Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index • Hacker News Board

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#851

Post by kqr » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

optimiz3 wrote: post #589

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.

Hypothetically this could be amortized better by increasing the transactions per block. Just because Bitcoin was first doesn't mean it's the best wrt efficiency. PoW can be competitive with legacy infrastructure with good clearing design.

I think Donatella Meadows made it quite clear a while back that fiddling with constants and coefficients doesn't really have an Effect with capital E.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#852

Post by perfunctory » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #813

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…

While I largely agree, the existence of volatile instruments (in the abstract) is a Good Thing in that it offers the possibility of rapid gains for people who are willing to accept risk but only have a small pile of capital, sort of like a poker game with no minimum stake (unless you want to treat the transaction fees as such). Where else can you take those sort of risks? Stock fads like $GME are notable for their ra…

> are notable for their rarity

If you consider that there are gazillion crypto currencies, bitcoin is a rarity among them. How is it different from stocks?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#853

Post by jostmey » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

Bitcoin's value is derived by the fact that an enormous amount of calculations (and therefore energy) are required to fake a transaction. But smart investors know that just because something is hard does not make something a worthwhile endeavor. We should always go after low-hanging fruit first, and cryptocurrency is not that. I gave up on Bitcoin almost 8 years ago and I haven't regretted it. It is not going to fix the world's financial problems and its going to further wreck the planet. As a father, I don't want any further part of it.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#854

Post by oblio » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

dieortin wrote: post #322

doctorwho42 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in your boat, when it was first explained to me in a hacker space at college when it was first growing and priced at a few cents per 100++ Bitcoin. All I could see was a waste of energy and resources (time, energy, hardware). It will always be a drain on society, and it scares me that it hasn't failed because we see it draining our GPU industry to the point that market prices have gone insane and availability is…

It’s not draining the GPU industry. No one buys GPUs for mining Bitcoin anymore, they use ASICs.

They're mining it with malware on CPUs, don't underestimate human stupidity when faced with large numbers of people...

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#855

Post by jude- » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:12 PM UTC

minsc__and__boo wrote: post #823

jude- wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The parent was talking about the cost per transaction being high. In reality, that number is basically 0.

The entire cost of Bitcoin mining is in block production, no matter how many or few transactions there are. If you're going to get mad about the energy use, at least direct it towards the right target.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#856

Post by ctz » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

There's a block limit, though, right? It doesn't scale up infinitely -- you might have 1000 transactions in a block, but not a million. Therefore, it is accurate to attribute the energy per block to securing the transactions within.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#857

Post by mateuszf » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

perfunctory wrote: post #845

Geee wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn't you eventually need military power to protect your bitcoin mining rig?

No if it's decentralized enough.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#858

Post by Animats » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #677

janoside wrote: post #612

Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global…

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.

It's not as if America would suddenly stop providing military support to Saudi Arabia if we suddenly switched to bitcoin.

No, but now that the US is a net petroleum exporter, puling the plug on the whole Middle East is a real possibility.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#859

Post by jayd16 » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

janoside wrote: post #612

Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global…

Ask yourself which of those things would go away if BTC replaced Visa. Only then should it count towards the cost.

Somehow I doubt BTC would lower military spending.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#860

Post by imtringued » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

andreygrehov wrote: post #658

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…

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…

>You are basically suggesting that we all should buy Teslas, right?

Here's how arguments work. You read a claim and disprove it by offering a counterexample. The weaker the counterexample, the weaker the disproven claim.

In the case of Bitcoin a weak counter example is to show that even a grossly inefficient method of money transfer has superior efficiency. A stronger counterexample based on Visa's less than 2Wh per transaction numbers absolutely destroys the claim that Bitcoin's efficiency is reasonable.

It's laughable that anyone would even defend Bitcoin instead of recognizing the inefficiency. It's laughable in the exact same way the Tesla suggestion is laughable, except Bitcoin is even worse.