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

71–80 of 127 posts

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

#71

Post by mr__y »

igravious wrote: post #46
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 g…

>cryptocurrencies being artificially constructs doesn't sit well with some non-techies

fiat currencies that non-techies do use are also artificial constructs. There is however the gold bars in federal reserve/national bank myth so the fiats appear as non-artificial to many people. Possibly that makes the difference. Or, more likely, people use fiat currencies since forever and don't really think about that. I believe more "the thing that exists for ages and I'm familiar with" vs "the new thing" thing. Anyway I'm not trying to invalidate your point, my experience with talking to non-techies about cryptos is more or less the same as yours

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

#73

Post by lone_haxx0r »

lumberjack wrote: post #67
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 intense desire for personal wealth that one truly owns. Not at all. It's the desire to get rich quick without lifting a finger. Also philosophically speaking, "wealth that one truly owns" as in "wealth that is not dependent on others" is not a thing. If your wealth is in Bitcoin, you are trusting in fellow Bitcoin users and your wealth is entirely dependent on their feelings about the cryptomarket. That is hard…

I prefer depending on the market instead of the state dictating how much my money is worth.

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

#74

Post by thisisit »

Oh I see it is that time of the year - People upvoting Bitcoin has breached $X or Bitcoin energy consumption is equal to Y country stories.

And the discussions are also same old - People criticizing bitcoin, others defending and then a small majority who feel quite smug about buying at $10.

Can we really stop upvoting stories which add zero value to what we already know?

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

#76

Post by thisisit »

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.

I am no expert but I fail to see what will be an environment-friendly solution will really be.

The problem is any solution which doesn't need a boat load of money will be get concentrated quickly because everyone and their grandmother wants in.

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

#77

Post by pintxo »

supergilbert wrote: post #66
gingabriska wrote: post #53

But how much energy does a bank serving as many customers as bitcoin consumes?

That's the right question, how much energy does the current financial system use, solely for our "basic" transactional needs (store/retrieve/send payments). Did anyone come up with an estimate?

Back of an envelope maths:

bitcoin does some ~450k transactions/day [1]

Switzerland has some 8.5m people [2]

Let’s assume bitcoin is only used in Switzerland, meaning we get some 0.05 transaction per person per day, or in other words every citizen of Switzerland may execute one transaction every 20 days. I have no numbers for how many financial transaction swiss people perform per day, but lets use a conservative estimate of one per day (think of the daily coffee paid by cc), so that there are 8.5m transactions/day handled by the swiss banks.

Now, if the total energy budget of Switzerland would be going to running their banking system (which it probably does not do) it would still be 20 times as efficient as bitcoin.

[1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland

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

#78

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

H8crilA wrote: post #62
igravious wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Eh, try to explain to people that money (as in USD) is the same thing as Bitcoin, except in centralised databases (plus a very small portion in portable pieces of paper/metal). There's a database in the FED that tracks who has how many dollars (it's coarse grained, banks subdivide it into accounts themselves). And new dollars are minted all the time when someone is issued credit, ending their life when the credit is…

I think this is the reason all sort of conspiracies regarding who controls the money become so popular. People just use money, no time or reason to think of those things or even why the world moved to fractual first place.

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

#79

Post by kspp »

michaelscott wrote: post #64
googlemike wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to see a single legal use case for bitcoin.

An alternative form of payment in countries with hyperinflated currencies, a means to make fast international payments (far faster than Swift), an investment (debatable) vehicle that exists outside the control of the finance sector, certainly an upward social mobility tool for many miners in developing countries, and a general store of wealth vehicle (in no way different to gold in this regard).

How is all of this possible when the network is barely able to support half dozen transactions a second? It's not even enough to cover one shopping mall, let alone some "countries" or the whole planet.

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

#80

Post by arisAlexis »

it's important to note that it should be compared with what it's supposed to change: gold mining, bank stores, payment systems. Then the cost is less.

Also important that this is the first iteration of a technology that will eventually be replaced with Proof of Stake systems which will be replaced by X.

Post reply on HN