Debunking the "Bitcoin is an environmental disaster" argument

[Daltonik]

Bill Smith, the founder of XcelPlus International Inc, suggests using the energy obtained from recycling landfills for bitcoin mining, according to him, landfills are what we have in sufficient quantity, so there are 10,000 landfills in the US. The only thing we have no shortage of is garbage, there are more than 400 closed landfills in Texas alone, so we look at them as overturned oil wells.
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/bitcoin-mining-green-energy

[stompix]

Emission reduction can be attained either trough lowering mining dependence from fossil fuels, or from increasing mining equipment efficiency.
RIOT made some improvement in this second direction:

Increasing efficiency per chip won't lead to reduce power consumption, I don't understand why some poeple who are heavily invested in mining keep saying this.
Bitcoin mining is not like car building, you reduce the energy spent on building one by improvements and that's it, you don't build twice as many cause it's half as expensive,  with the more efficient gear you burn 5$ to get 10$ instead of 7 for 10, it's normal with higher efficiency you will just add more miners as it becomes more productive.
If bitmain would release some 2nm gear doing 10x more hash power W the consumption will stay the same, it will be just that the hash rate will grow 10x.
The only thing keeping consumption down is the price, which:

That aside, yeah immersion cooling rules, especially when you're forced to set up mining in a not so cold climate, wish I could do the same since the noise from gear becomes unbearable for more than a quarter-hour but the cost is a bit prohibitive for small miners, 300E a gallon is a bit steep.
But when you're RIOT and you stand on a pile of millions thrown at you by investors it's a different story.

Bill Smith, the founder of XcelPlus International Inc,

A company that hasn't been able to complete one full project in 10 years now talks about plasma gasification on 10 000 landfills, another company that wants a iggy ride on the crypto wave. Plasma gasification is not always a net producing energy unlike traditional biomass methane capture, and on top of that is expensive as fuck, that's why everyone is abandoning those projects..
Keep it simple and nuclear.

[oHnK]

A company that hasn't been able to complete one full project in 10 years now talks about plasma gasification on 10 000 landfills, another company that wants a iggy ride on the crypto wave. Plasma gasification is not always a net producing energy unlike traditional biomass methane capture, and on top of that is expensive as fuck, that's why everyone is abandoning.

The issue of being environmentally unfriendly to Bitcoin is still very hotly discussed, but when compared to other technologies and innovations there are still worse impacts than Bitcoin itself. In fact, if green energy, which is currently a trend to solve energy problems around the world, could be reached at a low investment price, then maybe this would not be discussed anymore. The construction of solar-powered, waste-based, and other green energy power plants is still very expensive so that in every country still using coal which is cheaper.

[S4VV4S]

I would never say something like that where many people say that bitcoin is a disaster for the environment, we don't see if anyone feels harmed by bitcoin so it is said to be a disaster for the environment, can we say bitcoin causes air pollution so that it pollutes to the surrounding area but that doesn't really happen maybe it's just an issue we can say we want to drop bitcoin indirectly so it's a disaster for the environment

[fillippone]

If bitmain would release some 2nm gear doing 10x more hash power W the consumption will stay the same, it will be just that the hash rate will grow 10x.

Interesting point, and probably very true.
Anyway I believe there's not other way to measure efficiency as Mh/S J/TH.
Provided that this hash improvement would have been delivered anyway, of course power eficiency will keep the electricity consumption at minimum, even if I would doubt that we will ever haves an unbalanced choice of having 10x increase with same power consumption, while I expect a "mixed approach" (i.e. 5x hash with half power consumption).

[dark1234]

many say bitcoin is not environmentally friendly and blah blah blah....
it's just an excuse for those who want to corner it even to eliminate bitcoin from its development....
As we know, bitcoin is indeed one that uses electricity which has a negative impact on the environment, because the amount of fossil fuel used to generate electricity also gives birth to greenhouse gases and air pollution. environmentally friendly and this is not an excuse because one of the most polluting energy contributors such as cars still cannot be overcome even though many countries switch to electric cars, but; this is also not environmentally friendly imagine if the whole world uses electric cars how much electricity usage is used every day....
therefore don't make it an excuse but make it a homework together to find the best solution without stopping the development of more efficient transaction technology... because bitcoin is not a setback but an advancement

[stompix]

Interesting point, and probably very true.
Anyway I believe there's not other way to measure efficiency as Mh/S.

J/Th? 
No efficiency, can't be measured by anything else than the secs of the gears used, the best indicator which would show you where the hash rate is going would be the profitability per TH which now might beak 40cents, compared to 10 cents a year ago when the hash rate was nearly the same.

Provided that this hash improvement would have been delivered anyway, of course power eficiency will keep the electricity consumption at minimum, even if I would doubt that we will ever haves an unbalanced choice of having 10x increase with same power consumption, while I expect a "mixed approach" (i.e. 5x hash with half power consumption).

Yeah, it won't be a 10x, and most likely because the gear can't be delivered instantly but in batches,  and with this the last ones that would purchase gear will see a high spike in dif a drop in revenue and an insane amount of days for ROI, I'm fairly certain that if all the poeple mining now would have to go through all this again a lot would quit, but some are mining now after covering their gear cost already, so for them, it's a matter of revenue- electricity cost, unlike new people who would think revenue - electricity costs - purchase costs.

It's clear we're going to see a spike in electricity consumption of the network during the Q1 and Q2 of 2022, a lot of gear will come online, and some comparisons that were done in the past won't be pretty with the updated numbers.

[TheBeardedBaby]

All the el. radiators and water heaters are producing only heat and wasting electricity and are way more polluting than bitcoin...

Every water heater, radiator, and equipment which have capacity to use the heat for household and industrial needs, could actually mine crypto. We have not IoT and smart houses.. electronic components are keep getting smaller.. c'mon, that's the future and you all know it!

In a few years your stove will mine crypto while you are cooking your meal. ... wait wut...

Screenshot this $hit and you'll see I'm right

[fillippone]

It's clear we're going to see a spike in electricity consumption of the network during the Q1 and Q2 of 2022, a lot of gear will come online, and some comparisons that were done in the past won't be pretty with the updated numbers.

I am pretty sure about this, but I bet we also witness a massive increase in "efficiency". I have been told a lot of Chinese miners used older generation miners, relying on very cheap if not free energy. So efficiency wasn't a big issue there. But miners elsewhere have a great concern over operation efficiency, so they relied almost entirely on newer more efficient machines.
So I guess the increase in Electricity consumption will be less than proportional to the increase in the hash.

[stompix]

I am pretty sure about this, but I bet we also witness a massive increase in "efficiency". I have been told a lot of Chinese miners used older generation miners, relying on very cheap if not free energy. So efficiency wasn't a big issue there. But miners elsewhere have a great concern over operation efficiency, so they relied almost entirely on newer more efficient machines.

And who told you that was spot on, otherwise we wouldn't have had those numbers last year.

That's the beauty of speculation about the hash rate and about the future of mining, there are so many variables you never get the perfect picture about what's really happening, an industry far more elusive than the oil industry for example. I'm 100% sure that there was a lot of gear that was mining at below 2 cents per kWh a year ago and which can't turn profitable at over 10 cents in less than 6 months at current gear prices, this whole pile is standing on the sideline now and waiting, God knows for what.

In a few years your stove will mine crypto while you are cooking your meal. ... wait wut...
Screenshot this $hit and you'll see I'm right

I've been waiting for that toaster mining for 6 years already...
Stove, oven, no, heating your house or maybe a water heater that can be done, the problem is the chip costs when a water heater cost 200 euros and the miner 10 000  and the other is that you don't need constant heat. Buying a 15k mining oven that will run only 30 minutes a day and make you 100$ a month is .....childish let's say.

[fillippone]

Buying a 15k mining oven that will run only 30 minutes a day and make you 100$ a month is .....childish let's say.

Well, if there are oven that you can leave on 24/7, and well withing that pricing range, I can't see why a mining oven should be childish!
/joke.

[TheBeardedBaby]

I've been waiting for that toaster mining for 6 years already...
Stove, oven, no, heating your house or maybe a water heater that can be done, the problem is the chip costs when a water heater cost 200 euros and the miner 10 000  and the other is that you don't need constant heat. Buying a 15k mining oven that will run only 30 minutes a day and make you 100$ a month is .....childish let's say.

Lovely, a mining toaster! Jokes aside, no need to have $10K mining hardware, I bought my Cyrix@233 MHz with 32M RAM and 3.2GB HDD back in the day for a big bag of money and it was a low end PC, now you can get a cheap PC for 50$.  Prices of the electronics are going down (except now with this shortage of chips) so sooner or later there will be cheap mining devices on a single chip, included those in our day life devices, imagine higher hash power will less electricity consumption, that will be highly efficient devices.. making the bitcoin network highly decentralized and still making you some satoshi (better than nothing). Future is bright I might be a shitty visionary but I have the feeling I'm right on this one

[TangentC]

https://www.fi.se/en/published/presentations/2021/crypto-assets-are-a-threat-to-the-climate-transition--energy-intensive-mining-should-be-banned/

 

* The reason Ethereum is switching to PoS, because every adult knew the PoW bans were coming since 2013. *

[stompix]

Well, if there are oven that you can leave on 24/7, and well withing that pricing range, I can't see why a mining oven should be childish!
/joke.

Before clicking the link I was thinking of something more like Kentucky Fried Bitcoins or McBit as those things really do work sometimes a full day but those ovens of yours...yeah, nice...30k...they would better come with a cook and a maid in that price. 

Prices of the electronics are going down (except now with this shortage of chips) so sooner or later there will be cheap mining devices on a single chip, included those in our day life devices, imagine higher hash power will less electricity consumption, that will be highly efficient devices.. making the bitcoin network highly decentralized and still making you some satoshi (better than nothing). Future is bright I might be a shitty visionary but I have the feeling I'm right on this one

Bitmain and MicroBT are slowly killing that dream
The direction of ASICs is up, up and up, 1000W, 2000W, 3000W, the more chips you can cram into that miner the more efficient it gets costswise, it's almost impossible for something that has only 1/10 of that hash rate and on top of that needs to be integrated with something else to achieve the same efficiency and profitability.

Unfortunately rather than seeing mining coming back to small home hobby mining I see it going the way of datacenters, which brings us..

I bought my Cyrix@233 MHz with 32M RAM and 3.2GB HDD back in the day for a big bag of money and it was a low end PC, now you can get a cheap PC for 50$.

My second website was hosted on my desk, with a P3 processor as at that time storage was a killer for anything around here, if you wanted more than 10GB it was expensive as hell. At that time there were a lot of small business in hosting, nowadays can you even dream of competing with large data centers? 99% of the ones doing this are just resellers from the big guys.

Just because you can get 30x cheaper computing power from 20 years ago it doesn't mean you're going to have an advantage now, your 50$ PC would still behave 1% of the computing power of even a medium gaming rig, imagine your toaster brought 3 years ago had the efficiency of the BM1385 chip, it would be useless.
No, unfortunately, home mining will probably be completely dead in 2-3 years and appliances will never manage to make even a dent on the global hash rate.

[Daltonik]

Bitmain and MicroBT are slowly killing that dream
The direction of ASICs is up, up and up, 1000W, 2000W, 3000W, the more chips you can cram into that miner the more efficient it gets costswise, it's almost impossible for something that has only 1/10 of that hash rate and on top of that needs to be integrated with something else to achieve the same efficiency and profitability.

Unfortunately rather than seeing mining coming back to small home hobby mining I see it going the way of datacenters, which brings us..

I bought my Cyrix@233 MHz with 32M RAM and 3.2GB HDD back in the day for a big bag of money and it was a low end PC, now you can get a cheap PC for 50$.

My second website was hosted on my desk, with a P3 processor as at that time storage was a killer for anything around here, if you wanted more than 10GB it was expensive as hell. At that time there were a lot of small business in hosting, nowadays can you even dream of competing with large data centers? 99% of the ones doing this are just resellers from the big guys.

Just because you can get 30x cheaper computing power from 20 years ago it doesn't mean you're going to have an advantage now, your 50$ PC would still behave 1% of the computing power of even a medium gaming rig, imagine your toaster brought 3 years ago had the efficiency of the BM1385 chip, it would be useless.
No, unfortunately, home mining will probably be completely dead in 2-3 years and appliances will never manage to make even a dent on the global hash rate.

Yes, throughout the progress in reducing the technological process, we are only seeing increasing energy consumption, since everyone has started using the concept of energy efficiency. Since the production of the first BTC, the technological process from 32nm has reached the production of 2nm chips, for Asic, the start of production was based on 130nm chips, now it is already at 5nm, but now for the production of 1 BTC per day we approximately need to use 1600 S19 Pro or more, while we need to spend 5.2 MW. The same applies for video cards, with each transition to a new process, we see an increase in size and power consumption.

Not so long ago, Tesla developers presented a computing tile for AI with a computing power of 9 PFLOPs to build clusters of 1.1 EFLOPs, but judging by the presentation, only one tile consumes up to 15KW, so yes, soon an autonomous nuclear reactor will be needed for a separate competitively capable data center.

[franky1]

Increasing efficiency per chip won't lead to reduce power consumption, I don't understand why some poeple who are heavily invested in mining keep saying this.
...
If bitmain would release some 2nm gear doing 10x more hash power W the consumption will stay the same, it will be just that the hash rate will grow 10x.
The only thing keeping consumption down is the price, which:

not true at all
mining pools dont want to shoot themselves in the foot ramping up mining and jumping the difficulty up by 2X+ as soon as they upgrade their farm with next gen asics

no matter if its an upgrade or just a passage of time using current asics. mining pools will always only want to increase the difficulty by a few percent per fortnight.
emphases they still want to increase hashrate even if the asic generations dont change

by having more efficient asics does not mean hashrate jumps. because again for emphasis they want to keep a low hashrate progress to not making the difficulty spike

what you do find however is if we were to be on GPU mining and asics were not invented. the electricity usage right now would be much much higher. so infact ASICS has helped reduce energy usage.

this is proven by the recent upgrades from the s9 to the s19
s9 uses 1.4kwh and s19 uses 3.25kwh..

when an asic farm upgrades and say (easy math numbers) takes 232 s9 offline (325kwh)(3248thash)
they did not put on 100 s19 (325kwh)(1100thash) to have same electric bill
because if they did the hashrate and difficulty would jump by 3.38x

no where within the whole history of the last 2 years has the hashrate/difficulty jumped by 3.38x of the hashrate/difficulty of 2 years ago

so if your theory even had a small chance of being correct. you would see 2 things
1. difficulty changing from 13t to near 44t
2. hashrate changing from 94exa to over 310exa

well that never happened.
the max we have seen is, difficulty 25t and hashrate 176exa

so your theory is busted

also

Unfortunately rather than seeing mining coming back to small home hobby mining I see it going the way of datacenters, which brings us..
..
No, unfortunately, home mining will probably be completely dead in 2-3 years and appliances will never manage to make even a dent on the global hash rate.

if you think that there has every been a scenario where people could home hobby mine.. you are limited in your scenario thinking.
heres a thing you are missing
the reward is only 6.25btc.. meaning only 625,000,000 shareable units per block

with transaction fees being over 100sats that means you can only really split a block reward with under 6 million people. just to give someone 1 free unspent sat. when they want to move their value after receiving it

 even if you want to pretend that a pool accumulates 100 blocks before paying out a combined transaction. people will only get 100x of the fee(translates: pay 1% fee to receive reward). so its still not worth it for more then 6 million people to be mining at any one time as it will cost many %
it has and always will be the case that not everyone will get to mine. there just isnt enough slices of a cake to share with everyone at the party
 
so please give up the notion that there ever was a chance that home hobby miners could have been a thing for everyone to get involved in. (therre is never going to be an 'all invited' party with unlimited cake for all)

and one last thing. its not a 'datacentre' thing. asics hold no data. . its a asic mining farm
yep mining farms are going to remain.. thats life. accept it
have a nice day

[stompix]

so if your theory even had a small chance of being correct. you would see 2 things
1. difficulty changing from 13t to near 44t
2. hashrate changing from 94exa to over 310exa

well that never happened.
the max we have seen is, difficulty 25t and hashrate 176exa

so your theory is busted

Franky being franky again, talking about mining when he hasn't seen miner in his life
You do realize that for the hashrate to grow you don;t just need efficient gear, you need those miners to pe produced and delivered.

You obviously ignore a simple fact, that the hashrate is continuously growing, even as we speak without anything more efficient being released, and it will grow a lot since the main thing that determines the hashrate is the income per th.
If you would have bothered to do even the smallest research possible you would have known that right now even with this dip the profit per th/s is 30 cents, 3 times more than it was a year ago, which means a lot more ger is coming online.
If you would have bothered to actually research, you would have known that only US companies excluding Riot and Blockstream have 60 exa of orders to be filled in 2022.

Again, if you would have bothered to look at actual data you would have known that one year after the launch of the s9 the rate was about 4 exahhash, which means 300k machines of 1300w mining.
Right now, even if we assume the best gear in the world you have 1.5 million 3300W machines mining.
What's the difference? Oh well, just a x15 increase in power consumption.

with transaction fees being over 100sats that means you can only really split a block reward with under 6 million people. just to give someone 1 free unspent sat. when they want to move their value after receiving it

So, with 40 million addresses with a balance in the blockchain and with the current hahsrate that could be at maximum consisting of 10 million near obsolete gear, you can picture 6 million individual miners?
Again do a little research before throwing bullshit around.

[franky1]

its soo funny

he is showing a 15x multiple since the S9 release
which was september 2017..
ofcourse the hashrate is going to rise OVER 4 YEARS!!

but here is the thing.
from september 2017 to say may 2020 when s19's came about.
the hashrate still rose.. because thats the nature of bitcoin security
periodic small increases over time no matter if new gen are created or not
in that period of 65 difficulty jumps/hashrate rise..
it went from (your underestimated 6exa) to 120exa.. so for your benefit lets call it 20x

but each fortnight period of just s9's was not 20x it was it was 0.3x
now again your belief is that next gen asics offer the oppertunity to ramp up hashrate
so from may 2020 to may2021 26 periods it went from 120exa-176exa
this again is not some 15x or 3x or even 2x heck its not even 1.5x
its actually even LOWER fortnight growth rate than the 3 years fortnight-rate before the next gen was an option

thus again proving that next gen evolution does NOT cause extra growth beyond the normal growth

so please stop with the rhetoric that next gen efficiency means more asics beyond the norm

the actual reality is when they take off hundreds of old gen, they only put in a few dozen new gen
because.. and this is important
they dont want to shoot themselves in the foot by ramping up difficulty/hashpower too fast

oh and i actually do have an asic. i now use it as a foot stool. i have also visited some asic mega farms prepandemic too. so go take your chest beating hypotheticals to some place where your trash ends up and then try to do the math before acting like a know-it-all, because its getting real easy to debunk your hypothetical assumed guesses.
even if you quote websites (which have a small print that say the words hypothetical assumed guesses.)

as for stompix [his reply below] trying too hard to thump his chest thinking he can climb some non existant bitcoin social hierarchy.. . lets just debunk him one more time
the s9 v1 was short lived. most people went for the s9SE or the s9i which offered a few extra thash for the same kwh. the real efficient s9(SE) wasnt released until september.
but hey it now seems stompix doesnt want actual details. he just wants to create social drama.
just a shame his posts come with small print of assumptions guesses and hypotheticals
(and to pre-empt stomix.. the limited amount of hobby miners may have had the 13thash first version. but majority of farms had the more efficient higher thash version of the s9(released later))

anyways, moving on.. have a nice day folks

[stompix]

its soo funny

he is showing a 15x multiple since the S9 release
which was september 2017..
ofcourse the hashrate is going to rise OVER 4 YEARS!!

Weird...seems like a lot of guys were getting something called an S9 before September 2017..
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1493601.0
Get your story right next time! And do a bit of research before showing over and over to everyone you don't have clue what you're talking about.

[fillippone]

Apparently I missed this article by Nic Carter:

Bitcoin Mining Is Reshaping the Energy Sector and No One Is Talking About It

Recently, I was invited to give a talk at the Texas Blockchain Summit on the topic of the growth of bitcoin mining in Texas. Not knowing anything about bitcoin mining in Texas, I interrogated around two dozen mining entrepreneurs, wholesale energy traders, academics and energy experts. What I discovered would completely alter my views on bitcoin mining.

Put shortly, bitcoin mining is converging with the energy sector with amazing rapidity, yielding an explosion of innovation that will both decarbonize bitcoin in the medium term, and will dramatically benefit increasingly renewable grids. What’s more, it appears that only bitcoin – rather than other industrial load sources – can actually achieve some of these goals.

It quite old, but still valuable!