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
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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 @iridienne and
even if we had nuclear fusion ready to go (which it’s not) and installed everywhere in the world, the heat generated by cryptocurrency mining is going to massively contribute to pollution especially if corporations like microsoft keep trying to put data centers underwater
2 replies 2 retweets 15 likes -
Replying to @hipsterelectron @iridienne and
Yeah this is a basic and fundamental problem with the indefinite-growth model of capitalism that everyone assumes is inescapable If we need an exponentially-growing economy to survive, and that economy has an exponentially-growing energy demand, the waste heat keeps going up
2 replies 3 retweets 17 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @hipsterelectron and
It DOES NOT MATTER if we solve the problem of where the energy comes from completely (we climb up the Kardeshev scale and take all our power directly from the sun) And this has NOTHING TO DO with carbon dioxide HOLDING ON to heat in the atmosphere
1 reply 2 retweets 13 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @hipsterelectron and
It's just extremely simple math, the inescapable reality of thermodynamics Energy has to go somewhere, it turns into waste heat when you're done using it, it cannot just disappear
2 replies 2 retweets 17 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @hipsterelectron and
You crunch the numbers, if the physical energy economy has a couple centuries of the same exponential growth we just had in the 19th and 20th, it ends with melting the Earth's surface
1 reply 1 retweet 11 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @hipsterelectron and
(This assumes more economic production means more energy intensive production, which I don’t think is correct)
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Replying to @lawnerdbarak @hipsterelectron and
This is true, but economic growth that doesn't use more physical energy looks very different from the kind we're used to And Bitcoin proof-of-work is designed to make it fundamentally impossible
1 reply 2 retweets 11 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @lawnerdbarak and
And I mean *fundamentally* impossible (if I invent a cool new thing that generates more economic activity by providing utility without any increase in energy consumption - a meme-based economy built on replacing less dank memes with danker ones) Bitcoin burns more energy anyway
1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
The act of generating more economic activity itself burns more power, at an exponential rate The transactions drive the consumption of energy and not the actual goods being traded The NFT art market is this satirical parody reductio of this idea that people are actually doing
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Replying to @arthur_affect @lawnerdbarak and
"What if it was *ideas* that were valuable, rather than physical things or physical work And what if, in the process of becoming valuable, those *ideas* burned *even more coal""
1 reply 2 retweets 9 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @hipsterelectron and
Right, crypto works by proof of work, which DOES require exponential energy use. The he information economy, Moore’s law and so on, though, points to a growth model where GDP and energy use aren’t tightly intertwined, which is why they’ve become decoupled in the last decade
0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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