However, I think about it slightly differently -- crypto currencies (and their likes) are just an attempt to replace man-power with computer-power. We need someone to enforce the rules without human intervention, hence, freeing up more people to do stuff that doesn't involve managing the abstraction of money.
edit:
When we imagine "mining" in this realm, it'd help to think in terms of mining abstract resources like cost for verification of a transaction, rather than tangible resources like coal.
The purpose of bitcoin mining is not to "find coins," although the mining reward might make it seem like that. The purpose is to provide enough hashing power to the network to cryptographically verify transactions using a consensus algorithm, which prevents any single actor from double-spending. Without enormous hashing power, the network would be vulnerable to a 51% attack by a sophisticated attacker.
This is not to say that proof of work is the best consensus algorithm, but given it's age, the fact that Bitcoin has stood up so well to the test of time is a testament to it's viability as a consensus protocol.
> We literally are mining coal to burn it in powerplants to energize servers and GPUS to waste clock cycles to find "coins".
I'm curious to know what the carbon footprint of a human is, that way we can compare it to the GPUs doing an equivalent amount of work (which I think will be tricky to determine in the first place).
> The world is the realm and how we use its people and resources matters, especially when its to just create more entropy faster then natural systems
if anything, we're pushing entropy away, we're tending towards order not away.
According to rensmart.com, 1KWh is approx. 0.5 kg of CO2 saved/used.
A RX480 uses 160W on average according to TomsHardware, mining might pull more but lets use that as a conservative example.
A Mining Rig, decent one, might have 4 cards and pull 100Watts for itself (conservative estimate).
That puts the total power of the rig at 750Watts (approximately)
This will yield a hashrate of about 20MH/s for each card or 80MH/s for the entire thing (atleast from what I can tell)
So the right has about 0.7KWh per hour for 80MH/s, which yields about 0.35kg of CO2 every hour.
Ethereum has a total of 120TH/s or about 1'500'000 of these mining rigs. Which means the total carbon footprint estimate of Ethereum is about 525'000 kg or 525 Tons each HOUR. And that is using my conservative estimates.
The entire year (ass. 365 days incorrectly) is 191'625'000, or about 191 kilotons of CO2.
To comparison, a single person uses about 6 to 8 tons o CO2 per year so Ethereum alone produces as much CO2 per year as 191'000 people combined.
>if anything, we're pushing entropy away, we're tending towards order not away.
What order? Burning any fuel is literally increasing entropy. If you break a wineglass you increase entropy. If you repair the broken wineglass you still increased entropy. Entropy inevitably goes up and you can maybe delay it by putting in massive amounts of energy compared to the entropy saved.
Assuming those estimates are correct (I haven't verified it), I think it's hard for me to believe that there are fewer than 191K people working to manage an equivalent number of financial transactions in USD.
Yes, we are increasing entropy outside of ourselves but not within, if the population of humans is increasing, humans have acquired more negentropy from the environment and are "winning" against entropy as they get better at extracting energy from the environment, we'll run out of energy in the form of fossil fuels soon, so we'll have to find another source of energy, because we need more energy to decrease entropy.
Let me be clear(er) in saying that I don't support burning fossil fuels, I think OP linked mining bitcoins directly to burning coal -- we're mixing two very separate arguments here. Burning fossil fuels for generation of electricity is a topic on its own.
>I think it's hard for me to believe that there are fewer than 191K people working to manage an equivalent number of financial transactions in USD.
The problem is, this estimate is just for Ethereum. It does not account for Bitcoin which must arguably have a much larger energy usage.
The thing about these 191K people is that Ethereum uses them just for transactions while people working in the banking industry will most likely not spend most of their carbon footprint just on managing transactions.
Most modern banks also don't manage transactions with employees anymore, they use computers to transact. They use the power invested into transactions more efficiently, the energy used being directly proportional to the amount of transactions moved around, the human meat sacks are only there for the smiles and managing things the computers can't do. yet.
> if the population of humans is increasing,
> are "winning" against entropy as they get better at extracting energy from the environment
Making a human is a net increase in entropy. Burning fuel is a net increase in entropy.
>so we'll have to find another source of energy, because we need more energy to decrease entropy.
This is not a fight you can win as the amount of energy you need to expend is magnitudes larger than the amount of entropy you decreased, actually, by the law of thermodynamics, any energy you expend to reduce entropy will produce an equal or larger amount of energy as a result.
Entropy may decrease temporarily in a locality but overall it will always increase inevitably.
I ran out of HN time yesterday, so here's my delayed response.
> Most modern banks also don't manage transactions with employees anymore, they use computers to transact.
so, there's some of that carbon expenditure going into computers and networks to manage these transactions? Banks also use your money to make more money for themselves, does that bother you at all? considering that this thread started out by looking at things "holistically".
In any case, my point here isn't that crypto currencies are the best thing ever, but they're definitely a step in the right direction. I hope you can see the potential in these ideas and what they're trying to achieve. Basically, we need a system that can't be defeated with fraud, if everyone was honest we could just pass around a piece of paper and ask everyone to write down how much money they have and we'd be good, unfortunately that's not the case, as I see it, most of it is a just the cost of preventing cheating, we can certainly observe the current networks and come up with better ones in the future.
> Making a human is a net increase in entropy. Burning fuel is a net increase in entropy.
> This is not a fight you can win as the amount of energy you need to expend is magnitudes larger than the amount of entropy you decreased, actually, by the law of thermodynamics, any energy you expend to reduce entropy will produce an equal or larger amount of energy as a result.
> Entropy may decrease temporarily in a locality but overall it will always increase inevitably.
so, are you suggesting that we stop reproduction and burning fossil fuels and slow down the "advance of entropy"? (or is it just bitcoin you want stopped?)
>so, there's some of that carbon expenditure going into computers and networks to manage these transactions?
Yes, but a bit less, with high confidence.
>Banks also use your money to make more money for themselves, does that bother you at all?
Not really, miners in bitcoin also make money, don't they?
Additionally, European Banks announced they're starting SCT Inst, SEPA transactions which are confirmed in 15 seconds instead of overnight. My bank doesn't charge me fees for it.
Why bother with bitcoin's immense carbon footprint when it can't beat the lower effective carbon footprint of banks if they are faster and cheaper?
>but they're definitely a step in the right direction.
I can agree with that, but they need to fix things to be applicable for a wider audience.
> we can certainly observe the current networks and come up with better ones in the future.
I'm currently somewhat invested in Ethereum since they plan to go into PoS which would be immensely more efficient.
>so, are you suggesting that we stop reproduction and burning fossil fuels and slow down the "advance of entropy"? (or is it just bitcoin you want stopped?)
No at all, just refuting that you can decreaser net entropy.
>Also, "net increase" in what system?
In the closed system that is the reachable universe. In any closed system, net entropy increases over time. That's nothing inherently bad, just a property of closed systems.
You can somewhat "cheat" and decrease entropy in some parts of the system but the entire system will increase or not decrease it's entropy.
In the banking sector only a small fraction of employees are required to run the payments infrastructure (in one example, 2% of employees ran the business part of payments, and another 2% of employees could be the IT infrastructure part required for that); payments are highly automated and almost everyone is handling the other parts of the banking business e.g. lending and investments.
Visa and mastercard together employ ~20k people and handle much, much, much more transactions than all the cryptocurrencies combined.
The EU SEPA customer payments system handles ~1000 times more transactions than ethereum, and the infrastructure for running that (spread across all the involved banks) likely takes thousands of people, but not 200k, and certainly not the 200 million people that would be required to do so as horribly inefficiently as cryptocurrencies do.
> Visa and mastercard together employ ~20k people and handle much, much, much more transactions than all the cryptocurrencies combined.
20K people (debatable) and a bunch of computers and networks which need to be managed by more people, and the infrastructure doesn't run on sunshine either (yet).
Without laboring the point, if your position is:
* The methods applied by the crypto currencies waste more energy than our current system of currency.
I'll accept this, iff we make sure we've collected data rigorously and we notice that the difference is significant. Even then, there's no reason to give up on the idea of crypto currencies, we just have to make it more efficient.
Proof of work systems (such as bitcoin and ethereum as of now) inherently cannot be made more efficient - their security requires that approving transactions must take so much computing power that an attacker can't afford to burn as much resources as they'd need. It'd be trivial to make the processing 100 or 10000 times more efficient, but that would defeat the whole purpose - instead, the computational (and thus energy) requirements must grow as the currencies become more valuable and processors more affordable; that's why we have the scalable difficulty factor in bitcoin etc - so that the mining gets less efficient with time.
I agree, we should stop generating electricity using fossil fuels.
That said, I don't think it's right to just short the connection between "coal" and "bitcoin", we aren't mining coal to get bitcoins, it just so happens that majority of the electricity generated is through coal and mining uses electricity, so does our conversation on the internet.
> And the legacy systems from barter to bitcoin are all still around.
I'm not sure I get your point here. At some point, money of any form will be exchanged for goods or services.
However, I think about it slightly differently -- crypto currencies (and their likes) are just an attempt to replace man-power with computer-power. We need someone to enforce the rules without human intervention, hence, freeing up more people to do stuff that doesn't involve managing the abstraction of money.
edit: When we imagine "mining" in this realm, it'd help to think in terms of mining abstract resources like cost for verification of a transaction, rather than tangible resources like coal.