Electricity is too cheap for these uses.
Why is commercial power so cheap and residential so expensive? We could fix two problems by balancing that back.
Because companies > people in the eyes of the state.
It depends on which state, which is even more sad.
Something something job creators….something something trickle down
It’s more like companies = jobs in the eyes of voters.
ETA: What’s with the downvotes? You guys think this is wrong?
I have never once gave a flying fuck about a nebulous concept of “jobs.”
Sounds like you are in a very good position to appreciate how the average voter feels about this.
ETA: I think we’d all be better off if people had a more realistic and practical attitude to jobs.
They don’t produce anything except some numbers. A total waste of energy. I had to laugh when this guy I know who is very “progressive” and environmentally concerned got pissy when I pointed out how much energy was wasted on bitcoin mining just because he was into it.
My comment here is a much better use of energy
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Even if you upload it as an 8k video
My lower-down comment is an even better use of energy
Pfft, my comment is the best use of energy
Right this is the fundamental problem. There needs to be some value to the Blockchain application which the crypto tokens support beyond just token speculation.
no. it just needs to end, as does pretty much our entire economic system, worldwide. and the social systems that support wasteful, destructive living. transform or die. that’s the point we’re at. is humanity up to it? well know within our own lifetimes.
You should check out the impact of gold production also.
JFC how long do we have to wait for a carbon tax
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That’s. That’s the whole point. Things costing their true value.
Business exist to make money (even non profits need to make enough money from either sales or donations to cover operating costs). If something costs them more, it’s going to cost their customers more. This way negative externalities aren’t swept away to become an unmanageable problem in the future. The true cost of consumption is reflected in the price we pay.
What you’re describing as a bad thing is really the system working for good, as it was intended.
Unfortunately they are correct as the carbon tax in Canada is indeed a racket. It’s only on consumer consumption.
- oil exports, our largest source of emissions, are exempt
- agriculture and forestry, the next largest, also exempt
- shipping and rail, oh look, exempt
- heavy industry can buy phoney carbon credits for $5/ton instead of paying the $65/ton tax. Some of these are for forests that have already burned down
- oh yeah the greatest emission source last year, dwarfing all others, 80% of our total emissions came from the massive forest fires for which our policy is just to LET THEM BURN
So the only people who carry the burden of the Canadian carbon tax are the ordinary taxpayers. But hey, the optics are good! Looks very progressive. Despite the fact that Canadian consumer consumption is the definition of a drop in the bucket that is global emissions.
If Canada wanted to make a difference they would nationalize the grid, build nuclear and renewables. Or forget it all for now and just put out the damn fires!
Edit: I forgot one more, as imports are not taxed, the carbon tax actually encourages the import of goods made with coal power in China, over goods made with hydropower in Canada!
Do you have a source of your wildfires cause 80% of our carbon emissions?
Only thing I could find was about 25% which is much different then the number you showed.
I believe it was a CBC article last fall that mentioned it, talking about the massive rise in acres burned from previous years. But I can’t directly give you a link at this time unfortunately, am on mobile and can’t find it either.
I’d be really surprised if you could because it’s a made-up number.
Not made up, but estimated. Rather than find the exact article, here are the numbers after all was said and done:
In 2021, Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 670 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (couldn’t find 2023 quickly on mobile but it will be close)
https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/copernicus-canada-produced-23-global-wildfire-carbon-emissions-2023
The wildfires that Canada experienced during 2023 have generated the highest carbon emissions in record for this country by a wide margin. According to GFASv1.2 data, the wildfires that started to take place in early May emitted almost 480 megatonnes of carbon
470 / 670 = 72%
To be fair this is not 72% of total emissions including wildfire smoke, but wildfires emitted 72% as much as the Canadian economy did.
So yes, it’s not 80% of total emissions - but it’s still a massive amount. Putting out these fires would have had nearly the same effect as shutting down our entire country and letting them burn.
Or you could say letting them burn nearly doubled our emissions, and in the hand-wavey world of emissions accounting you would be pretty close.
I’m Canadian and I support the carbon tax.
I would like to see our government stop subsidizing the fossil fuel companies and establish a national oil fund too.
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I support the carbon tax means that I support the carbon tax that we have.
What form would you like to see?
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I pay almost 30% in taxes to heat my home.
I don’t understand this part of your comment, can you explain it please?
It means for every $10 he gets charged, he’s paying $3 for stuff like gst, carbon tax, etc. $7 is for the actual gas or whatever he is consuming.
And you get CAIP now, which, for most Canadians, especially lower income Canadians, CAIP is greater than the additional cost you pay for goods and services due to the carbon tax.
The carbon tax is quite literally a tax on the rich that gets given to the poor, while at the same time making high carbon intensity products more expensive incentivizing choices that lower carbon emissions.
Only the very rich lose.
The people who speak out against it, are either rich, or they are useful idiots, people who are ignorantly shilling to scrap the tax to their own detriment because they were told by their rich tribe leader it’s bad.
Which one are you?
I love how downvoted you are and how many people can see through this BS.
That sucks. It’s not like climate change is everybody’s problem.
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The tax will just be the cost of doing business. But surely “tHe MarKeT” will correct this by finding cheaper non carbon transport sell a cheaper product.
Personally I support tax of fossile and subsidization of alternatives. Worked like a charm to electrify Norways car park.
The cons are however that increased demand for electricity means building wind, hydro, solar power, with a huge cost to local environent both in most land and the diesel used by construction euipment
There’s still market incentive for reducing emissions. Either lets you charge the same and for higher margins, or reduce prices and be more appealing to consumers.
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Hey, just because companies always choose (and get away with) “make more money by cutting costs” instead of “attract more customers with lower prices” doesn’t mean they have to …right?
When has there been a carbon tax in recent years?
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Any suggestions on how we can actually make corporations pay for the carbon they emit if a carbon tax isn’t it?
Doing nothing is what we have been doing and it isn’t working.deleted by creator
How would you implement that? Like, how do you propose to impose a tax on the company that they can’t just pass along to the customer?
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How would that law work? Unless you’re setting the price as a matter of law, how could you ever prove that a price rise was because of the tax and not “other economic factors”?
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There is no good reason why this isn’t illegal.
Not a good reason, but money.
Not even real money, tech bro phantom bullshit.
The tech bros are convincing stupid people it is real money though. Just like they always have, whether it’s this or something else.
Crypto is the digital coal of our times.
Modern day gold rush.
Digging up more and more dirt for diminishing returns while destroying the environment.
Bitcoin using more and more power for essentially the same.
Misleading title - the problem is not “crypto”, it’s pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top
109 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.Isn’t it strange no one gave a shit about this a year and a half ago when the price was lower? It appears everyone’s concern for the environment and energy consumption only increases when the price goes up. Interesting correlation or may be causation.
Everyone already gave a shit about this a long time ago. It’s also one of the reasons Ethereum switched from proof of work to proof of stake.
Yes but only when the price was high did anyone care and ethereum switch. Barely a peep for the last 2 and a half years
I’ve been hearing about the stupid amount of energy usage for years and years. You just created a straw man that isn’t based on reality.
I’ve been keeping a close eye on the news about crypto and there has been virtually no stories about any crypto for the last 2 years, prior to that when the price was high there were a lot of stories about it which is my point. They only started to come back into circulation about 6 months ago. If you remember otherwise you are wrong.
Destroying the environment and not even for real money
What makes it less real than other fiat currencies, if I may ask? If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I’d argue it is “real money”.
It’s a speculative asset, based on the bigger fool theory. You need to sell it for real money to pay your taxes.
If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I’d argue it is “real money”.
That right there. The vast, vast majority of people don’t think it’s valid, therefore it’s not real money.
You’d think with all of the money they’re pulling in, they’d invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.
Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?
It’s Bitcoin, of course common sense isn’t involved.
I mean, fair, but still. People should push them to go green.
Solar panels give about 100 watts per square meters best case, practically you’ll be on half of that… With the amounts of electricity they use, they’ll need to cover entire nature reserves with solar panels to feed their miners. It’s simply not practical
Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that’s slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
Don’t misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I’d rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.They’d still need some type of battery to make solar work though. They want to mine 24/7.
Wind turbines? Solar thermal? Nuclear in exchange for all of those Bitcoins, perhaps?
Maybe pay off would be so far into the future that they don’t want to risk it? Who knows how long crypto will be a thing.
You can get solar panels for like $100-$200 on Amazon right now. Nice ones. The price of them dropped like a fucking rock since China got involved.
they should be doing that, otherwise I don’t get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn’t worth it to mine cryptocurrency.
no, that’s the magic of speculative market financing
With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don’t know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you’re walking by one of the coin ATMs that’s at one of my local stores I’ve watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks
Vs. Banks. That have offices, branches, atms, data centers… banking does use more energy yearly. So why not both invest in renewables
I agree with you. That still means Bitcoin is on the hook though.
Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd’s 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).
Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.
Mineral resource mining as well
What year do you think we’ll get the first product mined and manufacturered in space? And how about the first space grown food sold commercially?
I would guess 2040 and 2050 respectively, we’ll have the automation tools to get started by 2030 with government science projects then a decade for it to mature into something a company can try to create a market with, probably something that can only be made in low gravity like solve form of novelty such as space glass spheres or a special use material.
I think food will be fast behind because people will pay a lot for it and there’s already a lot of research into it for use in space based living facilities.
There may be some manufacturing processes that need microgravity or a good vacuum and could be be profitable, but I think you are being much too optimistic.
Maybe, it’s so hard to guess which way things will go. I would place a safe bet though that a rich person will buy a bit of jewelry or a watch that was made in space from space mined metals within in the next ten years.
Don’t forget the opportunity cost of achieving orbital velocity.
I’d say ban it but the cat is out of the bag. Tax it and provide alternatives and hopefully it will die.
dude you can totally ban it, it’s not even difficult, you just don’t let them suck up infinite power
Wait till you find out how much energy banking uses…
Per transaction?
Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.
How much? How much of total US power is used by banks? You have a number, right?
Just a PSA that the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (ETH) is no longer proof of work, and in the process, reduced their power consumption by ~98%.
And father.
That’s why I prefer Cardano, it has a good PoS (unlike Ethereum) and uses thousands of time less energy than Bitcoin.
fuck crypto shit ffs
This is as useless as saying “fuck currency shit ffs”.
Crypto isn’t a currency, it’s a commodity for trading. One that doesn’t physically exist. No inherent use and no inherent value.
The vast majority of “real” currencies are fiat currencies and don’t have inherent value or use either.
US dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it’s collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.But there’s so few uses of actually buying things with crypto. People don’t use it as a medium of exchange outside of illicit goods and money laundering. We’re more than a decade into this and using crypto to buy a pizza is still a novelty.
A major proof of this is that FTX collapsed and took a chunk of the crypto market out with it. The market at large shrugged this off. If it were actually linked in to the broader economy, then it would have had similar ripple effects to a major US bank failing.
I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I’m an artist) and to pay my VPS’s rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.
And, honesty, it’s pretty great, compared to alternatives.
Last time I’ve used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.
“Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity”
“Traditional banks’ total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. Totaling 139 TWh.”
Not to mention banks impact on people’s lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class… to purchase disposable products
https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks
Compare Wh vs # transactions. PoW is unsustainable and irresponsible. We need a different way.
I’ve always been a fan of having the USPS provide banking services to everyone. Make it a public service and it is no longer exclusionary.
Proof of work is not even scalable to the level of current bank transactions. Ethereum network didn’t have enough compute to clear the backlog created by some niche cat NFT “game” a few years ago when people still gave a shit about NFTs.
Limited purchasing power of the poor and middle class is a political problem, not a problem solved by tech, no matter what crypto gurus and tech messiahs will tell you. The most prolific crypto miners are the ones that already have more “traditional” capital to invest. So crypto is not solving the wealth divide, it is just making it worse.
I hate banks as much as anyone, but crypto is not the solution.
