Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland' • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by onion2k » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:06 AM UTC

solveit wrote: post #43

onion2k wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is government regulation eg banning mining cryptocurrencies.

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

In the sense that bitcoin miners can 'just' more their operations to mining-friendly countries until there are no more mining-friendly countries, sure. But pragmatically Bitcoin would not survive a coordinated assault on it's legality if enough countries decided it's too environmentally toxic.

Plus, there's no reason why Bitcoin should survive. Another cryptocurrency that's much more energy efficient would work just as well, so people could move their money if regulation was likely. It's one of the existisitential threats that Bitcoin faces in the long term.

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

#82

Post by arisAlexis » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:06 AM UTC

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…

wow what a hate comment really. you totally miss all of the pain points that Bitcoin addressses

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

#83

Post by _Kristijan_ » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:09 AM UTC

solveit wrote: post #52

sddfd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is all fine and good, but is it necessary at all (even if some people are willing to pay for it).

At the moment, we don't have anything clearly better. But everyone except the most hardcore Bitcoin maximalists believe some form of Proof-of-Stake will work well enough. PoS will bring along a different suite of problems, but requiring a nuclear power plant's worth of energy will not be one of them.

I would like to bring Open Representative Voting (ORV) into the game. On ORV, every account can freely choose a Representative at any time to vote on their behalf, even when the delegating account itself is offline. These Representative accounts are configured on nodes that remain online and vote on the validity of transactions they see on the network. Their voting weight is the sum of balances for accounts delegating to them, and if they have enough voting weight they become a Principal Representative. The votes these Principal Representatives send out will subsequently be rebroadcasted by other nodes. Open in this context means, that every account can be chosen as a representative by every account.

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

#84

Post by michaelscott » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:14 AM UTC

kspp wrote: post #79

michaelscott wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say it could run a country's currency supply. I said it was an alternative to a country's hyperinflated currency, and it would be one of many. What normally happens on the ground in such a situation is that the average person will use an array of different currencies that are accepted in their environment in order to make up for the country's standard (so in Zimbabwe for example, people will use a mix of the USD, ZAR and a number of other currencies in their day-to-day lives).

Bitcoin is just another alternative. Yes you're not buying a loaf of bread at the corner store with it, but it's definitely useable (and is used) for other types of payments.

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

#85

Post by AstralStorm » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:21 AM UTC

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…

Fiat money is not the same thing:

- anyone can issue Bitcoin - if anyone accepts Bitcoin they accept it regardless of origin

With fiat money, there are additional rules to limit money laundering and theft. (e.g. paper trail audit rules and special markings on banknotes - money matching these laws is not to be accepted)

Plus you cannot just issue say Zimbabwe dollars anywhere, that's considered a forgery. Likewise you can only issue Bitcoin if you do manage to notify the decentralised ledger that you have mined it. (Which is why verification is slow.)

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

#86

Post by mikekchar » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:34 AM UTC

googlemike wrote: post #57

ubersync wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Bic Camera in Japan at one point used it as their "point" system. Unfortunately you had to have one of their wallets, but essentially if you bought stuff with them and you had registered for the bitcoin rewards, they would give you some bitcoins. You could also transfer your own bitcoins into the wallet. You could then buy stuff at the store with it at some nominal rate. I thought about buying a computer with bitcoins because when you could still mine with CPUs, I heated my apartment mining bitcoins (then I lost interest ;-) ). Honestly, this is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping bitcoin would turn into. When Japan outlawed crypto currencies, the Bic Camera thing disappeared (or it's possible it disappeared earlier... I wasn't paying much attention).

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

#87

Post by mikekchar » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:36 AM UTC

kmitz wrote: post #58

Relevant info is at the end of the article : "The electricity used for Bitcoin produces about 22 megatons of CO2 annually, a study in the scientific journal Joule estimated. That is as much as Kansas City in the US." Bitcoin = Kansas City

Interesting: Kansas City = Switzerland??? A bit mindblowing if true.

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

#88

Post by jdijdhud » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:37 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #45

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.

If someone thought those cycles could be put to better use they would pay out bitcoins themselves to mining machines to convince them to run their computation instead, it's straight arbitrage.

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

#89

Post by Lerc » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:41 AM UTC

Interestingly, article cites a source that contradicts the headline. The Joule paper puts the number at 45.8TWh. The main focus of the article has some guys putting the number at 58.93TWh. That's quite the discrepancy.

In general I have come to treat anything that cites Alex de Vries with suspicion. Amongst other things, the repeated discussion of the number of transactions and the power expenditure. The power expenditure does not scale by number of transactions. Associating the two without mentioning one is not a factor of the other creates a misleading impression. Doing so repeatedly suggests bad faith.

Bitcoin does use a lot of power though. On the other hand, the reward halving does mitigate some of this. If you are confidant that Bitcoin won't increase on average 20% every year forever then you should be happy that the problem will fix itself.

The current problem comes from the value rise being greater than the reward halving. To sustain that it has to double in value every 4 years _forever_. The early growth has been higher than that, but to just sustain current power levels BTC would have to be worth millions in a few decades.

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

#90

Post by jdijdhud » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 8:45 AM UTC

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 Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks[