31–40 of 78 posts
Luckily there's at least a few businesses and such experimenting on putting miners and servers etc in people's houses and running them hard all winter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's zero. Exchanging banknotes or coins for goods or services does not consume electricity. Can't believe this was "sincere question".
This is anecdotal but my family operated a store in a rural vacation area and over half of our customers used cash. In the 2000s, we'd have to drive the cash 30+ minutes to the bank, twice weekly to mitigate the risk of a robbery. We sold the business, but more electronic transfers hopefully reduces the required driving miles, and overall cost to transact in cash.
If a business accepts any cash at all, the marginal cost of another cash transaction is really low. By your own antidote, your store still saw the value of accepting cash transactions, yeah?
Let us assume that 100% of all mining rewards go to electricity (and none to buying mining equipment, paying employees, servers, or networking), and let us further assume the electricity costs $0.01 / KWhr, which is cheaper than one can buy basically anywhere.
From flippening.watch, BTC paid miners $20,797,200 yesterday, for 2,079,720,000 KWHrs. This translates to approximately 87 GW of electricity, 24/7. 87 GW is approximately the output of the 21 Palo Verde nuclear plants in Arizona, which according to the US Energy Information Administration, can output up to 3937 MW. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3
In other words, Bitcoin is a drop in the bucket. Let's put this myth of massive energy usage to rest, and at the cost of being too snarky, and let us ask our journalists to learn basic math.
edit - I made a math mistake, which I have corrected. The overall point, while I was off by several orders of magnitude, however, holds.
edit 2 - I retract the entire comment. It appears the article is true, and that, ironically, I made the same mistake I accused the journalist of. I'm going to leave the comment up for posterity, but I retract it.
How does a nation expand credit with a cryptocurrency? Like as in the case with fractional reserve banking?
Before we had electronic bank records, banks could print "bank notes" which were as good as money if you trusted the bank. Now that we have electronic records they basically "create" USD by adding a deposit to your account while only having ~10% of that actually stored away in dollars.
If your account was truly in BTC they obviously couldn't just increase your balance, since it's a cryptocurrency and they can't just make something up.
One option would be for banks to have their own tokens, similar to bank notes of old. All banks would accept the tokens of other banks 1:1 and convert them to BTC on demand, but it would allow expansion of the "money supply" like we have now with dollars.
This article is based on some incredibly bad estimates, and reaches an outrageously large conclusion. Let us assume that 100% of all mining rewards go to electricity (and none to buying mining equipment, paying employees, servers, or networking), and let us further assume the electricity costs $0.01 / KWhr, which is cheaper than one can buy basically anywhere. From flippening.watch, BTC paid miners $20,797,200 yester…
EDIT: This is too perfect. 1053r calls out journalists for making a basic math mistake. In doing so, he makes a basic math mistake. I ask him about it, then get downvoted by HN.
This article is based on some incredibly bad estimates, and reaches an outrageously large conclusion. Let us assume that 100% of all mining rewards go to electricity (and none to buying mining equipment, paying employees, servers, or networking), and let us further assume the electricity costs $0.01 / KWhr, which is cheaper than one can buy basically anywhere. From flippening.watch, BTC paid miners $20,797,200 yester…
How are you getting that 2,079,720,000 KWHrs in 24 hours is 24.07 MW? EDIT: This is too perfect. 1053r calls out journalists for making a basic math mistake. In doing so, he makes a basic math mistake. I ask him about it, then get downvoted by HN.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sincere question: what's the energy usage for e.g. USD or EUR? Using VISA transactions for fiat currency, BTC uses 5K times more energy per transaction than VISA. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is...
5k and growing by orders of magnitude, where it's likely the case that Visa is continuously reducing their energy usage.
How does a nation expand credit with a cryptocurrency? Like as in the case with fractional reserve banking?
In the hope avoid down voting, in case you don’t know the problem of gold standards are three serious ones. First, it’s deflationary as the gold supply doesn’t change as economic growth occurs. Second, it’s decoupled from economic activity (e.g. you increase the money supply every time you use a credit card and decrease it when you pay off your bill — and that’s only one example). Third, it can suffer inflationary crises (yes, despite being deflationary!) when there’s a big gold strike (as happened with the California, Yukon, and Victorian strikes, among many others).
The argument FOR it is that governments can just print money if they get into trouble and inflate the currency. This usually screws the people doing the inflating as well (see: Venezuela) but can be pretty dreadful (e.g. Weimar). But the problems above are also terrible.