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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#541

Post by Mordisquitos »

whoisninja wrote: post #447
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?

let the market decide then, step away- don't mine, don't use Bitcoin if you prefer gold mining uses tons of energy we knew automobiles will pollute the environment, why didn't we stop using them altogether?

I will agree with "letting the market decide" on the energy expended in Bitcoin when there is an effective and globally enforced carbon emissions tax that adequately compensates the potential damage caused by these emissions.

Other industries and activities, such gold mining, automotives, food production, tourism, etc., must of course also be covered by said carbon tax. However, what makes Bitcoin particularly noxious compared to them is that it intrinsically carries a financial incentive to expend more energy as time moves on.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#542

Post by orange_tee »

amackera wrote: post #504
sharpneli wrote: post #440

At that rate and assuming 4tx per second a single Bitcoin transaction consumes 165kWh. A Tesla battery is bit over 50kWh. So let's round that to 3 full charges of Tesla battery. That's 350km/220 miles of range per charge. In total 1050km or 660 miles of driving. So basically if you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there…

The downside of driving your tesla with a case full of bills is that there's no immutable world-wide distributed record of your transaction making it irreversible.

That is not necessarily a downside.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#543

Post by ric2b »

tw04 wrote: post #515
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.…

How many of those directly convert electricity into profit? How many of those businesses have been rent seeking countries/states/locations that subsidize electricity for their populations? Electricity is one of those things most of society has deemed an essential good, and as such has subsidized it for the poorest among us. Bitcoin farmers are abusing that system to turn the government subsidies into personal profit…

> Electricity is one of those things most of society has deemed an essential good, and as such has subsidized it for the poorest among us.

Sounds like an argument for giving subsidies to the poor instead of anyone using electricity.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#545

Post by rawtxapp »

ecommerceguy wrote: post #520
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?

I'm not against bitcoin anymore than I am against unnecessary taxation but since bitcoin uses electricity at an insanely unnecessary quantity it should be taxed to the hilt to make up for increased environmental and infrastructure costs that are borne onto the 99.999% that do not participate in the scam.

Most of it is renewable energy.

edit: 39% of it, as in a lot of it and that number should go up as the world is phasing out dirty energy for cleaner energy sources.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#546

Post by kqr »

And this is not surprising. Cryptocurrency is designed to be anti-efficient. "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy."

This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#547

Post by betterunix2 »

leeoniya wrote: post #424
betterunix2 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nope, not the same. Bitcoin mining does not "produce" hashes, it "produces" Bitcoin blocks. All that changed with the improvement in hashing speed is the number of hashes that must be computed before a block is added to the block chain.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#548

Post by Taek »

TheCapn wrote: post #227
chrisco255 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake is relatively simple. You agree to stake a minimum amount of tokens (decided on by the network) and you get to run a node and validate transactions. If you attest to a malicious block and other validators call you out on it, you get slashed (i.e. you lose some portion of your stake, if not all of it): https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... One of the problems with it is that it…

>no single holder owns more than 1% of ETH, for example Curious about this statement. Is this something that can be looked up online? I know wallets/transactions are entirely public so I guess its just a question of whether someone has made a tool to do this with ETH or other cryptos. How do other coins fair in the same regard? What's BTC distribution? LTC? Or any of their forks?

I believe it's fairly well established that Joe Lubin holds somewhere around 10% of the Eth supply. Anyone with large holdings is incentivized to spread those holdings across many accounts to avoid scrutiny.

Pretty much every coin has substantial gini coefficient issues.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#549

Post by NickM »

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…

Things will be priced in bitcoin. You mean like how things are priced in gold now? Oh wait, we got off the gold standard specifically because of its high short-run volatility. Hmm....

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#550

Post by ctdonath »

amackera wrote: post #504
sharpneli wrote: post #440

At that rate and assuming 4tx per second a single Bitcoin transaction consumes 165kWh. A Tesla battery is bit over 50kWh. So let's round that to 3 full charges of Tesla battery. That's 350km/220 miles of range per charge. In total 1050km or 660 miles of driving. So basically if you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there…

The downside of driving your tesla with a case full of bills is that there's no immutable world-wide distributed record of your transaction making it irreversible.

Of course there is: physics. I hand you a pile of coins/bills, you have it and I don’t. “Bearer” is sufficient information.
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