[LAUNCHED] Bitcoincleanup.com: a website to stop Greenpeace's bitcoin FUD.

[NotATether]

I need to get an audience with Bitcoin Magazine.

I somehow need to get Bitcoin Magazine's attention to get them to interview me (and this site of course). It's the key to bursting the influence of this site beyond bitcointalk.

If anyone can get a hold of them and direct them to the email address on the bitcoincleanup webpage, I'll be greatful.

[1714536292]

1714536292

[LoyceV]

I mean for instance people who flare gas from oil production for example (larger scale)

That's actually big business, and it's said to lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to flaring, because a generator has a more complete combustion than an open flame.

[n0nce]

I mean for instance people who flare gas from oil production for example (larger scale)

That's actually big business, and it's said to lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to flaring, because a generator has a more complete combustion than an open flame.

Exactly! Up until now the problem was what to do with all that electricity out in the middle of nowhere. But ASICs can sit in steel boxes wherever the cheap / free electricity is produced. That's super unique; there's nothing like it.

[LoyceV]

In this topic, I found Michel Khazzaka's paper: Bitcoin: Cryptopayments Energy Efficiency.

It gives an interesting point of view. It counts the energy needed for printing fiat money, transporting money, bank offices, commuting bank employees, data centers and more. It then compares it to Bitcoin's energy consumption to "conclude that Bitcoin PoW consumes at least ~27.9 times less energy than the classical electronic monetary and payment system" (p. 19 of the above paper).
Of course, one could argue that even if Bitcoin takes over the global financial system, the millions of bank employees would still commute to some office somewhere, there would still be bank offices (for instance for providing loans), and Bitcoin users consume energy too. But it does show the potential of the Lightning Network to replace all global transactions at much lower energy consumption than the current banking system.

[buwaytress]

Taken here from some thread about Bitcoin being 56x more efficient than banking and my immediate (perhaps existing, rather) thoughts:

1. No study has really been truly complete in calculating cost + benefit. Neither for Bitcoin nor for banking. It always tends to cherry pick, rather than set a benchmark for what cost is, and what benefit is -- not to mention Bitcoin doesn't quite add up as a rival to what modern banks do. Khazzaka's paper (referenced here by Loyce), for example, is a great start but already identifies Bitcoin as a Monetary System and Means of Payment (which are merely 2 of many more services banking provides).

Earlier mentioned that there's a greater need to involve academics, scholars, economists, educators, scientists working objectively and in neutral intent of discovery... rather than celebrities, devs, pro-Bitcoin merchs etc.

We still need more fact-finding, if we really want to combat FUD.

[NotATether]

In this topic, I found Michel Khazzaka's paper: Bitcoin: Cryptopayments Energy Efficiency.

It gives an interesting point of view. It counts the energy needed for printing fiat money, transporting money, bank offices, commuting bank employees, data centers and more. It then compares it to Bitcoin's energy consumption to "conclude that Bitcoin PoW consumes at least ~27.9 times less energy than the classical electronic monetary and payment system" (p. 19 of the above paper).
Of course, one could argue that even if Bitcoin takes over the global financial system, the millions of bank employees would still commute to some office somewhere, there would still be bank offices (for instance for providing loans), and Bitcoin users consume energy too. But it does show the potential of the Lightning Network to replace all global transactions at much lower energy consumption than the current banking system.

The only reason why they wrote something like "with Lightning, bitcoin becomes extremely energy-efficient" is because LN a doesn't actually mine any transactions, so I don't see LN as being relevant to this problem.

In general, all Layer 2 technologies should avoid any discussion about excessive energy usage since this is Layer 1's business exclusively (unless that layer 2 dabbles into the topic of mining blocks [like Merged Mining?])

[coolcoinz]

In this topic, I found Michel Khazzaka's paper: Bitcoin: Cryptopayments Energy Efficiency.

It gives an interesting point of view. It counts the energy needed for printing fiat money, transporting money, bank offices, commuting bank employees, data centers and more. It then compares it to Bitcoin's energy consumption to "conclude that Bitcoin PoW consumes at least ~27.9 times less energy than the classical electronic monetary and payment system" (p. 19 of the above paper).
Of course, one could argue that even if Bitcoin takes over the global financial system, the millions of bank employees would still commute to some office somewhere, there would still be bank offices (for instance for providing loans), and Bitcoin users consume energy too. But it does show the potential of the Lightning Network to replace all global transactions at much lower energy consumption than the current banking system.

It's a good counter argument though. If they say you eat too much it's a good defense if you can prove that they also eat too much, even if it doesn't disprove their point.
Bitcoin does consume a lot of energy, but banks consume even more. Banks are important, just as bitcoin is important. I don't get why some people are attacking bitcoin when bitcoin isn't attacking them or their institutions. It just wants to coexist.
As for your argument about commuting, I'd skip that entirely. It's impossible to know how much energy is used here just as we don't know how much fuel a bitcoin mine operators use. Say, you have a business in Iceland and have to travel 1000km to get from your house to the place where miners are. One bank employee has to go across the street  to get home, another will travel for an hour to get there.

[NotATether]

BitcoinCleanup is now listed on EndTheFUD.org

Github user "pox" was kind enough to merge my pull request to include this site on their page. BitcoinCleanup is listed under the subsection "Bitcoin uses dirty, non-renewable energy". Kudos to them.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Many kudos to Ali Sherief NotATether for the time spent, as well!   

[LoyceV]

The only reason why they wrote something like "with Lightning, bitcoin becomes extremely energy-efficient" is because LN a doesn't actually mine any transactions, so I don't see LN as being relevant to this problem.

In general, all Layer 2 technologies should avoid any discussion about excessive energy usage since this is Layer 1's business exclusively (unless that layer 2 dabbles into the topic of mining blocks [like Merged Mining?])

Exactly!
That's the point: Bitcoin's energy consumption isn't just meant to secure the ~7 transactions per second, it's meant to secure countless applications on top of it.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Of course, one could argue that even if Bitcoin takes over the global financial system, the millions of bank employees would still commute to some office somewhere, there would still be bank offices (for instance for providing loans), and Bitcoin users consume energy too.

In the last few years, with the abrupt rise of the Internet, banks have focused on lowering their costs, and more than half of their costs come from employees' incomes. Here the fintech comes. I'm sure that by 2030, there will be even less employees dedicated in financial services.

And that's a good thing. These people shouldn't burden the economy by doing an inefficient job, while with technological improvements we can do the same job far more efficiently and cheaply. That's the actual energy waste. It'd be better, economically speaking, if they were devoted in jobs that require human hands, and can't be replaced by machines for the time being.

[NotATether]

Many kudos to Ali Sherief NotATether for the time spent, as well!    

I don't want to derail the thread with this but ESR has the following to say about handles in his over 2-decade old "how to be a hacker" page. The second and third sentences are particularly relevant here.

The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser.

Basically it's a website full of articles written by real people - and there is not a single handle on endthefud.org written by a handle. Nobody who makes the decisions about crypto is going to bother reading it if I just made the pull request for an article written by "NotATeher".

I'm going to be doing an interview with Bitcoin Magazine soon and while a pseudonym will probably work for Cøbra or ZmnSCPxj, someone as unknown as myself probably won't get away with it.

It's not a big deal, you already have https://notatether.com and Github links where I shed my invisibility cloak long ago.

It's one of the reasons that people (you guys among others) are actually rallying around this site but not similar websites like this or some random tweet or forum message by a user account.

P.S.: damn, I still have to write about this site on my own blog!  

[BlackHatCoiner]

Concealing your identity is a silly behavior? Why? Can't you have an opinion that you just don't want to be known for? Satoshi's turning in his grave.

[NotATether]

Concealing your identity is a silly behavior? Why? Can't you have an opinion that you just don't want to be known for? Satoshi's turning in his grave.

ESR's words not mine.

Specifically in the case for endthefud.org, to me it didn't make any sense to put a handle there.

The lunatics following Greenpeace propaganda in particular will more readily listen to what a real person has to say than a handle. So in a way it gives me some credibility to push back future Greenpeace FUD beyond bitcointalk.

[n0nce]

Concealing your identity is a silly behavior? Why? Can't you have an opinion that you just don't want to be known for? Satoshi's turning in his grave.

I love that we have the freedom to choose. Adam Back, David Chaum, Hal Finney or Gregory Maxwell are all known by their real names, meanwhile Satoshi and lots of people writing in this thread aren't.
Do consider that there's no way of knowing whether one of the 'real names' above may be posting here with a pseudonym / handle, as well. That's the beauty of pseudonyms. I don't think there's anything wrong with it and there are plenty of reasons for using or not using them. It's definitely possible that for NotATether's current goal, it makes more sense to present himself with his real name. Meanwhile for launching Bitcoin, it was definitely the right choice to do it under a handle.

[Rizzrack]

This need much more traction to start "trending".

That bi*ch a*s banker's PR agency so called "Greenpiece" has a few good million $ to spend on this campaign:
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/09/15/environmental-groups-to-spend-another-1m-on-ads-for-bitcoin-code-change-after-the-merge/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-29/greenpeace-crypto-billionaire-lobby-to-change-bitcoin-s-code

There needs to be Medium articles, Twitter hashtags, big firms, influencers (as franky1 suggested), shares, likes, follows and the whole enchilada !

Or a "fluke" like the Magical Internet Money campaign on Reddit that goes viral all by itself. (a bit of wishful thinking never hurts)

GreenPiecesOfSh*t have:
- million dollars ad campaign
- petitions to huge investment firms (that have BTC in their portfolio I assume)
- campaign representatives are talking to members of Congress and the Biden administration and lawmakers
and many more.

Anyone has any creative guerilla marketing ideas ?

[NotATether]

I found a site https://bitcoiners.network specifically for finding Bitcoiners to follow.

They can also launch follow campaigns to get bitcoiners to follow you.

Apparently somebody has already whitelisted the BitcoinCleanup twitter as a bitcoiner. Thank you, whoever you are.

Does anyone have experience using this site? I have about $100 in donations I can use for advertising and I'm wondering if it will be worthwhile to get a bunch of people to follow me. That will probably amplify my tweets against recent gargantuan Greenpeace garbage tweets.

EDIT: I think the service is actually for YOU to follow other accounts at once, not the other way around. Not sure though.

[BlackHatCoiner]

[...]

I'm not going to agree to this, despite of their good intentions. Why is this needed?

Our app requires read and write permissions from Twitter to function.

[tadamichi]

It’s funny and sad that they’re using an already debunked¹, flawed and paywalled-link² paper as „Fact“ Nr. 2. And how it’s blindly cited again and again over 100 times by other publications.

¹ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335457532_Could_Bitcoin_Emissions_Push_Global_Warming_Above_2_C
² https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8
Can be accessed here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328581842_Bitcoin_emissions_alone_could_push_global_warming_above_2C

To debunk this bs again(already been done by Dittmar and Praktiknjo, 2019) and not let them get away with manipulative unscientific lies this easily - we first need to look at the methodology used, described on the last page:

Amount of CO2e produced by Bitcoin usage.
[…]
To assess the carbon footprint of the global Bitcoin Network, using as reference the year 2017, we used the following approach.

We started by compiling a list of current hardware suitable for Bitcoin and their energy efficiencies (hashes per electricity consumed, Supplementary Table 1). To each block mined in 2017 (data from https://blocktrail.com), we assigned a random hardware from Supplementary Table 1 and multiplied the number of hashes required to solve the block by the energy efficiency of the random hardware; this returned the amount of electricity consumed to solve the given block.

To estimate Bitcoin electricity consumption in 2017, Mora et al. assume that each Bitcoin block was randomly mined on hardware included in a self-compiled list of 62 devices. As this list contains many old devices with high energy intensities, the resulting average hardware energy intensity and electricity consumption of Bitcoin mining are approximately ten times higher than other estimates (see the Supplementary Information).

So they basically used an outdated list of hardware³, which already resulted in an completely inaccurate estimation of electricity consumption at the time of the paper. And then tried to estimate electricity consumption up until 2100 based on 2017 hardware. Totally ignoring basics about hardware development, scientific methodologies and common sense. Any output coming from this model can already only result wrongly with exaggerated estimates and were just a few lines in.

³ https://github.com/Camilo-Mora/Bitcoin/blob/master/Randi_TableS1.csv

But lets continue, because it doesnt stop here:

Projected usage and carbon emissions from Bitcoin.

[…]
We studied the carbon emissions of Bitcoin if it follows the adoption trends of other broadly used technologies.
[…]
The first year of usage for each technology was set to one, to allow comparison of trends among technologies (narrow grey lines in Fig. 1b). For each year, we calculated the average and lower and upper quantiles of per cent population using all technologies and applied a logistic model to such trends (the red line and red shading in Fig. 1b). The projected trends of technology usage adoption were used to estimate likely Bitcoin usage assuming a global total of ~314.2 billion cashless transactions. We used only cashless transactions that are likely to occur in places where infrastructure is already in place for the usage of Bitcoin as a reference (for example, we do not assume that Bitcoin will replace transactions using fiat currency). The CO2e emissions of projected Bitcoin usage were estimated using the CO2e emissions for Bitcoin transactions in 2017 as a reference. We randomly sampled blocks mined in 2017 until their total number of transactions were equal to the projected number of transactions, then we added the CO2e emissions from computing such randomly selected blocks. The approach was repeated 1,000 times.

… we believe that the analysis of Mora et al. is flawed because their methodology ignores fundamental constraints imposed by the transaction-processing capacity of the Bitcoin network.

The diffusion scenarios presented by Mora et al. for Bitcoin transactions eventually assume ~314.2 billion Bitcoin-related cashless transactions per year. The corresponding throughput of roughly ~10,000 transactions per second would be at least two orders of magnitude higher than Bitcoins current transaction limits.
[…]
Mora et al. neither mention Bitcoin's transaction limit nor outline how it will be resolved to make their projection plausible. Instead, the applied methodology circumvents the scalability problem by implicitly reparameterizing the Bitcoin protocol to decrease the block interval and increase the number of blocks until the resulting transactions match the number of projected transactions. As the authors sample blocks from their base-year estimates, results are equal to those obtained from scaling electricity consumption in 2017 using projected transactions. Transaction growth is implicitly the sole driver for the electricity growth scenarios presented by Mora et al. However, neither in a reparameterized Bitcoin protocol, nor in the current protocol, is electricity consumption proportional to the transaction rate. Instead, Bitcoins electricity consumption is exclusively proportional to the hashrate, which is the computational capacity of the Bitcoin network. Hashrate growth, in turn, is driven by complex and mutually dependent relationships between mining rewards, transaction fees, hardware energy efficiency, electricity prices and the Bitcoin market price. Increases in throughput capacity, such as with SegWit, translate to a proportional decrease in electricity consumption per transaction, as the electricity consumption of blocks does not scale with the transaction rate.

They assumed ~314.2 billion yearly Bitcoin transactions and not even mentioning a block size limit anywhere. And then modeling future electricity consumption solely based on a transaction rate that cant even happen in practice. Basically basing the whole model on another protocol that doesnt even exist in reality.

This passed peer review, academia, one of the worlds biggest scientific journals and an army of journalists.

Its getting more and more cringe to read this paper, but theres also this:

In a recent commentary, Mora et al.' hypothesize that cumulative GHG emissions of Bitcoin alone could amount to ~231.4GtC within the next 16yr (on the basis of their median scenario), pushing global warming above 2°C. To put these numbers in context, the carbon budget of ~231.4GtC is equivalent to ~63 yr of emissions from global power generation at the rate observed in 2017 (that is, ~3.7 GtC). Bitcoin mining is undoubtedly electricity intensive. However, the electricity demand scenarios calculated by Mora et al. seem unlikely, as Bitcoin-related emissions would entail a tripling of global electricity generation within the next five years (see Supplement). We regard infrastructure bottlenecks and soaring electricity prices as barriers to such growth levels. For example, global electric power capacity increased by only ~ 17% over the past five years.

Spoiler alert, electricity generation didnt triple from 2017-2022(so the model is already unusable again by another factor) and idk if its worth it to go on when the whole paper has already been debunked long ago.


This is the state of science, journalism, activism and millions of marketing budget in 2022. Its sad, but i think we can also use the opportunity to debunk their arguments directly. If thats all they got.

[NotATether]

[...]

I'm not going to agree to this, despite of their good intentions. Why is this needed?

Our app requires read and write permissions from Twitter to function.

I am not quite sure, but it says on the front page that this thing can be self-hosted somehow to make it "run without trust" - they provide the source code anyway so you'd easily be able to verify this.