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

Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

digiconomist.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 463 posts

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#61

Post by qroshan »

lucisferre wrote: post #4

This seems completely outrageous to me. I had seen similar numbers thrown around casually in the past but still found it hard to believe to be true, (despite being pretty bearish on Bitcoin myself). This seems to provide some pretty detailed evidence, analysis and validation directly addressing criticisms. It seems pretty thorough. Is there any more to discuss on the topic of Bitcoin being outrageously wasteful? Or i…

Indeed.

Cost of running this public tamper-proof database is $4B + Personnel + Amortizing cost of ASIC Forms, Say $6B

Where does the money come from? This Database isn't selling any service to Enterprise or Government or Public to get revenue. So, the $6B money has to come from Bitcoin holders or new suckers.

Every year it has to get $6B new money just to maintain the current value of Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#62

Post by qwerty456127 »

iikoolpp wrote: post #47
qwerty456127 wrote: post #29

If only governments and corporations did not insist on limiting people's freedom to trade freely and anonymously we wouldn't need that. Just make trading and privacy fundamental human rights like air breathing is and huge amount of energy will be saved.

Didn't realise cash was suddenly outlawed

C'mon, it's 21-st century, we need electronic cash we can send to a person we don't know instantly with a press of a button without revealing ourselves. We could use more traditional banking if only anonymous accounts were legal and banks were banking secrecy was guaranteed.

I've never bought anything illegal (but some weed perhaps) yet I feel very uncomfortable every time I have to share my personal details with any party.

I also want anonymous P/O boxes.

I just bloody don't want any party to track me nor tell me what I am and what I am not allowed to buy (unless it's a weapon of mass destruction or a human slave and there are other ways to bust people selling these).

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#63

Post by Rebelgecko »

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #48

Can someone tell me whether this is ever going to change? When the last bitcoin is mined?

Not even then, and that won't be for a while. Even though about 85% of all BTC have been mined, the process gets exponentially slower the closer you get to the final blocks.

After the last BTC is mined, miners will still presumably be able to profit from block transaction fees. That might help power a little bit since they'll worry more about being efficient with which transactions go into a block.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#64

Post by baddox »

dragontamer wrote: post #60
aeternum wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have commented, per-transaction is a very misleading metric. Hashing difficulty is based on the number of other miners and time between blocks, not based on the number of transactions. With something like lightning network, a single Bitcoin transaction can facilitate millions of 'lightning' transactions.

> As others have commented, per-transaction is a very misleading metric. Can you name a better metric that we can measure?

Well, what do you actually care about? Why choose, for instance, cost per transaction instead of, say, cost per USD (or equivalent) transferred?

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#65

Post by TylerE »

snagglegaggle wrote: post #49
Analemma_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an accurate statement, since the pollution costs of Bitcoin are an externality not being paid by the people using it. It's more like Bitcoin users are dumping costs on the unconsenting public to avoid the "tyranny" of AML/KYC banking regulations.

That's great, but you could argue that AML/KYC has pollution costs of a different nature in regards to personal liberty. Whether or not they do me suggesting that is about as baseless as suggesting bitcoin has huge negative externalities. Without explicit evidence of a market failure it's probably fine to assume that negative externalities are factored into sticker price of goods as the opportunity cost of product X…

Yes, in these sense laws against theft "pollute" the personal liberty of thieves.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#66

Post by MuffinFlavored »

y3k wrote: post #19

One of the main reasons why I dropped BTC. "Getting rich" at cost of the environment (extremely high resource consumption)? No thanks, I'd rather leave that world for future generations.

At current difficulty rates, what is the profitability formula for cost of electricity versus hashrate?

example: if you aren't getting X Mh/s @ $Y kw/h, it isn't profitable?

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#67

Post by dragontamer »

baddox wrote: post #64
dragontamer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As others have commented, per-transaction is a very misleading metric. Can you name a better metric that we can measure?

Well, what do you actually care about? Why choose, for instance, cost per transaction instead of, say, cost per USD (or equivalent) transferred?

I like cost of electricity. While Chinese plants are subsidizing the BTC network right now, we can estimate the cost of "unsubsidized" BTC in the future based off of electricity costs today.

--------

With regard to the Lightning Network, it seems that it requires a bit of supervision to be secure. https://themoneymongers.com/lightning-network-watchtowers/

That supervision probably will have a cost of some kind.

> You can hire watchtowers nodes for a fee and design the revocation transaction in such a way that the watchtowers will also receive their service fee when you get funds of the other party as a penalty.

So we're adding many, many more middlemen to the picture. Not only do we have to pay for the final transaction (which requires a large amount of electricity to be "mined" into the blockchain), we have to hire watchtowers to ensure that our Lightning Network transactions remain correct even if our counterparty tries to screw with our transaction history. (Remember: the full transaction history in the Lightning network is off-chain).

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#68

Post by krick »

lucisferre wrote: post #4

This seems completely outrageous to me. I had seen similar numbers thrown around casually in the past but still found it hard to believe to be true, (despite being pretty bearish on Bitcoin myself). This seems to provide some pretty detailed evidence, analysis and validation directly addressing criticisms. It seems pretty thorough. Is there any more to discuss on the topic of Bitcoin being outrageously wasteful? Or i…

I'm afraid that the moment you chose to use the word "wasteful" it became a philosophical discussion and they don't typically have final words at all.

The stripped down reason you see it as wasteful is that you have some set of beliefs about what is "right" and "meaningful" (many of which, I'll take liberty to say, most likely likely NOT consciously thought out) and since the core technical principle behind Bitcoin is simple enough, it's easy for you to see it does something that seemingly does not contribute to the fulfillment of what you consider "meaningful" (i.e. performing tons of computation that essentially compute nothing "meaningful").

Technical principles behind markets, industries or your own existence are not simple enough, so you cannot see through them and decide at a glance that they are "wasteful". And since you generally avoid falling into philosophical discussions (rightfully so), this is good enough for you. This doesn't mean that they achieve something that will turn out "obviously meaningful" to you (I'm cynical enough to assume they actually not), it's all just too complicated to tell at a glance.

If this is all too abstract, I'm saying that Bitcoin is actually doing something, and this something is much more complicated than the technical principle you can easily see behind it. You should take this into consideration when thinking about what this giant CO₂ emitting machine actually is. It is not a machine for computing hashes, as it might seem from a purely technical perspective.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#69

Post by mindfulplay »

qroshan wrote: post #61
lucisferre wrote: post #4

This seems completely outrageous to me. I had seen similar numbers thrown around casually in the past but still found it hard to believe to be true, (despite being pretty bearish on Bitcoin myself). This seems to provide some pretty detailed evidence, analysis and validation directly addressing criticisms. It seems pretty thorough. Is there any more to discuss on the topic of Bitcoin being outrageously wasteful? Or i…

Indeed. Cost of running this public tamper-proof database is $4B + Personnel + Amortizing cost of ASIC Forms, Say $6B Where does the money come from? This Database isn't selling any service to Enterprise or Government or Public to get revenue. So, the $6B money has to come from Bitcoin holders or new suckers. Every year it has to get $6B new money just to maintain the current value of Bitcoin.

Darkweb, murderers, VCs and drugpeddlers can help run this network of "decentralized futuristic currency" or whatever buzzcrapwords people use for Bitcoin ...

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#70

Post by easymodex »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #40
dragontamer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wasteful compared to what though? How much energy, human capital, and resources are consumed by the banking industry? The article actually answers this to some degree. See the following graphic: https://i.imgur.com/8TdKevG.png

How much energy to mine an ounce of gold?

Why is this getting downvoted, I'm curious as well.
Post reply on HN