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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#671

Post by saalweachter »

wcarron wrote: post #583
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.…

> Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude. No, seeing a bunch of rich nerds wasting massive amounts of energy in a time of environmental crisis so they can make millions convincing people a store of value is actually a currency, and then getting mad about it, is not hypocritical. > While not everybody agrees, this may be more importa…

Hell, just consider that it's a store of value that costs $12B+ / year to secure.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#672

Post by ad31mar »

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…

https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#673

Post by jude- »

onyb wrote: post #442
Shoue wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Moreover, anyone who can stake their tokens to produce blocks will never sell you enough tokens that you'll be able to compete with them for future block rewards. Put another way, the value of a staker's token-minting stake is at least equal to the expected ROI over its lifetime (much like how the value of a stock is worth its expected dividends over time). PoS is a digital manifestation of a hereditary aristocracy -- you can almost never buy your way in; you have to be a first mover.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#675

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 »

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.…

Oh, come on. All of those things, except for travel, draw roughly zero watts compared to Bitcoin.

One Bitcoin transaction is about 750 kWh. That's enough to power a typical home for a month. It's enough to drive about 500 miles in an electric car, or (with vigorous handwaving based on EPA numbers) about 200 miles in an efficient gasoline car.

Bitcoin uses about 1/3 the energy of all the datacenters in the world. There are about 120 million Bitcoin transactions per year. If we assume 360 million people are using services that run in datacenters (obviously too low), one Bitcoin transaction uses as much electricity as the server time to support one user across all the services they use for a year.

>Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

This is an engineering problem.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#676

Post by choward »

jp555 wrote: post #441
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.…

Even more directly - How much energy does all the world's "legacy" Fintech use? Banks, exchanges, government tax agencies, accountants, money printing, retail cash machines (ATM, registers, etc) and all the way to gold mining.

Nobody uses the gold standard anymore.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#677

Post by Aunche »

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…

The first paragraph is a fair consideration. The second is a complete stretch. It's not as if America would suddenly stop providing military support to Saudi Arabia if we suddenly switched to bitcoin. An America that historically used Bitcoin would be even more incentivized to "secure" fossil fuel nations.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#678

Post by amackera »

kqr wrote: post #538
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.

Well, it is irreversible to the extent giving any physical papers to another person is irreversible. However, the upside 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.

It's reversible in the sense that the second you leave, I can just claim you never dropped off the cash. AKA I can reverse it.

Bitcoin isn't digital cash, it has different tradeoffs. That implies there are upsides/downsides to all of these factors.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#679

Post by andreygrehov »

majewsky wrote: post #318
Rallerbabs wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow the big money. Michael Saylor from Microstrategies: $1B. Elon Musk from Tesla: $1.5B. GrayScale: not sure how many dollars, but they own >550,000 bitcoins. Big money is of the opinion that bitcoin is an excellent store of value. Only a matter of time before it becomes a medium of exchange. And later on, a unit of account. By that time, you won't be asking yourself what 1 bitcoin is worth anymore. Things will b…

> Big money is of the opinion that bitcoin is an excellent store of value. Only a matter of time before it becomes a medium of exchange. By that same logic, I should be able to pay for my groceries with Apple stocks by now.

No, it's not the same. Bitcoin is like gold, which you also can't use to pay for groceries. A better example is if you were to physically mail bars of gold vs digitally sending Bitcoin.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#680

Post by dmnd »

rwoerz wrote: post #624
_0w8t wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Miners get compensated by transaction fees too.
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