I fucking hate how you people talk about speculative shit about "Who's really responsible for killing the electric car?" as though it is anywhere in the same ballpark as Bitcoin straight up DIRECTLY BURNING AND WASTING ENERGY to the tune of dozens of terawatt-hours per year
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Replying to @arthur_affect @gladstein and
It wouldn't matter if a shift in global energy markets pushed us to massively expand nuclear and renewable energy Because the Bitcoin miners would just use it all the fuck up and we still wouldn't be able to close any existing power plants
1 reply 9 retweets 53 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @gladstein and
If the *total amount of energy we use every year* is going UP, and going up EXPONENTIALLY, going in the exact wrong direction, it DOES NOT MATTER if we "shift" or "move" the balance of energy production toward renewables We'll still be burning more coal anyway
2 replies 8 retweets 52 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @gladstein and
You can say whatever you want about how you power the Bitcoin grid If you magically made a proof-of-work cryptocurrency that could ONLY be powered by renewable energy it would still be a fucking environmental disaster
2 replies 9 retweets 56 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @gladstein and
Bluntly, the creation of ANY power plant -- windmills, solar panels, nuclear, whatever -- is an environmental disaster and it's only a matter of degrees We cannot get anywhere unless we slow down or stop the growth of demand And with Bitcoin that's mathematically impossible
3 replies 10 retweets 43 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @gladstein and
The power consumption of the grid HAS TO scale with the size of the economy Burning those terawatts into waste heat is the only way to keep the system honest or it all collapses It locks us into the global energy demand crisis being eternally unsolvable
2 replies 3 retweets 27 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @FranckLeroy_ and
You're right, Bitcoin's impact on the environment is negligible compared to political factors. For ex, the U.S. is shutting down enough nuclear in the next few months (to be replaced largely by coal/gas) to pretty much power the whole Bitcoin network:https://medium.com/campaign-for-a-green-nuclear-deal/bitcoin-and-baseload-how-hodling-nuclear-will-deliver-the-future-22b231bec5d5 …
3 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @gladstein @FranckLeroy_ and
It doesn't matter, because any amount of energy needed to power the Bitcoin network now -- when essentially no normal person uses Bitcoin for daily transactions and they celebrate the network being able to pull off transactions at a rate of 1-10/hr -- is fucking peanuts
2 replies 2 retweets 23 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @gladstein and
"Oh, wow, these nuclear plants being shut down by eeeeevil EPA thugs like in Ghostbusters, who are just making up the environmental costs of keeping them open, could power all of Bitcoin right now Great, we just need to build 10,000,000x as many to reach Full Bitcoin by 2050"
1 reply 2 retweets 13 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @FranckLeroy_ and
Actually, it's really terrible that nuclear progress has been stalled in favor of fossil fuel alternatives. I'm surprised you feel differently.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
On balance, I think that nuclear power replacing fossil fuel capacity is a good thing and it's very bad for the Earth that it hasn't happened However, it is explicitly asking a community to shoulder certain risks and costs on themselves for the greater good of society
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Replying to @arthur_affect @gladstein and
And while that's something we do in fact have to do at some point if we don't want everything to burn and drown, we've done a pretty piss-poor job of openly communicating and then compensating those costs
1 reply 2 retweets 11 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @gladstein and
The fact that the current President of Taiwan was elected in 2016 on an anti-nuclear platform is, on balance, a bad thing for the country's economy and for slowing global warming But it's because people had no faith in the industry taking responsibility or taking care of them
2 replies 4 retweets 15 likes - Show replies
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