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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

cbeci.org

421–430 of 1001 posts

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#421
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.…

Why is not wanting to waste electricity on Ponzi schemes so triggering?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#422
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.

Bitcoin and most(all?) crypto currencies pretty much suck for payments. I think a BTC transaction costs around $16 USD just to get it on the blockchain now. Plus transactions are not private, and they are permanently public, so even if your BTC Address is unknown today, doesn't mean it won't be known tomorrow.

There are perhaps, some reasonable arguments for using crypto-currencies, but buying groceries is not on the list. Buying Houses... *MAYBE*, since that information is already public anyway.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#423
post #404
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-cus…

> there's no way why you'd go back to the legacy system

I can think of lots of reasons.

* Deflationary currencies are dangerous. Inflation is a feature, not a bug.

* If I screw up a bank transfer or have my credit card details stolen, I can have those transactions reversed. No such luck with Bitcoin. The idea of losing my life’s savings to a zero day or sophisticated hacker doesn’t sounds great to me.

* I can’t remember the last time my bank got DoSed.

* Bitcoin’s value fluctuates wildly, making it a poor medium of exchange.

* I like that my country can adjust monetary policy in response to world events like pandemics. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#424
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.…

Important difference between Bitcoin and everything else you mentioned: there is no incentive to improve the energy-efficiency of mining. We went from CPU to GPU to ASIC mining, each time reducing the per-hash energy consumption, and all the miners did was hash more using the same amount of energy. Whereas, for example, the energy used to watch porn -- energy spent by all the routers, switches, and servers involved -…

aka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone were to get excited about Monopoly money as a store of value, it would be wrong to tell you that you fail to see the huge potential. The crowd decided that bitcoin is worth something, and thus it is worth something. That doesn't make you wrong for not being part of the crowd. Today Elon Musk chooses BTC and it goes up. Tomorrow the US government could crack down on BTC and it could go down. Maybe a techni…

> doesn't mean it has potential, nor that it's useful. It just means there's uptake. This is a bit nihilistic. Bitcoin’s value has reallocated a huge amount of technical talent and resources in the global economy. It also has a growing carbon footprint. These give the public, and by extension its members, legitimate exposure to its downsides. Given that exposure, it’s valid to consider managing it.

So you determine the inherent value of something based on its price action?

To flesh this out: I'm not arguing that BTC has no value, nor that it has no externalities, so I really don't understand what motivates your reply. I don't feel that there's anything nihilistic about pointing out the logical flaw in saying, "oh the concept of Bitcoin has 12% more inherent value now than yesterday because the price went up by that much." I recognize that the article is about electricity, but I'm not sure how you get from my comment to electricity. If Bitcoin crashes tomorrow, does that mean that the inherent value (or conversely, the societal burden) of the concept went down?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#426
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 you combine the energy costs of delivering streaming video and the client side costs of playing video and executing JavaScript I have no doubt porn far outstrips Bitcoin. Hell, I bet JavaScript bloat from adtech alone and exceeds the totally energy budget of France.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#427
post #393
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…

Hey there. I'm one of those people who read Schneier's Applied Cryptography in highschool in the 90s, and immediately recognized the groundbreaking potential of using asymmetric cryptography for currency. I work in information security, and have seen first hand how our existing financial infrastructure is held together with string and scotch tape. For 10 years or so, every time I heard about some big credit card thef…

Why only healthy incentives? Could they not equally be unhealthy ones?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#428
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If governments banned the on/off ramps to normal currency, then yes it would be effectively neutered. There is an audience that wouldn't care, but it's a small audience.

Yes, but the narrative is that Bitcoin is innovation and any government against it is basically against innovation. If I wanted to neutralize it, I would do something like Bait&Switch. Support banks running own cryptos until point where general public will see no difference between BTC and private cryptocurrencies and leave BTC users with their wallets and even when it will remain legal and everything, the "crypto re…

As the other commenter says - nobody would care about those, because the only reason people are interested is the speculation. Stable cryptocurrencies are really only of interest to a small group of decentralisation fetishists, and stable, centralised cryptocurrencies are of interest to basically nobody.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#429
Yesterday I read "What Bloomberg Gets Wrong About Bitcoin’s Climate Footprint" [0] where the writer tries to make a case that you shouldn't compare Bitcoin to VISA, but more to something like the dollar. While I don't agree with his whole story, for example including the US army in the costs, I thought it was an interesting way of looking at it.

Edit: he also points out that after all Bitcoin has been mined, the electricity use will probably change.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bloomberg-gets-wrong-bitcoin-...

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#430
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…

> I simply can't answer what BTCs and other crypto coins are actually good for.

Getting rich quickly. It might be the largest Ponzi scheme ever. I hope it's not..

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