me how many people don't realize how much energy farming Bitcoin takes and how absolutely terrible for the environment it is. It's why I'm personally so against it.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
Your dollar solution requires feeding and supplying an army, are you taking this into account?
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u/greiton 1d ago
you don't have armies because of money, you have armies because of ownership. if I break into your house, torture you, and steal you bitcoin wallets, who are you going to go to? the police is a domestic army. unless you have a mad max survival of the strongest fetish, at some point you require social army enforcement. also, even in mad max, the strongest guy is the one with the biggest army.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
Fine, forget the military. If I want to facilitate a monetary transaction to someone in Sweden, I need their country's monetary system to interface with my country's monetary system. To ensure that requires an army of bankers and politicians. It's the same argument; people always lament the power cost of a cryptocurrency without properly taking into account the true cost of the current system. It's intellectually dishonest, and people on this sub specifically should know better.
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u/grundar 1d ago
Fine, forget the military. If I want to facilitate a monetary transaction to someone in Sweden, I need their country's monetary system to interface with my country's monetary system. To ensure that requires an army of bankers and politicians.
The vast majority of whom work on providing services other than person-to-person transactions, and yet who in that share of their time manage to provide for literally 1,000x as many transactions for just 2x the energy as bitcoin.
It may have other laudable properties, but bitcoin is objectively energy inefficient.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
Fine, all I'm saying is include this in the discussion instead of sweeping it under the rug. Also all the article says is we should be using layer 2 solutions or POS blockchains instead of bitcoin, which I support.
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u/greiton 1d ago
so you want to commit piracy and international smuggling without being caught. just be honest, you want everyone to use it so you can do crimes freely.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
What? Why would doing crime using an immutable public ledger make sense? Why would I want that paper trail? You are aware of how this technology works right?
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u/greiton 1d ago
paper trail only lasts as far as the tumblers and cleaners. some extremely large criminal transactions have been possible to reconstruct on the other side, but this has to do more with the extreme size and uniqueness of the transaction. drug trade, sex trade, and smuggling all use crypto for the reduced tracking requirements and tumbling/cleaning options.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
What's crazy is that this is easily googlable, yet you instead choose to spread misinformation.
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/10/02/exclusive-criminals-prefer-cash-to-crypto-new-report-finds/
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u/greiton 1d ago
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
All this report states is that online drug vendors use crypto, which obviously makes sense since they can't use cash. Cash is still kind when it comes to illicit transactions though.
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u/Disig 1d ago
Those bankers and so on still exist in your system even if they're not bankers. You want to kill them and replace them with machines? Because that's not how the world works.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
I'm pointing out the efficiency bitcoin provides over the alternative in a conversation about its overhead cost.
And the move to automation is exactly the trend we see in the world for the past hundred years, so I'm unsure what your point is.
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u/Disig 1d ago
You're ignoring my point. Also no it is not more efficient.
34 largest Bitcoin mining operations in the United States consumed more electricity in 2022 than all of Los Angeles combined
So are you telling me everyone in Los Angeles is a banker? They specifically are a part of this "army" of people working on currency? Because no, they're not. It's NOT more efficient. It kills the planet faster and uses more energy then humans ever could.
Now for my point: those people still exist. They still cost energy. They still need jobs. They don't magically go away just because automation happens. Yes, they can find other jobs sure but the energy cost just goes up, not down. This efficiency you claim doesn't actually exist. Things will cost more energy, not less.
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
And I am saying the infrastructure to support the current worldwide monetary system consumes vastly more power than LA. All the lawyers, all the bankers, all the servers, all the militaries.
Your point only makes sense for the Amish. Do we throw away our washing machines because it took someone's job? Of course not; we take that efficiency and allow it to afford us to go work on more important tasks. It's like Trump talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US when a lot of them have been automated already; you're barking up the wrong tree.
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u/Disig 1d ago
Did you not read the study linked on this very thread?
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u/TimeGrownOld Grad Student | Materials Science and Engineering|Smart Materials 1d ago
Yes, did you have a counterpoint or are we done?
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u/Disig 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, it's still far more energy efficient and that "army" is useful for other things.
What are you say? Cull the army in favour of Bitcoin machines? In your example, the army still exists and takes up resources. They need it more than your digital coin.
People exist whether Bitcoin does or not. Bitcoin doesn't need to exist
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u/animalafterlife69 2d ago
How much energy does traditional banking use considering all infrastructure?
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u/greiton 1d ago
per transaction? orders of magnitude less than crypto. people actually buy and sell things and pay their bills using banks. crypto is a speculative asset that wildly swings in value, and lacks a lot of the fundamental security banks provide.
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u/PsyOmega 1d ago
Wrong
blockchain is infinitely more secure than any banking system. The FDIC is the only thing backing banks and it doesn't cover that much per account, and isn't funded enough to sustain a systemic collapse anyway. The FDIC would fold during another great depression event before even 1% of the populace was made whole.
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u/grundar 1d ago
From the underlying report:
"In 2019, VISA processed 185.5 billion transactions"
By contrast, bitcoin processes about 500k transactions per day, or about 0.18 billion transactions per year.
In other words, your link demonstrates that bitcoin consumes half of the energy of traditional banking while processing 0.1% as many transactions as just one credit card network.
Compelling data indeed regarding bitcoin's energy efficiency.
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u/Discount_gentleman 1d ago
Is that a relevant comparison, since the two things serve different functions?
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u/animalafterlife69 1d ago
I think so. I believe the idea of bitcoin is to offer a more sound way of accounting for value. To me that offsets the energy costs - especially when compared to the current systems in place. In addition I think it would be worth considering the energy consumption involved in remedying the inefficiencies of the current banking/monetary systems which includes fraud, negligence, inflation and the challenges of exchange and exchange rates etc. You can’t say look at all this energy it uses without considering the value of what it accomplishes. Proof of work is exactly what provides the sound accounting for value. Moving away from that makes it less trustworthy.
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u/Discount_gentleman 1d ago
The answer is "no." The banking system (and the currency systems as a whole) are involved in billions of transactions every day, and are instrumental to every single person's life and every business. Crypto, on the other hand, is almost never used, and is certainly never used for most people's lives or businesses. It is an ineffective, expensive, and energy-consuming gimmick.
Glad we could clear that up.
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u/Baud_Olofsson 1d ago
There have been 1.17 billion bitcoin transactions in total, in all of history. Visa alone processed 234 billion transactions in 2024 alone.
If Visa or Mastercard used as much energy as bitcoin per transaction, then just processing credit and debit card transactions would use up the entire world's combined power output and then some.
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u/raulbloodwurth 1d ago
Fwiw credit is fundamentally different from settlement. A more fair comparison could be made between Bitcoin and Fedwire.
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u/No-Complaint-6397 2d ago
Ok just pointing out that recently everyone on here was smashing AI for its “egregious” energy use… but AI is helping tons of people, with medical questions, education, self and creative development, and crypto ain’t helping nobody that much except those who cashed out.
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u/farfromelite 2d ago
AI (generative text etc) is mostly not. If it is, it's a niche case.
Supervised machine learning is helping people with medical stuff, that's not nearly as energy intensive.
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u/greiton 1d ago
part of the problem is we have like 10 new technologies right now all just being called "AI" yes things like machine vision can be useful. but also, some things like LLMs can have major negative downsides that need to be addressed.
but yeah, Crypto has failed fundamentally at being a currency, or adding any significant value to the economic transaction infrastructure of the world, in fact it seems open to abuse and security issues without recourse unlock modern banks.
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u/parks387 21h ago
Ya bitcoin/crypto is trash…if you want to decentralize currency trade gold squibs….you think creating a ledger for every single transaction in existence is going to decentralize it? Not to mention the complete waste of resources…cue the 10-30 yr old Bitcoin boys who weren’t even mentally cognizant in 2009.
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u/shaftalope 2d ago
THEY HUNGER. That's OK because we are here to feed/serve them. They DEMAND more and more, solar and wind isn't enough for 24/7 computations, so they must convince their human caretakers to give them the nuclear and even fire up 50 year old reactors to feed their ever increasing needs. Eventually rolling blackouts for humans will be ordered so that THEY may luxuriate in the comfy nest of current.
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