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Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

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Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#371

Post by zallarak »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #228
zallarak wrote: post #181

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…

Are you comparing Bitcoin to settlement with gold to make Bitcoin seem less inefficient? This seems like a misleading comparison, because which significant central banks still physically move gold around for settlement? Either they don't move gold or it is only moved virtually, and in either case Bitcoin is vastly less efficient.

I am comparing it to settling gold in that a settlement is "final". You can reverse a credit card transaction, a bank wire, etc. You cannot reverse a Bitcoin transaction or Gold shipment without significant risk and cost.

Example that leads me to believe central banks still settle gold: https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/ronan-manly/bank-of-englan...

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#372

Post by danmaz74 »

krageon wrote: post #354
danmaz74 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the only way to have a decentralized, trustless, robust digital currency is to waste an inordinate amount of energy and increase our global warming and pollution problems, then we'll have to do without that kind of digital currency. It's a matter of priorities.

From a position of power it is easy to do without, because you derive no security or finances from this solution. After all, the status quo is paying you just fine. Why is what you say relevant for most people, who to varying degrees definitely don't have all the things that you apparently take for granted?

Is having food on the table and a roof on their head relevant to "most people"? Because, when we're talking about climate change, that's what is at risk for hundreds of millions of people.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#373

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #362
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're just going to ignore that we can do layer 2 technologies like lightning network?

Explain to me how they prevent the energy requirements of proof of work securing the entire cryptocoin infrastructure from growing significantly faster than the market using that infrastructure, and without compromising the whole reason behind cryptocurrencies in the first place, which is decentralization and lack of trust?

Hm I'm not sure I understand, because the answer seems very simple: because they dramatically increase ratio of the number of meaningful transactions describing real economic activity to a MB of valueable block space (and therefore per watt of total global PoW calculation).

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#374

Post by TeMPOraL »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #373
TeMPOraL wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain to me how they prevent the energy requirements of proof of work securing the entire cryptocoin infrastructure from growing significantly faster than the market using that infrastructure, and without compromising the whole reason behind cryptocurrencies in the first place, which is decentralization and lack of trust?

Hm I'm not sure I understand, because the answer seems very simple: because they dramatically increase ratio of the number of meaningful transactions describing real economic activity to a MB of valueable block space (and therefore per watt of total global PoW calculation).

If all they do is increase the ratio, that's only constant scaling. So in no way does it compensate for the scaling of PoW energy use with respect to market size.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#375

Post by aaron_m04 »

cwkoss wrote: post #113
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.

I think the traditional stock market has significantly greater environmental externalities, even proportionally to net value. Greed creates waste in all venues.

I think you're comparing apples and oranges here.

We're talking about just keeping track of who owns what amounts of a commodity. That part is using terawatt hours per year! I am very doubtful that the "keeping track of who owns what amounts" part of the stock market is anywhere near that.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#376

Post by keymone »

noxer wrote: post #367
keymone wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of work is the only objective datapoint that can’t be faked. It has value in itself proportional to how much energy went into the proof, so it’s wrong to say something was wasted - all the energy went into producing something of value. With proof of stake if you get out of the bunker and are presented with multiple competing chains - you can’t decide which one is genuine and which is a malicious fork. With proo…

Why compare PoW with PoS if there is consensus https://xrpl.org/intro-to-consensus.html which already solved the problems of both before PoS even existed. Consensus will never have 2 chains unless someone creates one on purpose. For all others it's always clear witch chain is the correct because everyone can check for correctness. in case the consensus fails (for example serious global network problems) the consensus…

> Each participant in the network chooses a set of validators, servers specifically configured to participate actively in consensus, run by different parties who are expected to behave honestly most of the time.

maybe you're fine with that, i'm not and everybody who values bitcoin aren't either. it's the kind of thing that PoW solves and PoS doesn't. every PoS system i've seen just obfuscates this glaring hole instead of admitting that there's no way around it - you can't know which chain is genuine without trusting third party. in Bitcoin you can, or at least it is trivial to detect when something malicious is happening. and i'm not talking about correctness here, correctness is trivial, you don't even need to bring it up.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#378

Post by trickstra »

ben_w wrote: post #359
trickstra wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Waste" is when there is no benefit. But here the benefit is decentralized, trustless, robust digital currency.

I see no benefit in a trustless currency: If I have no trust in a currency, why should I trust the goods/services? I see no benefit in a decentralised currency: gold is one (anyone can mine it) and there’s a reason we moved away from it. I don’t buy that bitcoin is either decentralised (they who control the algorithm steering committee control the currency); trustless (why should I trust irreversible transactions? Wh…

Trustless currency means exactly the opposite of what you think. It means you don't need to trust anyone, because everything can be proven and verified mathematically without any authoritative figure that you'd have to trust. That's why you can trust the system itself.

And I'm sorry, I won't address your other points.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#379

Post by trickstra »

noxer wrote: post #326
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.

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. P…

Miners are not paying their electricity bills with bitcoin (most of them). It's the other buyers, that buy the bitcoins from the miner in exchange for dollars, that in fact pay the bills. And those are willing to pay the current price of electricity required to create the block.

And mining costs have gone down before. It's when bitcoin's price falls making mining unprofitable, so some miners stop, which lowers the difficulty, which makes mining profitable again at lower level - mining costs decreased to match the price.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#380

Post by trickstra »

maxerickson wrote: post #368
noxer wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. P…

There's some question of what a crash looks like. If the block reward goes away but there are enough fees to cover a reasonable difficulty, the crash will just be the end of the enormous investment in chasing the block reward, the network might still be secure enough to be usable. I haven't checked the math, but this article says the block reward is ~$45 per transaction, vs ~$0.70 in fees: https://cryptoslate.com/eac…

We will see in May.
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