Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 127 posts

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#41

Post by BSVogler »

bobdamarley wrote: post #5

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.

There is a difference in just using the energy to soften peaks or having a constant energy drain. Bitcoin mining is the latter. If you have a constant energy surplus you could easily find other use cases like producing hydrogen.

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#42

Post by masklinn »

nullandvoid wrote: post #21
shownedeadnnn wrote: post #4

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)

> 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)

They absolutely can, though I think they've been mostly net exporters for the last ~10 years.

According to https://www.svk.se/siteassets/drift-av-stamnatet/bilder/map-..., Sweden has 7 HVDC (Denmark x2, Germany x1, Poland x1, Lithuania x1, Finland x2) plus 2x 400kV to Denmark, 2x to Finland and 4x to Norway (plus a 220kV).

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#43

Post by solveit »

onion2k wrote: post #31
cycrutchfield wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would miners ever agree to that?

The alternative is government regulation eg banning mining cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin was literally designed for the express purpose of surviving that.

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#44

Post by zaarn »

paulmd wrote: post #39
realusername wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a feature yes but that makes this technology very inefficient to process transactions.

Without this "feature" it would be trivial to double-spend transactions. The entire concept of Nakamoto consensus (upon which Bitcoin security rides) relies upon provable waste of electricity to a degree that the average transaction is impossible (or at least financially unviable) to reverse within some widely accepted timespan. And yes, this implicitly makes Bitcoin a bad idea, as well as blockchain in general.

Well, any blockchains that uses this amount of energy for it's consensus, though there are plenty of blockchains that don't really need that much energy (Git doesn't use much to run a commit either)

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#45

Post by schoen »

vinni2 wrote: post #33

Which is why we need useful proof of work. There is no appropriate solution yet. But I know researchers are working on it.

It's pretty hard to do. It appears that you need problems where (1) you can generate a practically unlimited number of arbitrary instances, (2) of arbitrary difficulty, (3) deterministically based on a random seed, (4) that are roughly constant difficulty to validate, and (5) where a randomly-chosen instance is likely to be useful to know a solution to.

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#46

Post by igravious »

jmauritz wrote: post #32

https://medium.com/@hillpot/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-hurts-the-... gold vs btc, at least BTC energy expenditure can be patched / limited to only renewables.

Neat! I wonder how they arrive at these numbers though?

I had a conversation with a non-techie friend the other day about cryptocurrencies and she expressed scepticism about the technology because of its immateriality or intangibility. Something about cryptocurrencies being artificially constructs doesn't sit well with some non-techies. I mean, when you think about it it's just as arbitrary that precious metals and gems have a store of value/worth above and beyond their utility. I guess we're in a transitionary period.

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#47

Post by solveit »

hbbio wrote: post #6

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.

Almost every altcoin and their grandmothers are working on it, but it's a legitimately difficult problem.

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#49

Post by ubersync »

stuffbyspencer wrote: post #37

Someone created Bitcoin. It was a neat idea and people played with it. When the first pizza was bought with Bitcoin, I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh cool, real world use!" 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…

The Bitcoin "bubble" has "burst" at least 6 times now. Which one were you refering to? Every time it recovers and reaches another all time high in a couple of years. Being the nascent but potentially world changing technology, it might take a few years to realize its true market cap. And along the way, we will see a few pumps and dumps. Its just normal.

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#50

Post by gerikson »

modeless wrote: post #30
gerikson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But at that point the cost of the electricity consumption of Bitcoin will be borne entirely by Bitcoin's users

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If a certain percentage of energy is used by PoW, less is available for other purposes, and thus prices will rise for all energy users.

Post reply on HN