Quote from: ranochigo on December 24, 2020, 04:07:45 AM

Quote from: pixie85 on December 23, 2020, 11:28:35 PM

Electricity doesn't produce CO2, its production does and not even all of it because solar panels don't produce CO2.

Miners don't produce CO2 just like your home computer doesn't do it.

Would CO2 not be produced if we stopped mining? The answer is no.

I think it's a pretty common myth but the construction of most renewable energy will actually incur some form of environmental degradation, CO2 or not. Solar panels don't just lay around and the manufacturing of the panels will essentially produce some pollution and it will take some time for the benefits of a solar panel to outweigh the environmental costs of it. It's obviously not without it's problem.

It would be wrong to assume that just because some mining operations uses renewable energy, all of the energy inputs are green energy. The issue on hand is that the electrical energy that could otherwise have been used for other purposes were used for Bitcoin mining. I wouldn't say it's completely invalid to attribute the CO2 production to Bitcoin mining because they use a ton of electricity and the production of which produces greenhouse gases.

No, CO2 production will never stop. But if Bitcoin mining doesn't use electricity, then the reliance on coal energy and/or natural gas would be lesser since that the energy requirements of the country would be lower.

To some extent, the above argument will hold water. But it's important to consider the transaction volume of Bitcoin on a daily basis.

I think CO2 has been commandeered as the go to metric for environmental impact because it occurs in a wide range of scaled processes. But it does paint a really incomplete picture of the situation. Perhaps a more holistic indicator could be something like environmental entropy production. Some metric that describes the rate of environmental disordering, which stresses the regulatory mechanisms that exist in our environmental ecosystem (e.g. CO2 absorption and transformation or pollinator populations that sustain flora populations).

So lets just use "impact" as a general term for human activity disordering the environmental state. Whilst the Bitcoin consumes electricity, it provides a valuable service. That is the security consensus of the PoW method which is enforced by thermodynamics. Some form of environmental impact in the form of electricity consumption, hardware manufacturing, etc. is of course acceptable. The amount of impact should be equal to the intrinsic value of processes that Bitcoin is used for (currently speculative, but the implementation horizon is fast approaching).

My quest is to find out that equilibrium point. how much impact should be deemed feasible at any given time?

My thoughts are that price is a contributor to the amount of impact. But as indicated by:

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on December 26, 2020, 10:15:53 AM

his does not necessarily hold true, though. There is not a direct correlation between hash rate, price, and/or mining reward.

I will have to investigate the indirect relationship of price on impact