Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

Post by DennisP » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

betterunix2 wrote: post #353

hobofan wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Determining fully decentralized consensus between arbitrary participants (or at least one of the best approximations of that). In Bitcoin that consensus is limited to transactions, in Ethereum with smart contracts it can be used for much more (though that might require additional layers of incentivation to work properly, depending on the use case).

"fully decentralized consensus" Can someone define this term? Do we ignore P2P bootstrapping issues? Do we ignore the roll of IANA, RIRs, and other authorities that manage IP address and ASN assignments? Or perhaps more to the point, why would it not work to have a consortium of banks set up and operate a distributed public ledger (thus avoiding the energy-intensive "mining" process)?

Post by _0w8t » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

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.

Post by ric2b » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

betterunix2 wrote: post #353

hobofan wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Determining fully decentralized consensus between arbitrary participants (or at least one of the best approximations of that). In Bitcoin that consensus is limited to transactions, in Ethereum with smart contracts it can be used for much more (though that might require additional layers of incentivation to work properly, depending on the use case).

"fully decentralized consensus" Can someone define this term? Do we ignore P2P bootstrapping issues? Do we ignore the roll of IANA, RIRs, and other authorities that manage IP address and ASN assignments? Or perhaps more to the point, why would it not work to have a consortium of banks set up and operate a distributed public ledger (thus avoiding the energy-intensive "mining" process)?

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

pawsed wrote: post #593

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…

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. […

Post by newswasboring » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

_0w8t wrote: post #613

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.

Cryptocurrency are inefficient by the design only at creation. But once mined, in principle with the right setup transactions can be arbitrary cheap. It is similarly as with gold. It is expensive to dig it once, but once a coin is minted, it can be used for millions of transaction making transaction cost rather low.