The post F%$K Bad Research appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Halving Issue”. Click here to get your copy. It is also report #1 of the “FUD Fighters” series powered by HIVE Digital Technologies LTD. F%$K Bad Research: I spent over a month analyzing a bitcoin mining study and all I got was this trauma response. “We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, First Series (1845) “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” — Williamson (2016) on Brandolini’s Law For too long, the world has had to endure the fallout of subpar academic research on bitcoin mining’s energy use and environmental impact. The outcome of this bullshit research has been shocking news headlines that have turned some well-meaning people into angry politicians and deranged activists. So that you never have to endure the brutality of one of these sloppy papers, I’ve sacrificed my soul to the bitcoin mining gods and performed a full-scale analysis of a study from the United Nations University, published recently in the American Geophysical Union’s Earth’s Future. Only the bravest and hardest of all bitcoin autists may proceed to the following paragraphs, the rest of you can go back to watching the price chart. Your soft baby ears might have screamed with shock at the strong proclamation in my lede that the biggest and squeakiest research on bitcoin mining is bullshit. If you’ve ever read Jonathan Koomey’s 2018 blog post on the Digiconomist–also known as Alex deVries, or his 2019 Coincenter report, or Lei et al. 2021,…

---

Filed under: News - @ August 28, 2024 9:18 pm