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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#401

Post by toolz »

nickpp wrote: post #332

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos? As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs.…

I don't know that name-calling adds much value to the conversation, but I will say it's a failing strategy to try and make value judgements for other people. The way forward is technological advancement. That has always been the case. We're not going to solve climate crisis by stifling anything as should be evident just by looking at China. I'd imagine we're all much better off supporting green energy rather than pointing fingers at anyone who has a different value judgement for how that energy should be used.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#402

Post by noch »

ForHackernews wrote: post #362
nickpp wrote: post #332

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos? As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs.…

Mining a single bitcoin block takes way way more energy than every one of the things you listed. Somebody on a different thread estimated you could drive a Tesla down the whole California coastline for the energy used processing a single BTC transaction. So yes, I absolutely do judge people who leave an SUV idling in their driveway 24/7 because "you never know when I'll need to jump in and run away from government ag…

> Somebody on a different thread estimated you could drive a Tesla down the whole California coastline for the energy used processing a single BTC transaction.

Bitcoin energy consumption is not a function of the number of transactions. A node broadcasts a transaction which miners then include in a block which, within limits, can have an arbitrary number of transactions. It is the Proof of Work(PoW) contest to find a valid hash for the block at a certain level of difficulty that creates a valid block.

Further, with Layer 2 solutions, a single transaction in a Bitcoin block can be "dense" with the value of an arbitrary number of transactions that occurred in Layer 2. That is Bitcoin providing the settlement layer.

Importantly, because Bitcoin is a timechain where the current blockheight represents the entire history of Bitcoin.

"The average cost per transaction isn’t an adequate metric for measuring the efficiency of Bitcoin’s PoW, it should be defined in terms of the security of an economic history. The energy spend secures the stock of bitcoin, and that percentage is going down over time as inflation decreases. A Bitcoin “accumulates” the energy associated with all the blocks mined since its creation. LaurentMT, a researcher, has found empirically that Bitcoin’s PoW is indeed becoming more efficient over time: increasing cost is counterbalanced by the even greater increasing total value secured by the system."[0]

[0] : https://danhedl.medium.com/pow-is-efficient-aa3d442754d3

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#403

Post by InitialLastName »

AnonsLadder wrote: post #373
doctorwho42 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in your boat, when it was first explained to me in a hacker space at college when it was first growing and priced at a few cents per 100++ Bitcoin. All I could see was a waste of energy and resources (time, energy, hardware). It will always be a drain on society, and it scares me that it hasn't failed because we see it draining our GPU industry to the point that market prices have gone insane and availability is…

You're looking at it from a totally wrong perspective. The U.S. government can print as much dollars as they want, whereas BTC cannot. The government does not care about green energy unless they can profit from it. To say that you did not buy BTC because of "wasting energy" is a very odd way to cope. You guys are so hung up on energy consumption, a meme, that you're forgetting the real intrinsic value of Bitcoin.

> the real intrinsic value of Bitcoin

Intrinsic: belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing [0].

Bitcoin, being a series of bits proving you or one of your financial forebears burnt some spare energy without any material return, has no intrinsic value. Its value is entirely extrinsic and intersubjective, in that it only has value if a quorum believes it has value.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intrinsic

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#404

Post by onyb »

baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…

Once you understand Bitcoin, there's no way why you'd go back to the legacy system. It's not Bitcoiners getting freaking rich; it's them adopting a superior store of value that is being selected as the winner in a free market.

Most people are perfectly happy entrusting their (fiat) money with the banks, and asking permission for accessing their funds. Bitcoiners, on the other hand, have tasted the freedom of self-custody and a permissionless payment system.

Whether it has value or not depends on how important it is to have a monetary good that is not issued by a nation state, and cannot be controlled/stopped/inflated/modified.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#405

Post by zadler »

cambaceres wrote: post #391
nickpp wrote: post #332

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos? As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs.…

If Bitcoin uses that amount of energy now, imagine how much it will consume when a large amount of the population actualy uses it for payments.

How many people use it for payments is not the right metric, it’s not the payments that cost a lot of electricity it’s the competition to win block rewards where more energy means a higher chance of mining a block.

Indirectly, if a lot of people use it for payments it may be worth more and attract more mining competition.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#406

Post by kybernetikos »

Rallerbabs wrote: post #292
baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…

Follow the big money. Michael Saylor from Microstrategies: $1B. Elon Musk from Tesla: $1.5B. GrayScale: not sure how many dollars, but they own >550,000 bitcoins. Big money is of the opinion that bitcoin is an excellent store of value. Only a matter of time before it becomes a medium of exchange. And later on, a unit of account. By that time, you won't be asking yourself what 1 bitcoin is worth anymore. Things will b…

> Only a matter of time before it becomes a medium of exchange.

It is impossible for BTC to become a medium of exchange without significant technical upgrades that the core developers have so far been hostile to.

Although it was a goal of the original bitcoin project (and continues to be for BCH and others), it is not a goal of the BTC community and it is incredibly unlikely that it will ever happen.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#407

Post by bonestamp2 »

pixelpoet wrote: post #392
nickpp wrote: post #332

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos? As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs.…

I tried to make this point on Reddit, and was downvoted to a smoking hole in the ground by people who were complaining that they can't get GPUs to play games, and that it's not eco-friendly. Of course, playing games on high powered GPUs is super eco-friendly, as are many other ways of making money... Half of them think people are mining Bitcoin on GPUs, and almost none of them know about Proof of Stake coins. Not tha…

Some people are really out of touch. By the time they found out about Bitcoin in the past couple years it had moved past GPU mining almost a decade ago.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#408

Post by JumpCrisscross »

thebean11 wrote: post #394
dixego wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If maintaining the infrastructure for something a miniscule percentage of the world's population benefit from requires more energy than entire countries, surely it's worth interrogating whether the benefits outweigh the costs?

> interrogating whether the benefits outweigh the costs What does this mean, in practice? Who investigates and what is the outcome? Do the things OP listed above warrant a similar investigation?

> Who investigates and what is the outcome?

The public? Something that benefits a few at the expense of the many is the canonical case for regulation.

(I don’t think we should ban or even really regulate Bitcoin. Not at this point.)

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#409

Post by Grustaf »

px43 wrote: post #254

Please put on your critical thinking hat for a minute. Using electricity is not the same as contributing to carbon emissions. Bitcoin is mostly mined in areas overflowing with excess green energy, and thus contributes negligibly to carbon emissions. The idea that all electricity generation is bad and therefore all electricity usage is bad is completely ridiculous. Instead of working so hard to figure out how to hate…

> Using electricity is not the same as contributing to carbon emissions

Until all electricity comes from renewable source, then yes it is.

> The idea that all electricity generation is bad and therefore all electricity usage is bad is completely ridiculous

All _frivolous_ electricity usage is obviously bad.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#410

Post by axxxo93 »

kgwgk wrote: post #335
axxxo93 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate an honest question. The negative sentiment around crypto is a bit extreme imo. Bitcoin does have intrinsic value. A trustless P2P payment network has value. Is POW flawed, yes. This is a big reason why I prefer and hold Ethereum. Eth is moving to POS which is vastly more efficient. It also has additional programability in the form of smart contracts that bitcoin does not have. Look into the DeFi space fo…

When even the people who says that Bitcoin has intrinsic value prefer something else it's hard to buy the argument. What's the intrinsic value of Bitcoin then? $10000? $100? $1?

> When even the people who says that Bitcoin has intrinsic value prefer something else it's hard to buy the argument.

This argument doesn't make any sense. I prefer BTC over gold. This does not negate the intrinsic value of gold in any way.

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