151–160 of 463 posts
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.
I think the traditional stock market has significantly greater environmental externalities, even proportionally to net value. Greed creates waste in all venues.
The energy consumption of Bitcoin isn't new news. What continues to disappoint me, however, is how many people immediately jump to its defense with arguments based on the value it provides, as if that offset its cost. What gets neglected is that the Bitcoin algorithm is inherently wasteful . By its very design, it results in an insane amount of duplicated, pointless computation. The question isn't whether something l…
With energy becoming more and more renewable, does it really matter if BTC uses a lot of it?
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> 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?
From the US Mint's financial statement [1]:
2017 cost $13.5 million dollars in "Communications, utilities, and misc charges", which presumably is the bucket that electricity bills falls under. There's no breakdown of overhead between currency coinage production and bullion/numismatic production, but the manufacturing obligation suggests that currency is roughly ⅕ of their total costs, which suggests that we might ascribe about $3 million in utility cost to produce coinage. The coins themselves were worth about $870 million, which suggests about 250 kJ (or 0.07 kWh) per $1 of coinage if we assume the Mint pays $0.05/kWh. I'm not including the energy cost of metal production itself, because I don't want to spend the time to track down that information.
[1] https://www.treasury.gov/about/budget-performance/CJ19/23.%2...
Per transaction is intentionally a bit misleading, as the amount of power usage is proportional to how-much-power the block-reward can buy regardless of there being 1 or 1 million transactions. Not to mention, a single transaction can power an infinite amount of (wash) transactions thanks to 2nd layer stuff like the lightning network. So it'd be similarly misleading to try quote in terms of that. So the correct unit…
I get what you mean, if you decide not to make a transaction, the energy still gets spent but the more you use bitcoin the more valuable it becomes which incentivizes miners to keep mining. Also someone elses transaction will just slot in to fill the gap left since there is a very limited amount of space for transactions which is always fully utilized.
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With energy becoming more and more renewable, does it really matter if BTC uses a lot of it?
Until most mining moves to renewables, yes it does.
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(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.
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How are KYC laws against theft...?
They're literally there to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes.
The problem with KYC and banking laws are that you can prevent anyone from conducting business for any reason. They've not seen abuse per se but people have been caught up in them with no recourse. Their application in reality may see them ruled unconstitutional.
Bitcoin, then, is just a correction in the other direction. Because face it: large financial institutions still facilitate money laundering, just not for small people.
The energy consumption of Bitcoin isn't new news. What continues to disappoint me, however, is how many people immediately jump to its defense with arguments based on the value it provides, as if that offset its cost. What gets neglected is that the Bitcoin algorithm is inherently wasteful . By its very design, it results in an insane amount of duplicated, pointless computation. The question isn't whether something l…
What you're describing is basically Libra with slightly better entities backing it. Transactions can be reversed by those "trusted entities" with no recourse by you and at no cost to them. At least with PoW and PoS (to an extent), attempting to reverse transactions has a cost.
Speaking of PoS, were the issues with PoS ever solved? Specifically the "nothing at stake" problem. The Wikipedia page[1]'s list of implementations makes it sound like it's not at parity with PoW in terms of security.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasteful compared to what though? How much energy, human capital, and resources are consumed by the banking industry? If (and big if) bitcoin is able to replace a significant fraction of the banking industry it will be extremely efficient in comparison. 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 everyda…
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.
The infrastructure required for functional cryptocurrency usage in society is far smaller than for traditional money, so with enough adoption to supersede fiat, there would be efficiency gains.
Remember, we used to need the phone network to connect to the internet. 30 years later, the trend is reversed and it's telephone that we layer on top of the internet.
The energy consumption of Bitcoin isn't new news. What continues to disappoint me, however, is how many people immediately jump to its defense with arguments based on the value it provides, as if that offset its cost. What gets neglected is that the Bitcoin algorithm is inherently wasteful . By its very design, it results in an insane amount of duplicated, pointless computation. The question isn't whether something l…