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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

cbeci.org

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#621

Post by aakilfernandes »

frongpik wrote: post #596
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…

Are you saying that if I send you $100 worth of bitcoins, the network would spend 700 kWh? I find that hard to believe.

Analyses like this just take the energy cost of each block of transactions and divide it by the amount of transactions in the block. If the number of transactions in a block doubles, the average energy cost per transaction is halved.

Another way of stating it is "the marginal energy usage of a bitcoin transaction is essentially 0".

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#622

Post by slg »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #603
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…

You are leaving out significant amounts of energy consumed in the legacy financial system. Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag? Where’d that come from? Etc. I’m not sure that any of this is meaningful in any way.

Which is also true on the opposite side or did your mining rig magically materialize out of nowhere? The difference is that a lot of the infrastructure for the traditional system is already built out which reduces the marginal energy costs to a degree that isn't the case for cryptocurrencies.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#623

Post by wickoff »

kungito wrote: post #574
wickoff wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you really not find a single use for bitcoin? Here is the most obvious one - true sovereignty over your capital. When you have bitcoin, you have have physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset. Not legal ownership where a custodian ultimately decides whether you can access it. In theory nothing prevents individuals from carrying entire national budgets as seed words in their heads. You can argue ethics,…

Well, the owner of 51% of processing decides. It also has no use if both parties aren't connected to the internet. Also, you are in the truest sense not the owner of the bitcoins. You are using the "ownership service" of the network. If the network goes down, you lose access to the network (goverment internet filtering) or the network gets taken over, you lose everything. It's strictly worse than gold. The only downs…

If the owner of Bitcoin's 51% hashrate decides to take anyone's coins, then Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is over. They all go to 0. If that happens, then all of the critics will be proven right.

Hasn't happened so far though because Bitcoin disincentivizes this sort of behavior.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#624

Post by rwoerz »

_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.

Could you elaborate on that? How can future transactions be accommodated if everyone stops mining new blocks?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#625

Post by [deleted] »

lmkg wrote: post #557
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.

[deleted]

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#626

Post by chrisco255 »

hummusman wrote: post #448
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.…

When it became blindingly apparent that mining diamonds, gold and rare earth metals was proving harmful to societies (pollution, war etc.) countries put into place regulation to ensure that future mining would be conducted in ways to try and eliminate these harms. Mining bitcoin is a growing contributor to energy consumption, and subsequently environmental damage and harm. Similar precedent?

Energy consumption does not necessarily mean environmental harm. That's not a law of the universe at all.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#627

Post by newswasboring »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #603
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…

You are leaving out significant amounts of energy consumed in the legacy financial system. Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag? Where’d that come from? Etc. I’m not sure that any of this is meaningful in any way.

The mining equipment needed to be produced. The mining rig needed to be installed, many factories needed to be produced. There are workers in these mines, did they spend energy driving a car? Did they use a gym bag? Where did that come from?

BTC is not magic dude, it has externalities too.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#628

Post by moonbug »

frongpik wrote: post #596
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…

Are you saying that if I send you $100 worth of bitcoins, the network would spend 700 kWh? I find that hard to believe.

...and yet it is so.

Total energy required to mine one block / # transactions per block.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#629

Post by janoside »

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?

Via Tesla, bitcoin is now implicitly held by all investors in the S&P 500, including, very likely, you. You are now a benefactor of bitcoin's growth, whether you're aware of it or not. This trend, where bitcoin quietly confers benefits to growing constituencies of people who remain completely unaware of the fact, will continue.

And, at the same time, there are many people, in less fortunate circumstances, for whom the benefits of bitcoin are felt much more acutely: https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1357757736394444800

The "minuscule percentage" you quote (without reference) is very likely already clearly incorrect and will continue, over time, to become more incorrect.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#630

Post by newswasboring »

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. […

Read two paragraphs below what in your own link.

>However, the CCAF’s report specifies that the 76% refers to the share of hashers who use renewable energy at any point. It estimates that only 39% of hashing’s total energy consumption comes from renewables.

> Behind hydroelectricity, coal (38%) and natural gas (36%) are the energy sources hashers favour most.

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