News Each Bitcoin transaction consumes 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages

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bill001g

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Seems someone that dislikes bitcoin wants to write another study of why it is bad. This is really just a variation of the bitcoin wastes electricity argument. The miner machines themselves do not directly use water almost all the so called usages is related to evaporation that happens during the power generation.

You really could write a study for any computer related activity you disagree with. Look at how much power youtube or tik tok uses all for the greedy advertisers to make their money. You could easily come up with a chart that shows how much water was used per ad shown.

I do not use crypto but it irritates me when people try to use environment as a argument against anything they disagree with.

I wonder how much water is wasted by certain authors at certain universities in Amsterdam writing article after article about why bitcoin is bad.
 
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bit_user

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bill001g said:
The miner machines themselves do not directly use water almost all the so called usages is related to evaporation that happens during the power generation.
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Some data centers use evaporative cooling, which does indeed remove water from the local watershed. They do this because it's more efficient (i.e. reduces electricity costs), hence I'd expect some large-scale bitcoin miners to do the same.

bill001g said:
You really could write a study for any computer related activity you disagree with. Look at how much power youtube or tik tok uses all for the greedy advertisers to make their money. You could easily come up with a chart that shows how much water was used per ad shown.
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Sure, but the amount depends greatly on the computation involved, which is much less for ads. Serving up a website ad probably takes millijoules, if that.

bill001g said:
I do not use crypto but it irritates me when people try to use environment as a argument against anything they disagree with.
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What evidence do you see that they're merely using water consumption as an excuse to slam bitcoin?

We should consider the possibility that they're indeed concerned primarily with water conservation. Some people do worry about that, because water scarcity is a real problem and groundwater is finite resource that's being rapidly depleted in many arid regions.

It seems some of the paper's authors also have critiques of the resource consumption of AI and the Metaverse:

So, it doesn't seem to me they're just singling out crypto.
 
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KADC

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I don't want to dismiss this article outright, but it seems to freely conflate mining with transactions, consumption with usage, and large-scale operations with any other setup equivalence.

That aside, the figures aren't particularly useful without some baseline comparisons to typical water usage in other server farms to know if that's a lot, a little, or just average. How much water is "consumed" by YouTube, Facebook, X/Twitter, Google, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, ICBC, the global banking system collectively, the Pentagon, etc.?

Finally, why the focus on Bitcoin? The article states it's a particular concern without stating the difference in water usage against other cryptocurrencies that makes it so. After the next halving event (predicted to occur in April 2014) will there even be a single system anywhere in the world still dedicated to Bitcoin mining ? Won't a large portion of the Bitcoin water usage issue simply evaporate when that happens?

While it does mention changes to Ethereum, it fails to state what the actual water usage reduction was; something which would be particularly insightful since Ethereum can no longer be mined thus the water usage would be strictly transactional. The article suggests other cryptocurrencies should adopt similar methods but fails to point out that ending mining entirely in order to adopt a system where the largest stakeholders gain shares faster isn't a practical consideration for less mature cryptocurrencies even if one overlooks the obvious fairness issue that introduces.
 
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Commodore_64

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I am not a fan of bit coins, but water is not destroyed and gone for ever. It may cause demand to exceed capacity, but the water remains on earth.
 
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-Osbert- said:
I mined crypto for four years and never used a single drop of water.
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As the article points out, they're including power-generation in the total. So, do you know that your power is generated 100% from some combination of wind, solar (photovoltaic), and hydro-electric?

Another pernicious thing about bitcoin is that it involves increasing amounts of computation, as time goes on.

punkncat said:
so many people think transitioning off to electric vehicles on this same power grid is only going to save the planet...
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If there wasn't also a push to shift power-generation over to wind & solar, you might have a point.

Commodore_64 said:
I am not a fan of bit coins, but water is not destroyed and gone for ever. It may cause demand to exceed capacity, but the water remains on earth.
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They're talking about it being removed from the watershed. If you live along the same river as me, and I evaporate a gallon of water to cool my server, that steam will condense and rain somewhere else - probably into a different river. Meanwhile, a gallon less water is flowing downstream to where you are, meaning you now have that much less water to use for whatever you need to do (e.g. crop irrigation, chip making, etc.).

An obvious problem with the headline claim is that someone might be consuming water where it's abundant. One gallon of water doesn't have the same value, everywhere. They do highlight water usage in some places where it's more scarce.

JTWrenn said:
It's just wasteful tech no other way around it. We should outlaw brutr force crypto. Force all of it to move to stake.
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I'd much rather see resource usage taxed appropriately than to see stuff getting outlawed. If you just make it too expensive, that will stop it because people won't do it if it's no longer profitable.

Part of the unique problem with crypto is that it can so easily move to the jurisdictions with the most lax taxes/laws/enforcement.
 
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bit_user

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USAFRet said:
"Each Bitcoin transaction..."

Each gaming session...
Each reddit post...
Each tweet...
Each and every spam email...
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Yes? We're waiting. The actual numbers are the part that matters. If you're going to say "3 ml", per email or post then it wouldn't seem like much of a problem.

Gaming sessions, on the other hand, should be really interesting. Let's have those numbers and we'll see some real nerd rage!
 
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USAFRet

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bit_user said:
Yes? We're waiting. The actual numbers are the part that matters. If you're going to say "3 ml", per email or post then it wouldn't seem like much of a problem.

Gaming sessions, on the other hand, should be really interesting. Let's have those numbers and we'll see some real nerd rage!
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Seeing as SPAM is estimated to be at least 1/2 the total traffic on the interwebs...2/3 of ALL emails sent...

I'm just saying, this article could have been written with anything as the target waster.
 
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tomachas

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It says nothing about how exactly these gallons were used.
Obviously water for the cooling is reused too. Was that taken into account.
How about all they rain water that is being wasted when it goes down the drain!
 
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tomachas said:
It says nothing about how exactly these gallons were used.
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The Toms article doesn't - it's just telling us about the publication of an academic paper, which does. If you're interested, you might want to read it. Toms articles nearly always have a link to their sources, if you look carefully.

tomachas said:
Obviously water for the cooling is reused too. Was that taken into account.
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From the paper:

"Water withdrawal pertains to the water taken from surface water or groundwater sources, while water consumption refers to the portion of water that becomes unavailable for reuse after withdrawal, primarily due to evaporation in cooling systems."
​

tomachas said:
How about all they rain water that is being wasted when it goes down the drain!
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Once it has evaporated, it often rains down into another watershed, particularly in arid regions where water scarcity is an issue.

Speaking of the original journal publication, I'd add that I'm surprised nobody seems to have tackled its core claim of exactly how much water is consumed. I'm not defending that and I'll bet there's room for debate, there. If I were particularly invested in the matter, I'd take a hard look at their rationale and supporting data.
 
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bit_user

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svan71 said:
Thankfully, 75% of the planet surface is water.
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Having water (and not too much), where & when you need it is the tricky part. Salt water can also be problematic to use for many purposes and desalination is expensive & energy-intensive.

Lastly, water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas. Even more so than CO2. I'm not saying evaporative cooling is a significant contributor to global temperature rise, but it seems plausible. Would be interesting to have some data on that.
 
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