I don't remember if I knew right away that I hated the idea of Bitcoin, but it was early. It sounded like a ponzi scheme, and that was before I knew about the energy use. After I heard about that, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it and thought it should be outlawed somehow.
At some point along the way I tried to mute mention of the terms Bitcoin and cryptocurrency on Twitter, but despite that, these tweets about the two words have gotten through into my monthly round-ups since 2014:
You can’t make me understand Bitcoin, people. Just stop trying already. This willful ignorance of it is not a facade. It’s who I am.
By John Moltz, March 2014
me, a dumbass: "smart cities" are cities with great transit, affordable housing, divested from fossil fuels
you, supreme tech genius: no "smart cities" means your car can mine bitcoin and there's an app for dialing an immigrant to do your chores for free
@mcmansionhell, February 2018
At its essence, Bitcoin is an arbitrage game that turns electricity into money.
Ross Andersen, March 2018
Bitcoin is the most selfish libertarian bullshit i've seen in years. You've destroyed the PC parts market and you're tormenting the world energy supply all in the name of trying to win free money
princessproto, May 2018
This is the most succinct definition of Bitcoin: imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin —@Theophite
iglvzx, August 2018
New study: Bitcoin is producing *more than double* the greenhouse gases of previous best estimates. That means despite its infinitesimal reach, the global Bitcoin network already uses a lot of electricity — about as much as the entire country of Austria.
Eric Holthaus, October 2018
bitcoin is the logical end of capitalism in that it has managed to remove every intermediary step between extractive environmental devastation and private profit under the false auspices of a more democratic power structure
@everestpipkin, January 2021
Bitcoin is MLM for men.
Kevin Gallatin, March 2021
Honestly you people make me so furious with this bitcoin shit. I'm still waiting on a graphics card for my new computer but I'll never get it cause some guy who unironically follows Elon Musk has confused numbers on a screen with productivity.
Tom Basgen, March 2021
Suddenly around 2020 people mostly stopped using the term "Bitcoin" and started using the more generic term cryptocurrency or crypto:
Everyone who loves crypto-currency is just desperate to avoid doing actual work to make money.
Tom Basgen, October 2019
crypto should be taxed at 120% because you clearly have more money than you know what to do with if you’re pouring it into pretend internet currency and living on an island resort
molly conger @socialistdogmom, January 2022
There should NEVER be a federal bailout of anything crypto. I'd take a deep recession over covering any of these grifters' scams. Tim Geithner may disagree, but we need "Old Testament morality" to apply to financial "innovators."
Jeff Hauser, January 2022
the two genders are cryptocurrency and astrology
katie @skatie420, January 2022
Any chance that if I take a really long nap, this whole crypto fad will be over by the time I wake up?
Alfie Kohn, February 2022
Striking how much a TV sports ad environment once mostly hawking cheap beer and pickups is now deluged with come-ons for online sports betting and cryptocurrency speculation -- both get-rich-quick pitches presumably aimed at manipulating the same wage-earning audience. Dystopic.
Charlie Savage, February 2022
I dug all of these up in honor of this excellent story from MIT Technology Review about the town of Plattsburgh, New York, which became the site of a number of Bitcoin server farms, starting in 2017, because it had plentiful, cheap electricity from hydropower.
From the story I learned:
- "each Bitcoin transaction consumes 1,173 kilowatts hours—more than the average American uses in a month."
- One Bitcoin-mining operation leads to another. After the first Bitcoin-mining operation set up, others followed. One prospect called the lighting department to enquire about getting five gigawatts of power. The department manager told him, "Excuse me. That’s a quarter of what New York state uses on a given day!"
- A city like Plattsburgh can exceed its quota because of the Bitcoin miners, such as on a cold day (do you know where Plattsburgh is?), and have to buy power at a higher rate. This affects the regular rate payers.
- The miners' operations put out a huge amount of heat, which require fans that create a constant high-frequency whine.
- Server farms don't make jobs. Well, I didn't learn that, I was reminded of it. The largest mining operation in Plattsburgh employs fewer people than a McDonald's.
- China banned crypto mining in 2021 in order to reach its climate goals.
Plattsburgh soon enacted a moratorium on crypto mines, got the state Public Utilities Commission to require high-density users to pay more, and required higher amounts and more up-front money for infrastructure costs. They successfully defended these changes in court (unlike Minnesota and Wisconsin principalities that tried to fight off frac-sand mining operations that destroyed the Mississippi River bluffs over the past few decades).
And — big shock — there have not been new crypto businesses in Plattsburgh since then! First the new server farms moved to nearby Massena, until that town enacted similar rules. Shit rolls downhill, as the saying goes. After China banned the practice, crypto moved to Kazakhstan (where electricity largely comes from coal).
So I'm back at the idea that the whole thing should be outlawed as wasteful, unnecessary, and just plain ridiculous. If it didn't cause harm, that might not matter, but it does.
We (the global sense of "we") have to come up with a way to stop these greedy, extractive, climate-destroying practices.
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Photo by Gabriela Bhaskar
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