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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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951–960 of 1001 posts

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#951
post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The greed is the chairs of central banks and the policymakers who are debasing other monies (some people benefit more than others from this). If they weren't debasing other people's hard earned value, there would be no need for bitcoin. But since they are, and are doing it at an increasing pace, the demand for bitcoin is inevitable.

You'll have to explain to me how replacing inflationary currencies with a deflationary one makes any sense in that context. Inflationary currencies punish those hoarding money, deflationary currencies reward them. The idea that bitcoin is good for the less fortunate and bad for rich people is pure propaganda and not based on reality. It's going to make a bunch of early adopters very rich, and that's about it.

Bitcoin will benefit anyone who wants to save (create capital). It will not be kind on those who merely want to consume. It's low time preference vs high time preference.

Not all rich people have low time preferences. Particularly those who are involved in the fiat system and who benefit from the expansion of debt. They think in quarters.

And not all poor people have high time preferences, but under fiat, saving money is highly discouraged because it loses purchasing power. People are encouraged to spend or invest in stonks - where the markets are rigged to benefit the big players.

Everyone benefits in a society where capital is accumulated, rather than debt.

As for "rich versus poor," this is a distraction because their is nothing you can do about it besides resorting to theft, which makes the problem worse.

The problem has always been "thieves versus hard workers." The current system is one where central banks and those close to them are stealing the time that other people have put into labour by deliberately devaluing their money.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#952

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…

> Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve

do you have a good link that explains how this all works and how these different components interact?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#953
post #728

The sudden barrage of anti-bitcoin news looks slightly suspicious.

Check my account history. You'll see I'm very critical of proof of work schemes and you'll find that it goes back to 2012. You'll probably also find me being enthusiastic about Bitcoin until ~2015 when it became clear what it really is. That more and more people are realizing this, especially as the problem gets bigger and bigger, is only hopeful to me.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#955

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason the Euro does not need all that "grossly oversized military" to be a proper, stable and usable currency. That alone kind of contradicts the entire grossly overstretched argument of this Nic Carter guy.

While I am also skeptical of the parent comment's quotes. The Euro is still backed by a centralized state(s) which does indeed have a monopoly on violence and require huge amounts of resources to maintain legitimacy. Crypto currencies demonstrably do not need these kind of resources. The rest of what people preach about crypto might be Bullshit, in a strict sense, but they are right about the anarchism thing.

All states by definition requires a monopoly on violence and resources to retain legitimacy. The currency is just a freeloader, and the consumption of resources to sustain a cryptocurrency is purely strictly additive.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#957
post #956

Everyone sleeping on Cardano, but it's creeping. It PoS consensus protocol in action. Tokens and smart contracts coming to mainnet soon. Keep sleeping and balking at PoW. Stellar and Cardano will reshape the future of fintech transactions.

Bitcoin holders don't actually care about proof of work or proof of stake, or even any of the technical details.

They only care that their investment goes up in value. That only happens if new entrants to the crypto ecosystem choose Bitcoin over alternatives.

Cryptocurrencies are like MLMs for nerds. The earlier you get in at the ground floor, the more valuable your position. You can help the price go up by convincing your friends to invest, who will convince their friends to invest, and so on.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#958

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…

Nic Carter's point is intentionally obtuse and belies his conflicted interests. The reality is that if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa (let alone the entire world economy) [edit or rather worded differently if each Visa transaction consumed as much power as a Bitcoin transaction], it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces…

That's not how Bitcoin scales. The amount of transactions doesn't matter. Bitcoin can have a limited number of on-chain settlement transactions and unlimited number of off-chain payment transactions (Lightning, Paypal, Visa, etc.) and it doesn't consume a single bit of more energy. Energy consumption is proportional to its value and the current block reward.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#959
post #778

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.

> A block could have 1 or 1000 transactions, but the energy consumption would be the same.

The calculations are based on the maximum throughput of the Bitcoin protocol, which is a fixed value due to the 10-minute block time and the limited block size.

The average number of transactions per block is always around 2K: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-per-block

> The proof-of-work is completely independent of the number of transactions.

Right, which makes this whole thing even more ridiculous. If number of transactions went to zero we'd still have to burn 120+ TWh per year just to keep the system going.

The 165kWh per transaction calculation is the best case scenario assuming every block is filled to the maximum with transactions.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#960
post #958

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nic Carter's point is intentionally obtuse and belies his conflicted interests. The reality is that if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa (let alone the entire world economy) [edit or rather worded differently if each Visa transaction consumed as much power as a Bitcoin transaction], it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces…

That's not how Bitcoin scales. The amount of transactions doesn't matter. Bitcoin can have a limited number of on-chain settlement transactions and unlimited number of off-chain payment transactions (Lightning, Paypal, Visa, etc.) and it doesn't consume a single bit of more energy. Energy consumption is proportional to its value and the current block reward.

That's not what I am arguing as it's not what Nic is arguing.

Nic doesn't say that Bitcoin consumes less power than you think on a per-transaction basis. He says that Visa consumes way, way more if you price in nebulous externalities.

I am rejecting his thesis by saying that if Visa used as much power per transaction as Bitcoin we'd need to generate 3X as much power as we currently do.

The quote is: "Any energy comparison must take the above into account – including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar."

I'm taking it into account. And I'm saying he's wrong.

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