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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#651

Post by rcxdude »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #621
frongpik wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yes, but the number of transactions in 'bitcoin' as it's currently defined is severely limited (blocks are already full at a $15 per transaction cost). Conceptually, making something which increases the transaction count involves forking bitcoin, and a fork which aimed to do exactly that was denounced heavily by the community and rejected by the markets. The marginal cost may be small but the cost per transaction is high, by design, and by design which has extremely heavy resistance to even small and simple changes.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#652

Post by UncleMeat »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #621
frongpik wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

But the number of transactions in a block is fixed.

We went through this with BTC/BCH. The BTC folks did not want to increase block size.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#653

Post by lr4444lr »

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.

Then you might as well price in the cost of the computers and GPUs assembly into Bitcoin's cost. I don't see the utility in going down this chain of production.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#654

Post by snickms »

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…

True - and even with this tremendous waste, it pays for itself. We have never looked beyond monetary return to justify the existence of anything and i fear we are doomed to stay that way.

Thankfully, renewables are becoming more profitable. If we built enough, we could power the USA. Imagine that.

All the bitcoin, teslas and visa transactions you would ever want, with no squabbling.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#655

Post by amackera »

ctdonath wrote: post #550
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.

Of course there is: physics. I hand you a pile of coins/bills, you have it and I don’t. “Bearer” is sufficient information.

That's not really what irreversible transactions means in this context.

What ledger has recorded this transaction? How might a dispute be resolved? What's stopping the receiver from just claiming you never dropped off the cash when you drive back home?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#656

Post by choward »

janoside wrote: post #612

Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global…

> including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar

This isn't true. Internationally the thing that backs the dollar is the U.S. economy. People know they can spend dollars to get anything they need. Domestically what drives the dollar is that it's the only way you can pay taxes.

I suppose you could say that oil is used to defend the U.S. economy but that's a stretch.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#657

Post by pattisapu »

_jal wrote: post #581
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.

Wait a minute . . .

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#658

Post by andreygrehov »

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…

Super pessimistic. I don't know why this comment is at the top. The analogy and calculations are fun, but nothing more than that. You are basically suggesting that we all should buy Teslas, right? 330 miles roundtrip is about 5-6 hours of non-stop driving. Not the best UX.

I do international transfers quite often. Every time I try to send a more or less large amount, it becomes a pain in the ass both for sender and recipient. You have to prove that you are not a unicorn.

People use Bitcoin because it's freedom from the existing banking system, plain and simple. When you are sending money via a bank, it's like someone is watching you at a bathroom. It simply doesn't happen with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin will be the force that will make all the miners completely switch to a green energy (and that's already happening).

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#659

Post by hshshs2 »

acec wrote: post #533
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…

Nobody ever said that Bitcoin was a efficient system. It has other qualities that worth it.

couldn’t it be replaced with something that’s not terribly broken? then we can save the energy expended in all these mental gymnastics too

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#660

Post by simias »

sparkie wrote: post #577
simias wrote: post #41

If this trend continue we may well seal our fate by crunching useless numbers at a global scale for the sake of greed and because we seem incapable of trusting each other. If this was written in a novel we'd deem it a bit too much on the nose really.

The greed is the chairs of central banks and the policymakers who are debasing other monies (some people benefit more than others from this). If they weren't debasing other people's hard earned value, there would be no need for bitcoin. But since they are, and are doing it at an increasing pace, the demand for bitcoin is inevitable.

You'll have to explain to me how replacing inflationary currencies with a deflationary one makes any sense in that context. Inflationary currencies punish those hoarding money, deflationary currencies reward them.

The idea that bitcoin is good for the less fortunate and bad for rich people is pure propaganda and not based on reality. It's going to make a bunch of early adopters very rich, and that's about it.

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