We are well aware the scaling debate was a fiasco. In many similar ways, the electricity sector is facing the same fate. In this paper, I will compare those two fields and maybe we all can extract a few ideas on the situation we are in. But first, here are a few words about the energy industry.
Energy-related challenge
When talking about energy, there are three deadlines to keep in mind:
Shortage
Climate Change
Demand
All of them operate on a different time scale.
Raw materials’ shortage happens when using non-renewable energy such as oil, gas or nuclear substance. Since these raw materials are not renewable, there will be a moment in the future when we run out of them. Truth is there will always be oil/gas, but at one point it will not be financially viable to extract anymore. So it will stay in the ground.
The prediction date for the shortage of coal is approximately 133 years. For the nuclear it will take roughly 230 years at today’s consumption rate. More or less depending on the method and the scale of our future production. By that time, it is crucial we moved to newer or sustainable energies. What is important is that it is a fairly long-term issue.
Then there is Climate Change. Climate has already been altered. No engineering will change that fact. But we can prevent it from getting worse. We need to be carbon neutral by the year 2050. Otherwise it will become impossible to keep Global Warming below 2 °C at the end of the century. So let’s say this is a medium-term issue.
And finally: demand. If demand is not met, citizens cannot drive their cars, cannot heat their homes, trains and planes are useless, etc. The whole society starts to dysfunction. That is a short-term issue.
What’s wrong with the energy sector?
Of all the energy available to us, nuclear power is the way to go. It is controllable, it can sustain demand easily, it is one of the safest method to produce electricity and it is efficient. And the most important one: it is a clean energy as it rejects few greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But besides being identified as a crucial method of production, the one that can solve short-term and medium-term challenges, it faces public apprehension.
Germany for example decided to permanently shut down 8 of its 17 reactors following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. And planned to shut down the rest of them by 2022. In the following years, these reactors were mainly replaced by coal plants. A recent research paper estimated the costs induced by that policy. They found that it released about 36 million additional tons of carbon dioxide per year and likely killed an additional 1,100 people per year from pollution-related illnesses. In other words, about $12 billion per year in social costs.
Let us take another example: France (where I’m from). France produces 71.7% of its electricity with its nuclear park. Which makes it the country with the lowest greenhouse gases’ emission rate of all its neighbors as pointing by this map. Only surpassed in Europe by countries like Sweden or Norway where hydroelectric dams are hugely abundant. Although France made all the best decisions for the climate in the ’70s when Climate Change was not a thing yet, we are almost making the same mistake Germans made almost 10 years ago.
When Germany closed its nuclear industry, it was to focus on renewable energies. But switching from non-renewable energy to renewable ones is doing nothing for our short-term challenges. It only prioritizes long-term shortage over short-term demand. And renewable energies cannot sustain today’s demand. So we need another solution to that problem.
In Germany, that solution was coal plants. Effectively replacing nuclear plants when solar panels and wind turbines were not self-sufficient. Coal plants could sustain the demand, but they would emit a lot of greenhouse gases, therefore increasing global warming.
So if we get this straight, we went from having a shortage problem to having a demand problem. And from there to having both a Climate Change and a shortage problem (as coal is not a renewable energy). Not only did it not solve anything, it aggravated our problems
Comparisons With the Bitcoin Project
The block-size limit was a temporary fix to a spam danger. The plan was never to set it in stone. It was always intended to raise it as usage grows. When the scaling debate took place, people opposed to the block size increase were concerned it would bring centralization to the ecosystem in the far future. That was the main point but I want to focus on another argument: the so-called need for a market fee.
When Satoshi invented Bitcoin, he implemented a fixed total supply of 21 million. The last Bitcoin of that supply will be mined in the year 2140. Until then miners are paid with newly created coins and after that they will have to rely solely on the market fee. Therefore the market fee is not needed today. The sooner it will appear the better, but it is not needed today. Yet it was pushed.
That caused fee to rise and transactions to take a longer and longer to process, damaging usability. In the same way as the nuclear ban, a solution to a long-term issue created an issue in the present. Pretending to make the sector sustainable only crippled it.
To solve this new issue, a layer 2 solution was proposed: the Lightning Network, supposed to bring instant free transaction. Going through centralized hub just to even work, defeating the whole purpose of Bitcoin and the reason to keep the limit in the first place.
Why? Any solution?
In the case of nuclear power, it can be argued that fear is the problem. Chernobyl and Fukushima are still vivid in every memory. This afraid people and make them think nuclear power plants are not safe. But despite those accidents, nuclear is still the safest method for producing electricity.
Maybe in the collective subconscious, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are associated with nuclear but it is far-fetched. But then, why would the cryptospace face the same problem?
I think it is because the nuclear field is a very complex scientific domain. It is hard to explain it in simple ways, it is hard to explain radioactivity in layman terms and it is hard to explain all the different measurement units (sievert, becquerel, etc). The Bitcoin project is the same in that regard. It is difficult to grasp and how cryptography works, how mining secure the network, how transaction are appended to the blockchain, what a fork and reorg are, etc.
We need to better educate people on the issues we are facing, to make it easier to expose manipulation or ignorance. And we need to keep our priorities straight. Short-term over long-term. Usability over sustainability. Hopefully, we will be able to improve both in the coming years. Maybe improving the first will improve the second.
And finally we should not be scared of forks while still valuing the strength of this community. Fortunately for us, Bitcoin is not dictated by any state. While the fate of nuclear power is in the hands of a few, we are allowed to pursue every change we see fit and let the market bring the right decision forward. Forking should not be seen in a bad light as it is what saved us from a dead-end road.
