F%$K Bad Research

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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, or Sai and Vranken 2023, or Masanet et al. 2021, or… Well, the point is that there’s thousands of words already written that have shown that bitcoin mining energy modeling is in a state of crisis and that this is not isolated to bitcoin! It’s a struggle that data center energy studies have faced for decades. People like Jonathan Koomey, Eric Masanet, Arman Shehabi, and those nice guys Sai and Vranken (sorry, we’re not yet on a first-name basis) have written enough pages that could probably cover the walls of at least one men’s bathroom at every bitcoin conference that’s happened last year, that show this to be true.

My holy altar, which I keep in my bedroom closet, is a hand-carved, elegant yet ascetic shrine to Koomey, Masanet, and Shehabi for the decades of work they’ve done to improve data center energy modeling. These sifus of computing have made it all very clear to me: if you don’t have bottom-up data and you rely on historical trends while ignoring IT device energy efficiency trends and what drives demand, then your research is bullshit. And so, with one broad yet very surgical stroke, I swipe left on Mora et al. (2018), deVries (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023), Stoll et al. (2019), Gallersdorfer et al. (2020), Chamanara et al. (2023), and all the others that are mentioned in Sai and Vranken’s comprehensive review of the literature. World, let these burn in one violent yet metaphorically majestic mega-fire somewhere off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Reporters, and policymakers, please, I implore you to stop listening to Earthjustice, Sierra Club, and Greenpeace for they know not what they do. Absolve them of their sins, for they are but sheep. Amen.

Now that I’ve set the mood for you, my pious reader, I will now tell you a story about a recent bitcoin energy study. I pray to the bitcoin gods that this will be the last one I ever write, and the last one you’ll ever need to read, but my feeling is that the gods are punishing gods and will not have mercy on my soul–even in a bull market. One deep breath (cue Heath Ledger’s Joker) and Here… We… Go.

On a somewhat bearish October afternoon, I got tagged on Twitter/X on a post about a new bitcoin energy use study from some authors affiliated with the United Nations University (Chamanara et al., 2023). Little did I know that this study would trigger my autism so hard that I would descend into my own kind of drug-induced-gonzo-fear-and-loathing-in-vegas state, and hyper-focus on this study for the next four weeks. While I am probably exaggerating about the heavy drug use, my recollection of this time is very much a techno-colored, toxic relationship-level fever dream. Do you remember Frank from the critically acclaimed 2001 film, Donnie Darko? Yeah, he was there, too.

As I started taking notes on the paper, I realized that Chamanara et al.’s study was really confusing. The paper was perplexing because it's a poorly designed study that bases its raison d’etre entirely on de Vries and Mora et al. It uses the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF) Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index (CBECI) data without acknowledging the limitations of the model (see Lei et al. 2021 and Sai and Vranken 2023 for an in-depth analysis of the issues with CBECI’s modeling). It conflates its results from the 2020-2021 period with the state of bitcoin mining in 2022 and 2023. The authors also relied on some environmental footprint methodology that would make you think it was actually possible for you to shrink or grow a reservoir depending on how hard you Netflix and chill. Really, this is what Obringer et al. (2020) inferentially conclude is possible and the UN study cites Obringer as one of its methodological foundations. By the way, Koomey and Masanet did not like Obringer et al.’s methodology, either. I’ll light another soy-based candle at the altar in their honor.

Here’s a more clearly stated enumeration of the crux of the problem with Chamanara et al. (and by the way, their corresponding author never responded to my email asking for their data so I could, you know, verify, not trust.