This seems as unlikely to be true, as it does sensationalist. Hate on Bitcoin all ya like, but don’t make off the cuff “calculations” and report it as news.
It’s not accurate but it’s not completely made up either.
There is a calculable power cost to each transaction. The work isn’t just happening on one computer and God knows how many ledgers are out there right? To be able to pay somebody some fractional amount of Bitcoin to buy a pizza, The cost to have generated the Bitcoin the cost to check the transaction the cost to update the transaction and all the different places. We don’t see the usage as a problem because it’s tons and tons and tons of people paying for it.
But their calculating the water usage as evaporation for the power plants and evaporation from hydroelectric. Like the freshwater isn’t returning to the system in large.
I wonder how much water was lost to make the pizza?
I can get behind “uses a lot of water”. But where the headline loses me (to the point where I won’t be reading the article) is “potentially cause freshwater shortages”.
If someone is using water to mine bitcoins… that’s because they can’t think of anything more useful to do with that water and likely means they are operating somewhere that has an abundance of water.
And if they’re wasting a resource that is needed to grow food, well that’s something the local government can easily stop.
I mean, yeah, it’s bad. We shouldn’t be ignoring how bad bitcoin is for the environment.
But are you really gonna tell me that all the computers and CPU time that Wall Street uses for trading somehow takes less?
It doesn’t matter what financial system you use, you’re still burning energy to make it work.
As far as transactions, yes, something like Visa takes way less than Bitcoin. For HFT compared to crypto, who knows, but one thing they’re not doing is something intentionally wasteful like proof of work.
You think having thousands of bankers use their car twice a day is better? It’s so much worse
Okay, the bankers could work remotely. What then? Anyway, yeah, it’s still set up in a dramatically inefficient way because proof of work is inherently wasteful. It may have been state of the art 15 years ago but it sure isn’t now.
The computer power behind the financial system is literally insane. But if everything changed to Bitcoin, we would use more energy.
What COULD be beneficial would be one of the other coins out there. Doesn’t have to be Bitcoin.
I guess my point had less to do with cryptocurrency and more to do with currency in general. It’s not a defense of bitcoin as much as it’s a critique of how much energy the system in general uses, either way.
However, it’s also one that’s not easily solved. Even with paper/coin money, you’re still using finite resources to produce the bank-notes.
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I dont think server rooms are often going to need humidifying, electronics like pretty low humidity. and water usage for cooling isnt generally consumed, the same water is used over and over again.
You want a certain amount of humidity to prevent static buildup and increase the cooling ability of air. Water used in cooling is only reused so many times before it’s discarded to prevent scale buildup. The article also mentions it includes the water used in power generation.
Yeah that part did seem disingenuous. Water cooling systems for data centers are almost always closed loop systems, at least all the ones I’ve seen and I’ve been in IT for over 30 years. It’s a very scaled up version of water cooled PCs. Basically a heat transfer medium not a consumable resource. So yeah a bit clickbaity in my opinion.
You know what else uses as much water as a swimming pool? Swimming pools.
And don’t get me started on golf courses.
Don’t get me started on humans either. Not only do those thirsty shits require shitloads of water to function, it also needs to be clean! Not relatively clean either, but clean clean!
Do you have any idea how many bitcoin farms I could run if there weren’t any humans? Me neither, but it’s probably zero.
Doesn’t the lightning network which is millions of times faster than btc alone solve this?
That’d be the same Lightning Network with NP-hard issues with routing and a whole host of problems right down to the fundamentals, right? (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
And even beyond that, having to stack another layer on there is a technical non-starter to begin with. For one thing, adoption of the Lightning Network is fundamentally bottlenecked by Bitcoin itself - if the entire Bitcoin network was dedicated entirely to onboarding people onto the Lightning Network, it’d take 28 months to onboard all of the people in the US alone, let alone the rest of the world’s population.
There’s a saying by Antoine de Saint-Éxupery that’s rather relevant here: « Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher. » Roughly paraphrased, it means, “It appears that perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.” Trying to stack extra layers on top of a precarious base goes against any sound engineering principles. In this circumstance, Bitcoin would be the thing to take away - it offers nothing and is in fact detrimental to an efficient system of exchange.
So by your definition the current banking system is equally flawed because bank transfer aren’t enough (Bitcoin main layer) and a second, faster and more scalable option on top of that is needed, I.e. for example Visa (Lightning Network).
Also exploding problem is a rather flawed or better incorrect way of comparing it. For example the current banking system also took its time to ramp up and I assume the 28 months you mention are for the entire US population (because there’s no source) and not all of that population has a bank account, which is a problem with the current system. So it isn’t “fair” to present bitcoin as infeasible to solve a problem that the current system hasn’t yet solved with its decades of existence.
Regarding those difficulties about the LN, I’m not the person you replied to but it’s still very much in development so it’s normal to have issues. Google it and you will find the same for the whatever system you think is the best atm. Heck some of those problems are there by design. But I will have a look at those links you shared.
The Lightning Network can only do the much-vaunted transactions-per-second number that it claims in theory; in practice, the number is a lot lower and even once you get past the onboarding stage takes something in the order of a couple of magnitudes of times the energy cost of a Visa transaction. Even the Lightning Network developers admit that for the LN to work as advertised even in theory, with a given case of two channels a year (naïve, when considering the only way to actually consolidate a LN transaction is to close a channel) for 7 billion people, block sizes on the Bitcoin network would have to be increased to 133 MB.
So this is basically a bunch of chancers selling a Heath Robinson machine built onto another, much worse Heath Robinson machine with no practical way to scale to the numbers they want.
