The Breakdown - A Point-by-Point Rebuttal of the Most Recent Bitcoin Environmental FUD

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

On this week’s “Long Reads Sunday,” NLW reads Nic Carter’s “On Bitcoin, the Gray Lady Embraces Climate Lysenkoism,” a rebuttal of the New York Times’ recent piece on bitcoin energy consumption he says is riddled with false data and debunked sources.    -- Earn up to 12% APY on Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD, EUR, GBP, Stablecoins & more. Get started at nexo.io -- Enjoying this content?   SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast Apple:  https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1438693620?at=1000lSDb Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/538vuul1PuorUDwgkC8JWF?si=ddSvD-HST2e_E7wgxcjtfQ Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9ubHdjcnlwdG8ubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M=   Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW   The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk.com

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by nexus.io and produced and distributed by CoinDes. What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, April 18th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday. Listen, I don't want to have to be reading this piece today in the same way that Nick Carter didn't want to have to be writing it earlier this week. But mainstream media insists on continuing to peddle nonsense around the environmental impact of Bitcoin and other parts of the crypto industry, so here we are. Today, on Long Read Sunday, I'll be reading Nick Carter's piece on Bitcoin, The Grey Lady

embraces climate lisenkoism, how the New York Times wields junk science in their attacks on Bitcoin. I want to thank the formerly eminent New York Times. I read their latest article on Bitcoin at 5.30 a.m. this morning, and I was immediately jolted into a state of alertness. No coffee needed. Their latest missive on Bitcoin's climate footprint is so poorly researched that once I read it, I knew I had an immediate duty to push back. I've transcended resignation at this point. My current attitude is astonishment. I am simply amazed that the New York Times would publish such shoddy work. Presumably someone at the New York Times

knows about Bitcoin. Why would they put through such a weak piece? Did they not think it would face pushback? Here's the article in question. In Coinbase's rise a reminder, cryptocurrencies use lots of energy. There's another equally inane article on NFTs from the same author that I don't have time to get into, but suffice to say the author's take on NFTs is woefully inadequate. The context here, of course, is that the New York Times tried to take down Coinbase, Uber-style, by publishing hit piece after hit piece on the company following CEO Brian Armstrong's commitment to keep the company focused on the core corporate mission, advancing the usage of cryptocurrency and refusing to wade into any ancillary culture wars or political conflicts.

Reasonable enough, right? Not in current year. This unforgivable crime of staying focused put a gigantic target on Coinbase's back and caused the NYT to direct considerable resources to tearing down the startup. Thankfully, the NYT manifestly failed and was humiliated when Coinbase rose above and had the most successful direct listing of all time yesterday, and the third biggest public listing ever. So, it's unsurprising you'd see some sour grapes from the New York Times in light of their defeat. Their journalists have never been positively disposed to Bitcoin, nor do I expect anything

different. But this article on energy is shocking. it doesn't pass journalistic muster. We're not just talking about differences of opinion. We're talking about complete misunderstandings of Bitcoin and a reliance on junk, thoroughly rebutted academia. You actually don't need to know anything about Bitcoin to ascertain that this article's core claims are invalid, just the willingness to actually chase down the sources in question and evaluate their credibility. Let's get to the article. It contains incredibly 10, 10 specific claims that are erroneous, questionable, or rely on a complete misunderstanding of Bitcoin.

impressive for a short article. And I'm going to ignore the author's generally confused descriptions of how blockchain's work. Let's lay them out paraphrasing in some cases. One, this quote from Camila Mora. All this accounts for so little of the world's total transactions, yet has the carbon footprint of entire countries. So imagine it taking off. It'll ruin the planet. Two, reference to the Mora at all paper. Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above the Paris Agreement target of 2 degrees Celsius. Three, cryptocurrency's heavy environmental toll is starting to royal climate policy in China, with a reference to the Jang at all paper. Four, imply that mining was responsible for blackouts in Iran. Five, suggesting that NFTs have an outsized environmental impact. Six, repeats the DeVries claim that

each Bitcoin transaction accounts for 10,000 X more energy than a visa transaction. Seven, claims that proof of work is a, quote, computing method that's intentionally designed to be inefficient. Eight, claims that Bitcoin is, quote, expected to eventually follow Ethereum's transition to prove of steak? Nine repeats the claim that proof of stake reduces your emissions to almost nothing. Ten claims that Tezos and Neer have vastly lowered their energy use by using proof of steak. I'm going to respond to these in turn. One and two are effectively the same point, so I'll address them together. Bitcoin emissions could increase global temperatures by two degrees Celsius. This is the central premise of the article that Bitcoin emissions could push up global temperatures

by two degrees. This claim relies on a single two-page paper, quote-unquote, dating from October 2018 from Mora at all. I don't believe the author of the New York Times read the paper, because if she had, she would have immediately known it was invalid. It's not really a paper. It's a two-page comment in the Nature Climate Change Journal. The problem is that it's paywalled so New York Times readers can't easily evaluate the source material itself. Citing paywalled work is pretty insidious, but at least we have the wonderful SciHub, powered by Bitcoin donations, as a convenient paywall buster. So if you want to read the paper, paste the link into SciHub and you should get the PDF. I don't often say this, but the

more a paper is complete nonsense. It's nonsense. It relies on a delusional, fictional conception of what Bitcoin is. You don't have to take my word for it. It's so egregious that there have been no fewer than three comprehensive rebuttals written. But you don't have to be an academic to spot the flaws with the paper. The paper is so incredibly brief and non-forthcoming in a methodological sense, so it's hard to fully infer the approach. From what I can tell the approaches as follows. One, rely on existing academia and hash rate and minor data to determine the energy and carbon outlay of the Bitcoin system as of 2018. Two, devise a per-transaction energy cost of Bitcoin by dividing that energy costs by the number of transactions processed. Three, assume 314 billion

digital transactions per year. Four, assume that Bitcoin transactions will follow the average growth trajectories of other technologies and account for many of those 314 billion transactions. Five, extrapolate Bitcoin's transactional growth to tens of billions of transactions per year. Six, multiply that extrapolated figure by the naive per-transaction energy cost devised in two. 7, assume that Bitcoin's energy mix will not change. 8, multiply the energy figure found in 6 by the static energy mix assumed in 7. Voila. Bitcoin is warming the planet by 2 degrees Celsius.

The problems with this analysis are endless. The first is that the transaction energy cost analysis is completely flawed. In 2018, the overwhelming majority of minor revenue was attributable to the issuance of new Bitcoins, so amortizing that figure to transactions makes no sense. There's no per-transaction energy cost. Individual transactions do not carry energy payloads. miners produce block space and mainly collect revenue deriving from subsidies deriving from new issuance, not fees. You have to tease apart fees and issuance-driven subsidy. In the long-term,

fees will be important in minor revenue, but that is a separate analysis. You can't use numbers from 2018 when minor revenue is almost exclusively issuance-based to derive estimates on what a fee regime would look like. Second, the Bitcoin system cannot support the tens of billions of transactions the authors assume it will. It's pretty much maxed out at 300,000 to 500,000 transactions per day. Data overheads mean that it will never grow much beyond that, and that's okay. Bitcoin is a settlement, not a payments network. This trivial point invalidates the entire premise of the article. As Massenae at all note in their critical response to Mora, second, all three Bitcoin adoption scenarios designed by Mora at all represent sudden and improbable departures from historic trends in Bitcoin

transactions. Over the preceding five years, annual growth ranged from 1.3x to 2.3x. Specifically, Mora at all assumed that Bitcoin transactions, which totaled $104 million in 2017, representing a mere 0.03% of global cashless transactions, would abruptly leap to $78 billion by 2019 in the fast scenario, a 750x increase in only two years, to $11 billion by 2020 in the median scenario, a 108x increase. Third, the authors assume that the energy mix of Bitcoin will be fixed. This is obviously invalid and fails to take into account the natural development of Bitcoin mining into a system that monetizes stranded energy assets, many of which are renewable. The more paper makes absolutely no sense and imagines a completely fictional version of Bitcoin. It erroneously assumes a per-transaction

energy cost and wrongly assumes that Bitcoin will scale at the base layer to hundreds of billions of transactions per year, and wrongly assumes that you can simply combine those two variables to get a carbon footprint. It's horrific. The paper has no place in a New York Times article, nor should the author be consulted for a quote. This isn't a footnote. This is the key premise of the New York Times article. Relying on this article is completely disqualifying. Bitcoin is affecting Chinese climate policy. The other paper the New York Times relies on in their article is policy assessments for the carbon emissions flows and sustainability of Bitcoin blockchain operation in China,

by Jiang at all. Tabucci relies on this paper to claim that Bitcoin mining, quote, could make it difficult for the world's largest polluter, China, to meet its climate goals. But this paper isn't affiliated with Chinese energy policy. It's not emanating from the Chinese energy establishment. The paper, published in Nature Communications, is a black box purporting to forecast Bitcoin emissions. The variables you have to include to forecasting Bitcoin emissions are as follows. Forecast the price of Bitcoin. Forecast the fees of Bitcoin. Forecast the energy consumption of

miners, resulting from the above. Forecast the energy mix of miners. But this paper doesn't approach it in a straightforward way. The paper presents an incredibly complex black box model to attempt to forecast the CO2 emissions of Bitcoin mining. This model is impossible to audit, and key variables are impossible to forecast, like price, fees, and energy mix of miners. No one knows what the price of Bitcoin will be in 5 to 10 years. The rate of fees is unknown, as is the sources of energy miners will consume. So it's completely unscientific to assert a hard figure relating to energy consumption or CO2 impact. And yet, that's exactly what the authors do, brazenly claiming that, quote, the annual energy consumption of the Bitcoin blockchain in China is expected to peak

in 2024, at 296.59-9 terawatt hours and generate 130.5 million metric tons of carbon emissions correspondingly. This isn't quite as bad as Moore's paper, but it's a largely unauditable black box algorithms spitting out overly confident estimates relying on unknowable variables. And regarding its insertion in the article, China has already banned Bitcoin mining in Inter-Mongolia, and could just as easily ban its uses in Xinjiang, the other coal-heavy province where mining occurs. That would solve China's Bitcoin emissions problem to the extent they have one while being extremely positive for the Bitcoin network. This isn't a problem. It's an anti-problem. Chinese antipathy towards Bitcoin is great news for its carbon intensity and the security of the network overall.

Bitcoin is to blame for Iranian blackouts. The New York Times also suggests that Bitcoin is to blame for blackouts in Iran. Quote, Iran is cracked down on Bitcoin mining, calling it a burden on its electric grid after blackouts hit Tehran and other major cities earlier this year. The Iranian government scapegoated Bitcoin for their blackouts. If you read actual news outlets like the AP, they saw through the Iranian regime claims, why would you believe these, and pointed out how hollow they were? quote, although Bitcoin mining strains the power grid, experts say it's not the real reason behind Iran's electricity outages and dangerous air pollution. The telecommunications ministry estimates that Bitcoin consumes less than 2% of Iran's total energy production. Bitcoin was an easy victim here, said Kave Madani, a former deputy head of Iran's Department of Environment, adding that,

quote, decades of mismanagement have left a growing gap between Iran's energy supply and demand. Why the New York Times is uncritically repeating propaganda disseminated by the Iranian regime is beyond me. NFTs have an outsized environmental impact. There's a lot to say on NFTs, but I'll just repeat what I told art news. To ascertain the energy costs of NFTs, you have to do the following. You want to measure the fraction of Ethereum transactions that are NFTs. Then you want to try to evaluate how far out of equilibrium those NFT transactions are pushing the clearing price of gas, which is then providing extra revenue to miners. Then you presume that those miners plows some of the extra revenue into more hashing, enlarging the Ethereum network and consuming more energy.

But, Carter noted, not all minor revenue is being homogeneously deployed into pure electricity consumption. As far as I can tell, no one has really done this analysis so far. To really understand the carbon footprint of NFTs, you'd also have to determine the energy mix of eth miners, which no one has done either. NFTs are a single-digit percentage of Ethereum transactions. As I point out in the article, 30,000 NFT transactions versus 1.2 million eth transactions when I last ran the numbers. They don't really move the needle energy-wise. The author's parallel article on NFTs could do with an entire tear-down of its own. There's passages which are just, dot, dot, dot, false. Quote, in a nutshell, when an artist uploads a piece of art and clicks a

button to mint it, she or he starts a process known as mining, which involves complex puzzles, awesome computing power, and a huge load of energy. Oh my God, I'm sorry, NLW kicking back in here. I hadn't read that line carefully, and I can't even believe that that's in here. All right, guys, back to it. Back to the article. This is back to Nick again. This just simply isn't true. I don't know how else to put it. Minting in NFT does not kick off a causal chain which leads to miners powering up their machines. They are mining anyway. Again, if you want to quantify the impact, you have to follow the methodology I lay out above,

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Bitcoin transactions use 10,000 times more energy than Visa transactions. This talking point is so pervasive and so fundamentally off base and relies on so many misunderstandings of Bitcoin that I've already written multiple articles addressing it. You see it all the time. Here's climate journalist Eric Holthaus relying on the same transactions have an embedded energy cost logic. Quote, at its current consumption rates, Bitcoin could never replace the global financial system. Right now, with its high transaction fees, Bitcoin can only handle about 350,000 transactions a day. At that rate, Bitcoin require 14x the world's total electricity just to process 1 billion

credit card transactions that take place every day. And of course, this claim underpins the baseless mora study. In short, the comparison between Visa and Bitcoin is wildly off base. Visa is a payments network, which relies ultimately on underlying financial infrastructure. Bitcoin is the financial infrastructure. It is a full-stack monetary network. I'm going to quote myself. I'll keep this short. Bitcoin offers fast, high assurance final settlement. This means transactors can trust that value transfers are absolutely final within a short period of time. This permits Bitcoin to scale to enormous size. Billion dollar transactions are common and settle without incident. Can you do that with Visa? Bitcoin is therefore best understood

as a high-integrity utility-scale settlement network similar to Fedwire, but arguably more resilient given Fedwire's recent outages. No surprise that like other real-time gross settlement systems, Bitcoin is a suitable base upon which other payments networks can be built. These are numerous, but they include off-chain transactions at exchanges, near-chain solutions like lightning, sidechains with new trust models like liquid and rootstock, and smart contract platforms like Blockstack that rely on Bitcoin's security. Like Visa with Fedwire, all of these payment layers introduce new trust models and different settlement guarantees, but in exchange provides scalability and transactional creativity. Bitcoin's transactions are payloads that run into the billions of

dollars. Visa doesn't give you that. Visa doesn't really give you final settlement. You need an underlying settlement's network for that. Quoting myself again. One Bitcoin transaction, therefore, can settle thousands of off-chain or near-chain transactions on any of these third-party networks. Exchanges and custodians could choose to settle up with each other once a day, batching hundreds of thousands of transactions into a single settlement. Lightning channels could settle literally millions of payments into a single Bitcoin transaction without a channel closure. This isn't just speculative, it's happening today. As Fedwire's 800,000 or so daily transactions reveal little about the total payment volumes supported by the network, Bitcoin's 300,000 daily transactions

and 950,000 outputs do not tell the whole story. And of course, as I mentioned in my other article about the topic, if you want to quantify the cost of Visa, you have to consider the cost of the entire dollar system. Visa relies on ACH, FedWire, Swift, the global correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve, and of course, the military and diplomatic strength of the U.S. government to ensure all of the above are working smoothly. Any energy comparison must take the above into account, including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar. As those who make this comparison inevitably fail to mention, the dollar's ubiquity is partly due to a covert arrangement whereby the U.S. provides military support to countries

like Saudi Arabia that agree to sell oil exclusively for dollars. It's worth noting that the grossly oversized U.S. military, whose presence worldwide isn't necessary to backstop the international dollar system, is the single largest consumer of oil worldwide. Bitcoin transactions by contrast rely just on Bitcoin. Bitcoin proposes a new monetary unit, also named Bitcoin, and mediates its circulation through the Bitcoin Protocol, which is administered by nodes and miners. Bitcoin's energy footprint is highly transparent due to the accessible and highly integrated nature of the system. This provides fertile ammunition for critics who can easily estimate the externalities of Bitcoin while insisting no equivalent ones exist for the dollar system. But the two

systems are different. Leaving aside the total lack of comparatibility between Bitcoin and Visa, I'll remind you once again that Bitcoin transactions do not have an embedded energy cost. 80 to 90% of Bitcoin's energy outlay is due to initial coin issuance. That causes energy usage that will occur if blocks are full or completely empty. From my same article, today Bitcoin miners earn around $50 million a day, which annualizes to around $18.2 billion in minor revenue. Fully 85% of that revenue derives not from per transaction fees, but from the issuance of new Bitcoins. This issuance process is finite. In fact, it's 88.7% done. The rate of new coin issuance halves every four years as it approaches that 21 million limit. These are the halvings

you've probably heard about. Bitcoiners really love them. So the issuance component of minor revenue is structurally decaying over time. Unless you believe that the price of Bitcoin is going to literally double in real terms every four years until 2140, that expenditure and hence energy usage is going to decline. If you strip out the subsidy from the issuance of new coins, which won't exist at maturity, Bitcoin's minor reward is much lower than it is today. There is an upper bound on the fees that users will tolerate, so there is a natural check on minor revenue. The Bitcoin Protocol can't support tens of millions of transactions at the base layer every day that's incompatible with the computer science constraints

that guide network development. So there will never be hundreds of millions of energy-intensive transactions settled on Bitcoin every day. You'd expect journalists repeating these claims to learn about block size. We fought a whole war over it. And lastly, as mentioned, many critics rely on the mistaken assumption that Bitcoin requires many more transactions, each with an embedded energy cost to achieve scale. But that's not the case. Bitcoin is scaling in a layered manner, vertically rather than horizontally, quoting myself again. Bitcoin's base layer cannot, for good reasons, scale up to a global payments network, nor should it. The layered model mimicking the way traditional payment system developed is what the community has wisely opted for.

Bitcoin has a fundamental constraint in terms of the block space available, which is a function of the cost to operate a node and be a peer on the network. Push too much data through Bitcoin's pipes and only individuals with large data centers will be able to validate the blockchain. The trustlessness of the system evaporates in that scenario. Proof of work is designed to be inefficient. This betrays another misunderstanding of proof of work in Bitcoin. Most of the energy outlay for mining comes from the revenue provided by the issuance of new coins. Today, that's 90%. The remaining 10% derives from transaction fees. The Bitcoin Protocol auctions off new units every 10 minutes, and miners bid for them in a lottery format. Miners will logically spend $99 to obtain $100 worth of Bitcoin. In practice,

their margins fluctuate. This is how Satoshi determined Bitcoins would be trustlessly distributed from scratch without a third party. So the vast majority of minor revenue and hence energy outlay relates to the initial distribution of Bitcoins from scratch. This is no different from energy spent to extract gold from the Earth's crust. Is that inefficient too? Now, you read this charitably and see this as a reference to the difficulty adjustment mechanism, which makes mining harder as more hash power comes online. But what does inefficiency mean here? Is there some optimal ratio of energy spend to transaction volume that the author is targeting? What is the acceptable number? Bitcoin users spent around 8.5 million in fees yesterday to send around $19 billion worth of Bitcoin. That's a

take rate of four basis points. Bitcoin will transition to proof of stake. This is false. This is simply not in the roadmap. No one wants it. Proof of work is inherent to Bitcoin and is what provides the assurances that make Bitcoin work. He'd be hard-pressed to find a single bitterner who would express a desire to move to proof of stake. Already a number of influential Bitcoin developers and community members have expressed their astonishment at this claim. It's a bit like reading an article on Venezuela that claims it's a country in Africa, or an article on Catholicism claiming that it's a polytheistic religion. It's just stunningly wrong. Changing something that essential to the protocol would be complete heresy. Bitcoiners argue passionately over

tiny changes. A gigantic change such as this would be virtually impossible to find consent on. And it's not clear at all that proof of stake offers any advantages or even works, frankly, beyond placating journalists. You'd expected journalists reporting on Bitcoin to know enough about the Bitcoin community to not make elementary mistakes such as these. This is nothing short of a credibility destroyer. Update. As I was writing this article, the journalist stealth edited the article in response to backlash, adding, without inserting any notice of correction in the article, the caveat that, quote, though some critics say Bitcoin will eventually need to follow, particularly if an environmental

backlash grows, there are no current plans to do so and such a move is unpopular with the Bitcoin community. Obviously, unacknowledged stealth edits or journalistic malpractice, but who at the New York Times would know this given that they fired their public editor. Proof of Stake reduces your emissions to almost nothing. This claim contains two embedded assumptions, both of which are false in my view. One, proof of stake offers equivalent assurances to Bitcoin. Two, there are no costs associated with proof of stake. For a full teardown, scroll to the end of my recent article on the topic. I'm going to quote myself on the first point. This is a cornerstone of the anti-Bitcoin energy argument, the notion that you can still have something for nothing with proof of stake. No energy consumption,

yet still a functional decentralized consensus. If this logic reminds you of perpetual motion machines, it's because that's exactly what's being proposed here, a completely free lunch where you get precisely the same assurances that Bitcoin with no cost whatsoever. Of course, this is fantastical. Proof of stake is just a fancy phrase meaning those who have the most wealth wield political control. That sounds a lot like our current system which Bitcoin is specifically designed to solve. Bitcoin explicitly rejects politics and doesn't grant any special privileges based on coins held. If holding more coins gave you more control, the attempted takeover of Bitcoin through the 2x movement, backed by the largest custodians and exchanges in the industry, would have succeeded.

So I thoroughly dispute that proof of stake gives you equivalent assurances. It seems strikingly similar to the existing financial system, which Bitcoin and proof of work is meant to free us from. On to the second point. Let's just assume for now that proof of sake works just the same as proof of work and provides identical assurances. To the extent proof of state consumes productive capital, it consumes energy. I'm not just being trite here. Capital is society's fungible tokenized energy. It's how resources get allocated. Dams, wind farms, solar farms, nuclear power plants, those require capital to be built. Capital can

produce literal physical energy. As a venture capitalist, I am in the capital allocation business. I am intimately familiar with the constraints of capital. Start-of-s-sliver die based on their ability to produce capital. So yes, it is finite, and yes, it has a capacity to be transformed into physical energy. Governments can print fiat out of thin air, but they cannot print real resources into existence. What happens if a proof of stake chain reaches $1 trillion in valuation and offers stake rewards of, say, 5%. Logically, stakers will borrow at the risk-free rate and lend to the protocol in a kind of carry trade. Thus, they will allocate productive capital away from other projects and deploy that $5 billion a year into staking. That's $5 billion that could be spent on cancer research,

reforestation, life extension, wind or solar farms, nuclear fusion research, carbon sequestration, creating a giant aerosol shield in the atmosphere to block the sun, you name it. Instead, this energy would be allocated to a monetary system. So there's really no fundamental difference here. Capital is energy, and proof of state consumes it just as Bitcoin does. Energy has an environmental externality, depending on how it's generated, but logically so does the allocation of capital via negativa. That capital could always be put to work towards carbon-negative projects. As always, emissions are not a monetary question. emissions are a policy question. It's up to governments to work with the private sector to design

grids that are sustainable, not scapegoat useful monetary technologies. Tazos and NIR have vastly lowered their energy use by using proof of stake. Tazos and NIR consume virtually no physical energy. Capital is another question, but they haven't lowered their energy use. They didn't have any to begin with. They didn't switch to proof of stake. They began as proof of stake networks. This comes with obvious tradeoffs. Both had to be issued as a sale by centralized entities. There is no way to trustlessly distribute units of new currency without proof of work, which is why Ethereum, even though it intends to move to proof of stake, launched on proof of work. And of course, you have the questions of whether Tazos or near offer the same assurances of Bitcoin. I think the answer is an unambiguous no,

but frankly, both systems are too young to yield a determination. If they can survive in the wild for 10 years, survive civil wars, coup and takeover attempts, and reliably settle trillions of value with virtually no downtime, and they can fully decentralize their governance, they will have a case. But we just don't have enough data on that. It's surely too early to declare competing proof-of-stake systems equivalent from an assurance perspective. In case you're wondering, Lysenkoism was the Soviet practice of inventing junk science to benefit the regime. In that case, it focused on biology and genetics. Genuine scientific endeavor was suppressed and thousands of scientists were imprisoned or executed to keep the charade intact.

In this case, the New York Times is choosing to deliberately ignore the science of blockchains and make spurious claims about the climate impact of Bitcoin. They are relying on two questionable studies, one of them definitively refuted. The New York Times is not interested in the truth. As I have said previously, this debate has a normative and an objective track. They're slightly feigning a discussion about the objective facts, but what they really care about is the norm. Bitcoin sure consumes a lot of energy as a metonymy for Bitcoin should not be allowed to exist. If they were interested in the facts, they'd report the facts. They would talk about the challenge of ascertaining a reliable energy mix, and the prospects for renewable mining are mining with

non-rival energy. They would talk about overabundant energy in southwest China. They would talk about the declining LCOE for solar and the prospects for mining with battery-augmented solar in the long term. They talk about how Bitcoin monetizes stranded energy assets. But instead, they elevate junk science that relies on complete misunderstandings of how Bitcoin actually works. This is all a sign that they care only about the values, not the facts. I will never deny that Bitcoin uses energy, nor I will deny that it has climate externalities.

But the way to solve that is by guiding mining towards a greener future. The debate requires a thorough understanding of the facts, and that is what we must pursue. I happen to be extremely optimistic about the possibility for decarbonized mining in the long term, and I think Bitcoin is well suited to monetizing stranded sources of energy, many of which are renewable. But the New York Times elevation of junk science helps no one. They do disservice to the environmental cause by being such unsound advocates. Critics of Bitcoin deserve better. If you are simply sick of the New York Times and want to never hear their takes on cryptocurrency ever again, just block the MIT. If you're an entrepreneur, investor, or builder in the

crypto industry, you can express your displeasure by simply refusing to talk to New York Times journalists. I'm always happy to talk to journalists and I talk to them daily. But I am selective with who I engage with. These relationships are a two-way street, and engagement must be earned. So to the founders, take a leaf out of Mark Andreessen and the Coinbase Leadership's playbook. On the morning of the direct listing, they simply published a direct conversation between investors and founders without doing any press. Build distribution and reach people directly. You do not need the press. So for me, it's NLW again. This is already a very long, long read. I want to just come back to this one point at the end

that critics of Bitcoin deserve better and by extension that Bitcoin deserves better criticism. I think this is the key point that drives me nuts. Every one of these dumb articles crowds out space for more thoughtful debate. If one is sincerely interested in climate change and how economic systems can be redesigned to fight the underlying causes of climate change in the first place, banning entire categories of technologies

is just a cheap talking point that makes you feel good but doesn't actually accomplish anything. On the other hand, there is a major movement inside Bitcoin among Bitcoiners to push aggressively towards the capture of stranded resources, resources that are cheap because no one else can get to them. There is immense room for debate and discussion and engagement around how that might happen and how, instead of just boiling the oceans or whatever easy talking point someone on Twitter wants to characterize it, Bitcoin actually becomes an economic incentive to green the planet.

As Nick puts it, this is not some polyanish dismissal of the real impacts of Bitcoin or any other energy consumptive technology. The frustration that Bitcoiners have is when instead of engaging in a real debate, we get the same repeated talking points that cell clicks over and over again. I'm not unsympathetic to the challenge of a journalist, or even more, an editor who feels pressure to drive traffic to their site because of the nature of the business model of their news organization. We live in a clickbait world, right? Then again, you just spent upwards of 40 minutes listening to an entire conversation about an extremely dense topic, and you're still here.

So maybe fuck that excuse. Maybe we can reject this pernicious idea that you have to design everything around clicks, that that is somehow the native model of news. Maybe we can reject that and point to all of these examples where it's simply not the case. For now, though, I appreciate you listening for you making it all the way through this. Until tomorrow, guys, be safe and take care of each other. Peace. We're witnessing the greatest paradigm shift in finance in modern history. Join thousands of newsmakers and influencers talking the future of money at Consensus by CoinDesk. A live virtual experience of leaders, change makers, virtual reality meetups, keynotes from Ray Dalio, Gary Vaynerchuk, and much more. Get an up close look at the boom in crypto, the surge in

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