Essay by Eric Worrall
Cryptocurrency, which until recently received a climate pass from Californian anarchy money advocates, is increasingly being seen as a climate villain.
Cryptocurrency price collapse offers hope for slowing climate change – here’s how
Published: May 18, 2022 1.16am AEST Updated: May 18, 2022 2.41am AEST
Peter Howson
Senior Lecturer in International Development, Northumbria University, Newcastle…
For years, interest rates have been close to zero, making bank bonds and treasury bills look boring as investments, while cryptocurrencies and digital non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) linked to artwork, look appealing. However, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England recently increased interest rates by the largest amount since 2000.
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The most polluting “proof-of-work” cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, ethereum and dogecoin, together use around 300 terawatt-hours (TW/h) of mainly fossil-fuelled electricity each year. Bitcoin has an annual carbon footprint of around 114 million tonnes. That’s roughly comparable to 380,000 space rocket launches, or the annual carbon footprint of the Czech Republic.
Proof-of-work mining can be thought of as a controlled way of wasting energy. The process involves specialist computers repeatedly taking random shots at guessing a long string of digits. The amount of computing power dedicated to this effort is referred to as the network’s hash rate.
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Tipping points and death spirals
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Miners with the highest costs are likely to sell off their bitcoin holdings as profitability drops, creating even more selling pressure in the market. Short-term capitulation among smaller mining outfits with high costs (often using intermittent renewable energy) is normal.
But a domino effect with major mining firms closing down one after another could cause crypto prices, and the network’s carbon emissions, to drop rapidly towards zero. This event is called a bitcoin death spiral in crypto-speak.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/cryptocurrency-price-collapse-offers-hope-for-slowing-climate-change-heres-how-183143
Obviously its hilarious that greens are finally tiring of their anarchic currency which consumes more coal power than a small country.
But what is the real reason Bitcoin has dropped recently?
My theory is the fortunes of Bitcoin are driven by China.
Chinese entrepreneurs a few years ago discovered they could use Bitcoin to bypass China’s strict currency controls.
Essentially Bitcoin functions like the medieval Hawala banking system. If you want to transport money to or from some remote lawless hellhole, carrying a big bag of cash is less than ideal. So you contact an intermediary, who gives you a secret token, like a torn dollar note. A trusted courier carries the other half of the torn note to your destination. If either you or the courier get mugged on the way – even a mugger would likely ignore something as apparently worthless as a torn dollar note. Then when you take the torn dollar note token to the intermediary’s contact at your destination, and they match it to the other half, they pay you your money, minus a handling fee.
Providing the flow of money in both directions more or less balances, no physical money actually has to be transported between the two banking contacts, but the money transfer nevertheless occurs.
Bitcoin functions in a similar way to that torn dollar note – you can exchange goods or cash for Bitcoin, then convert the Bitcoin back into cash, in another location. Like the torn dollar note from the Hawala system, Bitcoin may have no intrinsic value, but it can still function as a carrier of value.
So what went wrong? The Chinese government realised people were flouting their laws, they hate that money is flowing in and out of China without government oversight. So for the last few years, China has been cracking down hard on Bitcoin users. But Bitcoin use is hard to detect, so the crackdown has been less effective than most Chinese enforcement efforts.
A much bigger issue is China may be running out of money. An insane portion of China’s GDP until recently was dedicated to building “Ghost Cities”. A speculative frenzy drove demand for investment properties, even if there was nobody available to live in the new properties. Vast amounts of Chinese savings are tied up in worthless, crumbling property investments. A significant portion of the Chinese economy was dedicated to building these worthless properties.
Up until late last year, generations of people in China considered housing investments a sure bet. Grandparents who made their money out of China’s housing bubble urged their grandkid to invest in that same bubble – they all thought they couldn’t lose.
Chinese people aren’t fools, some of them realised investing everything into a single housing bubble was risky. Some Chinese investors wanted to move the profits out of China, to diversify their portfolios. But sending large amounts of money overseas is all but illegal for ordinary Chinese investors – so they used the modern digital form of that Hawala torn dollar note, Bitcoin, to facilitate the money transfer, and bypass Chinese currency controls.
Now the Evergrande crisis has all but popped the multi decade Chinese housing bubble, and lockdowns have trashed the real economy, hardly anybody is making speculative money in Mainland China anymore.
I don’t think this is the end of the road for Cryptocurrency, someone will always need a way to bypass government currency controls, regardless of the environmental cost of using “proof of work“, or other bizarre variants such as “proof of space“. And I have no advice for which way the price of various cryptocurrencies will go next – there are plenty of other factors driving the price of cryptocurrency, and not all of them are visible. But if I’m right, it is possible the fortunes of China, up or down, could be a major driver of Cryptocurrency price fluctuations for the next few years.
the energy use of bitcoin is greatly eggagerated.
further
“Miners with the highest costs are likely to sell off their bitcoin holdings as profitability drops, creating even more selling pressure in the market. Short-term capitulation among smaller mining outfits with high costs (often using intermittent renewable energy) is normal. “
wrong!!!! you never sell off your bitcoin. precisely because it will cause a death spiral
A) you walk away from your building and leases.
B you walk away from your PPA
C you sell btc OTC in private off market deals that never hit the price ticker.
you never never never sell off btc as profitabiity drops.
jesus who writes this shit
I’m not so confident nobody will play the red card. Might be a Prisoner’s dilemma / red card style situation, where the first person to sell gets to keep their capital.
Like any pyramid scheme, the early adopters of a crypto currency profit hugely. The middle adopters just enough to keep luring in the suckers, who get left holding the bag after the opaque sales (as Steven so eloquently expalins above) leave it worthless almost overnight.
“wrong!!!! you never sell off your bitcoin. precisely because it will cause a death spiral”
Right. it never happened with shares why would it happen for something that has no intrinsic value? /sarc
Sri that was for Mosh
“This event is called a bitcoin death spiral in crypto-speak.”
Actually is more like;
“This event is called a bitcoin death spiral in Calizuela-speak.”
No wonder at some point in time, bitcoin mining in Cal. will join the Calizuela Exodus.
Even Elon has left already, and Anthony too.
Too costly to do anything of value there, these days.
Looks more like a Calizuela death spiral, than anything else.
cheers
All of the things you mention Steven, that is consciously making sales of BTC opaque to the market, are exactly why BTC and other cyrptos are mere illusions. Poof. Gone in a flash. You only want sales (demand) to be visible, like tulip bulbs.
Buy fake money, get fake returns.
The US could be fake money…they sure create a lot of it 😉
I can go to store, Amazon, or a gas station and buy stuff I need to survive still with US dollars. That’s never been true for any crypto coin.
Several years ago, the WSJ did a experiment to buy a pizza at BTC advertising pizza joint in Manhattan, it took like 30 minutes for the wallet transaction to clear, just for a then cold pizza.
IMHO, the so-called ‘block chain’ that BTC touts continually gush over appears to be a very inefficient way of storing transaction data, albeit it supposedly provides a high degree of anonymity and security.
Offhand, do you know if it captures the ‘pizzas’, like, say, one would see on their VISA statement or does it just record the movement of BTC from one holder to another?
QR code platform,
makes the actual currency verification-authentication method, look like something from the stone age, in comparison.
It can be and operate only due to Blockchain.
cheers
Try using gold or diamonds…
30 years later you still be waiting for the pizza.
In a way, all money is an illusion.
The £ in your pocket is just a token and a promise to pay.
It used to be the £ (or $ for our American cousins) was backed up by gold ingots. Not so much these days.
But still less risky than losing your thumb drive.
a￡note can buy something meaningful anywhere in the world. It has value outside the context of a smartphone or computer.
If nothing else a bank note is still a physical thing you can give your kids to put in their scrap book and then years from now they can find it again in an old box and have a nostalgia moment.
Pretty sure you can’t do that with a bitcoin.
Cold Wallet
True, but I think this has more to do with ‘legal tender’ laws, as well as a past connection to physical money. Notwithstanding these supports, it’s a fact that all such ‘fiat’ currencies continually lose purchasing power over time due to the existence of government monopoly central banks that exist only to facilitate the expansion of government spending. At some point in this inflationary process, even legal tender laws and central banks will not be able to prevent the collapse such ‘money’.
We thought you got contacted traced right out of existence…whew.
He’s been underground mining Coin for Kim. Sorta the new Kars for Kids scam, but for dictators.
1-8-7-7-C-O-I-N -4 -K I M,
1-8-7-7-C-O-I-N -4 -K I M,
Donate your Coin today 🎶
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The problem with bitcoin is the same problem with Pokemon cards or Beanie Babies: they are only worth what someone else is willing to pay.
But even worse than Beanie Babies, which could be bought and sold at a flea market. Bitcoin needs a digital infrastructure and intermediaries that can be both hacked, and controlled by the government. The same government who’s currency bitcoin is competing against.
All currency is faith.
Not going so well eh?
So you are certain that no one sells out of a cratering market in a panicked bid to preserve some value? Maybe you can send me some stock picks that I can then ignore, perhaps some over leveraged and worthless real estate.
“jesus who writes this shit” says the supposed English major spewing unadulterated shit. The irony is so delicious.
Well, yeah, less crypto mining means less electrical energy use.
As I’ve noted here before, a buddy of mine heats his house in winter with his crypto mining rig. Some ungodly share of Three Gorges Dam hydropower went to mining crypto.
John,
You understand, you commenting in an article, of Calizuela speak.
Is a claim, that if they lose Bitcoin mining, as they losing already many other investments, it will be ok…
A commie speak of/for justifying a clear economical failure in Cal.
Maybe they could be even better off with no or very limited Internet.
cheers
“The most polluting “proof-of-work” cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, ethereum and dogecoin, together use around 300 terawatt-hours (TW/h) of mainly fossil-fuelled electricity each year. Bitcoin has an annual carbon footprint of around 114 million tonnes. That’s roughly comparable to 380,000 space rocket launches, or the annual carbon footprint of the Czech Republic.”
Well, it’s a good thing “carbon footprint” is utterly meaningless, otherwise there might be a problem.
Fake money, fake carbon footprint.
We’re surrounded by lies. They are everywhere now.
The climate scam. The proposed scams solutions to a science scam.
The claims of men can get pregnant. That 8 month old baby in the womb can simply be “aborted” and its not m u r d e r.
Printing a fiat currency under Modern Monetary Theory won’t have very bad consequences.
Once trustworthy institutions of science and medicine reduced to to lie factories for the Left’s many social and political power agendas.
So many lies. We live in an era of lies all around us.
Obviously no inanity is beneath climate change zealots.
Imagine being so delusional you think bitcoin has an impact on the climate.
Well in a roundabout way…
Bitcoin mining uses copious amounts of electricity and electricity production produces Plant Food and breathing plants affect climate sooo……
China is not running out of money.
China has a healthy foreign investment position with a positive balance of USD2.2tr.
If USA did not create the world currency then it would be in deep poo. US foreign investment position is in the red by USD18tr. The US owes the rest of the world almost 12 months of its annual output.
China is working hard to eliminate USD as the basis of its trade. It already has its own CYN oil exchange. Big miners in Australia have started accepting CYN crypto instead of letters of credit for iron ore shipments.
USA will have a problem when the producing nations no longer accept US paper for the stuff they mine and make. Biden can create USDs but other countries will have increasing aversion to holding a hollow promise for their tangible goods.
Crypto is dying because inflation is eroding disposable incomes. People need to be housed, fed and kept warm as their top priorities and those are getting harder as inflation erodes their buying power.
China has a huge internal (domestic) debt problem with far more loans given out to build empty shopping malls, money siphoned off to corrupt party pols and hacks. The internal debt problems of China
and..
According to George Friedman, China is at the end of an economic cycle.
He points out that the Great Depression was the result of America reaching the end of an economic cycle. He wonders what would have happened if WW2 hadn’t come along to end the unemployment problem.
Both of my parents were raised on the Great Plains. I was brought up on stories about the Dirty Thirties. It seems pretty clear that the Great Depression wasn’t caused by America running out of money.
China’s problem is not that it is running out of money. Its problem is that the biggest part of the economy recently has been bogus real estate.
Anyway, I can see no reason why China can not suffer from its own Great Depression.
Something will give. Xi is balancing a bunch of spinning plates on sticks and the extra 40 million males in the audience aren’t entertained by it.
I like the metaphor! Maybe we could help alleviate China’s troubling shortage of females by allowing the free emigration to China of the West’s progressive women, who electorally support socialism despite its manifold failures. Once more, free trade benefits everyone!
We entered the Great Depression because the Fed bumped the interest rate from 3% to 6% over 6 months and the margin calls required people to sell off their stock to cover the call. We remained in the Depression because FDR tampered with the economy. Instead of letting it recover naturally like Europe did, he taxed the money out of the economy and use it to grease his election machine with handouts were it would do the most good. Pump priming by the government doesn’t work because the economy is better at figuring out what to do with capital than the government.
China has a representative in the board room of any company of sufficient size. If the company wants to do something the government doesn’t approve of, that information is passed back to the government and the company is force to obey. China hints of a free economy but business still dance to the tune of the government. It works for a while but as the hand of the government get heavier, it all falls apart.
The ’29 market crash caused people to lose the difference between the higher prices paid
for their stocks & what they were then worth afterward. Those who weren’t in stocks lost
money in other assets as there was spillover with less money in the system to support
higher prices of the other assets. It’s then a case of “cash is king” as those with cash could
buy assets at reduced prices. This deflation countered the inflation that preceded the crash
when assets were bid up too much. Deflation’s the 600# gorilla that kills the economy like it
did in the ’30s.
This explains a lot. China has an aging population that’s also getting smaller. Companies are rethinking doing business in China and consumers are rethinking purchases of items made in China. The have milked all the money out of other territory they have acquired and they are expanding into other countries to keep their economy going. They don’t want Taiwan, they need it to boost their economy. They could be facing a contraction in the not to distant future and if it happens, they might have another change of power.
That’s what happens when the government calls winers and loser. It just can’t do it as effectively as a free economy. The massive amount of money wasted on ghost cities will hurt the economy when the people discover their saving are gone. Only ones who made out on this are the builders and the people who put the deal together.
I am not sure Eric understands what bitcoin is. He states “ Bitcoin use is hard to detect” which is in fact 100% wrong. Every single bitcoin transaction is stored permanently on the blockchain. Which means that everytime somebody uses bitcoin it is recorded on an open ledger for everyone in the world to see. And as multiple people are currently finding out various law enforcement agencies are getting very good at linking bitcoins to ledger transactions to IP addresses to real addresses. And China with its tight control over the internet is sure to know who is using bitcoins and for what.
You apparently are clueless to Mosh’s point C) above.
“C you sell btc OTC in private off market deals that never hit the price ticker.
you never never never sell off btc as profitabiity drops.”
I am not sure what “sell btc OTC in private” means in this context. The owner of every bitcoin is publically listed on the blockchain and cannot be altered except through transactions on the blockchain. If you try selling or buying a bitcoin without recording the transaction on the blockchain then the original owner can make a digital copy of the bitcoin and then resell and or use it and as far as the blockchain is concerned that is 100% legit since only transactions recorded on the blockchain count as proof of ownership.
Mosh is deep (note his never x 3 emphasis) into the dark-art of crypto exchanges and all its potential back-alley dealings. I couldn’t even begin to second guess his expertise on this arcane issue.
If I ‘give’ my wallet and key to someone, who would know?
Alexy,
nobody would know but the person you gave it too wouldn’t know whether or not you kept a copy and were planning on selling it a second and third time to equally gullable people.
I wouldn’t do that if I was buying a kilo of cocaine. Could be fatal.
Yeah I am sure they use there real legal names for a cyber transaction … umm just like we all use our full proper names to post on WUWT 🙂
LdB,
Have a read of
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-criminals-cant-hide-behind-bitcoin
The point is that every transaction made using bitcoin is publically available for all time. Bitcoins are designed to be traceable and if you use one to make an illegal transaction you should expect to be caught as a result. Cash is still king at least for smart criminals.
Read your own link there is a veil of anonymity you have to pierce.
In the examples given they needed a weakness in the accounting system ( a hack or flaw) and they were going after MASSIVE transactions.
I am sure that governments would spin up a taskforce and coff up the funds for staff and equipment to go after those. However the vast bulk of transactions nobody would waste the effort with.
Reading your post you are sort of claiming that authorities can easily link every transaction …from your own link that is manifestly false. If a large crime organization made no errors then they would also be able to operate completely anonymously … they need to make a mistake to get caught.
Let me tell you cash is very hard to launder and every developed country has entities that sift data to find it.I think you are showing how naive you are.
“Ultimately, investigators needed to tie this string of evidence to one crucial, missing piece of data: the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the computers used by buyers or sellers.”
I suppose you’re right, if you use your home computer without any additional VPN routing (think TOR).
Maybe I don’t know enough about BTC, but it seems to me that if the key to identifying a user is IP address, you could just go to a random Starbucks and use their internet service to get around that.
The transactions are open but the real identity of who owns them is less so. And use of evasion systems like the TOR project can evade the Great Chinese Firewall and obscure IP address trails.
I agree though that people have been caught out by being tied to their ledger entries.
Sorry didn’t realize you covered this back to Izaak .. yep I can’t imagine too many transactions are done in an individuals legal name 🙂
Cryptocurrencies as means of transfer of funds outside government surveillance and control, and speculation in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are different matters.
Speculation in Bitcoin, real estate, art, classic cars etc. is driven by the fact that official interest rates are far lower than the inflation rate, for instance in the US the current interest rate is 1% while the official inflation rate is 8.3% (probably higher), a recipe for economic disaster according to Art Laffer who says the current interest rate ought to be ~11%.
We may be entering a GLOB phase of economics.
The world suffers these GLOB periods, from time to time as a direct result of lunacy and economic incompetence of politicians and social leaders in general .There are endless examples of this phenomena playing out to its ultimate, unfortunate conclusion. Think Zimbabwe and Venezuela as recent examples, then remember Germany.
So what is this GLOB you may ask?
Go Long On Barrows.
The current incredible mass hysteria generated by the Climate Alarmists is of historic significance. When that history is looked back on by future generations. They will be bewildered at what we have done. As bewildered as we are that civilisations threw virgins down volcanoes thinking that will impact the weather gods. The Alarmists concept so widely advanced that the most beneficial molecule to bio diversity, CO2, is the ultimate negative, will be so unbelievable to future generations, they will question if such a thing actually happened.
We live in The Age of Lies.
I see crypto currencies as a variation to banks printing their own money in the 19th century.
The money was usually there but there could be questions, will others accept without ha ing to pay a discount. And since there were no controls, it had a spector to its use. Criminals love it, Russian oligarchs use it to avoid government restrictions.
Russian oligarchs…is Elon an African Oligarch or an African American oligarch 😉
China is screwed, when the people realise their investements are worthless there will be a revolution.
Bitcoin is a joke too. Should have been banned.
Banning never works.
Fake or a joke as you say, perhaps.
But in the other hand, Bitcoin-Blockchane is already very well established as a Global Capital asset. A free open source one at that.
Have you any idea how it can be actually really banned?
How such thing could be actually really banned, is beyond my mental capability to even imagine!
(especially in the midst of a global economical meltdown)
Yes of course it is far far, far easier said than done.
cheers
” Cryptocurrency price collapse offers hope for slowing climate change ”
The effects of a fiction on another fiction…
Totally incoherent article, but even a blind squirrel can find a nut.
No, $29K bitcoin price is not going to slow down mining. Despite official bans, it is rising again in China…
No, crash was partly the overall markets crashing and more the last algo stablecoin/Terra beatdown.
Yes, early “legal” crypto use was largely to evade currency controls in China and South Korea.
No, bitcoin at least is no longer “pink sheet” type investment, it has become HNW mainstream. But it is still a high risk asset – the type hurt the most by rising interest rates and lowering liquidity.
But Yes, the majority of cryptocurrencies are junk.
Its curious to me when its claimed that some made up digital currencies are junk while some made up digital currencies are not.
Some tulip bubbles just last longer than others? Some become too big to fail?
From an actual miner here. It’s almost as bad profit wise as it’s ever been. Yet I’m still seeing a 4 to 5 fold return on my investment (of electricity).
Also proof of work is not just lottery, it verifies a blockchain which among other things, secures digital transfers of wealth, as in using a credit card.
Plus I know it’s hard to wrap your head around what money is, but since we left the gold standard because we didn’t actually have enough gold to back up the dollars issued, it’s all been “Fake” money… And to that line, gold itself is “Fake” money.
Bitcoin is useful for transferring value without government oversight. My point is the need to transfer cash might drop precipitously in the.near future if the Chinese economy collapses. I’m not sure what other factors are keeping it afloat, but why not submit a story telling your POV?