Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

cbeci.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 1001 posts

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#751

Post by nostrademons »

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…

Say you want to transfer a billion dollars 3000 miles. A billion dollars is 10 million Benjamins, which weighs 10 tons. You're not fitting that in a Tesla. More likely, you'll put it in an armored car and hire a few armed guards to go along with it. If you need to transport it overseas, you need a freighter (and a week) too. Now the energy cost of that Bitcoin transaction doesn't seem so bad.

The institutional interest in Bitcoin I've seen lately seems to assume a thesis of dollar depreciation and Bitcoin usurping its role as the global reserve currency. Ordinary people are not going to transact in Bitcoin under this thesis: they'll use dollars, pounds, deutchmarks, lira, yuan, etc. for their ordinary domestic transactions. Only banks, importers, and other major financial institutions need to convert the local currency into Bitcoin and settle up on the international markets, and these transactions will be in the tens-of-billions. Most of Bitcoin's drawbacks go away with this use-case - it doesn't matter that the network is limited to 4 TPS when only ~hundreds of transactions are conducted daily, and the energy use per transaction is similarly minimized. Bitcoin's advantages in trustlessness and lack of a central authority are hugely important in international relations, where nobody trusts anybody else and there's no higher authority to appeal to.

(Stellar's even better for this use-case, and has had a similar recent run-up, but currencies have strong network effects and it's unlikely that Stellar could get the name recognition or trust that Bitcoin has gotten.)

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#752

Post by bingbong70 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #643
rattlesnakedave wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many people go speak to a bank teller to transfer funds? My bank can give me a mortgage for my home. The banking system is doing way way way more than counting how much people own and shifting that around. If the concern is the cost of brick and mortar banks then we can solve that with technology much more effectively than btc.

The problem with "interventionistas" with little/no understanding of bitcoin is, they look at one feature/component of btc's game theory in isolation and state "I can do this particular thing cheaper/faster/easier" while ignoring the 100 other aligned incentive structures that are lost with their 2nd/3rd-order-effect altering solutions.

Bitcoin is too elegantly designed to approach in this fashion.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#753

Post by PragmaticPulp »

dsco wrote: post #710
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.

There’s also proof of stake which requires a lot less energy. I think a lot of nuance is missed when discussing Bitcoin and its consensus mechanism as the only way of running a blockchain

> I think a lot of nuance is missed when discussing Bitcoin and its consensus mechanism as the only way of running a blockchain

Bitcoin holders are financially incentivized to steer everyone else toward Bitcoin.

As long as early adopters are financially invested in alternative currencies failing, we’re going to continue seeing a focus on Bitcoin.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#754

Post by lxgr »

aeternum wrote: post #650
lmkg wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By computing more hashes, you raise the difficulty for everyone else mining so you do ultimately push out the less efficient miners.

The problem is that there is, by definition, economic incentive to spend an amount of electric energy equal to the economic value of transaction confirmation to all protocol participants.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#755

Post by tippytippytango »

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…

The people making the transactions pay for that energy. At 10 cents a kWh that's $16.5 , right in line with the current transaction price. Some people are getting enough value from the transaction to purchase that volume of energy. Who are we to tell them how to use the energy they purchase?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#756

Post by undefined1 »

wpietri wrote: post #82
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't and even BTC enthusiasts have given up on that. They narrative is now that BTC is a "store of value".

Exactly. Here's VC and prominent cryptocurrency enthusiast Fred Wilson saying exactly that: https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ While I agree with him that Bitcoin is a terrible currency, I think the "store of value" thing is nonsense as well. Stores of value need to have relatively stable value. Bitcoin is hugely volatile. That's great for speculation, but nobody with any sense would use it as…

it's volatile because it's still in price discovery mode.

also, volatility only matters if you sell it. if you're holding as a store of value, then you've done extremely well over the long term.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#758

Post by lxgr »

arithmomachist wrote: post #724
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.

At the very least the proof of work ought to compute something useful.

That would be great, but unfortunately the structure of problems that are well suited to proof of work (hard to compute but easy to verify in a decentralized way) doesn't seem to have too many practical applications.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#759

Post by perseusprime11 »

nostrademons wrote: post #751
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…

Say you want to transfer a billion dollars 3000 miles. A billion dollars is 10 million Benjamins, which weighs 10 tons. You're not fitting that in a Tesla. More likely, you'll put it in an armored car and hire a few armed guards to go along with it. If you need to transport it overseas, you need a freighter (and a week) too. Now the energy cost of that Bitcoin transaction doesn't seem so bad. The institutional intere…

Correct. Ultimately, we will end up using Bitcoin as an asset and less for transactions. It is a better version of Gold.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#760

Post by Geee »

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…

That comparison is flawed. Visa is not money. The purpose of mining is to protect the value of the currency.

Protecting the value of the US dollar requires a huge economy with politics and military power.

Post reply on HN