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

[George³]

Yes all net business revenue is taxable, doesn't matter if I'm selling hotdogs, cars, frisbees or financial services.

Also when you buy goods you can pay Vat or sales tax if you is US citizen.

 

[gg83]

Crypto"currencies" are dumb, especially since they're just commodities to bypass regulations for currencies.

That out of the way, it's absolutely nuts that they use still that much power, but given that they chose the brute-force method for distributed proofs, it kind of makes sense.

Not only is the concept unsustainable from a planetary concern, it's also financially unsustainable entirely, I'm not sure why there's whackos here mad about their tulips on a ledger.

It's a way for retail investors to give all they're money to the rich. All about the fomo.

 

[palladin9479]

Also when you buy goods you can pay Vat or sales tax if you is US citizen.

Oh your international... that explains .. a lot.

Quick class on the USA, first don't think of it as one country, it's more like 50 smaller countries bunched together, think EU only much tighter.

So each State has it's own Constitution, government, laws and business rules. The Federal government only gets involved when it comes to regulating interstate commerce. We don't have "VAT" because each State has it's own internal tax code, Florida has a different sales tax system then Texas or California. There is no federal "sales tax" as that power is reserved for the States. Local sales taxes fall into the category of business expenses and are deducted from gross revenue and therefor act as a discount to net revenue tax.

In other words, there is a reason so many business's are incorporated in Delaware.

 

[helper800]

They are saying that each transaction requires the cooling worth of 4200 gallons, which is plainly wrong. Like insanely out of this world wrong. Do you realize how much energy it takes to boil 4200 gallons or water?

Water requires the input of 4.2 KJ to raise each kilogram by 1 degree centigrade. A gallon of water weighs 3.79 kilograms. Assuming you're raising it from 20C to 100C, the energy required is 4.2 KJ * 3.79 kg * 80C = 1273.44 KJ, or roughly one-third of a kilowatt-hour to bring the water to a boil. 4200 gallons would be 5,348,448 KJ worth of energy. 1kg of TnT has 4.6 million J worth of energy. That article is trying to say that each BtC transaction is 5,348kg's worth of TnT, or 5.3 megagram which is also known as ton.

That ... is a lot of power, like power a home for hundred years type power. We are not setting off a bombs worth of power every time someone trades crypto. Basic physics knowledge says none of that article checks out.

I think you did some of the math wrong there, but I get the point. I am no stranger to math and to some extent physics. I believe the correct conversion of KJ of energy would be 1162.7 kg of TNT. If 1kg of TNT is 4.6 million joules, which is 4,600 KJ, 5,348,448 KJ / 4600 KJ = 1162.7 KG of TNT worth of energy to boil 4200 gallons of water.

 

[punkncat]

Yeah ... this article is BS, evaporation does not "use up" fresh water.
Every day the sun evaporates a trillion tons (1,000,000,000,000) of water across the globe. This comes out to be about something like 1,400 cubic kilometers worth of water or 1.4 x 10^15 liters. This water does not simple disappear, it goes into the atmosphere where it forms clouds, those clouds drift around on winds where they eventually dump that water back onto the surface in the form of rain.

The numbers used by server farms is laughable in the greater picture.

Thank you for pointing out what seemed so blatantly obvious. I figured more people would have caught on when poster on the first page pointed out the comment about matter not being destroyed, simply changing state. The foolishness of the whole premise is clearly displayed over the last couple of page comments. This article is ecological alarmism driven drivel and nothing more.

 

[Bluoper]

Nuclear is an interesting topic because from an engineering point of view it's absolutely amazing. One nuclear plant, even old Gen II PWR types, can replace multiple coal and gas plants. Gen IV MSR's or LFTR's are one to two orders of magnitude more efficient then that old PWR design. Yes that is 10~100x more efficient because Gen II designs only consumed 1~3% of the available energy inside the fuel rods due to neutron poisoning + embrittlement making the rods completely unusable after consuming such small amounts of available energy. All the Gen IV designs involve refueling onsite via chemical reprocessing where you extract impurities and neutron poisons while inserting more fissionable material. Far less waste produced.

We don't see them because there has been a decades long moratorium on certification for new reactor designs. Only reactor designs under a certain size can be certified, which is how the US Navy gets around the moratorium. It's also why we are hearing about SMR's, they are trying to leverage that exception to certify small power plants.

We'd get them a bit faster if they got more Investment from governments but a lot of the funding goes to fusion witch is probably at least 60 years away.

 

[palladin9479]

I think you did some of the math wrong there, but I get the point. I am no stranger to math and to some extent physics. I believe the correct conversion of KJ of energy would be 1162.7 kg of TNT. If 1kg of TNT is 4.6 million joules, which is 4,600 KJ, 5,348,448 KJ / 4600 KJ = 1162.7 KG of TNT worth of energy to boil 4200 gallons of water.

Was doing the napkin math quickly but even 1162.7kg of TNT is ridiculous.
Here is a video of the Hamilton nuclear test that had a yield of 1.2 tons of TNT. They were experimenting with how low a yield was possible with a tactical nuclear device, this test was considered a dud as most of the material didn't undergo fission.

The article was stating one of those was going off for every bitcoin transaction. Explosive yields are particularly applicable to this article because network transactions are expected to happen very fast with 1s being "long". Flash boiling 4200 gallons of water, which is what would happen if a calculation "used" enough energy to turn 4200 gallons of water into steam, requires an insane amount of energy.

 

[palladin9479]

We'd get them a bit faster if they got more Investment from governments but a lot of the funding goes to fusion witch is probably at least 60 years away.

Well fusion is quite close, they've already moved onto commercial applications. Gen IV fission was developed and proven to work in the 70's.

Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Like I said, the reason we don't have any Gen IV's is the moratorium to certifying new reactor designs.

Currently the only way to have a fission plant certified for operation is to use a design that already has twenty years of proven operation. Since it's not possible for new designs to have proven operational experience before they operational experience, no new designs get approved. China is currently the worlds leader in fission and only because they had to wait for the various 70~80s US nuclear program documentation to become declassified.

 

[bit_user]

Yeah ... this article is BS, evaporation does not "use up" fresh water.
Every day the sun evaporates a trillion tons (1,000,000,000,000) of water across the globe. This comes out to be about something like 1,400 cubic kilometers worth of water or 1.4 x 10^15 liters.

Why do you think that's not a problem? California went so far as to try and use "shade balls" to reduce natural evaporation:

Shade ball - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

This water does not simple disappear, it goes into the atmosphere where it forms clouds, those clouds drift around on winds where they eventually dump that water back onto the surface in the form of rain.

Evaporates from where you are, to somewhere that you're not. If you're in a water-scarce region, that's a problem.

In regions like the Southwest US, there are huge fights over water, because there's not enough for everyone. Other places, like Portugal, are having historic droughts right now. In a water-scarce or drought-stricken region, it's worth considering all options to reduce water use so there's enough to go around.

Severe drought spreads in Portugal, officials seek EU help

Drought spread across almost all of mainland Portugal during an unusually hot and dry April, the meteorology agency IPMA said on Wednesday, and officials have requested aid from Brussels for the struggling farming sector.

www.reuters.com

 

[mdd1963]

I'm no proponent/defender of/for any inherent value in a 'bitcoin', etc...; however, the water being 'consumed', means what, exactly? The wording makes it sounds like those 4200 gallons of water are being transported off-earth, lost forever.

 

[bit_user]

By its very nature, bitcoin has value precisely because it is expensive (and wasteful?) to mine. In this case, "expensive" means it takes a lot of time and energy. Some will correct me to say its value comes from its scarcity, but ultimately the scarcity is still a result of the expense in creating it.

No, it's scarce because the supply is mathematically limited. They just used mining difficulty as a "fair" way to decide who gets them.

 

[helper800]

I'm no proponent/defender of/for any inherent value in a 'bitcoin', etc...; however, the water being 'consumed', means what, exactly? The wording makes it sounds like those 4200 gallons of water are being transported off-earth, lost forever.

Consumed in the same sense as when you flush the toilet or boil water. The usable potable water is transformed into non-potable water by any means, or consumed.

 

[bit_user]

The thing with the popular crypto currencies is that they are decentralized, meaning there is no way for anyone to regular or govern them.

This is a popular misconception and a core part of the mythology behind crypto.

First, the ones controlling the core software govern it! Not in the sense that they can invalidate specific transactions or block specific users, but in the sense that, for instance, the Ethereum maintainers can do things like switch from PoW to PoS, as well as setting the rate at which new coins are issued. These changes affect the value of existing coins and how practical they are for either a medium of exchange or a store of value. It's true of other crypto coins, including (and especially) bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s Future Depends on a Handful of Mysterious Coders

Developers with power to change the cryptocurrency’s software hold an unorthodox role, are elusive—and have been known to head off disaster for the coin. “It can be very scary.”

www.wsj.com

Second, I'm not sure about other coins, but Bitcoin is vulnerable to anyone controlling enough of the mining resources.

 

[Co BIY]

You seem to be suggesting that the energy cost of bitcoin transactions is inversely-proportional to volume. This is not so. The energy cost is roughly fixed, in the short term. In the long term, it increases as the currency becomes increasingly fragmented and the size of the blockchain grows.

No basically like you are saying - the energy costs are close to constant (all the little hamsters always spinning to make the crypto fairy gold) but the lower the number transactions the higher the costs (energy / water / valuable internet ridicule effort) per transaction.

 

[bit_user]

Fresh water is not used for power generation.

You're saying fossil fuel and nuclear plants don't use steam turbines? Nuclear plants are renown for their cooling towers that bellow out waste steam.

​

Granted, some plants built on large water bodies discharge waste heat via liquid form, instead.

At most water will be used as a coolant for wasted thermal energy, that's a pretty small amount since you really want that energy to turn a steam turbine., so throwing it away is throwing money out the window.

Once the steam has gone through the turbine, you're not saying they re-condense it, are you? That'd be terribly inefficient.

Here is something you didn't know, I happen to live in the datacenter capital of the world. The place where ~70% of all transactions happens. Driving from work to home has me pass dozens of datacenters. They are absolutely not billowing giant steam clouds into the environment,

Built when? And how scarce is water, there?

 

[bit_user]

Do you realize how much energy it takes to boil 4200 gallons or water?

They're not necessarily talking about boiling it, though. Evaporation is different than boiling.

Also, when we're talking about power generation involving steam-driven turbines, the turbines aren't terribly efficient. They capture just a fraction of the energy present in the steam.

I'm all for questioning the numbers in the report, but the best way to do that is to actually read the report and find out what they're actually claiming, and based on specifically what data and assumptions.

 

[Co BIY]

Not only is the concept unsustainable from a planetary concern, it's also financially unsustainable entirely, I'm not sure why there's whackos here mad about their tulips on a ledger.

Keep up the pump and look for the chance to dump.

But the problem is there is no way to cash out of bitcoin. No one will accept it for anything accept maybe commodities on the dark web or NFTs.

That the Sam Bankman-Fried debacle didn't pop the bubble is a wonder.

 

[bit_user]

you don't build datacenters in the desert... you build then near an Ocean.

Most of the southwest US is in the Colorado river basin. Anywhere out there is basically the same as anywhere else. The reason people build stuff in AZ and NV is for tax reasons and lots of sun = good solar efficiency.

Plus, there are other considerations like latency, connectivity, geological stability, risk from natural disasters, and physical security.

Here are two sites I found where you can interactively browse a map of datacenters. Indeed, you will find a fair few in Central California, AZ, NM, and NV. Also, some in CO.

• https://baxtel.com/map
• https://www.datacentermap.com/

 

[Co BIY]

I am still trying to sort the source data out here. Is the study implying that water ran through a hydroelectric dam generator is "waisted"? Because if that is being implied it simply isn't true. The energy is, but the fresh water is still fresh water on the dams output, just at a lower elevation. This isn't to mention that it is pretty common that several hydro stations exist on the same river. Also unless the facility is using an evaporative cooling system or dumping to a holding pond, virtually any water dumped down the drain will end up back into fresh water sources, albeit having to go through sewage treatment in most developed nations. I am not in any way defending the absolute fact that crypto wastes resources, especially electricity, but this article really needs to do a better job of sighting sources as it really does nothing to back its numbers and draws into question its validity on a whole.

I doubt the study did that based on their figures for Washington state which is the state with the highest rate of hydropower.

 

[Co BIY]

By its very nature, bitcoin has value precisely because it is expensive (and wasteful?) to mine. In this case, "expensive" means it takes a lot of time and energy. Some will correct me to say its value comes from its scarcity, but ultimately the scarcity is still a result of the expense in creating it. What I am saying here is that you can never, ever, ever make bitcoin not wasteful, otherwise it wouldn't be valuable. Start giving gold to everyone for free who wants it and it's value sinks. Imagine a future in which we have sustainable controlled fusion and energy is almost free with no environmental impact. My non-expert opinion is that bitcoin mining would go through the roof and be worth pennies on the dollar and suddenly get much less interesting. Or I'm wrong... there's alway that.

Coins within the Bitcoin ecosystem are "scarce" but they face an infinite number of extremely cheap potential electronic decentralized (or centralized) competitors.

For the price of a few electrons I can create a computer spreadsheet of wealth. Anyone can! No reason to use Bitcoin now unless you are already a Bitcoin billionaire.

 

[Bluoper]

Well fusion is quite close, they've already moved onto commercial applications. Gen IV fission was developed and proven to work in the 70's.

Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Like I said, the reason we don't have any Gen IV's is the moratorium to certifying new reactor designs.

Currently the only way to have a fission plant certified for operation is to use a design that already has twenty years of proven operation. Since it's not possible for new designs to have proven operational experience before they operational experience, no new designs get approved. China is currently the worlds leader in fission and only because they had to wait for the various 70~80s US nuclear program documentation to become declassified.

Tell me what company's make profit with nuclear fusion, we have never gotten more than we put in, the closest we got was that thing with the national ignition lab witch sounds great until you read the fine print and find out they spent 150 times more power than was generated by the reaction, the only "profitable" nuclear fusion application is thermonuclear bombs. Also it's a good thing reactors need certification as without that level of scrutiny nuclear disasters would be a actual threat rather than an irrational one.

 

[gg83]

Yeah ... this article is BS, evaporation does not "use up" fresh water.
Every day the sun evaporates a trillion tons (1,000,000,000,000) of water across the globe. This comes out to be about something like 1,400 cubic kilometers worth of water or 1.4 x 10^15 liters. This water does not simple disappear, it goes into the atmosphere where it forms clouds, those clouds drift around on winds where they eventually dump that water back onto the surface in the form of rain.

The numbers used by server farms is laughable in the greater picture.

Lmao! That's a natural process responsible for the stability of our planet. Just like a volcano dumps huge amounts of pollution. So who cares is we add additional pollution? Same type of argument I think.

 

[palladin9479]

Consumed in the same sense as when you flush the toilet or boil water. The usable potable water is transformed into non-potable water by any means, or consumed.

The cooling water in datacenters is non-potable already, along with being mostly closed loop. It doesn't get flushed or consumed.

Keep up the pump and look for the chance to dump.

But the problem is there is no way to cash out of bitcoin. No one will accept it for anything accept maybe commodities on the dark web or NFTs.

That the Sam Bankman-Fried debacle didn't pop the bubble is a wonder.

Ehh, crypto currency is commodity and is traded like any other commodity. People buy and sell it all day long. Due to it's new nature, there is not much historical data to go on so we are going to have massive swings in perceived value. In theory it could be used like any other currency, but in practice not really. It does serve as a useful way to store / transfer wealth out of a location that prohibits such things.

Tell me what company's make profit with nuclear fusion, we have never gotten more than we put in, the closest we got was that thing with the national ignition lab witch sounds great until you read the fine print and find out they spent 150 times more power than was generated by the reaction, the only "profitable" nuclear fusion application is thermonuclear bombs. Also it's a good thing reactors need certification as without that level of scrutiny nuclear disasters would be a actual threat rather than an irrational one.

Huh? That's a science project, all government funded science projects are obscenely inefficient but sometimes necessary. Hellion and Commonwealth are making good progress and have demonstrated scale. The thing to realize with Fusion is that with ICF there is always some size that generates net power. Fusion rate scales with volume while energy losses scale with surface area, volume goes up much faster then surface area. We can already do fusion easily, the question is about reducing loses through better confinement time coupled with favorable energy scaling. The real difference between all the various fusion configurations is confinement time, Tokomaks and Laser Fusion tries to brute force it but end up with ridiculously large and uneconomical configurations. Other methods like Z-Pinch or M-Target try to finesse the plasma by playing with electrostatics. In all cases we are way further along and know what more about it then ever before. In any case Fusion is definitely not stealing funding from Fission as you imply, there is no political will in most western nations due to various political factors. Germany decommissioned it's remaining fission plants only to then turn around and have to buy power from France, who is heavily Fission. I linked the info for you to use as a starting point to realize that Gen IV reactor designs are not new, they've been around for decades but the NRC will not license any of them to be built, ever.

 

[Bluoper]

The cooling water in datacenters is non-potable already, along with being mostly closed loop. It doesn't get flushed or consumed.



Ehh, crypto currency is commodity and is traded like any other commodity. People buy and sell it all day long. Due to it's new nature, there is not much historical data to go on so we are going to have massive swings in perceived value. In theory it could be used like any other currency, but in practice not really. It does serve as a useful way to store / transfer wealth out of a location that prohibits such things.



Huh? That's a science project, all government funded science projects are obscenely inefficient but sometimes necessary. Hellion and Commonwealth are making good progress and have demonstrated scale. The thing to realize with Fusion is that with ICF there is always some size that generates net power. Fusion rate scales with volume while energy losses scale with surface area, volume goes up much faster then surface area. We can already do fusion easily, the question is about reducing loses through better confinement time coupled with favorable energy scaling. The real difference between all the various fusion configurations is confinement time, Tokomaks and Laser Fusion tries to brute force it but end up with ridiculously large and uneconomical configurations. Other methods like Z-Pinch or M-Target try to finesse the plasma by playing with electrostatics. In all cases we are way further along and know what more about it then ever before. In any case Fusion is definitely not stealing funding from Fission as you imply, there is no political will in most western nations due to various political factors. Germany decommissioned it's remaining fission plants only to then turn around and have to buy power from France, who is heavily Fission. I linked the info for you to use as a starting point to realize that Gen IV reactor designs are not new, they've been around for decades but the NRC will not license any of them to be built, ever.

Hellion makes me laugh, unshielded nuclear fusion is hilarious. I fing know gen 4 isn't new, neither is fusion but one has proven that it can be profitable and the other has never made profitable energy except for weapons of war. The first large scale fusion reaction on earth was in 1954, and yet we still don't have any actual fusion power plants and they are so far away they haven't even got to the certification process that you talked about for gen 4. That's how far away they are, the 50 year process gen 4 has taken hasnt even begun with fusion. And no fusion is not "clean" fusion makes large amounts of nuclear waste, the reaction vessel itself becomes radioactive from the intense radiation and would have to be replaced pretty often if a reactor was actually on all of the time. My biggest problems with Fusion are 1: misleading marketing. It isnt clean and likely make a similar amount of power to Fission. 2: unproven technology. Never made profit or even any electrical power ever. 3: used by people as an excuse for doing nothing about global warming "oh but once we have Fusion in 30 years we'll be fine" has been said too many times to be funny any more. While gen 4 has been proven since the 80s and are actually starting to be built to make power, we need to start reducing carbon emissions now, not a hypothetical feuture where fusion is everywhere. I don't think fusion should be abandoned but we need to do something now, fusion isn't ready yet so we need to use the next best thing.

 

[palladin9479]

Hellion makes me laugh, unshielded nuclear fusion is hilarious. I fing know gen 4 isn't new, neither is fusion but one has proven that it can be profitable and the other has never made profitable energy except for weapons of war. The first large scale fusion reaction on earth was in 1954, and yet we still don't have any actual fusion power plants and they are so far away they haven't even got to the certification process that you talked about for gen 4. That's how far away they are, the 50 year process gen 4 has taken hasnt even begun with fusion. And no fusion is not "clean" fusion makes large amounts of nuclear waste, the reaction vessel itself becomes radioactive from the intense radiation and would have to be replaced pretty often if a reactor was actually on all of the time. My biggest problems with Fusion are 1: misleading marketing. It isnt clean and likely make a similar amount of power to Fission. 2: unproven technology. Never made profit or even any electrical power ever. 3: used by people as an excuse for doing nothing about global warming "oh but once we have Fusion in 30 years we'll be fine" has been said too many times to be funny any more. While gen 4 has been proven since the 80s and are actually starting to be built to make power, we need to start reducing carbon emissions now, not a hypothetical feuture where fusion is everywhere. I don't think fusion should be abandoned but we need to do something now, fusion isn't ready yet so we need to use the next best thing.

Ehh... that's a lot of anger at something that is completely irrelevant to the statement. Fusion is not stealing from Fission... two completely different things.