91–100 of 463 posts
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Or you could say Bitcoin is wasteful because PoS accomplishes the same thing with 99.99% less energy.
PoS opens up new threat models concerning the tyranny of the majority. PoW utilizes the honest indicator of un-forgeable expense to mitigate this class of risks.
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?
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…
Its not the final word, but it is something to vigilantly monitor in case the following changes:
Most bitcoin energy use is from mining, and that mining uses renewable energy or energy waste byproducts. Source: my experience with mining companies that don't publicly disclose how they do this profitably.
So for now, try to corroborate it yourself. I would say that 70-80% of bitcoin mining is not a wasteful use of energy and that merely estimating the energy numbers doesn't tell you anything about the source. What I mean by "not wasteful" means that it isn't pulling away from another use of energy that was ever going to happen.
This wasted energy is usually in the form of byproducts around other power facilities that cannot be economically converted and transported to residential and commercial areas. This is where bitcoin mining shines: Bitcoin mining does not need a robust internet connection and does not need to occur in residential or commercial areas. A computer with a satellite connection can submit hashes to the bitcoin network, and pools further make it practical to have lower latency, because they merely pay out based on your contribution to the pool.
So miners that use energy waste byproducts (converting those byproducts to electricity at the source and taking transformers there) often times are doing a favor to the power company or whoever is there.
What to monitor: if nation states start competing over power of this network, they may disregard the economic feasibility of doing so, and then it will be incredibly wasteful uses of electricity.
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> Is there any more to discuss on the topic of Bitcoin being outrageously wasteful? The carbon estimate seems very poor. > Since we know the average emission factor of the Chinese grid (around 700 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour), this can be used for a very rough approximation of the carbon intensity of the power used for Bitcoin mining. The reason many miners are in China is that they can acces…
I love when bitcoin promoters claim that bitcoins massive waste of energy is okay cause “it’s totally renewable”. Setting aside the non-trivial ecological damage caused by dams.... all that renewable energy could have been used to power something that actually adds value to society. Instead it is getting flushed down the toilet solving useless math problems so that a relative handful of people can milk a larger set o…
If the miners are using excess production, then by definition, that power could not have been used for anything else; otherwise, some consumer in the grid would have used it!
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> Per-transaction measures isn't the right metric since the Bitcoin blockchain can still be successful as a reconciliation backbone without being used for small everyday purchases. This idea has been around the corner for a while now. How likely is it really, how long will it take, and what will adoption look like? Until it happens and is popular, it seems fair to discuss how much a Bitcoin transaction actually costs…
It's up and running now: https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning
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it's cheaper to transfer Bitcoin and immediately convert to fiat than to do a wire transfer from overseas. Then you're using the home banking system like ACH in the US and SEPA in Europe Wires cost me $50+ because of intermediary banks, even if I don't pay anything at my own bank, someone is getting a big cut.
Don’t companies like TransferWise already do international payments electronically without the need for a blockchain? I definitely support lowering the amount of human labor required for payments, but I don’t see the need for many coal plants worth of computers randomly hashing a bunch of junk over and over again when a normal efficient server can do it. Every bitcoin exchange I’ve used required me to physically writ…
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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…
Being a watchtower is extremely low cost, it only requires a small amount of memory. Every full lightning node is watching the blockchain anyway so it is easy to watch for some extra transaction ids with a certain prefix. Transaction IDs are sufficiently long that only part of the txn ID (half) needs to be shared with the watchtower. The tower can only decrypt and send the revocation txn once the malicious txn is broadcast, and the watchtower reward can be built in to the revocation txn.
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> Is there any more to discuss on the topic of Bitcoin being outrageously wasteful? The carbon estimate seems very poor. > Since we know the average emission factor of the Chinese grid (around 700 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour), this can be used for a very rough approximation of the carbon intensity of the power used for Bitcoin mining. The reason many miners are in China is that they can acces…
I love when bitcoin promoters claim that bitcoins massive waste of energy is okay cause “it’s totally renewable”. Setting aside the non-trivial ecological damage caused by dams.... all that renewable energy could have been used to power something that actually adds value to society. Instead it is getting flushed down the toilet solving useless math problems so that a relative handful of people can milk a larger set o…
> Setting aside the non-trivial ecological damage caused by dams..
I don't think anyone is claiming that the dams were built to mine Bitcoins. The power generation was provisioned to power towns, but it is generating more electricity than the towns can use or profitably transport away.
> all that renewable energy could have been used to power something that actually adds value to society.
There is a market to buy the energy. If anyone wanted it for basically any other purpose, the price would increase and the miners would presumably go anywhere else in the world with overprovisioned renewable energy, so that their profit can be preserved. Mining doesn't have many requirements: it doesn't even need to be on-grid. It's created an arbitrage market for cheap electricity, and people will search out the cheapest electricity in the world to use for it. By definition, the cheapest electricity will be the least wanted.
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There’s no indication I’m aware of that Bitcoin is removing any labor or equipment from the banking system. So far all I’ve seen is traditional banking layering crypto on top.
it's cheaper to transfer Bitcoin and immediately convert to fiat than to do a wire transfer from overseas. Then you're using the home banking system like ACH in the US and SEPA in Europe Wires cost me $50+ because of intermediary banks, even if I don't pay anything at my own bank, someone is getting a big cut.
Bitcoin is an ongoing environmental disaster, profiting off of subsidized coal power in China and elsewhere in the world. Millions of people die every year from air pollution. But on the other side, hey blockchains are so cool they can do the same work as banks but six orders of magnitude less efficiently.
Otherwise, we could also argue that iPhones are a humanitarian disaster.