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Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

theguardian.com

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Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#41

Post by wizeman »

1053r wrote: post #34

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 did you go from 2,079,720,000 KWHrs to 24.07 MW of electricity, 24/7?

My calculator and Google (search for "2079720000 kWh per 24 hours to MW") says it's more than 86,000 MW (so ~86 GW).

edit: corrected units from TW to GW, as pointed out by philipkglass

Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#42

Post by hndamien »

llamataboot wrote: post #20
spraak wrote: post #2

Sincere question: what's the energy usage for e.g. USD or EUR?

Irrelevant question though, in many ways. There's simply no chance that bitcoin is replacing fiat money. I realize that offends the bitcoin True Believers, but fiat money is not going away unless nation states go away, and if that happens there's some more issues we have to deal with than the cost of a transaction.

No True Believers believe it is going away, they believe that it will diminish in purchasing power and trust (Relative to Bitcoin - or at least cryptocurrency). So far, this trend appears to be true and continuing. Who knows how far it goes? Of course you will always be able to pay taxes in USD.

Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#43

Post by kegn »

rs999gti wrote: post #16
spraak wrote: post #2

Sincere question: what's the energy usage for e.g. USD or EUR?

> 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...

from the article you linked:

> Of course, VISA runs call centers, offices, and a whole lot else on electricity as well, which isn't counted in this comparison. But those hardly matter due to the extreme difference between the two figures.

--- I think this absolutely needs to be counted, because it is an operating cost of the entity. With bitcoin, there are no call centers because by design, the transactions are irreversable.

When pitted against the total cost of financial institutions, which all independently hold massive amounts of customer data, which should be considered a liability due to the recent issues with consumer data here in the West. This further increases the operating costs of each institution because they are running servers to house account data.

Imagine a global, catastrophic EMI event. Even a temporary one would cause introduce to these systems (like visa), a higher likelihood of race conditions where accounts will not reconcile, causing a higher cost to converge.

Bitcoin does not necessarily have this problem.

If we are truly worried about the future costs of running financial systems, maybe we should also add liabilities into the mix.

Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#44

Post by wizeman »

1053r wrote: post #38
brucephillips wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2,079,720,000 / 3600 / 24 = 24070.8333 KW, or 24.07 MW.

Why are you dividing by 3600? The numerator is already in kWh units (kW hours), it's not kW seconds.

Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#45

Post by philipkglass »

wizeman wrote: post #41
1053r wrote: post #34

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 did you go from 2,079,720,000 KWHrs to 24.07 MW of electricity, 24/7? My calculator and Google (search for "2079720000 kWh per 24 hours to MW") says it's more than 86,000 MW (so ~86 GW). edit: corrected units from TW to GW, as pointed out by philipkglass

86 GW, not 86 TW. 86 TW would be several times world primary energy consumption.

Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#46

Post by contravariant »

lubos wrote: post #3
spraak wrote: post #2

Sincere question: what's the energy usage for e.g. USD or EUR?

It's zero. Exchanging banknotes or coins for goods or services does not consume electricity. Can't believe this was "sincere question".

That's pretty much the only time it clearly consumes energy; and even worse, manpower.

Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#47

Post by wizeman »

philipkglass wrote: post #45
wizeman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you go from 2,079,720,000 KWHrs to 24.07 MW of electricity, 24/7? My calculator and Google (search for "2079720000 kWh per 24 hours to MW") says it's more than 86,000 MW (so ~86 GW). edit: corrected units from TW to GW, as pointed out by philipkglass

86 GW, not 86 TW. 86 TW would be several times world primary energy consumption.

You're right, thanks! It was an unfortunate typo.

Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#48

Post by baddox »

habosa wrote: post #36
ohiovr wrote: post #26

How does a nation expand credit with a cryptocurrency? Like as in the case with fractional reserve banking?

Here are some thoughts on how it could work. Not completely thought out, but something: 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 obvious…

Any online site that sells bitcoins for fiat, like Coinbase, could just keep the fiat (or use it for anything other than obtaining bitcoins) and increment your bitcoin balance. Their total bitcoin holding may be less than the sum of their users’ balances, and no one would notice unlrsss there was a “run” of users attempting to withdraw bitcoins into their own real wallets. We’d probably all consider that blatant fraud.

Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#49

Post by withdavidli »

lubos wrote: post #30
withdavidli wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coindesk did a write up of this. https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-real-costs-dollar/ Looks like data was taken from places like: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/ba... and rest of the numbers were taking into account of how much each note costs to make. "The Euro publishes sustainability statistics on their currency, and according to latest estimates, 3 billion banknotes printed in 2003 ha…

According to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption , Bitcoin is currently at 42 TWh. That's over 20 million tonnes of CO2. If we assume energy costs to produce annual supply of new banknotes and coins in entire world is at 1 TWh. You see how insane energy consumption of Bitcoin really is. And that's comparing an entire money supply of the world to single cryptocurrency. Banks cannot be part of the equat…

Fair point. All I was trying to show was that currencies like the Euro or USD has greater than zero energy usage to create/distribute.

I don't think BTC will stay the top crypto if it cannot resolve its current issues (though new ones will come after). Articles like takes stance, whether they know it or not, of this is here to stay for a long time and we need to deal with the ramifications. If that is true, more people are going to work on solving this issue either, or all of, through energy regulation, better hardware, better renewable energy, mass adoption of different coins, or moving to POS (or anything other proof system) instead of POW.

Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it

#50

Post by AlexandrB »

habosa wrote: post #36
ohiovr wrote: post #26

How does a nation expand credit with a cryptocurrency? Like as in the case with fractional reserve banking?

Here are some thoughts on how it could work. Not completely thought out, but something: 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 obvious…

> 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.

Why not create one big bank that can issue its own tokens that any bank will accept? We can call it a "central bank" or something. And then maybe after many years we can decouple the value of these central tokens from the value of bitcoin, instead allowing the central bank to control the total supply of tokens based on some kind of "monetary policy" to keep prices stable.

Sounds good. The future of crytocurrency is bright indeed!

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