Dear Bitcointalk family,

I have prepared a free PDF which aims to provide a comprehensive template and body-of-knowledge for bitcoin evangelists to use to promote Bitcoin to merchants. This is especially useful if you have access to a sales affiliate program with a major exchange and/or payment processor, or if you are a significant holder of BTC who wishes to see BTC’s value rise on the back of healthy and well-justified merchant and consumer adoption.

Reddit Thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/28d1y5/adoption_promoting_bitcoin_to_merchants_a_toolkit/

Free PDF: http://bitscan.com/articles/promoting-bitcoin-to-merchants-a-toolkit-for-evangelists

Customisable MS Word Version & Excel Spreadsheet: http://bitscan.com/articles/your-bitcoin-promotion-toolkit

I wish you all the best in your Bitcoin promotion efforts!

I'd say that we'll only find out when it happens - way too many variables to speculate on it from now

I do have a firm belief that the emissions are most definitely trending downwards as cleaner energy will become the cheapest form of energy

Not just trendy my good friend, it is becoming necessary - not for the sake of saving the planet, but for the sake of saving our species!

The planet will be 100% fine. It has been rocked by meteors, volcanos, earthquakes - you name it - for the past 4 billion years. The planet will cope with global warming and climate change. The human species won't

Bitcoin, our saviour! :p

Thank you for the tip!!

The paper you linked to is certainly an interesting read - I will incorporate some of its ideas into my 2nd edition.

Dear Mining Community,

If anyone ever has the gall to tell you that you are unsustainable wastes of electricity - fire back at them with this comprehensive and conclusive research data!

Gold Mining has the following impact every year:
- 475 million gigajoules of energy used
- 54 million tonnes of CO₂ produced
- Consumes 800 billion litres of water
- Consumes 400,000 tonnes of deadly cyanide
- Generates 4 billion tonnes of waste rock
- tens of thousands of worker deaths in recorded history, and an over 100 deaths a year in the modern age
- USD$600m of Conflict Gold mined every year, which it tainted with physical and sexual violence, and human enslavement.

Meanwhile, here are the stats about Bitcoin mining:
- 3.3 million gigajoules of energy used
- 550,000 tonnes of CO₂ (99% less than Gold mining!)
- No consumption of water or cyanide, and no generation of waste rock.


Link to the full research paper is here: http://dealingwithdisruption.com/2014/06/05/an-order-of-magnitude-estimate-of-the-relative-sustainability-of-the-bitcoin-network/


Keep fighting the good fight, and mine on!

Dearest Bitcointalk community,

The other day I published a detailed research paper on the relative sustainability of the bitcoin network, when compared with the impacts of the gold mining/recycling industry, the physical currency printing-&-minting industry, as well as the broader banking system (although this is probably unfair to compare with bitcoin, many people were interested to know what the carbon footprint of legacy banking was, and this has now been quantified).

The research was well received on reddit, but despite receiving a lot of upvotes and replies, was buried all the way down to the 12th page within a few hours of publication. I would like to share this research with you all here, as it is a more serious and friendly community than r/bitcoin.



Link to research: http://bitscan.com/articles/is-the-bitcoin-network-sustainable

Link to original reddit thread, which contains community feedback and questions, along with my answers to said feedback and questions: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27d793/research_is_the_bitcoin_network_sustainable/




I hope you all enjoy the read (even if you only read the TL;DR executive summary), and I hope that this research is valuable to you all in your BTC promotion and evangelical efforts.

Thank you all in advance

Hass




TL;DR of the Research

Comparison of Annual Economic Costs:
- Gold Mining:            USD$105 billion
- Gold Recycling:           USD$40 billion
- Paper Currency & Minting:   USD$28 billion
- Banking System Electricity Use:   USD$63.8 billion
- Bitcoin Mining:           USD$0.66 billion

Comparison of Annual Environmental Costs (Tonnes CO₂ produced):
- Gold Mining:      54 million
- Gold Recycling:           4 million
- Paper Currency & Minting:   6.7 million
- Banking System:   390 million
- Bitcoin Mining:           0.55 million

Comparison of Annual Socioeconomic Costs:
See the exec summary of the PDF - I couldn't figure out how to create a multi row/column table! :p