Technology

i strongly urge skepticism when reading articles about the environmental impacts of bitcoin. I am not saying that bitcoin is a sensible use of resources - rather that the claims made about the environmental impacts are often overstated and based on models extrapolated to absurdity. For example, see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8 where Mora, Camilo et al suggested that "Bitcoin Emissions Alone Could Push Global Warming Above 2°C". Then read Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions by Masanet et al.

Again - the environmental impacts of cloud computing in general and bitcoin in particular are something we should be concerned about. But there are a number of researchers who have made wild claims that should be treated with a critical eye.

These data centers consume water for cooling systems

How does a data center consume water? Doesn't every liter that enters as freshwater leave as slightly warmer freshwater? What am I missing here?

Ok thats not even remotely accurate. wtf is this clickbait shit. You can argue that bitcoin is bad for the environment but if you're gonna invent statistics at least make is plausible.

These calculations are a bit off IMO. They factor the total amount of mining and divide it by the number of transactions.

However, the amount of mining is not dependent on the amount of transactions.

I'm not a fan of bitcoin due to the wasteful proof of work mechanism but 'blaming' the transactions is not really fair IMO, especially because people don't really use bitcoin as a payment method anymore. It's just used by speculators now.

False. Mining is what uses electricity (and water) in bitcoin, not transactions. Adding more transactions does not add to the cost. Calculating consumption per transaction is misleading as the two are not related.

What does add to the cost is complexity, and complexity is calculated based on number of miners in the network in order to achieve the sweet spot of 1 block every 10 mins (if i remember correctly). If there's a lot of competition, each miner will have to use more electricity to win.

That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. BS clickbait

Because of these transactions, many countries, such as the United States, could face freshwater shortages if the currency becomes more widely adopted.

False.

Blocks get mined (secured) with the same amount of power no matter the number of transactions in each.

Interesting that an article like this would come out right as Bitcoin's value is going up and the US SEC is considering approval of several Bitcoin ETFs.

I do wonder how this compares to current payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, etc)

As tradition I won't read the actual article and only comment on the headline - while BTC is a massive energy waste, it seems unlikely that each transaction would waste so much cooling water. Maybe each mined block, but each block should contain thousands of transactions

700kWh per transaction? That's absurd amount of power. That's 70 EUR of energy per one transaction at current (EU) exchange price.

Is there anyone here knowledgeable enough about this issue to say whether those numbers are correct, or just an overestimate? It feels wrong.

Not only is the science underlying all these findings completely non-existent, they only "guesstimate" what the water usage of what every thing that uses water is; then blindly divide that by the transaction volume per time period.

Not only is that method highly flawed; it's incorrect. Computers do more than mine crypto; and 1 transaction typically costs not even 1 tenth of a percent of most miners' overall computer resources. This is due to the fact that many miners are utilizing either a GPU or FPGA style device to power optimize and optimize the mathematics necessary to secure a transaction.

When the alternative to prove of works (vouched by those hoarding compute resources) is prove of stake (vouched by those who can afford to park piles of money), both are suck for their own reasons.

OP, your "news" article sucks. It's just clickbait

Not even a mention of lightning? I have no idea if it works as I’ve been hearing both yes and no for several years, but writing such an article without mentioning what at least theoretically would be the solution just seems bad.

It's a necessary sacrifice to push more ponzi schemes

I don't understand some things in the water consumption.

Why do they need to humidify the air for the datacenter?

Why is there water consumption for cooling? Aren't they recirculating water used for watercooling? Or are they using f*ing tap water then throwing it out?

Water for electricity production, kinda, yes. Could be indirectly attributed to their water consumption as they are using the electricity produced by the sources using water.

ok then just use salt water. You're welcome nerds!

Ethereum transactions are claimed to use about 1-22 Wh per transaction. Not sure where the wide range comes from, but at least it's quite a lot better then Bitcoin's ~700-2000kWh per transaction. Ethereum is comparable to how much a credit card transaction is said to spend, although those figures only take into account power needed for their computer systems. Blockchain currencies replace a lot more infrastructure than just the computer systems, so I think it's reasonable to say that Eth2 is more energy efficient than credit cards.

That's not enough to make it a replacement for credit cards yet, but it's a good lowest of the low barriers to be crossed to qualify as a replacement.

In a few years, we'll probably be spending a huge amount of power for AI also, and there doesn't seem to be any Proof-of-Stake -like technology to help with that. Good times.