i should be smarter than to argue with bitcoin maximalists about the energy intensity of bitcoin, but seriously, technologists, the industry has a problem with energy usage *even at this scale*. if it 'actually' scaled to replace everything it would be catastrophic.
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5 years ago bitcoin used ~6.56 Twh/y (annualized), now it's using 126 Twh/y (a). about 20x more energy usage at the same time hashing has gotten like 20x more efficient! 400x more hash compute has been thrown at bitcoin for a mere ~120x price increase (from ~$420 5y ago)pic.twitter.com/zfpkUrruQu
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even this article trying to defend bitcoin's energy usage vs this provocative nature article et. al. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 …) uses as an argument "you can't imagine to scale bitcoin to handle global requirements like that" -- i agree, i can't!pic.twitter.com/vlMmAVrc3H
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Replying to @DanielleFong
as a cleantech entrepreneur do you see any way out of this mess that isn't mass-scale geoengineering, likely state-directed (e.g. Chinese style state capitalism)? because it really seems really unlikely that market capitalism can solve for a coordination problem of this size.
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Replying to @mrmidwit
i mean, yeah we can do it technically, but the answers to do it in time may require a lot of political will (big electricity superhigh lots of storage and/or nuclear)
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Replying to @DanielleFong
i brainfarted out ‘big electricity super high’ (was i having a stroke?) but i mean major investment renewables and storage. we’re still really far off and i don’r really think we have disposable energy. try to model how we are supposed to get to 0 carbon http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#funding-private …pic.twitter.com/YOQCMes38X
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Replying to @DanielleFong
I recently read David Wallace-Well's "Uninhabitable Earth," really scary shit - is solving this in any way really possible? Seems like the mother of all coordination problems - meanwhile the US is obsessed with great power competition instead of cooperation on climate change.
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yes, it’s possible, and at least solar wind and storage has fallen dramatically along the cost curve, but still if you look out on the road, you see cars nearly all of which must be replaced with evs, we are less than half renewables, materials /agriculture is carbon intensive...
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