Gordon Stein, CFO of CleanTech Lithium, explains why CTL acquired the 23 Laguna Verde licenses. Watch the video here.
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Just reading through this, the original MIT / Nederlandsche Bank paper is primarily about the lifecycle and e-waste of redundant BTC mining hardware, which seems a perfectly legitimate question, whether it is 1.5 years or 3 years. What happens to all of those machines, can they be recycled for any other purpose or are they all dumped on a third world country like Ghana or Bangladesh for stripping down like a lot of other toxic electronic waste from the developed world ? The trouble with the article is that it reframes the original research paper really poorly, making generalised comments about one BTC transaction being equivalent to binning two i-phones, which surely is just nonsense ( the article has already fairly quickly been pulled from the main page). But as a shareholder in a carbon-neutral mining company (which l think is a great policy), l'd be interested to know from PW what happens to all of the old machines. Seems like a fair question to me.
On energy consumption, bitcoin being mined in containers remotely is a game changer for green energy adoption. It uses stranded energy in remote uninhabitable locations. It allows energy producers to get more profitable. It allows energy arbitrage, allowing variable consumption/shut down during peaks etc. The real question should be: how much energy is bitcoin stealing/diverting from other consumers? And what effect does a mining op have on energy tariffs? Because let’s face it, the total energy available for harnessing is infinite. The revolution has barely begun.
@Amanensia, You're right, I'd be more concerned about how the hell I'd travel 6000ml back to my rice farm with most transport systems being u/s as well, It's a long swim :-)
Proof of stake inevitably results in centralisation, completely against the tenet. Not happening in Bitcoin imho. And ETH likely to lose some hard core believers when it switches. It’s why I m in ETC. It has the same attributes of ETH, but stays POW. Just my two pence. A lot to read and understand, I concede quite a lot of it outside my grasp intellectually :)
The study was by Dutch central bank & MIT. The former is protecting its lunch and could Gensler have any influence over the latter?
I love that idea!
Yep Lotto, completely understand the argument. It remains to be seen whether proof-of-stake is an answer; computational complexity is replaced by investment, but then presumably for that investment to have what we can call "difficulty value", it can't really be bought by fiat currency...
Probably just stupid random musing but perhaps a system could be imagined where a cryptocurrency is still the reward for a difficult problem, but the problem itself is negative-carbon. One Greencoin for verifiably removing x tonnes of carbon from circulation...!
@Lottohopes Ditto "this is a healthy debate to have". ATB
Grayem: so if a solar storm of that proportion hits our beloved earth, frying every electric equipment going, do we think our bitcoin or gold holding will be our main worry? Nice try.
Grayem - if we get a CME event on the scale that it destroys all Bitcoin-related hardware, that will be the very least of our worries!
Amanensia: this is a healthy debate to have. The point they make is: the commodity (bitcoin coin or gold) being difficult to “produce” or being incredibly energy intensive, is not a bad attribute. It’s a good attribute. At a very basic level one can’t have something from nothing. Which is what Fiat money supply has become in my eyes.
Does the figure of 1.29 years ( rubbish anyway) factor in immersion technology ?
@ Lottohopes, there's more of an existential threat it's called a Carrington Event when a solar storm fries electrical equipment, the gold will still be there but there'll be no trace of Bitty anywhere, who owns what, the blockchain, zilch. AFAIK there's no way of protecting against it. Maybe if there's enough time to record the info on hard matter, but nothing magnetic is likely to be safe either.
Good post Lottohopes, and I agree with pretty much all of it. But perception is (almost) everything, and Bitcoin is a very easy and very visible target. The "Bitcoin uses more energy than " rhetoric is out there, and that's a genie that can't be put back in the bottle. We won't deflect that criticism easily by just saying "gold is just as bad" (not that you were suggesting we could.)
It's a problem, of course, whatever anyone's personal views on climate change are - even the most vehement "denier" must understand that their individual views are not relevant to the argument overall. Personally, I'm the polar opposite of a denier, but again that's neither here nor there.
“If there is an existential threat to Bitcoin, it's power consumption. I don't say this from any judgemental position whatsoever - it just is.”
There are debates about this. Creating money easily, from thin air has brought us to where we are. If money has to have its intrinsic attributes, it needs to produced via a process that has costs. It’s the same with gold our competition. Why has gold got value? Partly because producing it COSTS. Its energy intensive.
Gold production is dirty, energy intensive, destroys any number of pristine landscapes. The waste from gold mining (tailings) in many instances wrecks havoc on the environment, decades after the gold is mined. Wafi Golpu for ex intended to dump tailings into the ocean. Nearly a third of all gold mined is artisanal, ie uses heavy metal, destroys water bodies, affects the health of labour; creates dissocial cultures where it operates (arms, prostitution drugs, child labour etc).
Every ounce of gold produced: add in the above costs. Add the cost of mine closure, remedial work to the environment. Add in the ONGOING costs of storing gold. Protecting it. That’s the TRUE cost per ounce. Ditto for the USD and any other Fiat.
Exactly what does bitcoin cost, to hold, to transact? After it’s produced. Rhetorical q.
It’s fascinating that folks who are gold bugs ignore these aspects of the “full cycle costs” for gold. Ditto with nuclear. Full cycle costs are unsustainable imho. Just my musings.
which is why there's been so much movement recently to hedge with ETH as it heads towards proof of stake. London update is due December.
Any idea if there is any work in the pipeline to reduce energy consumption?
I'm seeing a move to green energy sources, but surely the future is a combination of that + less net energy needed.
Yes BTT
Governments, banks and big companies are the only fud spreaders that effect the price of btc, now its so high
If there is an existential threat to Bitcoin, it's power consumption. I don't say this from any judgemental position whatsoever - it just is.
even so... if you don't move your investments out of high carbon stocks before too long you're going to start losing money, PW is rightly aware of this
Bitcoin is Global - a UK paper isn't going to have any relevance on what happens to the BTC movement...waste of ink!
Didn't bother to read that article as has a feeling it would contain FUDs.
But, what I thought was that I will be happy to throw and even smash 3x iphones to pieces, if you give me 1x measly BTC! Come on guardian! Give me that 1x BTC and I will make you happy!
The underlying issue is a serious one though, which the market will require to be addressed going forward, and why precisely ARB needs to stay on the front foot with the Climate accord, renewables and net carbon negative operations etc. Increasingly, companies that don't tick the boxes won't be included in fund and pensions indexes.
Always fud causing Btc to drop just at the wrong time, otherwise we should be over £1.60 resistance by now
Found this obvious spin particularly outrageous:
"That’s the weight of two iPhone 12 minis."
They've clearly found the lightest phone to equate to so it looks worse.