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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

cbeci.org

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is not true, when you have billions of dollars at stake you need to be a lot more careful with the changes you're going to implement, otherwise, it would jeopardize the whole network. There are many upgrades that have and are happening, some examples: segwit, schnorr/taproot, lightning network, etc.

And the outcome has been exactly what in terms of TPS?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#822
post #762
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.

Mining for gold is even more inefficient. You've got dig earth several kilometers down, build massive infrastructure, use harmful chemicals to purify it, lose lives etc etc

That's falsely equating fixed and variable costs. A mined bitcoin is useless if the network isn't burning electricity, whereas mined gold is continually useful after mining.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#823
post #667

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…

Bitcoin transactions take negligible amounts of electricity to produce and validate. The fact that you can spin up a Bitcoin node on a Raspberry Pi is trivial proof of this. Block production, on the other hand, takes as much energy as the market will bear.

Bitcoin transactions are worthless unless put into blocks, and blocks have a cap for transactions.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#824

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…

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 on…

We've got plenty of mechanisms (SWIFT, ACH, wire transfers) that work pretty well for large electronic inter-bank transfers within the same monetary authority. The trouble is what happens when you want to trade between currencies.

Say that I want to buy a DJI drone, which is made in China. The workers who made the drone all get paid in yuan. I get paid in dollars. I want to spend my dollars on Amazon, receive a drone, and have those dollars automagically converted into yuan to pay DJI. Behind the scenes, Amazon takes my orders and my dollars, and has a contract with DJI to send them a certain number of yuan. Similarly, behind the scenes DJI is spending yuan to buy ads on Google.cn (hypothetically), which Google then wants to turn into dollars so it can pay my salary. Both Amazon and Google have relationships with banking institutions, so they say "I need to convert $X of dollars in CN¥0.15X of yuan".

The banks net out all the purchases made by Americans with the purchases made by Chinese, and then they need to trade on the currency exchange markets for any shortfall. On the national level, the shortfall is called the current account deficit, which has been persistently growing since 1991:

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/483/economics/why-us-curr...

That article lists a lot of hypotheses for why the current account deficit has been growing for the last 30 years, but the primary one relevant to this thread is the dollar's status as the world reserve currency. This means a few things:

1) Historically, since WW2, the U.S. has been the most economically stable nation in the world, and so holding U.S. government debt is the most stable place you can park any excess savings that you get from a current account surplus.

2) Because of this stability, a lot of trade in other currency markets is denominated in dollars. Rather than trade directly between Iranian rial and Chinese yuan, Iran takes the dollars they receive for oil, pays China for infrastructure improvements with them, and then China converts the dollars into yuan to pay their employees. (In practice it's a bit more complicated because since 2015 China has been doing their best to reduce their dollar holdings, so now China might pay Caterpillar or Bechtel to build a road in Zimbabwe, with a contract that lets China take over the road if Zimbabwe defaults on the loan that funds it.)

3) Oil is priced in dollars, meaning that most countries on earth need to buy excess dollars in order to afford a fundamental energy source.

The dollar's status as a reserve currency means that the U.S. can get away with certain things that would cause other countries to default. For example, take the recent $6T COVID stimulus. Who's paying for that? It's literally holders of U.S. treasuries: all the countries that have sold more to the U.S. than they've bought and parked the excess in treasury bond purchases. They're not exactly happy about that, but the U.S. controls the world supply of both dollars and of U.S. government debt, so if you own either of those, you are at the mercy of the U.S. government's decision to print more.

This is where the trustless aspect of Bitcoin comes in. You know that the supply of Bitcoin is fixed. If you settled up your current account deficit in Bitcoin instead of dollars, you know that you'll have an asset that you can trade back at a later date, and that the supply of that asset will not have increased (devaluing your own holdings). This makes it very appealing to other governments who are sick of bankrolling Americans' propensity to consume more than they produce. It's potentially bad for Americans (though the effect of this is complex: it might actually bring manufacturing back to the U.S at the expense of the financial industry, because a major reason U.S. manufacturing is non-competitive is because the dollar is overvalued, which is because the dollar is the world's reserve currency), but it's good for foreign countries with a trade surplus, and for holders of Bitcoin.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#825
post #567

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…

What about all those Lightning Network transactions on top of Bitcoin?

Lightning removes any of the benefits of Bitcoin by being a traditional trusted payment system.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#826

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.

I know why, and I said as much in my original post. Bitcoin is purely for speculation at this point. It’s a money making scheme. These people don’t care about energy usage or transaction fees as long as they are getting incredible returns on their investment.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#827

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…

Super pessimistic. I don't know why this comment is at the top. The analogy and calculations are fun, but nothing more than that. You are basically suggesting that we all should buy Teslas, right? 330 miles roundtrip is about 5-6 hours of non-stop driving. Not the best UX. I do international transfers quite often. Every time I try to send a more or less large amount, it becomes a pain in the ass both for sender and r…

In your estimation, how much Bitcoin is purchased in hopes of gaining freedom from the existing banking system, and how much Bitcoin is purchased in hopes of making money when it goes up?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#828

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…

I think the real value in Bitcoin is its immutability. I don't think there's any piece of information in the world as immutable as the first bitcoin block mined by satoshi.

This property is what powers amazing projects like OpenTimeStamps (https://opentimestamps.org/), this will become an essential tool for notaries all around the world, seriously!, and this has nothing to do with number of transactions, this scales to O(1) (you only need one transaction to prove as many things as there needs to be proved). Previous to bitcoin existence I don't think there was ever a distributed way of proving a piece of information existed previous to X, and even if there was, it was probably centralized or much much MUCH weaker than bitcoin. There's just no replacement, not even a million years as effective as bitcoin is for this, if I'm wrong please tell me! I want to know!

Most people here in favor of bitcoin argue about inflation, I understand the reasoning, and I'm from Venezuela, I pretty sure understand that value, but that's just missing the point, immutability >>> inflation protection.

And if we go into the smart-contracts terrain, that's a whole other world of very diverse possibilities of values to be uncovered

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#829

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 problem w Bitcoin as a global reserve currency is that it cannot be manipulated by the nation-state. Manipulation in this case is not a bad thing it is actually a safety feature for society against pure supply/demand dynamics. The prevailing wisdom is that having a fiat currency which value and velocity can be manipulated by, granted the Fed Reserve is a quasi govt agency, in times of emergency helps preserve the social order and smooth fluctuations. So Bitcoin has no value as a reserve currency unless it could be manipulated by the state, which it can’t, so it won’t.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It can't be made useful because the output of a useful calculation can't be known in advance - otherwise it wouldn't be useful.

I think Gridcoin offers a happy medium. It's proof of stake, but it also offers rewards for participating in BOINC-based research projects.

https://gridcoin.us/

Not exactly "proof of work" in the same sense its being used, but I wish that the project would get more attention.

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