Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy?
Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong
Edit: Good responses from everyone, my point in asking this was completely hypothetical, ignoring how hard it would be to implement a restriction. My own thoughts are that requiring the use of renewable energy for high electricity products could help spur the demand for it as now it's a requirement. Of course companies would fight back, they want money
Since it's a common mistake when discussing cryptocurrency energy use, I should point out that it's really only Bitcoin specifically that uses significant amounts of electricity these days. Most other cryptocurrencies have switched to proof of stake systems, which uses negligible energy.
Just to expand on this, While eth is 99.99% less energy use than Bitcoin, it still added 2.8 kilotonnes of co2 last year which is equal to about 2000 average houses for a year.
It's a negligible amount in the scheme of things, but a lot for a virtual currency especially when you add up all the various cryptocurrencies out there.
It wouldn't hurt to make all the POS ones use green energy, but probably wouldn't impact anything by itself.
Changing Bitcoin to green energy alone probably would however.
Why is it "a lot for a virtual currency?" What's the typical energy usage of a virtual currency?
In 2019 Visa used 740,000 gigajoules of energy, which is equivalent to 6727 households (google dug up a figure of 110 Gj/year for that). So this really doesn't seem like a lot for this kind of thing.
By your estimate, visa used 3.4x the power of eth. I would guess visa handles much much more than 3.4x the volume of currency transactions and is way more efficient on energy.
The thing that everyone misses in these comparisons is that yes that’s the energy that VISA expended to make these transactions but for a crypto currency the energy use isn’t even to make the transaction. In the end each transaction is a few Bytes of data that have no difficulty getting across the world (much like this post or any comment). The energy use is so “high” because that’s is used to secure the currency. And of course that’s a much harder comparison to make but a fairer one.
How much energy does the the banking system actually use? How much energy is used to secure the US dollar for example?
You have to account for the entirety of it. That’s like saying that F1 doesn’t pollute all that much because they use bio fuel and the cars are very energy efficient, completely disregarding the fact that the majority of the pollution is in the constant global shipping of cars and gear, as well as R & D
Ethereum did approximately 1.1m transactions a day. Visa did approximately 660m a day.
Small difference lol
Probably, but Ethereum does a lot of things that Visa can't. Visa transactions are exceedingly simple. It was just the only generally comparable thing I could think of that I could get energy figures for, do you know of any better examples?
And that's just Visa.
https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/data/2012/c&e/cfm/pba4.php
That lists the energy usage of banking and financial office space to be 18 billion kWh, or 64.8 petajoules. (About 87x that Visa figure.)
And even that is just office space. Doesn't factor in the manufacture, distribution, transport, storage, and disposal of physical money, or any other associated costs.
On the flip side, global banking processes something like 5+ orders of magnitude more transactions than ETH, so even at the low end it’s 1000x more efficient than the most well known POS coin.
Acting like 2000 average houses is a lot of power consumption for a cryptocurrency with such an unimaginably high market cap... That's basically a rounding error.
I specifically said it's negligible if you bothered to read past that line
Where did I say I was disagreeing with you, mate?
Sorry, I've had like 2 hours sleep in the last 2 days so I'm tired and grumpy lol, just ignore me
There's an estimated 2.2 billion residences on earth. That's a pretty small percentage 😅
Everything above 0% is not neglible for such uselessly decadent endeavours as cryptocurrency.
Who decides what "negligible" is? It's unnecessary and we're living in a climate crisis.
Greedy arrogant cryptobros decides that obviously.
Interesting, is it because of competition requiring more machines? What about something like Monero?
It's because proof-of-stake is fundamentally different from how proof-of-work operates.
The fundamental problem that all blockchains need to solve is something called the Byzantine Generals Problem. A blockchain needs to consist of a list of transactions that everyone agrees on - everyone needs to be able to know which transactions are part of the list, and what order they appear on that list. But there can't be any central "authority" making that decision, it has to be done in a completely decentralized way.
The way proof of work does it is that it requires people adding transactions to the list to do some extremely expensive calculations and attach the results of those calculations to the transactions that they're adding. Anyone can do those calculations so there's no central authority, but the costliness of the calculations means that once the transactions are added it becomes just as expensive to create a substitute set of transactions. So everyone ends up agreeing on what transactions were added because it would be unfeasably costly to "fake" an alternative history to the blockchain. This means it's impossible to make a proof-of-work chain that isn't hugely "wasteful", because the waste is the point of it. It has to be costly for it to work.
Proof-of-stake takes a very different approach. It solves the same basic problem - determining which transactions are part of the chain in a decentralized manner - using some very fancy cryptography that I have to admit that I don't fully understand. But instead of proving that the transactions you're adding are "trustworthy" due to proving you've wasted a whole lot of resources adding them, you do it by putting up a "stake." You lock a big sum of money in your cryptocurrency staking account and essentially make it a hostage to your good behaviour. If you put up a bad transaction you can lose your stake. So under proof-of-stake there's simply no need to burn huge amounts of electricity.
Monero uses a proof-of-work algorithm like Bitcoin. The reason Monero doesn't use anywhere near as much energy as Bitcoin is simply because it isn't worth as much and so not as many people are mining it. If Monero was worth as much as Bitcoin the energy usage would rise to become comparable.
Also over half is used by green energy already and will continue to grow
There is a caveat to this. It’s been a few years since I read the article, but oftentimes the reason Bitcoin miners run on renewables is because they set up shop in places that have established local cheap electricity.
The example in the article was a town with ideal geography for hydro power, to the point electricity was cheap enough to sell it to the next town over. Crypto-miners set up in the first town and quickly began using more power, driving up the cost and eventually causing serious issues for the second town as there wasn’t enough electricity leftover to send their way anymore.
I'm no fan of Bitcoin, but often the energy they use from hydro plants is energy that would literally be wasted otherwise. A hydro dam can't control how much water is entering the reservoir, so if there's more water entering the reservoir than is needed to generate electricity for the current demand then the dam will need to just throw the extra water away. Trying to transmit the electricty to remote markets can be an alternative, but that costs resources too and isn't always practical.
I dug up the original article: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/
In this case, they already were exporting 80% of the hydro-energy generated, about enough to power Los Angeles in 2018 when it was written. Maybe there are some cases for your suggestion on a small scale, but if a site is generating enough excess electricity to make mining worthwhile, why would it be less worthwhile to connect it to a larger grid?
The hydro plant for my city doesn't even have a reservoir. It's just on a river that flows down a mountain. And 99.999% of the water doesn't go through any turbines.
Having said that - it doesn't produce enough power for the city, let alone spare to be wasted on other things.
I’ve read different stories. Of towns where cheap and renewable electricity can be made but it’s financially not viable especially at the start. So Bitcoin miners were used to sell the excess energy and that made the project possible. In a way something like Bitcoin can create a global price/demand for electricity which can have its advantages like I mentioned or disadvantages like you mentioned.
I’ll concede there’s probably something to miners footing the initial capital to build the infrastructure, and if it’s in a remote area it may be prohibitively expensive for public utilities to extend the grid to it. But mining setups still require high internet speed connections to use the network, and I just have to wonder if installing that is a better use of resources than installing power lines to take some load off non-renewable power sources.
They don’t require high internet speed at all. Why do you say that? You have to keep up with the network that creates a couple MBs of data every 10mins. That’s it. You need processing power and as such electricity but none of that requires high speed internet, quite the contrary. You can get away with a mobile data in most places.
There's a sentence in the article I linked to in another comment that, in the city the article was about, there were data centers for Microsoft and similar companies that had required high-speed internet infrastructure be built in town despite its small size. I suppose, based on what you said, that speed wouldn't be too essential but you would want stability to maintain a connection. Satellite internet probably wouldn't be great for that (maybe Starlink is?) in which case you still want to run some kind of cable.
A law in which country? What would you do if someone in a different country doesn't want to follow that?
just ask the president of the world nicely to make the rule
Would be nice, but we haven't yet achieved global unity.
Then miners would siphon off renewable energy and other more polluting sources would be used to power the remainder.
They’re not gonna build more green power supply just to help out crypto miners.
They would if we cut them off from the grid. All Bitcoin does now is raise electricity bills. Let them build solar farms and buy batteries if they insist on mining something useless to 99% of humanity.
You think these clowns are going to build anything? They’re just leeches trying to make money by doing nothing other than letting computers run.
No, but crypto miners could fund a boom in green energy industry if they bought their own panels, wind turbines, battery banks, etc.
They could. But they won’t.
You think a bunch of people Mining crypto for greed are gonna altruistically buy green energy?
Not altruistically, but if laws were made and enforced to where green energy was the most financially rewarding way to power their mining rigs, they'd do it.
Problem is energy from the grid is just energy. You'd get crypto companies buying "green" energy leaving the dirty enegery for everyone else. It'd be meaningless.
Ultimately crypto mining is a pointless industry. It benefits the miners financially but doesn't produce anything meaningful, while expending huge amounts of energy and polluting the world as a result. It's also an extremely energy wasteful way to run the infrastructure needed to maintain crypto currencies.
It wouldn't matter if we were in some Nuclear fusion powered utopia with an abundance of energy. But we're not - we're in the middle of a climate crisis and desperately trying to move over to green energy. Growing demands for energy for crypto is countering that.
The real solution is to tax crypto mining - for example tax then on every kWh they use. Regions that entice crypto operations in are chasing fools gold - the costs out weight any local economic benefits of new data centres being built.
While being right about crypto being meaningless for some people (I guess there are people valuing hope in decentralized monetary system, even if it is misplaced.), you failed to mention that most of other industries are equally meaningless and good part of them are even harmful: fashion, fast food, industrial food, banking - in a way we have it, cars in current form(no need for this huge tanks)...
In comparation crypto is just wasteful and isn't harming anyone.
If you mean their own green energy that they have to buy, set up, and maintain on their own, then sure. Force them off grid and bring enormous financial consequences if they pollute to make their energy
They would just set up in Kazakhstan or something. How does that help? There's no way everyone in the world passes the same law
It is a waste of energy either way which could have been used for actual useful purposes. So no, that is not a helpful solution.
Make a law to power everything with green energy
Like a carbon tax? We've been talking about that for years.
Why not use that energy for something useful?
It could help a bit, but I think then there would just be less green energy available for the other applications.
They would get around that with green washing the way a lot of companies are these days.
It all depends on the details, but power is a local produced good and is not something that can be escaped with laws that want to stop carbon emissions.
You say that like the laws we have right now against carbon emissions are working. I get what you're saying but the laws probably need a re-write.
The current laws most certainly do not work. The fact that they don't work is a willing failure on the part of the lawmakers.
Why not just pass a law that no one can generate electricity except from green sources? It sounds so easy when I put it like that.
Are you thinking that sprinkling the buzzwords "AI" and "Crypto" on an "only green energy" kind of provision would allow lawmakers to leverage hype to cut through right-wing resistence to green energy mandates in a way that a more blanket (or even just not-Crypto/AI-focused) provision couldn't?
Um - those laws have been passed in many countries. Usually with a reasonable approach such as "you can continue operating the coal plants that were already built, but no more can be built".
What's actually happening around the world though is those plants are becoming too expensive to run, so they're shutting down even if they are allowed to continue to operate. Renewable power is just cheaper.
About two thirds of global electricity production is zero emission now and it'll be around 95% in a 25 years or so.
Source (note: this is a "renewables" article, not a "zero emission" article. Some non-renewable energy produces zero emissions and there's not expected to be much movement on that in the foreseeable future): https://renewablesnow.com/news/renewables-produce-85-of-global-power-nearly-50-of-energy-in-2050-582235/
Yeah, I know. I just wondered what putting a "but only for AI and crypto applications" as OP said added to the conversation.
In civilized places, e.g. not the U.S. (it's cool, I'm American), where it's not a struggle to get any environmental legislation passed, adding "AI and crypto" to the conversation is unnecessary. In the U.S. where the minority of conspiracy theorists get what they want through cheating, I doubt adding AI and crypto to the conversation is going to help any.
Force this unnecessary tech bullshit to invest in becoming self-sufficient through green energy
Too much
T - double O. It's a different word.
Although "so much" would probably be a better fit anyway
I actually meant to say so instead of to, but it ended up working out
Fixed it
Fair enough. I didn't assume that because S & T are separated on the keyboard. Autocorrect can do weird stuff though.
There is no such thing as "green" energy, all energy has an environmental extraction/capture cost. Crypto has insane per user power usage, AI isn't quite as bad but it's still much higher than normal websearch. Both should be used sparingly in cases where they actually make sense.
I would say this is a dangerous slope to go down, since electricity is just electricity and IMO shouldn't matter how it's used as long as it's payed for. It's like the Net Neutrality situation where it shouldn't matter how/what data is being transmitted through their network shouldn't be discriminated for/against as long as it's getting payed for.
Tax the greenhouse effect from the energy production, UBI to give people the money to afford what they need.
Trying to moralize every action on the market is a losing game though. I mean is this, the fediverse, worth the energy, are games, streaming, plant lights for your indoor plants?
It's better to leave that to be individuals choices but make sure that the cost of the consequences are on the individual making the choices.
Only proof of work crypto currencies require a ton of energy and the only way it's profitable is by buying energy that would otherwise be wasted like methane flaring or excess renewable generation.
Something topic-adjacent is going down in BC, Canada right now.
We had a large timber company that branched out into crypto mining, augmented with solar. They made an absolute killing with this pivot, and wanted to expand. But need a metric fuck-ton of electricity. The local utility company denied them, citing their own issues with keeping up with demand in the near future. The timber company sued them, and I think it settled to this:
https://vancouversun.com/business/local-business/crypto-mining-company-loses-bid-to-force-bc-hydro-power
Super interesting story - thanks for sharing. Helps getting perspective:
> the data centres proposed by Conifex would have consumed 2.5 million
> megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s enough to power and heat
> more than 570,000 apartments
@Wiitigo @technology
Carbon offsets and credits, Wikipedia
The bigger operations already are using so called green energy. There are large operations in the north west where hydro is abundant and cheap.
This might be a few years off but I am considering setting up a farm where I am. We are planning on a very large solar installation at some point in the near future and we will probably have way more supply than we can use. I wouldn't mine btc but running some other algo hardware and throwing it at nicehash or other smart pools would probably be a good use of that power assuming I can get the hardware cheap enough.
No one with any working braincells is running larger than at home operations on standard power costs in most of the country. My state has some of the lowest cost power in the US and it's still not profitable to mine most coins and it doesn't get much better with commercial rates. I'd also bet that the larger AI farms will also do what they can to run on solar, wind, etc so that they pay as little as possible for power.
Who defines "too much"?
"to much"
That would actually not do anything.
So there’s this stupid thing called carbon capture right? It’s where instead of putting money into useful things there’s these companies that use a lot of resources on machines that take CO2 out of the atmosphere. The companies claim that they use “green” energy, but it doesn’t. As earmarked as that may be these machines still just use grid energy, which still uses fossil fuels. All it does is take some capacity to replace fossil fuels from green energy.
You mean "carbon offset", not "carbon capture". Carbon capture is where you extract carbon out of the air and make concrete or something else out of it. Capture isn't widely done but likely will be soon.
Carbon offsets are very useful. They paid for a sizeable portion of the solar installation on my home for example. Which has cut my household power emissions by about two thirds and that's with us selling about 80% of the generated power to the grid (where it reduces emissions for other households).
First, you need to separate power hungry crypto from AI, one provides a real benefit while the other is a useless fiat that can be accomplished without dumping gigawatts down the drain. If you want to trade crypto that’s fine, just don’t use a vulgar amount of society’s power to do it.
Which is which ?
We really need to grow past this idea that just because you don't personally use or like a thing that it is useless. Who are you to get to decide what has value and what doesn't? If there wasn't value, no-one would buy or use it. The unspoken part of this argument that gets repeated so often is that the reasons people are interested in the thing are reasons associated with groups you've been told very confidently don't matter. Lack of control from the government? Only a nasty conservative/libertarian hick who "don't like no GuBmint" would want something like that. Anonymity/privacy reasons (I know, only for for certain coins)? Only a scammer would want that, why care about privacy if you have nothing to hide?
None of this is even promoting or saying I'm pro crypto, just saying these are poor arguments.
As an example, as someone who doesn't follow any sports whatsoever, I could argue the amount of resources and travel for this big football game coming up are vulgar. I mean come on, I don't care about this game so why should anyone else be allowed to use resources on it?
Inevitably, you will come back and say but sports offers X, Y, and Z real benefits. If I were to continue the analogy of the inverted argument, the next argument is ALWAYS: "Yes, true, but it's not the absolute best or most efficient at X, Y, or Z so therefore that doesn't count". It could very well be argued that any benefits coming from the super bowl could be done in cheaper, more environmentally friendly ways. Do we cancel this game then? Is anyone who is interested in it a POS?
This was an example, I actually realize there are tons of benefits to sports even though I don't get much at all out of it personally. But it's part of becoming a well adjusted person to realize people are going to have different values and I don't get to decide what is important to them, or that because they are part of an out group their interests and values don't matter.
To make one more example, if someone said they put their life savings in gold in their safe to prep for some doomsday scenario, I certainly wouldn't agree at all that it was a good choice. A fairly objective case could be made that it is in fact the wrong/bad decision, however I still don't get to decide their values don't matter just because I don't agree with them, or more importantly because Reddit/Lemmy folks told me confidently that those values only belong to preppers/conservatives/libertarians/etc etc and also that those are bad people.