The first google result for "how many people hold bitcoins" says that an estimated 46 million Americans own bitcoin. The huge inaccuracy shows the author's bias and kills the credibility of the rest of the thread.
Only ~60M households (50%) have an investment account. I'm skeptical that there's a huge portion of households with bitcoin but w/o a traditional investment account. I'm also skeptical that ~80% of people with investment accounts have Bitcoin. Almost everyone I work with and most of my friends and family have an investment account. I only know a couple of people who currently have any Bitcoin. I know a lot of people that at one point owned Bitcoin, though.
Then I look and see that it was a small sample sized survey of higher income individuals, and was commissioned by an "alternative investments firm" who wants to tout Bitcoin annuities and life insurance.
Since we're speaking of bias, after all...
For one, this is why reading articles and doing your own research (DYOR) is so important. That headline, which is attributed to NYDIG, a crypto proprietor, isn’t actually sourced anywhere else. Gemini, the Winklevii crypto exchange, places the number substantially lower.
Given that Coinbase has had a maximum of 8.8 million monthly active users, which is going to put us within spitting distance of the true number, suggests the true figure is much much lower.
Additionally, speculating on bitcoin’s price on an exchange does not mean you’re utilizing the network (hell, you don’t even need actual bitcoin to do this, futures will do). But this is what the overwhelming majority of people do with bitcoin.
So the real question is how many people use the bitcoin network to transfer bitcoins. This is what POW enables. Do I believe that 10m are sending bitcoin to each other? No fucking way. Much much lower.
So yeah, 10m seems conservative even if the assumption is poorly worded (network users vs coin holders).
In my understanding, there are many stakeholders when it's about bitcoin technology. Be it miners, traders, holders, exchanges... BTC is not solely a common legal entity (like: country, company) nor a widespread regular resource (as: oil, gas, water). It's more like the Internet; another protocol to exchange information(+value). Then, who is going to fairly assess the overall energy consumption of The Internet? Thus, the logic followed in that assertion is incredibly hard to understand (but unfortunately popular nowadays).
For example, in Jan 23 million bitcoin wallets had transactions. Since many actors hold multiple wallets, this would imply not so many active bitcoin users. [1]
Per capita could mean anyone who has ever touched it in any way, or could mean someone who actually uses it reasonably often.
[1] https://decrypt.co/56188/bitcoin-hit-record-number-of-22-3-m...
The Tweet is specifically about electricity (kWh). It appears Norway uses mostly electricity in applications where other countries might use more natural gas (heating). This is likely because Norway has plentiful clean hydroelectric electricity, so they export their natural gas instead of burning it.
This inflates their electricity consumption numbers but given the mostly hydroelectric source and reduced fossil fuel burning it’s actually a net win.
Iceland is small but has some power-hungry industries (that's the point, to produce Aluminum with cheap power), influencing their total.
Well, showing a logarithmic graph is a deceptive way of comparing things.
I do not see many people in the crypto community approaching this with the deadly seriousness it deserves. Most conversations seem to devolve into:
- wishcasting about how energy is produced: “There are a whole bunch of miners in South America running on hydro!” This ignores that we are decades away at least from a solarpunk world where energy isn’t a zero-sum game, the hydro energy being used by miners just means the people in nearby cities have to resort to fossil fuels.
- wishcasting about Proof-of-Stake: “We could just switch to this and the carbon problems go away!” I admit it would be great if this happened, but No large coins use it, and I’ll believe Ethereum when I see it. Proof-of-Stake also has downsides that some crypto people won’t accept, so by their own admission it’s not credibly considered an option (certainly not for Bitcoin).
- wishcasting about carbon offsets: “We can buy our way out!” The recent California wildfires have burned through a lot of the trees planted as “carbon offsets”, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere. Offsets were a neat idea, but they don’t seem to have panned out well, and I have yet to hear a credible case that carbon capture can ramp up fast enough to match crypto’s growing carbon footprint.
- whataboutism: “You ride planes don’t you? Those have huge carbon footprints!” I have yet to hear a compelling argument that a Planes+Bitcoin world would have a smaller carbon footprint than the current Planes+Mastercard world. And no one is talking about Bitcoin making planes go away.
I’d love to hear a clear and credulous case for how we get out of this problem, but I have yet to hear one from the crypto community. If the crypto community won’t take this seriously and propose real solutions, people from outside the crypto community will come up with solutions that will involve banning crypto.
IOW, Bitcoin isn't a scheme to destroy the world by exhausting energy or destroying the planet, it's just a bunch of people who want distributed consensus and they're willing to pay for it and you can't fathom why. You don't complain about aluminum fiends or anybody else spending money and potentially exploiting carbon externalities, ask yourself why not.
If you care about the environment so much then impose pollution controls rather than singling out one particular use you don't understand.
And don’t tell me what I don’t complain about ;) I’m plenty concerned with other sources of carbon emissions too.
As for the rest: I feel like another bad trope I see in these debates is the “you just don’t get it. Enjoy your irrelevance” thing. If crypto is misunderstood, then explain it. If there’s something people like me aren’t getting, help us get it. The burden of proof is on crypto-boosters to demonstrate why this is worth it and what the actual endgame here is.
IIRC Polkadot staking has a 28 day minimum unstaking cool-off period, yet one can stake/unstake instantaneously in Kraken, so I'm led to believe that off-chain transactions must already happen to at least some extent.
Am I missing something?
The mining-related costs are mostly unrelated to whether the bitcoins are traded on-chain or off-chain. The mining-related costs are more directly related to the price of bitcoin, or rather, how much a miner can earn with the block rewards and transaction fees. By trading bitcoin, even off-chain, you increase the demand for bitcoin, and therefore indirectly increase its price; the only difference is that by trading off-chain, the miners don't receive the transaction fees (which are currently less than 2% of the block rewards).
https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x?sh...
...we found that they do not pose a large threat to the climate, mainly because the energy consumption of PoW blockchains does not increase substantially when they process more transactions.
BTC is not.
(DeFi is used to speculate on crypto prices with leverage, which is also not essential)
I was staying in a hotel in Nepal around 10 years ago. I was sharing a room with someone I met. I paid the hotel, and my roommate paid me in bitcoin. It was pretty convenient considering my home currency is USD, his was EUR, and the local currency was rupees.
Anyway, as far as I'm aware there wasn't any cybercrime taking place that day :)
An unfathomable transfer of wealth from normal people to the rich is happening because of the Fed. How? The rich can borrow money from the Fed at near zero rates. They use that money to buy assets. Meanwhile, the government borrows money from the Fed at near zero rates. The government spends the money, inflating the circulating money supply. That causes the value of money to go down.
The rich can repay their loans to the Fed using money that is worth less than when they borrowed it. I.e., borrow $100M in 2021 dollars and repay $100M in cheap 2050 dollars.
This is turning America into a nation of renters, rather than a nation of homeowners.
It's also turning us into a nation of debtors, via the Federal debt, which will become overburdensome soon. We will either default, or the debt will be erased through hyperinflation, making the rich even richer again (as they get the money first and buy assets at the old prices).
Bitcoin fixes this.
And only bitcoin, or something almost exactly like it, can fix this.
The impoverishment of normal people via the banking system is exactly what the Jeffersons of the world were trying to prevent the Hamiltons of the world from doing.
Treating this as a "crypto problem" and not a general energy / fuels problem does almost nothing but sell clicks / views / newspapers.
Trying to contribute here though on where we really are in crypto and angles of attack for discussion, vs an alarmist view:
1) BTC maximalists don't care and will argue to the teeth that the energy costs are baked into the economic value of the network. From a purely market argument they're not wrong here. BTCs energy use is "worth it" to a lot of people who truly believe BTC to be a store of value, a hedge against inflation, and a vote for decentralization.
2) Short term companies like Crusoe Energy are working on solutions to onboard "trapped" energy stores to reduce the carbon footprint. The most likely outcome of these efforts is likely not an overall reduced carbon footprint given the continued growth and interest in the overall market. (2)
3) Proof of Stake is much more efficient than Proof of Work (3) but it is unlikely that BTC moves in that direction short term. Or perhaps ever.
(1) https://www.torquenews.com/9539/ford-f-150-continues-its-sal...
(2) https://www.crusoeenergy.com/
(3) https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-basics/what-is-proof-o...
I would love to hear responses vs downvotes to the floor
Do you think that we can regulate crypto into lower energy use?
Change hearts and minds?
