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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

cbeci.org

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#631

Post by choward »

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.

This "legacy financial system" comparison isn't fair. I use standard banking and haven't been to a bank in years. I think a more reasonable comparison is with online only banks. Our current system doesn't actually need physical cash. You just need banks keeping score for individual accounts and a central bank keeping score of the banks' accounts.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#632

Post by MereInterest »

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.

That is exactly correct. Bitcoin's inefficiency is tremendous, its throughput minimal, and by design it cannot scale.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#633

Post by ashtonkem »

ric2b wrote: post #571
ashtonkem wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a neat slight of hand trick you’ve pulled off there, connecting Bitcoin to entertainment in order to shame those of us concerned about Bitcoin energy usage. Everything else you’ve listed provides subjective value to the user, which makes them hard to attack. Who can say what the value of skiing is to a society in terms of kWh? There is no way to objectively compare the value of energy spent on a ski lift vs. d…

> But the issue is that Bitcoin isn’t supposed to provide subjective value, it’s supposed to provide objective value; it’s literally supposed to be money. Money's value is also subjective, I'm not sure what you think is objective about it. Sounds like you're just trying to dodge the comparison.

Definitionally, money’s value is not supposed to be subjective.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#634

Post by starclerk »

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.…

You're getting a lot of replies but I don't see anyone answering the initial questions. Some really rough math for playing video games:

Assuming I'm playing with someone across the country, I hop 13 routers in a quick traceroute.

Assuming each router is commercial hardware (~400W) and my traffic completely saturates them, that's 5,200W.

Plus the two machines at the end of each line, assuming they're beefy gaming PCs/servers with 1,000W power supplies at 100% load just for this game. That's 2,000W.

Playing a 30 minute Starcraft game comes to 3.6kWh, or two orders of magnitude less than a bitcoin transaction. It's almost certainly less than that since my assumptions were very conservative.

~~~

For something live like a concert, a 54,000 sqft hall uses about 1,100 kWh of power per day (lighting, HVAC). Plus 15kW of speakers for a 6 hour concert is 1,190 kWh. Divided by the 6000 people attending, is 0.2 kWh per attendee. Adding a 10 mile solo drive per person is about 3 kWh. Or again about 2 orders of magnitude less.

~~~

These aren't good comparisons when I could do hundreds of each of the activities you listed for the cost of one transaction.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#635

Post by positr0n »

dosenbrot wrote: post #522

I like the fun-facts on this page: "The amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the USA alone could power the Bitcoin network for 1.8 years" Where is the discussion about the smart home devices using that much energy? This is horrible, thats twice as the Bitcoin network and this is just the USA. I would really like if someone estimate the energy usage (with all trucks and c…

I didn't have time to dig in to the sources but I wonder if that fun fact is still true. Back in the day your VCR and TV used to consume a large amount of power in standby. These days a device on standby consumes pennies of power a year. Of course there are a lot more electronics in the average home these days...

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#636

Post by ecommerceguy »

Nursie wrote: post #527
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.

Many would see that as an upside. Irreversible transactions are not very desirable to a lot of folks, particularly where it comes to the consumer side of things.

As such thus regulations will occur once normal folks can't get a refund for whatever broken trinket they purchase with Dogecoin or EROS or ETH or ETHC or BSV or Ripple or Stellar or, or do I need to continue?...

I'm off to play in the penny stock section of Yahoo... /s

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#637

Post by ufo »

Taek wrote: post #535
ghego1 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking exactly the same. I would be in favor tbh. If the government is allowed to dictate how my car must be built in order to make it more environmentally friendly, I don't see why it shouldn't be able to dictate how my blockchain must be built in order to make it environmentally sustainable. This wouldn't mean banning blockchain altogether. It would entail banning only those forms of distributed consensus t…

Government regulation should focus on how electricity is produced, not how electricity is used. If Bitcoin created pollution or dumped toxic chemicals, I would agree with you. But Bitcoin doesn't do either of those things, the power plants do those things. So save your regulations for the power plants and let the market figure out how to spend the electricity. If you wouldn't be in favor of the government regulating…

Even renewable energy has externalities. They're not as bad as burning fossil fuels but we still want to avoid wasting energy on inefficient things.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#638

Post by fastball »

sharpneli wrote: post #601
deeeeplearning wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most newer cryptos are built on proof of stake. So your criticism is mainly aimed at Btc.

Naturally. While POS cryptos share many other bad sides with Bitcoin at least they don't ruin the planet so they're far far better.

POW only ruins the planet if you're using non-renewables / non-nuclear. It's not intrinsic.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#639

Post by rcxdude »

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. […

That article actually states the opposite: 74% of miners use some renewable energy. Only 39% of energy used comes from renewable sources, and most of it is hydroelectric, which is limited so miners demand for it is likely crowding out other users from it. The remainder mostly consists of coal and natural gas (there's a popular idea that miners use or can use the excess energy usage which occasionally comes from wind or solar, but the cost of the hardware they use prevents it: they will run the hardware 100% of the time to pay for it, so they represent a strong base load on the system, not a convenient energy sink for excess renewable generation).

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#640

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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