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Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

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Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#321

Post by TeMPOraL »

lifty wrote: post #296
davidgerard wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We definitely should tax all dirty energy, and the shifting price landscape will do a lot to fix the environmental issues we're facing.

That said, it's not enough - because the market isn't some NP-complete-problem-solving magic oracle. It's just a greedy optimization algorithm. It's very prone to falling into bad local optima. We know that for a fact, that's the basis of most regulations around markets. Left unattended, the market would happily prioritize mining Bitcoin over producing food, as running Bitcoins in circles is more profitable than selling grain - up until there's an actual shortage of food and the market self-destructs.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#322

Post by noxer »

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…

I'm pretty sure stellar uses more or less the same consensus mechanism as the XRPL and there is absolutely no way to reverse transactions. Every few seconds a ledger is closed and it can not be changed anymore. If all validators would agree on one Tx being "bad" they would need to exclude it from the very first moment and from that point on to eternity. There would be a valid signed public Tx that isn't processes. So it would be public know that the system is corrupt. People who disagree with that could fork include the Tx and move on. This is a totally different kind of risk than if Tx can actually be reversed.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#323

Post by Empact »

It makes no sense to me to put Bitcoin under different scrutiny than, say, Christmas lights, Netflix or the US Military. We need to decarbonize our energy sources, but Bitcoin or not is not the answer to how.

https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-... https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9062282/netflix-energy-crisis-... http://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-...

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#324

Post by keymone »

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…

You’re wrong. If you think Bitcoin’s mining is wasteful you don’t understand what is valuable in Bitcoin. If you think there is duplication - you don’t understand how modern bitcoin mining even works.

Proof of stake doesn’t work and trust based models are the very thing bitcoin is designed to save us from.

If you have ideological bias here I won’t try to convince you, only time will.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#325

Post by keymone »

konschubert wrote: post #241
lacker wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we aren’t quite there yet with Ethereum and Stellar. Proof of stake is promising, but it hasn’t rolled out yet. It’s possible that the migration leads to unforeseen problems, or fails entirely. The trusted models like Stellar aren’t operating at the same financial scale as Bitcoin. The question there isn’t technically whether they can handle the transactions per second, but socially whether they are as resist…

> In the end, more people want Bitcoin than want Ethereum or Stellar. This is an accident of history more than anything. I think the distribution will look different once the monetary cost of Proof of Work starts to impact the Bitcoin ecosystem.

When will the monetary cost of gold mining start impacting gold ecosystem?

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#326

Post by noxer »

trickstra wrote: post #288
konschubert wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think bitcoin won’t be able to compete long term because one way or another, it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense. I hope we recognize this rather sooner than later, such that we can stop wasting so much energy.

> it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense. They are. How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? And so far it seems like the users are happy to pay what it costs. The fact that you don't see the benefit doesn't mean there isn't any for them.

Miners more or less entirely pay the cost with the blockreward which means the users pay way way less fees for their Tx than it would actually cost in energy.

If we assume max 7Tx/s 1 block can hold 4200 Tx One block gets the miner 12.5 BTCs that's a 0.003 BTC "subvention" per Tx that would otherwise have to be pais as fee.

In other words the cost is paid by inflation which hurts most who holds and not who uses it. People don't care about a little inflation because the price gains where way way over that. But in the long run this system can not work. Every halving requires the BTC price to at least double (assuming the same mining cost). Problem is mining cost goes only up the halving is finite it goes to zero blockreward. Since the price can't go to infinite it's obvious that this system has to crash at some point we just don't know when.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#327

Post by keymone »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #316
trickstra wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense. They are. How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? And so far it seems like the users are happy to pay what it costs. The fact that you don't see the benefit doesn't mean there isn't any for them.

> How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? With speculation on currency (it's the primary use of Bitcoin) and theft - the latter less so, given the very high centralization of hashing power, but it was and still is common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for.

> common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for

Define “common” and provide sources for your claims please.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#328

Post by keymone »

Iv wrote: post #165
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 am really surprised that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general) hasn't solved its energy use yet and is still legal. I thought the world would switch to proof-of-stake coins and gradually make bitcoins harder to use.

Bitcoin’s energy use is its most valuable feature. If you think it’s an issue - you don’t understand what’s valuable in Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#329

Post by konschubert »

keymone wrote: post #325
konschubert wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the end, more people want Bitcoin than want Ethereum or Stellar. This is an accident of history more than anything. I think the distribution will look different once the monetary cost of Proof of Work starts to impact the Bitcoin ecosystem.

When will the monetary cost of gold mining start impacting gold ecosystem?

That analogy does not hold if you think about it

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#330

Post by tromp »

londons_explore wrote: post #246
atq2119 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets repeated over and over again, but the causality of this has never been proven, as incredible as that may sound. Yes, the causality of "create too much money -> inflation" is plausible (but note the emphasis on "too much"). However, we live in a world of endogenous money, where money is largely created by commercial banks in the form of loans to private entities. When prices increase, those loans get bigger.…

Bitcoins rate of coin creation is also ~7% per year at the moment...

No; it's approximately 3%.

We had 4 years with 4x the reward, 4 years with 2x the reward, and about 3 years with the current reward, which makes for 1/(4x4+4x2+3) = 1/27 inflation.

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