Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
1–10 of 127 posts
Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
#2This is not a bug, it's a feature.
Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
#3This is not a bug, it's a feature.
It is a feature yes but that makes this technology very inefficient to process transactions.
Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
#4So Bitcoin cannot trivially be subject to a 51% attack, certainly not by Sweden anyway.
~~~ So awesome, I have to make an account to see the dead comment. Way to go HN mods.
Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
#5The sensationalism ignores that this tends to be trapped pockets of otherwise wasted surplus energy. Bitcoin creates a global energy arbitrage market for the first time. Energy can't be transported long distance, but it can be used to mine bitcoin. The benefits here are massive, including incentivizing cheap green energy, or the use of mining for ambient heating.
Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
#6Does this energy consumption come more from mining (i.e. finding the new bitcoins) or from transactions?
If the former, then the Bitcoin network should find a way to reward nodes for transactions in a more environmentally-friendly manner since mining should (in my understanding) disappear or become insignificant at some point.
Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
#7Does this energy consumption come more from mining (i.e. finding the new bitcoins) or from transactions? If the former, then the Bitcoin network should find a way to reward nodes for transactions in a more environmentally-friendly manner since mining should (in my understanding) disappear or become insignificant at some point.
Why would miners ever agree to that?
Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
#8This is not a bug, it's a feature.
It is a feature yes but that makes this technology very inefficient to process transactions.
"Very inefficient" is an understatement too! I wonder how much energy Visa and Mastercard combined use to process their transactions. Mind you, they probably do orders of magnitude more transactions per second.
I recently had a discussion with a friend about the viability of a distributed/ blockchain alternative to YouTube. Extrapolating BTC inefficiency to a distributed CDN processing TBs and PBs of traffic...
Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
#9This will be bad for global warming. All that extra energy being produced.
Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'
#10Missing from all of the discussions about this is the fact that almost all of the electricity is purchased with the mining reward, which is temporary. It is cut in half every 4 years, and will eventually dwindle to nothing. The amount of electricity Bitcoin miners can afford to buy therefore will fall.
Of course, until now that effect has been more than compensated by the increase in the Bitcoin price. But that certainly can't continue forever either, and so the electricity usage and carbon footprint of Bitcoin will inevitably fall in the future.