| ▲ | sam_lowry_ 12 hours ago |
| Satoshi would be first in line? |
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| ▲ | jandrewrogers 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| AI and bitcoin, regardless of what one thinks of them, have made negligible contributions to climate change. It is below the noise floor relative to other major industrial and commercial sources of atmospheric CO2. Virtually all of the current conditions were in motion before bitcoin and AI were even a thing. |
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| ▲ | atoav 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Sure. But you have to weigh any application relative to (1) how useful it is and (2) how easy it would be to rely on a carbon-neutral alternative. And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society. AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing. We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion. Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely. All of that while we know how to address the issue. | | |
| ▲ | tancop 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society if you mean PoW mining instead of crypto in general then maybe. ethereum uses about as much power as a small village in europe so it should never be a target for climate action. the public benefit of blockchains is real and it comes from the fact that no one controls them and they let users ignore the law. thats the part governments dont like. corporations also dont like it even if they work in the industry, coinbase and binance started their own chains so they would have full control over the way they evolve. crypto is a cypherpunk/anarchist technology that got hijacked by investors to sell their scam coins and fake decentralized web services. without it your only option for buying things that are illegal in your country (weed, abortion pills, guns, hacking tools) is sending cash in paper mail or using some complicated scheme where you have to trust third parties. i think thats worth some tax evasion. | | |
| ▲ | atoav 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | No. The societal impact of crypto currencies is net-negative. I know the original idea. In 2009 I bought coffee using Bitcoin. I had to wait 30 minutes till it went through despite using a fee that back then mirrored what PayPal would take. Then I knew: OK this is not going to be used as a cash replacement. Then it became clear that it was used as a way to pay for illegal shit on the internet, be it drugs, botnets or services of questionable ethical value. Of course also to speculate, to launder money, to blackmail, to extract ransom, to run ponzi schemes or rug pulls, which became a big driver by people who wanted to get the wealth without having to put in the legwork. And these are still the main drivers behind crypto currencies today by a wide margin. So yes: Net-negative. Prove me wrong. |
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| ▲ | nprateem 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Opinion stated as fact | | |
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| ▲ | tensor 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No, excessive fossil fuel use is the cause by an immense margin. It's completely dominated by commercial shipping (boats), followed by planes. Then I think it may actually be gas from cattle before cars. Bitcoin and AI are so recent and still relative to everything else small. |
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| ▲ | othello 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is completely incorrect. Aviation contributes 2.5% of global emissions (but is terrible on a per capita basis, as only around 10% of the world's population travels on any given year). Global shipping accounts for 2.3% of global human-made emissions [1]. In transport emissions, passenger vehicles dominate by far (with around 12% of global GHG emissions), even more so in developed countries. Then freight by road with 7.5% of total emissions. Maritime shipping is actually the least carbon intensive way to transport goods over long distances by at least two orders of magnitude [2]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport [2] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/transport/06_figure_8-6/ | |
| ▲ | tao_oat 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Electricity (including heating) is actually the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but transport is indeed number 2: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector Followed by agriculture & manufacturing. | |
| ▲ | 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | esafak 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is that so? Too bad nuclear civilian ships are not common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion | | |
| ▲ | nradov 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Widespread use of nuclear power for civilian merchant shipping is a non-starter. It's simply too expensive to train and pay enough qualified nuclear engineers. The US Navy barely manages this for a few dozen nuclear powered vessels with a huge budget and limited concern for cost effectiveness. Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports. If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines. | |
| ▲ | vel0city 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I really feel like if the US really wanted to support US shipbuilding (like what the Jones act was supposed to do) it would subsidize building a fleet of nuclear shipping boats. Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again. | | |
| ▲ | scottLobster 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I love the theory, but the security concerns around nuclear anything are a big deal when we're talking ships that sail around the world. Imagine if even one of the tankers hit in the strait of Hormuz was nuclear. | | |
| ▲ | AngryData 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It would have sunk to the bottom and been of no immediate concern. The benefit of nuclear reactors on boats is that you can drown it out at anytime. The only real concern is a nuclear ship getting beached and not having the passive failsafe of sinking underwater. | |
| ▲ | vel0city 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Would Iran be as likely to have hit one of these ships if the result was potentially a nuclear meltdown close to their shoreline? It would pretty radically change the costs to them for such an attack, wouldn't it? | | |
| ▲ | Ekaros 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you sink nuclear ship you won't get nuclear meltdown. You have enough thermal mass to cool down anything if you are underwater. Some level of loss of nuclear material would happen. But meltdown is not something that would happen. | | |
| ▲ | vel0city 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Its not like all the ships hit by attacks in the Straight of Hormuz sank. A ship could potentially become critically damaged and become unable to operate the reactor and still be floating. Either way, "loss of nuclear material" is the real concern isn't it, instead of just the nature of how that loss happened? The question still stands. If a country knows they're potentially going to cause a nuclear disaster by hitting one of these ships on their shoreline, are they as likely to shoot at them? | | |
| ▲ | scottLobster 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | The hardliners might want to cause a nuclear incident to keep the strait closed longer. And even among the non-hardliners mistakes are rampant in war. It's not about what they're likely to rationally do, it's about what some local, demoralized missile officer who graduated in the bottom 20% of his class does when he's cut off from command and drinking too much. |
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| ▲ | raffraffraff 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not every culture encourages the same principles or values as yours. I'd say they possibly would. | | |
| ▲ | vel0city 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are there cultures out there which wish for important parts of their own country get turned into nuclear wastelands? If Iran wants to make their country a nuclear wasteland, they don't need to blow up ships to do it. I'd imagine they probably don't want that outcome, but hey I'm not an Iranian so I can't speak for them. I kind of figured that'd just be a "logical" thing and not necessarily a "cultural" thing, but I agree I don't know all cultures. |
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| ▲ | pbkompasz 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I’d put people who have maliciously and intentionally undermined action on climate change first. Donald Trump comes to mind. |
