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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#831

Post by ChainOfFools »

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.

proof of work is cleverly misnamed, because what's actually going on is proof of wasted work, or simply proof of waste. you are proving you threw a precise measure of something valuable away (money/resources/energy... whether your own or someone else's).

the behavioral econ assumption is that you will seek to recover that loss someday, thus requiring you to hold and protect the receipt token representing it until that time.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#832

Post by ashtonkem »

undefined1 wrote: post #749
ashtonkem wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a neat slight of hand trick you’ve pulled off there, connecting Bitcoin to entertainment in order to shame those of us concerned about Bitcoin energy usage. Everything else you’ve listed provides subjective value to the user, which makes them hard to attack. Who can say what the value of skiing is to a society in terms of kWh? There is no way to objectively compare the value of energy spent on a ski lift vs. d…

it does provide objective value. bitcoin is a store of value. digital gold. even if it never proves to be a viable currency, a secure digital store of value is objectively useful. especially if you're in a country experiencing institutional failure, risk of hyperinflation and so on.

> it does provide objective value. bitcoin is a store of value. digital gold.

The only reason I don't laugh at these arguments is because I'm utterly exhausted by hearing them. The value prop for bitcoin is, fundamentally, circular. It's valuable because it's money (like gold!), but when you point out how it's an objectively crap currency, it's suddenly a store of value. When you ask why it has value, it's because it's the currency of the future. Round and round it goes.

> even if it never proves to be a viable currency, a secure digital store of value is objectively useful.

I mean, you're just asserting that it stores value. But, why does it have value?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#833

Post by bromuro »

esotericn wrote: post #380
baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…

You can send me money across the globe without a middleman or anyone being able to block that transfer. That's it. If you don't want that, you don't want that. Some of us do.

It doesn’t seem a good deal consuming so much energy for fixing that “middleman problem” - which I think it could affect 1% of the people?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#834

Post by arithmomachist »

lxgr wrote: post #758
arithmomachist wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aren't there lots of NP problems that have this property?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#835

Post by bennybitcoin »

Hi HackerNews, I don't typically post but seeing as this involves what I do daily, thought my input might be warranted.

1)Bitcoin mining by nature is a competitive game, people have flocked to cheapest power sources (unused hydro, solar, etc.) where the power costs are super low as that is the only recurring production cost.

2)There are no batteries that are power plant sized..... other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin allows opportunities for unused power to generate instant profit for the producers.

3)Because Bitcoin prices are currently soaring, it has opened up the profitability to mining in many areas with reasonably cheap power as essentially the global hashrate density can not catch up to adoption fast enough. In the long term, more and more efficient equipment will be manufactured and as the hashrate grows exponentially past the pace of mainstream adoption, the power usage again will need to be next to nothing to be competitive as the cost to produce 1 Bitcoin becomes harder and harder with increased competition and lower block rewards. *Please understand that via Moore's law continuance this is inevitable that hashrate will explode past the correlation to BTC prices due to more efficient chip technology increasing exponentially, and block rewards decreasing*

4)In the future, Bitcoin will only be mined in places where electricity is nearly free as the rewards ($/TH) will be shrunk to next to nothing. That is the end goal. We are at an asymmetric point at the moment where the mining is behind adoption. But just as the internet took time to be adopted, so will Bitcoin. But adoption curves must always end, and at the terminal equilibrium the incentives to only use waste energy for mining will be restored.

5)We are witnessing the birth of something A-M-A-Z-I-N-G that will completely change how banking and finance work on this planet forever. Of course there will be some growing pains along the way, but the future envisioned by Bitcoin is one of digital freedom, empowerment, and privacy. At the end of the day, you can't fight this tidal wave, all you can try to do is steer the technology towards your desired outcome.

So it is written, so it shall be.

All Hail Satoshi

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#836

Post by benlivengood »

Geee wrote: post #760
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.

Visa is literally money created by issuing credit just like all the other money in the economy. No one spends specie.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#837

Post by paulsutter »

rspeele wrote: post #769
paulsutter wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin uses electricity for security, not transactions. The transaction rate for bitcoin is basically independent of the hashrate

This is like saying my car's engine uses oil as lubricant, not as fuel. It's true, but I still have to change the oil every 5,000 miles. So I can still calculate the cost of oil changes into each mile. Since transacting Bitcoin securely is the utility of the network, just as moving around is the utility of a car, it seems quite fair to judge the energy consumption of the network in terms of energy expended per transa…

It's quite different: the energy represents the market cost of securing the network. The value of the network supports that cost otherwise nobody would be performing mining.

If this were taxpayer supported I could understand the objection, but the people buying the energy to run the system are doing so as a commercial activity to make a profit. How is this commercial use of energy inherently worse than other commercial activities?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#838

Post by fthssht »

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.

The correct comparison is with the transaction and storage costs, in electricity, of storing gold in fort knox and moving it once a century in a boat across the ocean. Tesla's 1.5 billion USD in bitcoin probably won't move in your lifetime.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#839

Post by randomopining »

nostrademons wrote: post #768
Aunche wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Take a look at OPEC companies that have priced oil in other currencies: Iraq started pricing oil in euros in 1999: https://www.theglobalist.com/iraq-the-dollar-and-the-euro-5/ Iran started pricing oil in yuan in 2012: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-17988142 What's our geopolitical relationship with Iraq and Iran now?

So they changed their pricing currency and then we became enemies? Or we were enemies, and they changed their pricing currency because of that... lol

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#840

Post by j3th9n »

minsc__and__boo wrote: post #825
j3th9n wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lightning doesn't remove anything from Bitcoin, it only adds the option to make instant transactions as a second layer on top of it. If you want the benefits of Bitcoin, you can use the slower and 100% trustless Bitcoin network.
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