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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?
gold vs btc, at least BTC energy expenditure can be patched / limited to only renewables.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So ever since Bitcoin's creation, it has been using the exact same amount of power? Because the transaction throughput surely has changed. Do you not agree that, loosely, there is a correlation between transaction throughput/ popularity/ real world usage, and the amount of people being happy to invest time, effort, and money into mining?
Is this market failure? I don't know... Bitcoin still works despite it.
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.
They're not different things. Mined blocks is how you add transactions to the chain (because bitcoin is PoW-based). The miner is rewarded as part of that process by embedding a coinbase transaction in the block, which lets them create a set number of new coins out of nowhere (as well as collecting transaction fees from the transactions they include in the block)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
There's about 6 orders of magnitude difference in transaction cost. Mastercard/Visa would use ~2W.h per transaction, Bitcoin about 1MW.h.
Then Bitcoin bubbled. People panicked and jumped on board without researching, Bitcoin went up a bazillion %. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh wow... Lots of people want this!"
Then the bubble burst, price went down, people got mad, but, most importantly, Bitcoin inspired others. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh huh... This is really changing the world..."
Now, the problems are rearing their heads. Energy consumption, 51% attacks, scalability issues, etc. I wonder how the creator feels? "Oh dear..."
[ this is, of course, assuming the creator is still alive ]
It just boggles my mind that this weird internet currency exposed something so powerful in society: The intense desire for personal wealth that one truly owns.
This is not a bug, it's a feature.
It is a feature yes but that makes this technology very inefficient to process transactions.
And yes, this implicitly makes Bitcoin a bad idea, as well as blockchain in general.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So ever since Bitcoin's creation, it has been using the exact same amount of power? Because the transaction throughput surely has changed. Do you not agree that, loosely, there is a correlation between transaction throughput/ popularity/ real world usage, and the amount of people being happy to invest time, effort, and money into mining?