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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#592This comment will probably get buried but I wish someone would make something like coinmarketcap that showed how much energy was being used to secure each cryptocurrency.
If there were solid metrics, it'd help people who want to be more conscientious about where they put their money to actually do that.
Something like "coincarboncap".
A lot of cryptocurrencies don't use even a fraction of the energy bitcoin uses but there's no index to show that, so even if there were incentives for people to invest in energy efficient cryptocurrencies, how would they know which ones to go for?
The closest thing I can think of is whattomine. Maybe they'd be best equipped to build something like this, although I'm not sure if they'd have an interest in it.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#593At 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…
This isn't exactly an rebuttal to your argument, but 74% of energy that Bitcoin used to power it's network was renewable energy [1], that's more than you can say for most countries. While the network itself is inefficient, I think the philosophy of "why bitcoin", is always amiss in these arguments. Everything can be made more efficient.
Edit: 39% of energy used is renewable, not really sure how that doesn't matter.
[1] https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-....
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system Yeah, but those people are wrong. It's perfectly reasonable to judge them for doing harmful actions in service of a wrong belief.
Beliefs that used to be "wrong" and now are considered right: abolitionism, homosexuality, marijuana. How do you know this is a wrong belief that will stay wrong?
This is a bit of a tangent, but I think often of how wrong it is that we allow indoor marijuana production in places like Canada and the Western USA where it's legal. What a horrible waste of energy.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#595Earlier 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?
Capitalism always seeks a very local optima of maximizing profit with absolutely no question about the cost of "externalities". I put that in quotes because on a finite planet (that at the dawn of industrialization felt infinite) there's no true externality.
Energy is how our society is able to maintain its existence and current quality of life. If you over extended that energy usage you are looking towards total collapse of that system. That's what "unsustainable" means, that the system cannot be sustained in it's current state indefinitely.
We already rely on fossil fuels to over extended the carrying capacity of the planet for humans by nearly and order of magnitude. Ignoring climate change and other sustainability issues, the inevitable end of fossil fuels would mean billions of lives lost, even if we were able to stabilize the current global population.
I suspect, ultimately we will learn that humans are no different than bacteria in a petri dish: completely unable to do anything but consume all available resource even at their own eventual peril. But if you have any hope that we as a species can avoid the fate of any other species placed in a similar situation, then you, at the very least, have to recognize that "markets" can't solve this problem.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#596At 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…
Are you saying that if I send you $100 worth of bitcoins, the network would spend 700 kWh? I find that hard to believe.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#597And 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.
Most newer cryptos are built on proof of stake. So your criticism is mainly aimed at Btc.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#598Earlier 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.
Plus the non-instantaneous driving part.
Apparently you haven’t tried to send Bitcoin when it is backed up. In such times, driving the cash across the country would be much faster than waiting for the Bitcoin transaction to clear.
edit: fixed a typo
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#599At 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…
What about all those Lightning Network transactions on top of Bitcoin?
https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning
No information on actual transactions performed. But in practice the lightning network is tiny and stagnant.
If it would actually be used it would perhaps be more relevant, but it really doesn't seem to be. Except as an excuse for the bad efficiency.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#600How 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 mostly agree. As long as the price of energy is adequately priced, we should be able to make our own decisions on what amenities we need. You need a F150? Great, but be prepared to pay for its use. Naturally, the question immediately becomes, who decides what is adequate, which is not fun. Incidentally, I am learning about bitcoin now since it is clearly becoming mainstream and it is related to my job. I am trying…
> As long as the price of energy is adequately priced.
It's not, and doing so is a hard problem, requiring a global solution, against the wishes of many interests and industries. It doesn't seem likely any time soon.