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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#551

Post by paystaxes »

minikites wrote: post #276
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…

>realize the massive net benefits it offers to society Surely you can list some of them.

Preservation of wealth.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#553

Post by ric2b »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #478
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 much energy does watching porn consume? I guess if you got stats on how much porn they watch in Argentina you would be well on your way to answering this question. Same for the rest. I think the more interesting thing is: as bitcoin becomes more difficult to mine energy needs go up, but countries are working hard to bring their energy usage down. Can bitcoin be overtaken on the downward journey by a country, or…

> as bitcoin becomes more difficult to mine energy needs go up

Difficulty adjusts up and down as needed to maintain an average of 1 block every 10 minutes, it doesn't just tend to infinity.

It's mostly correlated to the block reward, miners won't spend more money on energy than they get back from mining blocks.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#554

Post by squarehorse »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #359
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…

If tens of thousands of folks like yourself had mined and kept the coins, it wouldn’t be nearly as valuable as it is today. It’s a deflationary asset, meaning the less it gets used the more valuable it is.

How do you make that out? There would still be the same amount of bitcoin in circulation.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#555

Post by esotericn »

minitoar wrote: post #455
esotericn wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send me money across the globe without a middleman or anyone being able to block that transfer. That's it. If you don't want that, you don't want that. Some of us do.

Unless, you know, it’s illegal. Then someone with a gun might take you & it away.

Well, sure.

At the moment someone with a gun might stop me from going to have a cup of tea with my mother.

I learned long ago to ignore such things in order to maintain my sanity.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#556

Post by Taek »

chrisco255 wrote: post #108
IgorPartola wrote: post #10

Slightly off topic, but does anyone have any good resources on how alternative consensus protocols work, like proof of stake and proof of importance? I either see really simplistic explanations or ones that assume a lot of domain knowledge. I also recently saw a crypto coin that claims to be energy efficient, and I don’t quite understand how that’s possible without the possibility of a 50.1% attack.

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…

Nothing about Proof of Stake is relatively simple lol. Not the incentives, not the threat model, not the trust model, not the impact on the economics, not the implementation, not the scalable byzantine fault tolerate research.

There are plenty of people who understand it well, I'm not saying it's outside of reach of a normal human being. But understanding proof of stake is not a 30 minute journey. (nor is understanding proof of work for that matter)

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#557

Post by lmkg »

kqr wrote: post #546

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.

My issue with it is even more fundamental than this: it is structurally impossible for Proof of Work to become more efficient. If you find a more energy-efficient way to mine, the correct decision is not to reduce your energy usage, but rather to use the same amount of energy to compute more hashes.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#558

Post by reedf1 »

Nursie wrote: post #532
reedf1 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the cost of an off-chain transaction? Actually, you're right, that's not worth mentioning because that doesn't fit with your argument.

Well that would be double, as you have to set up and tear down the lightning channel with a transaction for each operation...

...and the cost of those operations?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#559

Post by chill1 »

Nursie wrote: post #532
reedf1 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the cost of an off-chain transaction? Actually, you're right, that's not worth mentioning because that doesn't fit with your argument.

Well that would be double, as you have to set up and tear down the lightning channel with a transaction for each operation...

Your comment is so obviously disingenuous. It makes absolutely no sense to open a Lightning Network channel to send one transaction and then immediately close it.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#560

Post by beckingz »

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…

With a fancy tesla it might even be faster.
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