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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#791

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

Indeed it does, but generally in industry and technology one goes from inefficient prototype that serves as proof of concept to a more efficient one. Do other cryptocurrencies not improve on Bitcoin in some way? If so, why does it continue to have value despite its agreed-upon flaws? If not, why do they have any value?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#792

Post by drak0n1c »

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

Proof-of-stake distributed ledger technology is extremely efficient. Hedera Hashgraph uses a gossip protocol and has extremely high transaction-per-second support with finality. Already being used by major corporations.

https://hedera.com/

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#793

Post by rspeele »

totheloop wrote: post #686
Taek wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy that goes into a Bitcoin transaction doesn't just pay for the one transaction. It also pays for the security of all the value stored in the rest of the system, and that's actually where most of the revenue for mining comes from - inflation, not fees. But also, Bitcoin transactions aren't typically buying coffee from your local store. It's very often international, and Bitcoin transactions offer a finality…

You mean deflation, incidentally.

No, I do think he means inflation. He's talking about the block reward, the Bitcoin "minted" through mining, being larger than the fees. Currently it's 6.25 BTC minted per block and the fees only add up to between 1 and 2 BTC.

We don't really see this as inflation because of the value of Bitcoin going up, but it is a tiny tiny tax on all the people HODLING their coins, as it dilutes the value (again, by a miniscule amount).

In theory if BTC is still being used in 2150 or whenever the block reward goes to zero, all the cost of mining will be borne by those actually exchanging BTC, and the people just holding it will be free-riding, with the security of the network paid for entirely by people transacting on it. Not sure how well this will work.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#794

Post by tippytippytango »

brokencode wrote: post #782

Bitcoin is so fundamentally deficient that I am absolutely shocked by its continuing popularity. I’ve tried and tried to think of a legitimate purpose for it, but I’m confident that it doesn’t have one. It is just too slow and inefficient to be used as a currency, and I can’t understand why anybody would use something so volatile as a value storage mechanism similar to gold. Transactions provide extremely dubious pri…

Lots of people are paying for the energy the network uses right now and they thought it was worth it. You might have missed something in your thinking. Maybe go talk to some people that have used the network and ask why they though it was worth it to pay for all this energy.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#795

Post by flopunctro »

danans wrote: post #747
flopunctro wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the grand scheme, the "tons" (or rather, gigajoules) of energy wasted by the Proof-of-Work are nothing. The Sun radiation that hits Earth every second dwarfs this consumption. Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death e…

> Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death ever so slightly. The discussion about energy use of Bitcoin is within the context of the effectively closed system of Earth. Until such a time that solar generated electricity i…

> effectively closed system of Earth.

All the plants, algae, and everything with chlorophyll would beg to differ. I really think we cannot consider Earth a closed system, because we're not a rogue planet in the insterstellar void.

Our solar _system_ would be a better approximation of a "closed system".

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#796

Post by casi »

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.

You can participate in most(all i am aware of) PoS chains with any amount of underlying tokens, in the same way you can participate in a mining pool if you lack the hashrate to mine independently.

There will be independent PoS validators who can afford upfront costs, but there are independent miners too who purchase lots of hardware. In PoS the next block is randomly distributed, so those with better hardware dont outperform. So you can validate off a solar powered raspberry pi or nuc if you'd like and not underperform someone with a highend gpu, so the hardware cost is much lower, added to this in long run it will be cheaper to participate in staking than having to replace gpus/asics to mine with.

I don't see how this leads you to think it is unfair in comparison to mining? Upfront costs pretty similar, running costs cheaper, long term hardware replacement costs much less.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#797

Post by [deleted] »

mrb wrote: post #778
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.

[deleted]

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#798

Post by flopunctro »

rspeele wrote: post #789
flopunctro wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the grand scheme, the "tons" (or rather, gigajoules) of energy wasted by the Proof-of-Work are nothing. The Sun radiation that hits Earth every second dwarfs this consumption. Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death e…

Is that you, Gary Johnson?

No idea who's Gary Johnson. I'm just a guy from Eastern Europe, watching too much Isaac Arthur.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#800

Post by ketamine__ »

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 team that works on it isn't interested in making any upgrades. It's pure religion at this point.

They would argue that a chunk of the energy is renewable -- so that makes it better.

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