from Hacker News

Bitcoin and carbon dioxide emissions: Evidence from daily production decisions

by pen2l on 10/27/23, 7:59 PM with 76 comments

• by droffel on 10/27/23, 8:49 PM

  In the short term, flexible power production like coal generation gets used to satisfy grid demand during situations with abnormally high power requirements. It has the benefit of being able to be turned on and off practically instantly. There is no economic incentive to build out sustainable generative capacity if it won't be running all the time, and balancing the load on renewable power is awkward (see power price rate inversions for examples of utilities paying people to use excess energy).

  I remain unconvinced that cryptocurrency is long term detrimental to clean power generation infrastructure. Quite the contrary, the existence of cryptocurrency to mine acts as a 'productive' sink for power produced in excess of grid baselines. In practice, our entire grid could be renewables in excess of peak demand, and cryptocurrency mining a flexible network load. It could quite possibly get us off of non-clean energy entirely.

• by cyphertruck on 10/27/23, 9:15 PM

  There are so many false premises here that it’s not worth listing them.

  But if the power in the area is coming from coal then every use of that power is equally coal based.

  Hair dryers use more power than bitcoin mining, ban them first.

  The attempt to demonize certain uses of power is just the attempt to demonize certain people in order to oppress them.

• by dang on 10/27/23, 9:42 PM

  This was commented about here before the Bitcoin paper even came out:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253999

• by meristohm on 10/27/23, 9:28 PM

  How do the costs of our current dominant model of currency change at scale? Seems to me the cost-per-unit drops as the currency foothold expands, based primarily on existing infrastructure.

  Conversely, costs to "mine" bitcoin and similar proof-of-work currencies increase over time, unless I'm mistaken. The infrastructure is already in place, so it seems absolutely bonkers for costs to go up at scale.

  Is the argument for bitcoin that in the long run (hundreds of years), with bitcoin the global currency and no longer being mined since it hit the cap, costs will on average be less than bills/coins/credit/cheques?

• by psychlops on 10/27/23, 8:41 PM

  No effort was spent calculating "damages" from competing currencies or stores of wealth.

• by x86x87 on 10/27/23, 8:32 PM

  Love it how the boogeyman is back once bitcoin starts doing better.

• by TheDudeMan on 10/27/23, 8:49 PM

  Carbon tax fixes this?