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.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 it counts water that flows into streams that makes no sense
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.
Water cooling towers have been common in my DC experience, but admittedly it's limited.
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.
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Yeah, whataboutism is essentially telling on one's self; an implicit recognition that one has no better arguments than to try to distract.
Are swimming pools using one swimming pool or water per swim? Per year? 5 years? 10 years?
I think you missed the 'per transaction' part. Which is kind of important.
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.
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Wasteful but not as bad as golf.
https://www.deseret.com/2022/3/22/22988989/an-illogical-oasis-golf-course-water-usage-st-george-golf
The U.S. Geological Survey’s most recent water use data for Utah shows the state uses about 38 million gallons of water on golf courses per day.
Uh, it's far worse. That's a mere 9k transactions. According to https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_transactions_per_day 12/3/23 had about 71k transactions. So bitcoin is using 7x the water that all the golf courses in Utah use. So in one day Bitcoin used as much water as Utah golf courses use in a week. Low point for this year was around 19k transactions. So still 2 days worth of Utah golf courses.
let's stop it all.
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IMO seems like a policy change could easily fix this issue if computers are cooling using freshwater. It also doesn’t seem like this issue is limited to bitcoin.
Anything with proof of work applies, but of course BTC is by far the largest.
Another field that is using a ridiculous amount of power and thus water for cooling is AI.
Crypto is entirely an extremely expensive gambling system. It serves no actual explainable purpose for the vast majority of people. It's trivially provable to be worse than existing alternatives in every way that isn't scams and or money laundering.
It frustrates me how it strayed from its original course. It was supposed to be a payment system independent of banks and thus not capable of screwing people over. Sanctions would have made it hard for me to pay for some things, but Monero offers a way. People who need to make sensitive payments can do so without their bank having a record of that. It is just cash for the digital world. A tool, not a stock.
That is - I wish the people that want to get rich from it just quit. Leave the system for people who really need it.
Provable to be worse than existing alternatives? Which alternatives there are? The only one that comes to mind is cash by mail, which is not doable in some places.
Sorry, I meant than using Zelle, a credit or debit card, Paypal, etc. Last time I looked, most crypto is completely traceable because of the public ledger (monero does built in illegal in the US money laundering style transaction mixing to try and make it less traceable, not sure how well that works, but the rest apply to it), and the distributed public ledgers are the only way it works. I'd argue the way most people can get crypto requires a bank account tied to something like Coinbase, so that's a link from your bank, to your crypto wallet, then the rest is even more public.
However, for most people, crypto doesn't work like cash, and does work like a stock. You need a special broker, you need to move money with fees into the crypto account, then pay fees to buy the crypto. This is way more analogous to stocks, so that's how people think of it, than cash or bank transfers.
Assuming you can figure out the right crypto to buy, now every time you spend it or try and send it to a different wallet, there's stupid high fees for the common Bitcoin and Etherium networks (I haven't actually tried to use the other ones as they get very obscure). We tried to move $30 dollars in Etherium to a different wallet (granted this was 4 years ago) and it cost $15 in "gas fees". This makes me long for the 3% credit card processing fee.
After the fee, it takes quite a while to transfer, I recall Bitcoin took over an hour, and it was like several minutes or more for Etherium. Paypal, Zelle, Card are all instant, or maybe seconds.
Basically if you're not buying something highly illegal, there's 0 benefit to a normal person and masses of costs, complexity, opportunities to get hacked and all your crypto stolen, and exchanges to either collapse or also steal whatever money you had in there. It doesn't solve a problem, and so normal people are right to not use it. I'd suggest after 13 years it's only been used by speculators and scammers "successfully".
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Will no one think of the scammers?
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Eth consistently seems to be the better technology. I really don't see why Bitcoin doesn't see more transition from mining to just validation as it sunsets.
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it makes sense that we'll doom ourselves mining something absolutely worthless
[Alex De Vries] calculated that the computational process behind the Bitcoin network uses 8.6 to 35.1 billion liters of water annually in the United States or roughly one swimming pool's worth of water per transaction.
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