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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#881

Post by jostmey »

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…

So what? Almost all transactions are going to be significantly smaller than a billion people usd. You are just focusing on an edge case. Bitcoin is a horrible system for conducting the vast majority of transactions.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#882

Post by rodiger »

lottin wrote: post #371
tmoravec wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is a potentially revolutionary technology in a very early stage. The important new part, the consensus algorithm, is ground breaking. Now, the very first implementation (Bitcoin) kinda sucks, like most technologies in their first versions. But there are newer generations, each more interesting, and each unlocking more possibilities. We are for example getting: * No-autority enforcement of contracts (Ethereum)…

Do you have any idea about what 'finance' is? Shuffling money around is not finance.

Do you know what Aave is or any of the other decentralized finance protocols?

Also: "the management of large amounts of money, especially by governments or large companies" it literally is shuffling money around.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#883

Post by justicezyx »

rspeele wrote: post #862
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, i…

Please provide meaningful evidences for these claims?

I might be in a bubble, but it seems my intake of bitcoin information is balanced enough that most things are not this polarized.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#884

Post by rodiger »

ctz wrote: post #856
mrb wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« 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.

Also worth noting though that "extra" energy per-tx increases the security of that tx. You aren't just paying for the system to function, you're paying for the system to be resistant to bad actors.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#885

Post by sanderjd »

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…

My answer to this is that back in the early '10s I massively underestimated how successful it would be as a pyramid scheme that I could get in on early, but that I massively overestimated how useful it would be as a currency, despite having an extremely low estimation of that. So I guess you and I should have had better foresight to see how good it would be for unhinged speculation, but frankly I never really have any regrets about this: I'm fundamentally not a gambler or a speculator. (However I might not like it if my wife were to gain a full understanding of how much wealthier and easier our lives could be right now if that hadn't been the case.)

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#886

Post by amelius »

badjeans wrote: post #438
px43 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there. I'm one of those people who read Schneier's Applied Cryptography in highschool in the 90s, and immediately recognized the groundbreaking potential of using asymmetric cryptography for currency. I work in information security, and have seen first hand how our existing financial infrastructure is held together with string and scotch tape. For 10 years or so, every time I heard about some big credit card thef…

What a weird comment. There's tons of fraud within the bitcoin ecosystem, and it's also used in a lot of fraud too.

> What a weird comment

It's just another comment by someone who tries to fabricate a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#887

Post by mudlus »

There's no energy index for the US military industrial complex, the entire US police force--but the primacy of fiat is based on the ability of an authority (for most of the world an authoritarian regime) to protect property through violent cohersion or violent force.

Bitcoin changes that. How much energy is a non-violent property protection commons system worth to humanity?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#888

Post by Capira »

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…

This nails it!

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#889

Post by Sleepytime »

nevi-me wrote: post #773
nostrademons wrote: post #751

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…

> The institutional interest in Bitcoin I've seen lately seems to assume a thesis of dollar depreciation and Bitcoin usurping its role as the global reserve currency. Aren't we losing the assumed federation in this system? A country whose banking system is under strain (Nigeria) or has collapsed (Zimbabwe) will have a bad-faith government acting to constrain the free-flow of money (because they want a transaction-fee…

>Do we create a localised version/model where people can transact with each other without touching the blockchain

This is what the lightning network is for: scalable, instant, low-cost, and off-chain TXs. All transactions between the opening and closing of a payment channel are consolidated into two TXs. One to open it another to close it. This means energy cost per TX goes down pretty significantly with adoption.

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