In the paper titled, Economic estimation of Bitcoin mining's climate damages demonstrates closer resemblance to digital crude than digital gold, the authors suggest that rather than being considered akin to 'digital gold', Bitcoin should instead be compared to much more energy-intensive products such as beef, natural gas, and crude oil.
"We find no evidence that Bitcoin mining is becoming more sustainable over time," said UNM Economics Associate Professor Benjamin A. Jones. "Rather, our results suggest the opposite: Bitcoin mining is becoming dirtier and more damaging to the climate over time. In short, Bitcoin's environmental footprint is moving in the wrong direction."
[...] "Globally, the mining, or production, of Bitcoin is using tremendous amounts of electricity, mostly from fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas. This is causing huge amounts of air pollution and carbon emissions, which is negatively impacting our global climate and our health," said Jones. "We find several instances between 2016-2021 where Bitcoin is more damaging to the climate than a single Bitcoin is actually worth. Put differently, Bitcoin mining, in some instances, creates climate damages in excess of a coin's value. This is extremely troubling from a sustainability perspective."
[...] "Across the class of digitally scarce goods, our focus is on those cryptocurrencies that rely on proof-of-work (POW) production techniques, which can be highly energy intensive," said Regents Professor of Economics Robert Berrens. "Within broader efforts to mitigate climate change, the policy challenge is creating governance mechanisms for an emergent, decentralized industry, which includes energy-intensive POW cryptocurrencies. We believe that such efforts would be aided by measurable, empirical signals concerning potentially unsustainable climate damages, in monetary terms."
[...] The authors conclude that Bitcoin does not meet any of the three key sustainability criteria they assessed it against. Absent voluntary switching away from proof-of-work mining, as very recently done for the cryptocurrency Ether, then potential regulation may be required to make Bitcoin mining sustainable.
Journal Reference:
Jones, B.A., Goodkind, A.L. & Berrens, R.P. Economic estimation of Bitcoin mining's climate damages demonstrates closer resemblance to digital crude than digital gold [open]. Sci Rep 12, 14512 (2022). 10.1038/s41598-022-18686-8
(Score: -1, Troll) by aristarchus 3 on Saturday October 08 2022, @04:45AM (1 child)
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: SN is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered SN community when IDC confirmed that SN posting has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of Slashdot. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that SN has lost more users, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. SN is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in a recent survey of news aggregators.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict SN's future. The hand writing is on the wall: SN faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for SN because SN is dying. Things are looking very bad for SN. As many of us are already aware, SN continues to lose users and subscribers. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
SN is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its users. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time SN admins c0lo and The Mighty Buzzard only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: SN is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot leader whipslash states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Pipedot are there? Let's see. The number of Slashdot versus Pipedot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Pipedot users. SN posts on Usenet are about one hundredth of the volume of Pipedot posts. Therefore there are about 14 users of SN. A recent article put Hacker News at about 80 percent of the news aggregator market. Therefore there are (7000+1400)*4 = 33600 Hacker News users. This is consistent with the number of Hacker News Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of NCommander, abysmal management and so on, SN was taken over by martyb who is another troubled admin. Now martyb is also gone, and SN's corpse was turned over to Janrinok the Censor.
All major surveys show that SN has steadily declined in users and comments. SN is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If SN is to survive at all it will be among gun nuts like Runaway and khallow. SN continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save SN from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, SN is dead.
Fact: SN is dying
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday October 08 2022, @05:52AM
Really? Then based on past experience with Netcraft confirmation, I predict SN to be around for a long time to come.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Fuck You Niggers 29 on Saturday October 08 2022, @05:17AM (4 children)
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: SN is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered SN community when IDC confirmed that SN posting has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of Slashdot. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that SN has lost more users, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. SN is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in a recent survey of news aggregators.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict SN's future. The hand writing is on the wall: SN faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for SN because SN is dying. Things are looking very bad for SN. As many of us are already aware, SN continues to lose users and subscribers. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
SN is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its users. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time SN admins c0lo and The Mighty Buzzard only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: SN is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot leader whipslash states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Pipedot are there? Let's see. The number of Slashdot versus Pipedot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Pipedot users. SN posts on Usenet are about one hundredth of the volume of Pipedot posts. Therefore there are about 14 users of SN. A recent article put Hacker News at about 80 percent of the news aggregator market. Therefore there are (7000+1400)*4 = 33600 Hacker News users. This is consistent with the number of Hacker News Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of NCommander, abysmal management and so on, SN was taken over by martyb who is another troubled admin. Now martyb is also gone, and SN's corpse was turned over to Janrinok the Censor. Even as the admins use spam mods to pretend all is well, SN readership continues to plummet.
All major surveys show that SN has steadily declined in users and comments. SN is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If SN is to survive at all it will be among gun nuts like Runaway and khallow. SN continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save SN from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, SN is dead.
Fact: SN is dying
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 08 2022, @08:47AM (3 children)
This is the person who tried so hard to pass himself off as a philosopher.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 08 2022, @09:04AM (1 child)
It looks like APK or an APK impostor. Just another lowlife.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Saturday October 08 2022, @10:04AM
I'll let you decide. He has also posted the exact same spam today under the following names aristarchus 2, aristarchus 3, FatPhil Can Kiss My Ass, and Fuck You Niggers (FYN)-29.
He has created 47 accounts so far TODAY, including TheMightyChickadee 2, TheMightyChickadee 3, Anti-aristarchus 2, Anti-aristarchus 3, FYN 15-40 and - to show how low he can stoop - Janrinok's Dead Wife and Dead Wife of Janrinok. Fortunately, such name calling doesn't concern me at all and it just goes to show the sort of person that he actually is. The only thing Netcraft can confirm as dying is what little remains of aristarchus' reputation.
I have suggested that he seeks the medical help he obviously so desperately needs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 08 2022, @09:24AM
Just be glad it's a rare specimen. Humanity would have self destructed long ago if his ilk were more common.
(Score: -1, Spam) by FatPhil Can Kiss My Ass on Saturday October 08 2022, @06:04AM
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: SN is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered SN community when IDC confirmed that SN posting has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of Slashdot. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that SN has lost more users, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. SN is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in a recent survey of news aggregators.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict SN's future. The hand writing is on the wall: SN faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for SN because SN is dying. Things are looking very bad for SN. As many of us are already aware, SN continues to lose users and subscribers. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
SN is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its users. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time SN admins c0lo and The Mighty Buzzard only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: SN is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot leader whipslash states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Pipedot are there? Let's see. The number of Slashdot versus Pipedot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Pipedot users. SN posts on Usenet are about one hundredth of the volume of Pipedot posts. Therefore there are about 14 users of SN. A recent article put Hacker News at about 80 percent of the news aggregator market. Therefore there are (7000+1400)*4 = 33600 Hacker News users. This is consistent with the number of Hacker News Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of NCommander, abysmal management and so on, SN was taken over by martyb who is another troubled admin. Now martyb is also gone, and SN's corpse was turned over to Janrinok the Censor. Even as the admins use spam mods to pretend all is well, SN readership continues to plummet.
All major surveys show that SN has steadily declined in users and comments. SN is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If SN is to survive at all it will be among gun nuts like Runaway and khallow. SN continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save SN from its fate at this point in time, not even firing janrinok and FatPhil. For all practical purposes, SN is dead.
Fact: SN is dying
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday October 08 2022, @07:20AM (4 children)
and any cryptocurrency based on proof of work. Problem solved.
It shouldn't be too hard: most governments take a dim view of crytocurrencies already - and with good reason, considering the unmitigated trainwreck it's turned out to be. All they have to do is get together and agree to impose prison sentences on anyone found mining or exchanging Bitcoins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday October 08 2022, @12:22PM (2 children)
Let me be asinine here for a bit.
My spooge is proof of my wastage of time, energy, and resources. Anybody wanna buy some?
Or, would my water bill considered valuable as it's a proof that I uselessly drained thousands of gallons of perfectly good water down the sewer?
This whole concept just seems so asinine to me that I can't seem to even begin to take this seriously. But the financial types do!
No wonder I have so much trouble trying to communicate with a lot of these business types. Many seem to have no idea that money is only one of many forms of wealth... What I am seeing today appears to me to be the banker class hell bent on exhausting all of the easily accessible stored energy on the planet by having us masturbate it into Bitcoin.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday October 08 2022, @01:11PM (1 child)
They take green slips of paper serious. Why do you care about the opinion of obvious lunatics?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Sunday October 09 2022, @12:53AM
I don't care about their opinion.
What I do care about is their desire and ability to drain the commons. ( "Tragedy of the Commons" if you didn't get the drift ).
I am an engineer, not a businessman. I build things. And I see many things unnerving to me concerning resource depletion. Energy tops my list. Energy is all around me, but the energy I can get to and use is not.
If I knew this world was at my disposal, then why shouldn't I go ahead and finish it off for my enjoyment? I am an engineer. I will not do such a thing. I am already witnessing woes of hurt from many who lack access to even the basic needs of life.
I have been gifted with the ability to build things that will last for generations, and the compassion to share, along with what I consider righteous indignation against seeing waste of that of which others need so badly.
To me, my own people provide way too many examples of power gone terribly wrong. Greed and corruption. Power corrupts. Absolute power is even more funner, some say, and when I consider the source, I find it hard to find compassion in me for them should they fall and need me to care.
I used to work in the oil industry and became quite concerned with oil depletion. Not necessarily fuel for motor vehicles...that is quite fungible. No. Haber-Bosch. Ammonia. The building blocks of the fertilizers that feed us.
Life for us is gonna change once we spend our inheritance.
I don't think it's gonna be funner.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 08 2022, @02:39PM
>All they have to do is get together and agree
Insoluable problem #1 ^^^ starting with: how will this agreement further enrich all signatories? There are only so many short positions available in cryptomarkets...
>to impose prison sentences
to wit: most of the world doesn't use imprisonment nearly as much as the United States. Problems ranging from human rights through to the costs of imprisonment.
>on anyone found mining or exchanging Bitcoins.
and there you have it. You yourself just wrote a law with the enormous loophole you started with saying needed to be plugged: all proof of work cryptocurrencies. Now: define a proof of work cryptocurrency and watch the roaches circumvent whatever definition you create in days, if not hours, along with "whitepapers" about how transition from the existing "MARKET KAPATILIZATION OF TRILLIONZZZ" cryptocurrencies to the new "legal in all jurisdictions" ones will enrich all players...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 08 2022, @08:13AM (3 children)
"I'm going to burn X amount of energy, then use proof of that wasted energy to claim some kind of wealth and value, while claiming that my wealth is green!"
Green wealth was notches in a stick. Indian wampum was green. Bitcoin is a cesspool of waste.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday October 08 2022, @05:03PM (2 children)
No. Green wealth was the Norse (Icelandic sub-variety) of money: Cloth. If it got cold, you could wear it. (The colony in Greenland changed to weave when the weather got colder.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Sunday October 09 2022, @02:26AM (1 child)
Wealth to me is creature comforts.
The ability to share. To help others.
And is appreciated when others help me. Money being only a trade lubricant.
Tools, along with the knowledge to make and use them, are my most treasured assets. Tools assist me to do what I do. I have no pride in myself when I look in a mirror and all I see is a parasite sucking resources and producing nothing of any value.
I am quite aware of the foundation I stand on. I know how hard others worked to put it there. I will do all I can while I am here to build on it, not tear it down.
That foundation is what supplies me with every creature comfort I have. Our history as to how we got to where we are now is NOT pretty! We have it unimaginably good compared to our ancestors, and the means to make it even better for the next generations if we can only keep greed and lust for power in check.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday October 10 2022, @03:20PM
Good luck at keeping greed and lust for power in check. The best you can do is harness it. So that greed and lust for power are steered in the right direction.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday October 08 2022, @09:13AM (6 children)
> Bitcoin mining, in some instances, creates climate damages in excess of a coin's value
So clearly the authors understand nothing. The value isn't in "creating coins". The value is in producing a universally trustworthy ledger.
Block producer expend compute resources to produce objectively trustworthy transaction records, and are compensated for providing such a service with currency on the ledger in kind. To bootstrap the service, they are provided "newly minted" coins (as the alternative is some party starting with all of the coins in their possession, as is the case for many cryptocurrency scams unlike Bitcoin), but ultimately users shall pay a fee in exchange for the service of having their transaction objectively validated.
It is not so different from paying a fee to wire money, except that the transaction cannot be censored by any entity such as a government and is processed on the free market of block producers. Users decide how much they will pay for their transaction, block producers decide how low a fee they are willing to take, and any person can decide whether or not to become a block producer based on the supply/demand for transaction processing.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Saturday October 08 2022, @10:07AM (5 children)
A secure ledger does not need proof of work.
It really is like mining gold or diamonds: You fuck up earth for an imaginary value that has little to do with the actual material. The only reason this imaginary value works is because a shitload of people share the same delusion.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday October 08 2022, @02:29PM
It needs something in order to be secure. We'll see if stuff like proof of stake survives.
These complaints are bike shed logic. We don't have any idea why someone would use cryptocurrency. But electric power is something we moderately understand and we have some vague idea that using less power is good. Hence, the whining, calls for bans, and such.
My take is using power is not a big deal else it wouldn't be this cheap. And I don't care enough about the reasons for using and mining cryptocurrency to question the usage of those coins - though I see plenty of interesting economics coming from this should anyone ever be interested in that.
Further, we have decided on a democracy with free people. Free people routinely make choices that you don't like.
Welcome to every medium of exchange. They all work the same way - a shitload of people share the same opinion on their utility.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 08 2022, @02:43PM (2 children)
I wonder though: which is really worse overall: mining gold, diamonds, or oil? I agree: crypto is a lot like gold or diamonds, much more exchange value than intrinsic - although crypto takes that ratio to new highs by many multiples. At least oil does something, for the purchaser and is consumed in the process, which makes it more tricky to calculate a cost-benefit ratio when the benefit starts becoming significant in relation to the cost.
Whatever the order of gold-diamonds-oil in terms of environmental damage per unit benefit, proof of work crypto certainly beats them all in damage per unit benefit.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 10 2022, @03:23PM (1 child)
I would posit that oil is worse. Due to the fact that oil doesn't last long. Compared to the likes of Gold and especially Diamonds. In the event that we used oil for products and not as a fuel. It wouldn't be anywhere near the problem that it is.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 10 2022, @07:49PM
Oh, but we do use petroleum for all kinds of things besides fuel, starting with plastics, progressing to the pan-oceanic distribution of microplastics... They are everywhere basically because they are a byproduct of oil fuel production.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by einar on Sunday October 09 2022, @07:03PM
Darkfeline's argument is that the study only looked at the value of the mined tokens. That the tokens carry a value is just a side effect to pay miners. Distributed ledgers create a service and the study must look at the value of this service to decided whether it justifies the environmental damage.
(Score: 1, Troll) by rigrig on Saturday October 08 2022, @04:04PM (1 child)
The problem is externalized costs of energy production in general.
Oh, I get it: the exchange rate for Bitcoin is volatile enough to find some moments where factoring in those costs leads to a "net loss".
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Sjolfr on Saturday October 08 2022, @05:59PM
Why single it out? Because BTC is what most people know about. BTC is the flagship experimental product.
BTC only has a value because a small fraction of people are willing to buy them at excessive rates of exchange. They have exactly zero intrinsic value. That's what BTC-cash should provide instruction for. Conceptually cryptocurrencies have many times more potential for abuse. If a government wants to adopt cryptocurrency as a standard then all they have to do is clone a coin, rename it to something else, and go forward . Every single type of coin could be used as a denomination of the same currency. The fact that we fraction each cryptocoin is another concern. At some point you have to round up or down and that fraction of each coin can be skimmed. When a coin runs out? Fork it. Done deal.
The control measures for cryptocurrencies rests completely in their arbitrary definitions.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Saturday October 08 2022, @04:55PM
Researches Find Water Is Wet
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 08 2022, @05:11PM (1 child)
Shouldn't this be labeled as "from the no-shit-sherlock dept." ?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 08 2022, @08:03PM
Not for everyone.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday October 11 2022, @02:31AM
Stop mining new bitcoin. Mining is where most of the energy waste occurs. Surely there is already an adequate supply, and if no new supply is added the "value" of a bitcoin is more likely to steadily increase. The only losers will be miners, and they deserve to be punished for their foolish waste of resources both human and natural.