Between record-breaking rallies, increasing institutional buy-in, and the arrival of new, vocal champions, 2021 has reaffirmed the ascendance of Bitcoin.
However, Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies remain locked in a battle for hearts and minds. Critics argue Bitcoin is a solution looking for a problem. As Warren Buffett said in an interview last year, “Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don’t produce anything.”
Does that mean we should close off this frontier? Many inventions and innovations were discovered without their use cases or killer applications already at hand. Using microwaves for cooking was the result of an engineer working to improve military-grade magnetron tubes for radar sets. Teflon was created accidentally by a DuPont chemist trying to invent a better gaseous coolant. In both cases the technology came first and the transformative commercial product emerged second.
Bitcoin is barely a decade old, and cryptocurrencies represent one of many proposed uses for blockchain technology. Innovators and investors are just beginning to explore other applications including smart contracts for decentralized lending and public control of distributed computing.
Given how young the field of study is, the possibilities already identified, and the use cases that haven’t been fathomed yet, how can we possibly pass final judgment on Proof-of-Work?
For many critics, one charge rises above the rest: Bitcoin has a large energy footprint. The security of Proof-of-Work-based digital ledgers comes with massive energy expenditure, meaning the system requires country-level electricity usage for development and maintenance.
Given two-thirds of global electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels, there are legitimate concerns that come with power-hungry technologies. The human health impacts of air pollution, including 4 million premature deaths per year, are clear downsides of reliable, life-giving electricity. Climate change is also a very real threat of unknown magnitude. In the face of uncertainty and potentially catastrophic consequences, action should be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The conventional wisdom is to tackle the negative societal and environmental impacts of energy consumption, we will necessarily have to use less energy, and what energy we do need to run society will have to come primarily from solar and wind.
But renewables can’t actually replace fossil fuels, as we recently saw in Texas. Right as the state plunged into a record-breaking polar vortex, electricity production from Texas’ brand new, $60 billion fleet of wind turbines plummeted. This revealed that the state, like everywhere else, is dependent on fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro.
California, an aggressive early leader in solar, provides another example of attempted dependence on renewables leading to blackouts. The situation was smaller, but more predictable: on a hot day, the sun went down on the state’s $70 billion solar fleet, and not enough reliable power was left to meet needs. In the middle of a global pandemic, darkened highways caused traffic accidents, food rotted in unpowered refrigerators, and emergency rooms and fire stations had to scramble to get back up generators.
Advocating for a system built on variable renewables means advocating for less energy. A grid completely reliant on renewables puts society at the mercy of the weather. If we invest in the back-up capacity, storage, and transmission necessary to keep the lights on when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, the result is an excessively expensive system that incentivizes energy austerity and increases poverty. Today’s society is an emergent property of cheap electricity; the amount of energy storage that would turn night to day, much less winter to summer, would never be built. We would just cut back on society.
If energy scarcity is required to tackle climate change and to responsibly steward the planet, then Bitcoin simply can’t exist. But neither can the creative pursuits and scientific endeavors that drive human progress. Increasing energy consumption over time has coincided with greater levels of healthcare, education, democracy, security, and economic freedom. What will we be sacrificing if we decide to reverse this trend?
A stable, more equitable society is a society with abundant energy. And an abundant society means there is absolutely enough clean energy for exciting new socio-technical experiments like Bitcoin. So how do we build a system of abundance that will encourage the ingenuity of humanity without exacerbating consequences like air pollution and climate change?
With nuclear fission, we’ve got the closest thing possible to a free lunch. Like fossil fuels, fission can produce nation-scale electricity reliably year-round, regardless of time of day or season. Unlike fossil fuels, it does so cleanly without emitting greenhouse
gases.
Further, uranium is extremely energy-dense and relatively abundant. And we can recycle the spent fuel and turn it into new fuel, which is already routinely done in Europe, Russia, and Japan. A single coke can’s worth of spent nuclear fuel can provide all the energy for the average American lifetime, and at this rate even an earth of 10 billion should be fine (on energy and carbon) for the long term. In short, nuclear liberates us from material limitations and ecological constraints.
But a nuclear-powered future is far from guaranteed. Nuclear energy is under assault in America, with plants being forced to shut down decades prematurely as a result of broken markets and politics. Bitcoiners need to defend the fleet and call for a build out of new reactors to protect the future they’re trying to build.
The opportunity cost in Bitcoin of losing these reactors is immense. Right now, 5.1 gigawatts of clean, baseload capacity is scheduled for premature retirement by the end of the year, which would be a record for the largest annual nuclear capacity retirement ever. To put that number into context, that’s currently about enough capacity to power the entire Bitcoin network.
Or let’s consider an example closer to the mecca of cryptocurrency. About 200 miles south of Silicon Valley sits Diablo Canyon, California’s last nuclear power plant. Despite its profitability and California’s rolling blackouts, the plant is being forced to shut down in 2025 to placate misguided environmentalists. Diablo’s two reactors provide enough steady, round-the-clock electricity to account for over 40% of the network’s hash power.
Rather than break with the conventional wisdom on energy, some cryptocurrency advocates maintain they can mine exclusively when there is an excess amount of clean electricity being generated, i.e. when wind and solar output is high. This will be profitable despite the low utilization of expensive equipment, they claim, because it takes advantage of cheap, or even free, electricity. But this strategy only works as long as it represents a very small portion of the network. The network will not survive if miners are only contributing to it when the winds are up or the sun’s at high noon.
Bitcoin is fundamentally baseload demand. Like any capital-intensive industry, it requires massive, uninterrupted power. That’s why nuclear seems almost custom-made before the fact for the needs of Bitcoin. It enables an energy system that can reliably deliver constant power without jeopardizing nature or human welfare. Without nuclear, what will provide that baseload in the future, and will there be enough of it for Bitcoin without hazarding the planet?
If we want to dream, if we want to experiment and explore, if we want a better future, we need a society robust and plentiful enough to provide for one. Whatever naysayers claim about Bitcoin, it’s a future-oriented endeavor at its core. Anyone interested in participating in innovation needs to condemn policies that promote scarcity and champion the technologies that bolster abundance. Building a future for Bitcoin relies on protecting and expanding the nuclear energy that could power its ascendance.
Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-Börse in Europa
Source: https://medium.com/campaign-for-a-green-nuclear-deal/bitcoin-and-baseload-how-hodling-nuclear-will-deliver-the-future-22b231bec5d5?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency
