Do you miners ever feel bad all pollution mining causes?

[laststop]

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

[Gabi]

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

Bullshit, the normal system with banks, banknotes, coins etcetc pollute much much more. Bitcoin is much greener.

[laststop]

yea but adding bitcoin just adds more carbon into the air without reducing the demand on paper money at all. But if that's the rationale you use to keep you guilt free do ya thing

[Lethos]

Not really, I came late to the party (bitcoins) and use energy efficient mining hardware, FPGA's, so I'm using 1/10th the energy most GPU based mining rigs would. When ASIC's come a long I'll be using those for most of my mining eventually, thus reducing my energy footprint even further.

As far as I'm concerned I do my best to move to a more energy efficient hardware, I pay my electricity bill (of course) and do my best to encourage the energy company to invest in greener ways of producing energy. In the UK is historically expensive, so their is a lot of plans in place to encourage both individuals and companies to build wind and solar panel farms, both small and large. It's taking a while but we do have some really quiet large wind farms now on this little island.

Also it's funny to hear you bring up this topic, when you aren't even paying for the electricity you use in your Apartment. The energy companies continuing to use heavy polluting methods of energy generation is a choice of profit. It's not a choice I made, their are alternatives and yes it could be done if they wanted to.

Bitcoin is not such a bad energy consuming method of generating a digital currency, that it hurts the environment and if you want to label it as such their are most certainly worst offends which never get labelled as such. It's advancement in technology it can make use of actually makes it one of the most efficient in the industry.

[laststop]

Interested on what people think mainly. Personally I don't even think global warming is real. The earth goes through a natural hot/cold cycle. But if bitcoins never existed less electricty would be being consumed that's fact.

[Vanity]

Not a miner, nor a very green person to begin with, so my views might be a bit biased, but I just cannot see bitcoin mining having any effect really.
Sure if there was no bitcoin, the electricity wouldn't be used to mine bitcoins -- but it surely would be used to some other stuff nonetheless.

[laststop]

if I didn't mine coins I wouldn't be using it on something else

[JoelKatz]

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

This is precisely counter-balanced by their increased demand for energy pushing up the prices of the fossil fuels that provide the energy causing an increased incentive to develop carbon-neutral sources of energy. All the energy that can profitably be produced by releasing carbon will be. It's just a matter of when.

[stevegee58]

To make an omelette you have to break some eggs.

[Gabi]

yea but adding bitcoin just adds more carbon into the air without reducing the demand on paper money at all. But if that's the rationale you use to keep you guilt free do ya thing

Again, bullshit. We use bitcoin so we reduce the demand for all the traditional things. Tell me, how much do paypal servers pollute? How much do all banks datacenters pollute? What about moving money left and right?

[Lethos]

Technically their would be less energy consumption if you only excluded the energy now not used by bitcoin.
Bitcoin is however starting to replace for some the energy consumption by more traditional methods of currency exchange, which if you are aware of how the big banks do it and how many computers are involved you'd realise they are far from energy efficient.
So one could say few years from now, if bitcoin adoption for online and global trade really picks up enough, it could save energy by not needed as many computers from more traditional methods of currency exchange.

The entire bitcoin network spread across the entire globe (assuming majority used inefficient GPU's) would be about 2400 MegaWatts a year last time I estimated it. Of course that number will start to go down pretty quickly once adoption of FPGA's and ASIC picks up, which have a 1/10 and 1/100 fold differences in energy consumption in comparison.

The worlds energy consumption is in the region of 20,000,000,000 Megawatts a year. So am I worried about a new method to trade currency, digital created for and by the community, which could make a significant difference to entire world and how it does trade, costing at the moment 0.000012% of the worlds energy. Bitcoin has spread that far, it has had an effect in some small way in every major country in the world. So am I worried?
Nope!

It's a scale thing, doesn't really put much of a dent in it. Also unlike most things as they grow bigger in popularity it's not going to consume more energy as a whole. With technology adoption going to quickly it's going to start declining on the energy consumption front, since ASIC tech is so cheap when mass produced there be no reason to sue GPU's any more. 1 years from now, it would not surprise me if that figure looks more like 200 Megawatts or less for the entire network.

[Lethos]

btw for comparison, most of the big banks individually, usually have an total energy consumption which is measured in millions of Megawatts Annually.
Just this year, BOA said theirs was a little under 5million Megawatts annually, with hopes to reduce it by 25% over the next 3 years.

So for arguments sake, the bitcoin network is still obviously showing itself to be far more efficient, since it's still a long way off that.
With ASIC tech I don't see it ever getting that high.

[pekv2]

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

What about people that receive electric from water power generators or wind mills?

Have you recently looked in to coal burning plants? They are becoming cleaner and cleaner with their carbon filters.

Do you feel guilty for shopping at walmart or any other stores? They use semi trucks to deliver their goods that sit idling by in truck lots burning diesel 8-12 hours long. Basically semi trucks are running 24/7. Cops leave their vehicles running entire time they are on the job, same with taxi's.

[JMAHH]

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

Fuck you.

I don't care about all the electricity YOU use for watching porn or charging your buttplugs either. Go spout your eco-crap somewhere else.

If troll: congrats, 1 rage point

[matthewh3]

I'm thinking of moving my GLBSE listed mining company "RSM" over to 100% renewable sourced green electricity.  It will only cost about ~£0.14xxx per kW/h.

[Stephen Gornick]

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

To date, nobody has provided any other suggestion as to how to provide transaction timestamping in a secure manner that is not dependent upon a central authority.

If you think you can come up with an alternative, please share.

For today's GPU miners, well more than half of the revenue from bitcoins goes to pay for electricity.  But those using FPGA use a fraction of that.  The reason the GPU miners are still around is because FPGAs are so expensive.   ASIC designs are even more efficient than FPGAs and they can be produced (after paying the fixed expenses for the R&D) cheaply.

So we are probably well past peak electrical consumption of the Bitcoin network even though hashing capacity continues to increase.  At peak, a locomotive train with two engines could create more electricity than all of the Bitcoin mining combined would draw.  A single Band of America building in Manhttan draws more than all the Bitcoin mining combined draws.

[Stephen Gornick]

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

Troll?

laststop previously wrote:
"I have been using dual 6990's to mine since the card was released and It's done ok."
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104285.0

[kjj]

Meh.  Some of us don't feel that carbon dioxide is pollution at all.

[Portnoy]

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

Do you feel guilty, or a little stupid, to use a computer and the internet to complain about others waste of electricity?   

[foggyb]

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

Compared to ONLY ocean C02 emissions, total human output of C02 is like a small fart.

So to answer your question, no, I don't give a toot.