661–670 of 1001 posts
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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.
Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…
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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.
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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.
If you don't want irreversible transactions, you don't want bitcoin.
My point is that claiming bitcoin is or isn't inefficient relative to other systems is nonsense. There's simply no comparable system that has the same guarantees as bitcoin, presently or throughout history.
As far as we know, the power cost of bitcoin may very well be the minimum required energy to run an irreversible proof-of-work distributed ledger. Maybe spending 1% of the world's energy to have this public infrastructure is actually a good deal? I really don't know.
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Nobody ever said that Bitcoin was a efficient system. It has other qualities that worth it.
Every time anyone brings up a problem with Bitcoin someone says this. It seems like bitcoin is not designed for anything but existing.
Why do they have to mine bitcoins at this point? There are enough in the market just transact and trade with them.
When a miner mines a block, they are rewarded with the sum of all fees paid by transactions in the block, plus a subsidy, which is 50 >> height/210000. The subsidy is the process by which the available bitcoin supply is released into the market - a predictable rate which cannot be accelerated. Miners can chose to NOT claim the subsidy if they want, but would be doing so at their own loss.
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…
Block production, on the other hand, takes as much energy as the market will bear.
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.
However, if the ultimate utility of Bitcoin is to store trillions of dollars of value, transmit it into the future, across borders, quickly, pseudonymously, and without capital controls from coercive and corrupt governments, then energy-per-transaction is an inappropriate metric.
Bitcoin is the only asset with these properties, and it doesn't need many transactions to do what it does best.
If you find you're angry about Bitcoin's energy usage but you're not even more angry about the energy wasted by industries and technologies that have much less social utility, then maybe it's not the wasted energy that you're angry about after all.
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 you combine the energy costs of delivering streaming video and the client side costs of playing video and executing JavaScript I have no doubt porn far outstrips Bitcoin. Hell, I bet JavaScript bloat from adtech alone and exceeds the totally energy budget of France.
It takes about 30 W to watch video in a browser [1].
Assuming every internet user watches 85 minutes of video per day [2] (517 hr/year), video consumption is 52 TWh per year. Or less than half of than the bitcoin network.
Google uses 12 TWh per year [3]. Assuming Google is entirely focused on serving the world's video (it likely could), that still is ~half of the bitcoin network.
(France consumes about 480 TWh per year [4])
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/microsoft-internet-explore...
[2] https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/video-110520
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/10/21/googles-...
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When the alternative is simply just using Proof of Stake and lowering the energy consumption by an estimated 99%, yes, we can be judgmental of how others use energy in this specific case. It's not Bitcoin/PoW or no cryptocurrencies at all, that's a false dichotomy, if that's what you're implying.
PoS lacks fairness. To participate in PoS, you need an existing stash of coins, which is inaccessible for many individuals from countries where cryptocurrencies are outlawed. Not forgetting to mention that participation in consensus would indirectly require going through KYC. PoW, on the other hand, is akin to buying Bitcoin with electricity - a borderless natural resource.