this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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To draw a comparison between bitcoin energy consumption and water use is plainly seeking to remove context from the conditional justification for Bitcoin's energy use, which has nothing to do with water. It's deliberately sensationalistic. Anything that consumes energy can be described as consuming or wasting an equivalent amount of water. As a statement on whether that consumption is justified, it's meaningless.
Then do so. What equivalent exchange of any value of money uses as much water as Bitcoin? If I'm not asking you the right question here, can you tell me the actual question and what the answer is?
You'd need to qualify what you mean by 'exchanging any value of money'. If it's handing a note of currency to your friend, the energy cost of circulating the bill is associated. If you mean someone not in the same room, then you need to accept the associated caveats of running the traditional finance system e.g. ATM costs, financed emissions, and other essential components of the fractional reserve bank concept. Totally aside from the server requirements to physically run the network. Without all of those things, you can't exchange any value of money.
Traditional finance almost certainly consumes as much water as Bitcoin on a per-capita basis, and on an absolute basis traditional finance uses way, way more. The difference is the global network of banking operations is opaque. For Greenidge Generation, their 2.5EH/s hashrate is a part of their product, advertising it is a sales tactic. Just makes it a bit less abstract to pick apart and then make broad generalisations about the sum hashrate of the network based on this LNG-powered site the report is based on. For what it's worth, that's not really a feasible way to mine Bitcoin. It suggests energy generation is their real product.
The real answer is a rhetorical question: what is the impetus for the traditional finance system to operate sustainably, either now or in future? Because for Bitcoin miners it's clear. The monetary policy essentially dictates it over time. Reward yield decreases for the same amount of work. You don't need to get into whether it's environmentally sustainable, because it's not economically sustainable unless you're generating a fully renewable energy source.
Previously you said "whether it would replace any more or less efficient actions" and I'm trying to get to the bottom of what you mean. I even asked for clarification if i was asking the wrong question. I feel like I'm now being asked to qualify what I just asked you to qualify.
This sounds like it's agreeing with the premise of the article here: Bitcoin is not sustainable. This isn't to say other things are sustainable. It's just pointing out that it uses a ton of water, and a lot of it has moved to a place that can't really handle the increased water usage so it might cause a water shortage. If this is the reason the article is "not how any of this works" and "BS clickbait" then I disagree.
It was the wrong question and I just guided you on how it was wrong. For it to be the correct question you should have qualified what you meant by using that phrase. I'm sorry you didn't understand that.
The post headline is "each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water". This generalisation is based on one Bitcoin mining operation which upon cursory inspection is actually a LNG electric company. I'm speculating but likely the reason they mine Bitcoin is to make it worth keeping the gas fire on during off-peak.
If you're going to use a single operation to generalise about the whole network, why use this small weird outlier and not the bigger companies like Riot, Bitfarms, Genesis? I could turn around and say "each bitcoin transaction is fully renewable" based on the operations of any of those companies, and the claim would be even more substantiated than that headline is by that report. But it would still be wrong. Neither example is representative of the energy required by Bitcoin.
Now, I'm not coming to the party trying to push Bitcoin as a transactional currency, like you seemed to have a notion of it trying to compete as. I don't think it's much good for that. But I'm not about to go believing some made up shit about how a computer solving some cryptographic puzzles has a comparable environmental impact to filling an entire swimming pool. Gimme a break dude.