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.
There are hundreds of VPN services that accept Bitcoin. It's easier to list ones that don't: HideMyAss.
Many server, VPS and web hosting services accept Bitcoin.
You can buy giftcards for many sellers with Bitcoin.
" inordinate amount of energy " It's comparable to what a single hydro dam like the Three Gorges Dam can produce. Don't fall prey to the scary comparisons BECI employs to mislead its readers. Global warming is critical, but there are other energy wasters much, much bigger than Bitcoin miners. Besides, as it's been said many times, miners tend to use renewables since they have become cheaper than fossil fuel power pla…
Right now the share of the world economy running on Bitcoin is negligible, yet its energy consumption is relevant. If that share became consistent, the price of Bitcoin would increase by many orders of magnitude, and mining bitcoin would become more and more competitive in relation to other uses of energy, and would increase in tune - that's why I say inordinate. PoW is just unsustainable by design.
Bitcoin's energy consumption is also by design self balancing - increase the price of electricity, less electricity will be used. With the same benefits for the network.
It's not a "waste" if the result is a decentralized, trustless, robust digital currency. And the global warming argument is a many times debunked hoax - if anyone has better use of that electricity, they are welcome to use it, which will make mining cryptocurrency unprofitable. Except in the other cases, the benefits go to the single entity that owns the business, whereas with cryptocurrency every participant benefit…
Why isn’t it a waste? You say it like it is a fact ... what’s the logic there?
"Waste" is when there is no benefit. But here the benefit is decentralized, trustless, robust digital currency.
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…
It's incredible that people on HN, a technical readership, still don't understand why the energetic or computational "waste" of proof-of-work is needed. There is simply no other known way of implementing a decentralized, censorship-resistant, robust digital currency. Without PoW you lose one of these properties. Proof-of-stake doesn't work. It isn't robust. Eg. PoS cryptocurrencies can't resolved which chain is corre…
> Proof-of-stake doesn't work. It isn't robust. Eg. PoS cryptocurrencies can't resolved which chain is correct after a network split.
Where can I get best details on this? Which papers? Thank you!
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…
The other side is that people who mine bitcoin have to have basically “free” energy - margins are too tight. So while it’s wasteful, people aren’t burning coal or gas to produce bitcoin in the big bitcoin farms. Hydro and geothermal rule.
Free or stolen, some miners steal electricity to or bribe officials.
It does not really matter if it's 2 miles or 2 million miles per bitcoin transaction. You cannot stop bitcoin. Edit: You would end up burning even more if you tried to stop it.
nah, there's approaches. I meet with politicians and suggest a carbon tax on crypto exchange conversion to fiat - miners have to cash out, after all. You have to tax the clean coins too, otherwise buyers will just exchange dirtycoin for cleancoin before cashing out.
Why not tax or make all energy more expensive? That way all wasteful usage will be curtailed and only the valuable use cases will be left after a while. If we do what you proposed it sounds like we should start taxing other behavior on the internet based on its usefulness to society and electricity usage.
It's not a "waste" if the result is a decentralized, trustless, robust digital currency. And the global warming argument is a many times debunked hoax - if anyone has better use of that electricity, they are welcome to use it, which will make mining cryptocurrency unprofitable. Except in the other cases, the benefits go to the single entity that owns the business, whereas with cryptocurrency every participant benefit…
> if anyone has better use of that electricity, they are welcome to use it, which will make mining cryptocurrency unprofitable I'm sorry, but you got this backwards. If bitcoin becomes a relevant part of the world economy, then it HAS to use a relevant part of the world energy, because consuming energy for PoW is the only limiting factor against a 51% attack. So, either Bitcoin is irrelevant - and thus its power usag…
From the point of view of the miner, they have a supply of electricity at a certain price and can decide what to do with it. They might run their TV, computer, heating, industrial machinery, datacenter, or a bitcoin miner. They have to compute what profits can each of the options give them. If running bitcoin miners at that electricity cost and at that profit they can get from selling the bitcoins is more profitable than the others, then it's logical to do that. If on the other hand the price of bitcoin goes down, or the price of electricity goes up, or people start paying more for server hosting, then the decision changes. The fact that miners are now mining, means it's currently most rational to do that, given what society (users, participants) are willing to pay for the services.
> Because there really is no need for an untrusted ledger when there is the USG certifying that the NYSE and NASDAQ will not execute erroneous trades. What is the emission cost of the system which enables this functionality?
for processing/validating transactions? couple hundred MWH. How much do you think the Nasdaq/NYSE mainframes really eat? bitcoin numbers don't include the off-chain stuff either, lol. Bitcoin energy is literally expended on a massive, inefficient mainframe that processes a couple hundred transactions a second. That's all - everything else is additional to that.
No, what is the cost of the system which enables the USG to reliably prevent the execution of erroneous trades?
Tens to hundreds of thousands of highly paid bureaucrats, accountants, risk managers, regulators, legislators, clerks, lawyers, law enforcement, judges, etc.
Obviously the purely digital systems consumes more compute, but I think you're discounting many of the true costs of the existing system.
« isn't widely used anywhere » Bitcoin processes 10 million transactions a month (300k/day) and it's generally been growing over the years: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht...
But how many useful transactions? Isn’t the vast majority of that trading and not economically useful activity?
Who is the global arbiter of usefulness? My transactions have always been useful for me and for my counterparty, if that's what you are asking.
Clarifications (this website perpetuates some common misconceptions): - A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction. - Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactio…
Off-chain transactions effectively don't exist at all in terms of transaction volume, and the players who staked money on Lightning lost approximately 99.97% of that money. https://cryptobriefing.com/ln-nodes-lightning-network/
You misread the article. Those large nodes that used lightning had a rather small return (0.03%) but they haven’t lost their money.