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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

cbeci.org

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#581

Post by _jal »

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.…

Watching porn and playing video games do not have structural ratchets essentially forcing ever-greater porn-watching or game-playing.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#582

Post by riffraff »

snickms wrote: post #237

If the goal is to educate the public on the scale of power involved, a comparison with a commonly used service would help a lot IMHO. Something like 'Bitcoin consumes 14 times the energy of Google and half (according rough estimates) that of Youtube' would make things easier to grasp before hitting the reader with country comparisons. FWIW here is my list of 'if a service were a country': Google Guatemala Bitcoin Arg…

I think the average person would find it easier to imagine the consumption of a country than that of a an internet service.

Both are basically unintelligible, but at least the country one is something that one can _imagine_ from their experience, if wrongly (my house consumption:country consumption = 1:population).

I bet few people on hackernews itself have any clue what the energy consumption of google might be, and have no way of relating to it.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#583

Post by wcarron »

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.…

> Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

No, seeing a bunch of rich nerds wasting massive amounts of energy in a time of environmental crisis so they can make millions convincing people a store of value is actually a currency, and then getting mad about it, is not hypocritical.

> While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy,

It's not. It's a massive waste. Stop killing the planet.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#584

Post by scythe »

kqr wrote: post #538
amackera wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it is irreversible to the extent giving any physical papers to another person is irreversible. However, the upside 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.

I was expecting the last word of your post to be "public".

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#585

Post by jf22 »

samuel wrote: post #282
jf22 wrote: post #169

Remember, the earth is burning. Crypto is a huge environmental issue.

It's completely meaningless because GWh aren't interchangeable. A hydro o thermal energy source too far from inhabited places could be used for bitcoin mining and its CO2 footprint would be near zero. I'm not saying you are wrong but this requires a far more exhaustive analysis.

So we'd build energy production away from where people live just to mine a digital currency?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#586

Post by modemuser »

jiriknesl wrote: post #274
jqpabc123 wrote: post #55

Bitcoin is Crypto 1.0. There are better ways to do this. But people remain infatuated with Bitcoin.

It is crypto 1.0. And it can be overtaken. The problem is (and I have been involved - most often unsuccessfully) that building anything in this ecosystem requires a lot of understanding of digital signatures, distributed system, economics, game theory, security & quality, trustless ecosystems, incentives, possibilities of players with big budgets (PoS - 51% bought by some government)/great developers (bots frontrunni…

The only fully functional crypto I know that could make Bitcoin obsolete is Nano. It does one thing, and does it well. Fast, feeless, green.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#587

Post by ctdonath »

dixego wrote: post #372
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 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?

That’s...what money does: evaluate supply vs demand, identifying the relationship of value between options, decided by those with a vested interest. Such a system inherently evaluates cost vs benefits in a holistic networked manner (vs wishful thinking by the uninvolved).

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#588

Post by ric2b »

NickM wrote: post #507
px43 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you are very confused. Asymmetric cryptography is a completely separate, much older technology that has nothing directly to do with cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, Bitcoin does nothing to solve the kind of fraud problems you are talking about, and in fact makes the consequences of them much worse, since you no longer have a central authorities that can reverse fraudulant transactions and the like. The "double…

> Asymmetric cryptography is a completely separate, much older technology that has nothing directly to do with cryptocurrencies.

It does, Bitcoin wouldn't work without it, the whole thing relies on cryptographic signatures.

> The "double spend" problem refers to a problem in distributed systems, not applied security.

Is it not both? It's a security issue present in distributed systems.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#589

Post by optimiz3 »

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.

Hypothetically this could be amortized better by increasing the transactions per block. Just because Bitcoin was first doesn't mean it's the best wrt efficiency. PoW can be competitive with legacy infrastructure with good clearing design.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#590

Post by throw_m239339 »

ucha wrote: post #92
Jonnax wrote: post #23

From what I understand bitcoin currently has a $20+ transaction fee with a transaction time takes 60 minutes+ With these issues in addition to the high power consumption, how will Bitcoin become a usable currency?

Buying US stocks takes 2 days to settle. Sending simple wires in the US takes hours. Last time I tried to send significant funds from France to the UK, it took me a whole week of back and forth with the bank to complete all the AML/KYC paperwork. Let's not even talk about how long it would take to move gold from one part of the world to another cf. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-30/iran-is-h... You c…

> Last time I tried to send significant funds from France to the UK, it took me a whole week of back and forth with the bank to complete all the AML/KYC paperwork.

How much time would it take to convert, transfer to a bank account AND withdraw that same amount of money from Bitcoin to plain FIAT?

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