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Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

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Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#121

Post by limomium »

spookthesunset wrote: post #91
cwkoss wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A class of risks that the normal financial system doesn’t have. My bank doesn’t expose me to “double spend” attacks.

I don't know. My bank "double spent" a hundred bucks the other day, that took them half a month to return.

There was some error with the debit card system where it wouldn't accept my card, then when the cashier rebooted the device, it informed me that my account balance was insufficient. Sure enough, checking my balance I see that somehow the first try "stuck" into the system as a 'pre-authorization' -- inexplicably unusable money. The bank just shrugged, it would fix itself in two weeks.

I stopped paying with plastic. Fear the day the ATM fails to produce the bills yet drains my account.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#122

Post by cwkoss »

spookthesunset wrote: post #91
cwkoss wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A class of risks that the normal financial system doesn’t have. My bank doesn’t expose me to “double spend” attacks.

Fraud is absolutely a big deal in banking.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#123

Post by spookthesunset »

cwkoss wrote: post #122
spookthesunset wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A class of risks that the normal financial system doesn’t have. My bank doesn’t expose me to “double spend” attacks.

Fraud is absolutely a big deal in banking.

Thankfully many types of fraud can be reversed in our modern financial system. With bitcoin, virtually any form of fraud leaves you completely fucked with absolutely no recourse.

Which makes bitcoin an even bigger joke because on a per transaction basis (one that includes miner subsidies) bitcoin costs several orders of magnitude more and cannot even deliver the same basic features that mainstream fiat offers.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#124

Post by ur-whale »

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

> Didn't realise cash was suddenly outlawed

First: it absolutely is being outlawed, slowly but surely. The US is not yet fully there (although: try to buy a 1M USD house cash and see what happens), but most EU countries are fully there.

Second: Try and wire a large sum to your brother who happens to currently be stationed in disreputable country X or Y, and see what happens. Or mail him a box full of cash. See what happens.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#125

Post by jron »

spookthesunset wrote: post #90
krick wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Bitcoin is absolutely wasteful to the vast majority of the population on earth. It provides no benefit to them, and makes their energy bill (and video card bill) go up.

There isn't a person on earth mining bitcoin with GPUs.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#126

Post by spookthesunset »

jxcl wrote: post #20
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…

(Edit2: I interpreted your use of "outrageous" to mean surprising or unbelievable. If instead you meant inciting to outrage, then I agree, it is.) My opinion is that if you find this outrageous then you don't understand the core principles of Bitcoin. The difficulty of mining a block on the network goes up with the amount of mining being done to maintain a constant block mining rate. There are massive bitcoin mining…

To summarize your excellent summary: bitcoin wastes energy by design. It cannot keep all the “features” it’s supporters value without wasting energy.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#127

Post by jeremyw »

The contrarian take on Bitcoin and carbon is that Bitcoin chases the cheapest energy, and solar is quickly becoming the cheapest source. In some areas of the world it already is (various subsidized infra in China).

See Ramez Naam (co-chair for energy and the environment at Singularity University) for more on this friendliness to proof-of-work. This is a good intro: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/09/16/64-r...

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#128

Post by spookthesunset »

jron wrote: post #125
spookthesunset wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is absolutely wasteful to the vast majority of the population on earth. It provides no benefit to them, and makes their energy bill (and video card bill) go up.

There isn't a person on earth mining bitcoin with GPUs.

Tons are mining alt coins with them. These stories never include the rather sizable market for alt-coins, almost all of which use the same energy-sucking design that bitcoin does.

I’ve never seen an article like this for the entire crypto space as a whole but I imagine it is much, much worse.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#129

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

To put this somewhat in perspective, we can look at Wh/$

From the article, Bitcoin used 73.12 * 10^12 Wh and generated $5,749,979,074 in mining revenue

Googling shows that the US economy used 3.82 * 10^15 Wh and generated $ 19.39 * 10^12 in GDP

So bitcoin uses 12,716 Wh of electricity for every $ of revenue, and the US economy uses 197 Wh of electricity for every $ of GDP.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#130

Post by aeternum »

dragontamer wrote: post #108
aeternum wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be possible to build watchtowers into the protocol itself. A lightning node could elect some number of random nodes as watchtowers at bootup, similar to how many clients now elect random channels. 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…

> watchtower reward can be built in to the revocation txn. How much will watchtower rewards cost? The economics aren't fully studied. But I'd expect a good watchtower would be proportional to the amount of the transaction. That is, if you wanted to protect a 100 BTC transaction, you'd want to spend more on the watchtower reward than if you wanted to protect a 1 BTC transaction. Hypothetically, if you spend too little…

The reward can still be low because you can choose many watchtowers. If you have a high value channel, you could choose for example hundreds of watchtowers. Only the first one to broadcast the revocation would get the reward.

The reward only has to be high enough for it to be worthwhile for other nodes to spend a small amount of memory storing your txn.

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