So 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.
Hashing power is not directly equal to power consumption
Sweden may hypothetically purchase miners 2x more efficient than the average miner and therefore need only half their countries power output.
In addition I would be surprised if Sweden can't source power from other countries ( prove me wrong I'm not sure on this one)
Missing 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 cert…
Mining rewards will be replaced by transaction fees. There will still be an economic incentive to keep the hardware running.
This will be bad for global warming. All that extra energy being produced.
Yup. With things like heating, refrigeration etc at least it has a tangible benefit on human lives. This is just selling the health of the planet for money!
The energy consumption is priced into the cost of holding and transacting Bitcoins. I wonder if it is any different with any other thing you pay for. Or if any money you pay for anything ultimately results in energy being used up.
That is all fine and good, but is it necessary at all (even if some people are willing to pay for it).
It is a feature yes but that makes this technology very inefficient to process transactions.
Bitcoins energy consumption has no correlation with its transaction throughput. Price goes up > People turn on more miners > Difficulty goes up > Less efficient miners become unprofitable > People turn off more miners > Difficulty goes down. It's a self-correcting dynamic purely due to economics, not linked to usage.
I would not go as far as to say there's no correlation. The price of Bitcoin is also dependent on how many people would use it / value it, so the profitability of miners. Multiply by 100 the usage compared to now and for sure the price would go up by a lot.
The 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.
Missing 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 cert…
No it doesn’t, assuming the mining tech improves via FPGA and ASIC, leading to more hashes per KWh. It’s very hard to predict the future ratio between hash rates and mining rewards.
Improvements in mining tech do not change the total amount of Bitcoin earned by mining, and thus the budget miners collectively have to buy electricity. Efficiency of mining is irrelevant because the difficulty adjusts to keep the mining rate stable, and the total number of Bitcoins available to mine is fixed and unchangeable.
Does 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?
Bitcoin miners by definition wouldn't. If they did, they are not mining bitcoin anymore, but a fork.
Missing 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 cert…
Mining rewards will be replaced by transaction fees. There will still be an economic incentive to keep the hardware running.
But at that point the cost of the electricity consumption of Bitcoin will be borne entirely by Bitcoin's users, who will not pay more than the value they derive from use of the network. That would only fund a small fraction of today's Bitcoin mining electricity consumption.