Encouraging Bitcoin mining to boost renewable deployments is like encouraging smoking to boost lung cancer research.
Proof of work is a grey goo in the nanotechnology way, it gets more and more energy intensive the more efficient technology gets. It also increases the budget for power and electronics the more expensive the token gets. This leads to the runaway power consumption you see now.
Renewables are green relative to coal, but they’re not zero footprint. To build a windmill with limited lifespan you need to mine rare earth metals in open air hellscapes in Mongolia [1]. You need to produce mountains of fiberglass. There’s no way to recycle fiberglass so once these fall apart you get your ores back, but have to bury the windmills [2].
Similarly for photovoltaics. The PV cells currently in use are made with cadmium and tellurium, heavy metals which again can’t really be recycled and end up buried in pits where they leech out into the environment. [3]
Bitcoin also generates 100g of ewaste per transaction which cannot be recycled meaningfully. The old ASIC miners can’t event be reused because they’re special purpose. So they’re shipped to poor countries where poor people dump toxic chemicals over it with inadequate safety gear to obtain what little metallics they can, and once again bury the rest. [4]
The only way forward is to reduce consumption by investing in efficient technology, not promote it with actively anti-efficient technology.
Comments
Encouraging Bitcoin mining to boost renewable deployments is like encouraging smoking to boost lung cancer research.
Proof of work is a grey goo in the nanotechnology way, it gets more and more energy intensive the more efficient technology gets. It also increases the budget for power and electronics the more expensive the token gets. This leads to the runaway power consumption you see now.
Renewables are green relative to coal, but they’re not zero footprint. To build a windmill with limited lifespan you need to mine rare earth metals in open air hellscapes in Mongolia [1]. You need to produce mountains of fiberglass. There’s no way to recycle fiberglass so once these fall apart you get your ores back, but have to bury the windmills [2].
Similarly for photovoltaics. The PV cells currently in use are made with cadmium and tellurium, heavy metals which again can’t really be recycled and end up buried in pits where they leech out into the environment. [3]
Bitcoin also generates 100g of ewaste per transaction which cannot be recycled meaningfully. The old ASIC miners can’t event be reused because they’re special purpose. So they’re shipped to poor countries where poor people dump toxic chemicals over it with inadequate safety gear to obtain what little metallics they can, and once again bury the rest. [4]
The only way forward is to reduce consumption by investing in efficient technology, not promote it with actively anti-efficient technology.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
[3] https://grist.org/energy/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-wh...
[4] https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/toxic-e-waste-dumped-in-poor-nat...