Statements about Bitcoin mining that sound like data but are actually unscientific emotional manipulation. A guide for journalists. 🧵👇

> “Bitcoin mine uses as much energy as the nearby 65,000 households”

Ants eat the equivalent of 60,000 hotdogs per day, so should we eradicate them so we can have more hotdogs for humans? Miners, like ants picking up crumbs, soak up *low demand* energy at rock bottom prices.

Miners do not compete with residential households for energy because they have a difficulty adjustment! This means miners that are not on the cheapest energy go out of business. The only reason to use the word households is to make you imagine machines stealing from humans.

> “A single Bitcoin transaction emits as much CO2 as a household in 3 weeks”

A single Bitcoin transaction can be thousands or millions of payments. Using the word “single” is designed to make you imagine that it’s wasteful.

Try this: “a single cargo ship consumes 63,000 gallons of fuel per day”. Is that scary? Like a cargo ship, a Bitcoin transaction performs important functions for millions of people across the world, and should not be thought of as a single payment.

> “[Miners] were paid more than $18 million for not operating, from fees ultimately paid by Texans who had endured the storm.”

This sounds like miners tricked energy companies into paying them some sort of ransom, and worse, it was taxpayer funded.

In fact, energy companies need flexible loads like Bitcoin miners in order to efficiently operate, lower costs, and have some of their traffic shut down on a moment’s notice during demand spikes. This is not a special privilege enjoyed by Bitcoin miners.

This is a program that miners participate in to make the grid *more efficient*. It just so happens that Bitcoin is the perfect kind of business to act as a flexible load: it wants the cheapest energy (low demand) and it can turn off on a moments notice during high demand times.

"Bitcoin uses more energy than many countries"

But Bitcoin is not a country. Bitcoin mining is highly decentralized, spread all over the world. Recently, a hydropower station in a remote Kenyan village went online, giving the village cheaper power.

When such power stations go online, they add to Bitcoin's overall energy use, making it grow bigger and bigger. But since it's not all in one place, comparing it to a country is an emotionally manipulative statement making you envision a giant power plant "doing nothing useful".

> "34 mines’ power use was causing nearly 16.4 million tons of carbon pollution each year."

Bitcoin miners do not emit carbon pollution. (some) power plants do. The number 16.4 million sounds like a lot, but is it?

Global emissions are ~36B tons, so this highly inflated… twitter.com/i/web/status/1646283017541787650