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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#771

Post by volgar1x »

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…

Deutsche Marks do not exist anymore.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#772

Post by willmadden »

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 4 transactions per second is an artificial cap that is not associated with the power consumption of Bitcoin. The answer was, and is, to increase the maximum block size parameter, preferably making it dynamic.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#773

Post by nevi-me »

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…

> 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.

Aren't we losing the assumed federation in this system? A country whose banking system is under strain (Nigeria) or has collapsed (Zimbabwe) will have a bad-faith government acting to constrain the free-flow of money (because they want a transaction-fee cut).

Wouldn't that still lead to me wanting to go buy my groceries with BTC? Do we create a localised version/model where people can transact with each other without touching the blockchain (because of the low throughput), or how do we address this use-case; as it seems to be the most attractive one?

Has the energy requirement peaked, or is it still going to increase? Linearly or not?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#774

Post by Symbiote »

tippytippytango wrote: post #755
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?

> Who are we to tell them how to use the energy they purchase?

Personally, I also criticize people who use private jets, drive large cars, air-condition/heat a building excessively, and so on.

Since I end up breathing the pollution they cause (and all the other effects), I feel I have a right to complain about it.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#775

Post by Green_man »

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…

I'm not very well informed on the modern banking system, but I remember hearing an anecdote about banks flying people with bags of checks on airplanes to handle exchanges (before the system was updated in the 70s iirc). In your example of transferring a billion dollars in cash 3000 miles, couldn't that transfer be done using the banking system for much cheaper than the armored car and guards? Is the metaphor valid only for transactions that don't want to trust some third party? Is there some reason why moving a billion dollars cash is something that anyone other than the CIA would want to do? I'm also curious about your claim:

> 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.

Is this really true? I mean, what do large international exchanges use now? A majority of them certainly don't currently use bitcoin. Many large banks have a significant international presence, and most parties interested in exchanging can find a bank they both trust.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#776

Post by ericb »

xorcist wrote: post #725
dsco wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So far no one has shown in practice how to run a decentralized proof of stake network. How do you bootstrap a node in the face of conflicting history? How do you handle network partitions? There are also open question surrounding security, prevent actors from colluding and so on. Most other blockchains do not even bother. At least the Ethereum people have the ambition to have something practical. Let's study the desi…

Tezos is up and running and working just fine.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#777

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

What percentage of transactions are 1 billion dollars? I'm pretty sure VISA has never had anything over $10M.

This is excessively hypothetical.

The more obvious benefit is that a Tesla can't drive 3000 miles in 15 minutes. But a VISA transaction is faster and uses 1/100,000th the electricity. And neither are "anonymous".

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#778

Post by mrb »

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…

«a single Bitcoin transaction consumes 165kWh»

This needs to be repeated in every HN thread about Bitcoin: no, transactions don't consume energy. The proof-of-work is completely independent of the number of transactions. A block could have 1 or 1000 transactions, but the energy consumption would be the same.

People have this wrong idea that more transactions imply more energy consumption. That's just not true.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#779

Post by DanielleMolloy »

xorcist wrote: post #725
dsco wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So far no one has shown in practice how to run a decentralized proof of stake network. How do you bootstrap a node in the face of conflicting history? How do you handle network partitions? There are also open question surrounding security, prevent actors from colluding and so on. Most other blockchains do not even bother. At least the Ethereum people have the ambition to have something practical. Let's study the desi…

It is quite noteworthy that Ethereum trusts proof of stake so much that they want to move to it though. Ethereum has some really good devs.

Last time I checked for altcoins that are trying to solve Bitcoin‘s various scalability problems I ended up with a proof of stake coin too, Nano (using the rather new idea block lattice, small but so far quite low-toned development team that seemed to focus on problem solving rather than scammy marketing).

I’m surprised that Ethereum is convinced that they can „just move“ from proof of work to proof of stake. Should be possible for Bitcoin too then, shouldn’t it? (Maybe I’m missing something about this transition.) Nano required a whole new development.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#780

Post by nostrademons »

volgar1x wrote: post #771
nostrademons wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Deutsche Marks do not exist anymore.

Many of the same people who buy the Bitcoin-as-global-reserve-currency scenario also believe the Euro is going to collapse. It has known problems as a monetary union without a fiscal union, which lead to periodic bailout crises.

Here "deutsche mark" (and lira, which is another dead currency) are stand-ins for whatever national currency emerges after a Euro collapse. It may not be called that, but the point is that there will be some German national currency that settles up into Bitcoin in the international markets.

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