this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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[–] zartcosgrove@beehaw.org 103 points 11 months ago (2 children)

i strongly urge skepticism when reading articles about the environmental impacts of bitcoin. I am not saying that bitcoin is a sensible use of resources - rather that the claims made about the environmental impacts are often overstated and based on models extrapolated to absurdity. For example, see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8 where Mora, Camilo et al suggested that "Bitcoin Emissions Alone Could Push Global Warming Above 2°C". Then read Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions by Masanet et al.

Again - the environmental impacts of cloud computing in general and bitcoin in particular are something we should be concerned about. But there are a number of researchers who have made wild claims that should be treated with a critical eye.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 14 points 11 months ago

(Checking if outbound federation is back)

Yeah, if they had said 10 gallons, I'd buy that, but a whole swimming pool of water would be worth far more than a transaction fee I'd expect.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah, generally miners will set up in places with cheap electricity. And excluding places like Azerbaijan, those sources are generally renewables.

[–] Greg@lemmy.ca 49 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

These data centers consume water for cooling systems

How does a data center consume water? Doesn't every liter that enters as freshwater leave as slightly warmer freshwater? What am I missing here?

[–] lechatron@lemmy.today 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Some of the water is evaporated so it doesn't leave as a liquid.

[–] Greg@lemmy.ca 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)

That's unlikely in a closed heat exchange system. Maybe some additional evaporation because the water is slightly warmer. But unless I'm missing something, it seems very misleading to suggest that a Bitcoin transaction uses 16 kilolitres because of evaporation. Napkin math, it would require about 10 megawatt/hours of energy to evaporate that much water (please correct me if I'm wrong). I'm not a Bitcoin fanboy, I just don't like BS.

[–] lechatron@lemmy.today 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Some water is used in humidifiers, there are also systems that use direct evaporative cooling where the water is eveporated to cool the hot air. There are probably other ways the water is lost.

AWS’ preferred cooling strategy for its data centers is known as direct evaporative cooling. In this system, hot air is pulled from outside and pushed through water-soaked cooling pads. The water evaporates, reducing the air’s temperature, and the cool air is then sent into the server rooms.

https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/

[–] derbis@beehaw.org 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Even if so, does evaporating cause it to exit the water cycle?

[–] lechatron@lemmy.today 6 points 11 months ago

These cooling systems remove and release all of the heat produced inside a data center – from servers, IT equipment, and mechanical infrastructure – into the outside environment, through a cooling tower that uses a water evaporation process.

It goes outside and eventually becomes rain.

[–] PenguinTD@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

someone from a totally different thread mentioned that the water can't stay in the system because of whatever mineral stuff from the cooling pipe/anti-algae/anti-corrosive has to leave the system after certain cycles. So unless you have a treatment plant down stream it's not exactly "drinkable" freshwater. (and I doubt water regulation would allow that to happen.)

The consume here means that water is not usable for other application. How? I don't know, maybe it can be used for power wash?

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[–] gus@beehaw.org 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Swamp coolers.

Fans blow over water to lower the pressure, causing evaporation to occur at room temperature.

Evaporating water absorbs heat from its surroundings without raising the water's temperature as it undergoes a phase change. It absorbs nearly 20 times more heat than it would from being heated from 50 degrees F to 100 degrees.

[–] 4am@lemm.ee 5 points 11 months ago

Aquafers do not refill as quickly as industry sucks them dry. It’s not just a Bitcoin or even a cloud computing problem, but the author is using this fact to make Bitcoin look even more ridiculous.

[–] quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone 38 points 11 months ago

Ok thats not even remotely accurate. wtf is this clickbait shit. You can argue that bitcoin is bad for the environment but if you're gonna invent statistics at least make is plausible.

[–] Michal@programming.dev 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

False. Mining is what uses electricity (and water) in bitcoin, not transactions. Adding more transactions does not add to the cost. Calculating consumption per transaction is misleading as the two are not related.

What does add to the cost is complexity, and complexity is calculated based on number of miners in the network in order to achieve the sweet spot of 1 block every 10 mins (if i remember correctly). If there's a lot of competition, each miner will have to use more electricity to win.

[–] peter@lemmy.emerald.show 3 points 11 months ago

Finally someone that get's it

[–] Zworf@beehaw.org 22 points 11 months ago (8 children)

These calculations are a bit off IMO. They factor the total amount of mining and divide it by the number of transactions.

However, the amount of mining is not dependent on the amount of transactions.

I'm not a fan of bitcoin due to the wasteful proof of work mechanism but 'blaming' the transactions is not really fair IMO, especially because people don't really use bitcoin as a payment method anymore. It's just used by speculators now.

[–] Pulptastic@midwest.social 5 points 11 months ago

Wasteful and unsustainable.

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[–] S0L1DX@lemmy.sdf.org 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. BS clickbait

[–] EatATaco@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] gila@lemm.ee 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

Whether the energy consumption of an action is justified depends on the efficiency of the energy use, the practical aim of the action, whether it would replace any more or less efficient actions, and the energy source.

Simply stating it has no purpose and that the energy use of Bitcoin is somehow analogous to mass water wastage, does not seek to investigate whether Bitcoin's energy use is justified. It's disingenuous and reactionary.

[–] EatATaco@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago (5 children)

So the quibble is not with the claim that it uses that much water, only that they didn't do a comparison to other things that meet the same/similar needs?

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[–] Deemo@bookwormstory.social 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I do wonder how this compares to current payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, etc)

[–] GameWarrior@discuss.online 10 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Well my understanding is that visa, MasterCard ECT. Are far more efficient in terms of energy and transaction time when compared to Bitcoin and Ether. Visa uses about a quarter of the power per 100,000 transactions.

So I would assume that would mean fewer data center computers to cool and therefore less water used per transaction

[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

By design.

Bitcoin has pretty much no incentive to make the transactions efficient. The load is distributed to other people (their customers), and their biggest customers have a perverse incentive to want the transactions to be as inefficient as possible in order to discourage competition.

Vista et al have to pay for their own transactions, so keeping it light is simple cost savings and totally rational.

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[–] fwygon@beehaw.org 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not only is the science underlying all these findings completely non-existent, they only "guesstimate" what the water usage of what every thing that uses water is; then blindly divide that by the transaction volume per time period.

Not only is that method highly flawed; it's incorrect. Computers do more than mine crypto; and 1 transaction typically costs not even 1 tenth of a percent of most miners' overall computer resources. This is due to the fact that many miners are utilizing either a GPU or FPGA style device to power optimize and optimize the mathematics necessary to secure a transaction.

[–] JWBananas@startrek.website 7 points 11 months ago

That might have been true a decade ago. But GPUs and FPGAs have long been obsolete for mining Bitcoin.

Mining is happening on custom silicon in large-scale operations. They specifically observed several of those large-scale operations in multiple nations and extrapolated out. I don't see how that methodology is flawed.

[–] Destraight@lemm.ee 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

OP, your "news" article sucks. It's just clickbait

[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 13 points 11 months ago

As tradition I won't read the actual article and only comment on the headline - while BTC is a massive energy waste, it seems unlikely that each transaction would waste so much cooling water. Maybe each mined block, but each block should contain thousands of transactions

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 13 points 11 months ago (3 children)

700kWh per transaction? That's absurd amount of power. That's 70 EUR of energy per one transaction at current (EU) exchange price.

Is there anyone here knowledgeable enough about this issue to say whether those numbers are correct, or just an overestimate? It feels wrong.

[–] quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 11 months ago

They are insanely off, yes.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The number varies a little bit (I've seen estimates 600-1200 kWh) but this is well within an order of magnitude of being correct. It's the nature of the competitive mining network and the proof of work system: if you can spend more computing power (i.e. energy) than everyone else there are lucrative mining rewards to be had. At the same time adding more computing power to the network doesn't add more transaction processing power, because mining difficulty is constantly adjusted to keep the speed more or less constant.

This naturally leads to exorbitant power consumption per transaction. Note that most of this power is not being purchased at EU exchange prices (mining naturally moves to where electricity can be had for cheap to maximize profits).

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 10 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I just hope bitcoin will finally die. It's literally just wasting absurd amount of energy, only to allow scammers to scam billions of dollars from victims, and regular people to steal from eachother by investing into it. I mean, if the only use of bitcoin by now is for speculation and investment, then it means that any dollar you made, you literally stole from someone else who will be left with useless bitcoin once it's all over. There's no value, and with the ledger getting bigger and bigger, and bitcoin more expensive to mine, it will eventually be worthless. And we all know it, so anyone who makes thousands of dollars, there's someone who probably financially ruined himself by making a wrong and stupid investment at the wrong time.

I hate crypto so much :D.

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[–] Michal@programming.dev 8 points 11 months ago

It's incorrect. I would comparing to fuel consumption in a car based on how many times you turned. If you make more turns on your way, it would seem your car is more efficient, when in reality there's very little relation between turns and fuel usage, just like there is little relation between number of blocks mined and transactions.

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 12 points 11 months ago

When the alternative to prove of works (vouched by those hoarding compute resources) is prove of stake (vouched by those who can afford to park piles of money), both are suck for their own reasons.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's a necessary sacrifice to push more ponzi schemes

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[–] Tibert@jlai.lu 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand some things in the water consumption.

Why do they need to humidify the air for the datacenter?

Why is there water consumption for cooling? Aren't they recirculating water used for watercooling? Or are they using f*ing tap water then throwing it out?

Water for electricity production, kinda, yes. Could be indirectly attributed to their water consumption as they are using the electricity produced by the sources using water.

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Why do they need to humidify the air for the datacenter?

Static electricity. Humidified air dissipates static charges before they can build up enough to arc and cause damage to sensitive components.

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[–] cwagner@beehaw.org 8 points 11 months ago

Not even a mention of lightning? I have no idea if it works as I’ve been hearing both yes and no for several years, but writing such an article without mentioning what at least theoretically would be the solution just seems bad.

[–] fosforus@sopuli.xyz 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Ethereum transactions are claimed to use about 1-22 Wh per transaction. Not sure where the wide range comes from, but at least it's quite a lot better then Bitcoin's ~700-2000kWh per transaction. Ethereum is comparable to how much a credit card transaction is said to spend, although those figures only take into account power needed for their computer systems. Blockchain currencies replace a lot more infrastructure than just the computer systems, so I think it's reasonable to say that Eth2 is more energy efficient than credit cards.

That's not enough to make it a replacement for credit cards yet, but it's a good lowest of the low barriers to be crossed to qualify as a replacement.

In a few years, we'll probably be spending a huge amount of power for AI also, and there doesn't seem to be any Proof-of-Stake -like technology to help with that. Good times.

[–] gatelike@feddit.de 5 points 11 months ago

ok then just use salt water. You're welcome nerds!

[–] Pratai@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

The people that care about this sort of thing are incapable of fixing it- and the people that could fix it- don’t care.

My advice? Get used to it. This is the new normal.

[–] TJmCAwesome@feddit.nu 4 points 11 months ago

Or make it illegal. Why waste so many resources on something that doesn't produce any value for society?

[–] JimmyBigSausage@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

Bitcoin is fake so fake story of fakeness.

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