Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#191

Post by sodafountan » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:02 AM UTC

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.

Wow that's really noble of you, have you considered logging off permanently and living in a tent in the woods? You realize none of the world's problems ever get solved if you bury your head in the sand and ignore things right? I mean we could all go back and start living in caves again, that would certainly solve the climate crisis wouldn't it?

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#192

Post by aey » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:03 AM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #179

For anyone that wants to promote a free-market cryptocurrency ecosystem, my suggestion is to look at the Stellar Foundation. Doesn't fill the earth with C02, and enables trades across borders

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.13302.pdf

only 2 nodes away from failing :)

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#193

Post by me551ah » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:08 AM UTC

The most powerful supercomputer in the world reaches 143 petaflops, bitcoin network in comparison reaches 80704290.84 Petaflops. Granted that a majority of this computing power is in the form of custom ASIC's, but the figure is really staggering.

And all of the 80704290.84 Petaflops, consume 73.12 TWh to repeatedly calculate SHA256 ! What could be the world's most powerful network does absolutely nothing but crunch hashes billions of times to discard almost all of the results anyway. Sheer waste of computing power.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#194

Post by leppr » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:08 AM UTC

stordoff wrote: post #172

shsjxjbsbs wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Every bitcoin exchange I’ve used required me to physically write something on paper and show it to a human I'm curious - what did you have to write? Is it just part of proof of identity, or something more?

Usually the date and name of the exchange, to comply with "Know Your Customer" regulations and fight duplicate accounts.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#195

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:09 AM UTC

I read that some miners operate right next to hydro electric stations where electricity comes cheap, that would mean they are using excess energy that would have been lost in transit?

https://news.bitcoin.com/how-big-hydro-power-partners-with-b...

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#196

Post by puranjay » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:12 AM UTC

sodafountan wrote: post #186

puranjay wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have countries that have no reliable form of currency at all, again bitcoin solves that problem Countries that don't have reliable forms of currency also don't have reliable power or internet access.

and yet all you need is a simple phone and access to these satellites: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ I agree the infrastructure isn't there yet but problems with national currency is a government issue, infrastructure issues can usually be solved but governmental issues tend to be a lot harder and all countries that rely on fiat currency are subject to inflation

Countries that don't have reliable currencies are countries like South Sudan and Somalia. Do you really expect illiterate people (3 in 4 women in Somalia are illiterate, 1 in 2 men) to use Blockstream?

You can tell that Bitcoin, and its advocates, are from developed countries. No one who has lived in a developing country and seen crushing poverty would make such arguments.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#197

Post by somebodythere » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:13 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #158

lukev wrote: post #132

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…

>trust-based models (like Stellar) 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 Wik…

In Casper proof-of-stake (Ethereum 2.0), staking on the "wrong chain" will result in part of your staking deposit being slashed on the winning chain.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#198

Post by spookthesunset » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:20 AM UTC

aey wrote: post #168

spookthesunset wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to actually quote where the banks are spending $2 trillion a year to stop double spends?

The world is. There is no engineering reason why it’s so expensive to move numbers around in a bank. In comparison the search engine market is 170 billion. If a google sized company or decentralized network could reduce the 2 trillion global spend on payments to 170b, that would be fantastic regardless of how much it spends on preventing double spends.

Dude. That $2 trillion is all of finance. Finance is a hell of a lot more than preventing double spends (which don’t exist outside of bitcoin). On a per transaction and even global domestic product basis, the cost of our financial system is tiny. By comparison the cost of bitcoins financial system by any metric is astronomical.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#199

Post by foepys » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:20 AM UTC

me551ah wrote: post #193

The most powerful supercomputer in the world reaches 143 petaflops, bitcoin network in comparison reaches 80704290.84 Petaflops. Granted that a majority of this computing power is in the form of custom ASIC's, but the figure is really staggering. And all of the 80704290.84 Petaflops, consume 73.12 TWh to repeatedly calculate SHA256 ! What could be the world's most powerful network does absolutely nothing but crunch h…

That's like saying a water bottle factory has only an output of N water bottles per day while the Three Gorges Dam can output N million liters of water a day with the difference that the Three Gorges Dam actually produces something useful, electricity, while doing so.

Just because it's a higher number, it doesn't mean it's equally useful.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#200

Post by bdcravens » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:26 AM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #160

lukev wrote: post #132

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…

I don't even know what problem Bitcoin is solving anymore. I haven't seen a single website accepting Bitcoin as a payment in the last whole year.

We were an early adopter of Stripe’s Bitcoin integration. I even was sent a Stripe t-shirt for finding bugs in their docs. In the entire time until Stripe ended the integration, we never received a single payment using Bitcoin.