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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#861

Post by roenxi »

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.

If the Saudis started selling oil in bitcoin they'd probably lose their military support and/or be overthrown.

It is difficult to justify why the US is providing militarily support to the Saudis without invoking oil and dollars. They are a pretty shady regime and not the sort of people the US wants to be supporting. And the Saudis don't seem to be trading with America as much as China [0, 1].

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/saudi-arabia/exports-by-country

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/saudi-arabia/imports-by-country

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#862

Post by rspeele »

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…

Bitcoin fans when you complain that transactions are expensive, slow, and always irreversible:

"Bitcoin isn't a replacement for Visa or for your checking account. It's a store of value. It's not for day-to-day purchases."

Bitcoin fans when you complain that Bitcoin is massively wasteful:

"If you compare it to every cost that can be attributed to the existing financial system as a whole, including military spending, it's cheap."

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#864

Post by Geee »

benlivengood wrote: post #836
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.

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

It's credit that is backed by the US dollar. Similarly Visa could use Bitcoin as their base currency, and they probably will.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#865

Post by heterodoxxed »

AnonsLadder wrote: post #373
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…

You're looking at it from a totally wrong perspective. The U.S. government can print as much dollars as they want, whereas BTC cannot. The government does not care about green energy unless they can profit from it. To say that you did not buy BTC because of "wasting energy" is a very odd way to cope. You guys are so hung up on energy consumption, a meme, that you're forgetting the real intrinsic value of Bitcoin.

> The U.S. government can print as much dollars as they want, whereas BTC cannot.

In a macroeconomic sense, this is a strength of the dollar and a weakness of Bitcoin.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#866

Post by Gibbon1 »

mdoms wrote: post #713
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…

On the other hand Visa actually works for its intended purpose.

And Bitcoin is a paper asset backed by absolutely nothing.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#867

Post by lawn »

jiriknesl wrote: post #274
jqpabc123 wrote: post #55

Bitcoin is Crypto 1.0. There are better ways to do this. But people remain infatuated with Bitcoin.

It is crypto 1.0. And it can be overtaken. The problem is (and I have been involved - most often unsuccessfully) that building anything in this ecosystem requires a lot of understanding of digital signatures, distributed system, economics, game theory, security & quality, trustless ecosystems, incentives, possibilities of players with big budgets (PoS - 51% bought by some government)/great developers (bots frontrunni…

Bitcoin only delivers 100% of its promises because the promises have changed.

At first it was supposed to be peer-to-peer digital electronic cash. It was meant to both be money and a payment system to replace PayPal and the like.

Now it's been reduced to just a store-of-value, and not even that, it's a speculation that the volatility will stabilize and that it will be a store-of-value in the future.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#868

Post by splintercell »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #866
mdoms wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand Visa actually works for its intended purpose.

And Bitcoin is a paper asset backed by absolutely nothing.

Bitcoin is a global settlement layer. it is not a representation of something else, it's the final product on its own.

You're not going to say that in a prison system cigarettes are not backed by anything for them to be used as a currency.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#869

Post by Nition »

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…

This is like arguing that station wagons full of tape drives could one day replace the Internet.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#870

Post by jude- »

There's lots of misdirected anger these last few days towards Bitcoin.

First, the only thing that's energy-intensive about Bitcoin is block production. Making transactions, relaying them, validating them and storing them have negligible energy cost.

Second, nothing about the Bitcoin protocol requires block production to use fossil fuels. Just like with every other energy-intensive industry, the problem isn't the industry. The problem is the fossil fuel use.

Therefore, if you want to get mad about the high energy use of block production leading to environmental pollution, you should direct that anger at the appropriate target: miners who use fossil fuels to mine.

How do we fix this? The same way we fixed it in every other energy-intensive industry: through taxes and regulation. Let's get some laws passed to require miners in your area to use only renewable energy, and to require exchanges to impose a carbon tax on coins whose miners rely on fossil fuels to mine. Properly applied, these laws would make fossil-fuel mining unprofitable, which is exactly what we want.

Bitcoin and PoW aren't going anywhere at this point. So let's make sure it's continued existence doesn't make the world worse. Sound good?

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