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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#961

Post by PragmaticPulp »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #603
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…

You are leaving out significant amounts of energy consumed in the legacy financial system. Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag? Where’d that come from? Etc. I’m not sure that any of this is meaningful in any way.

> Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag?

It's 2021. Carrying around duffel bags of paper bills received from a human bank teller is not how anyone manages their cash or transactions.

Bitcoin is not the only way to digitally transact. It's not even a good way. In practice, it's just about the worst way to handle transactions unless you have no other options.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#962

Post by Permit »

Geee wrote: post #958
arcticbull wrote: post #913

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.

How many transactions/day is Lightning handling? I recall this same discussion in late 2017. Have they managed to successfully get people using it yet?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#963

Post by 3np »

dpweb wrote: post #829
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 problem w Bitcoin as a global reserve currency is that it cannot be manipulated by the nation-state. Manipulation in this case is not a bad thing it is actually a safety feature for society against pure supply/demand dynamics. The prevailing wisdom is that having a fiat currency which value and velocity can be manipulated by, granted the Fed Reserve is a quasi govt agency, in times of emergency helps preserve the…

The state can still manipulate their national currency (which Bitcoin likely won’t replace). Positive things with Bitcoin are that:

1. When the US dollar eventually loses its status as the global currency for settlement and reserves, no individual country needs to have the same perverse control that they US had as a consequence today.

2. Citizens have an exit ramp from the local currency. This means the state doesn’t have the same totalitarian control of the national economy, limiting the impact on citizens of demonetization and hyperinflation.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#964

Post by conanbatt »

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…

Also bitcoin fans say all that swimming in millions of dollars the vast amount of people could never get in a lifetime by simply owning bitcion.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#965

Post by r3ctilinear »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #959
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.

> 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 independe…

Incorrect. The proof of work difficulty scales automatically. If the miners/hash-power reduces then blocks become easier to mine.

The Bitcoin blockchain could subsist on a minuscule fraction of todays energy usage if the majority of miners decided to throw away their investments and stop mining.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#966

Post by 3np »

xur17 wrote: post #848
Taek wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy that goes into a Bitcoin transaction doesn't just pay for the one transaction. It also pays for the security of all the value stored in the rest of the system, and that's actually where most of the revenue for mining comes from - inflation, not fees. But also, Bitcoin transactions aren't typically buying coffee from your local store. It's very often international, and Bitcoin transactions offer a finality…

> The energy that goes into a Bitcoin transaction doesn't just pay for the one transaction. No energy "goes into a Bitcoin transaction". A block with 0 transactions and a block with 100 transactions will both take the same amount of energy to generate.

You just repeated why they said

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#967

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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.

The Saudis have chopped a guy to pieces and his the body at the embassy in a foreign country.

Imagine the headlines if Russia did that in US. Yet they are sill 'allies'

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#968

Post by ClumsyPilot »

The part that impressed me:

"The amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the USA alone could power Bitcoin for 1.8 years"

In other words idle devices in US could power all of Saudi and Netherlands. And all it would take to reduce that is some proper thoughfull design.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#969

Post by zie »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #777
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…

What percentage of transactions are 1 billion dollars? I'm pretty sure VISA has never had anything over $10M. This is excessively hypothetical. The more obvious benefit is that a Tesla can't drive 3000 miles in 15 minutes. But a VISA transaction is faster and uses 1/100,000th the electricity. And neither are "anonymous".

If you think BTC is anonymous you have a mistaken understanding of how permanently public blockchain transactions are.

A given transaction might be "anonymous" today(for some definition of anonymous), but chances are it won't be anonymous at some point in the future. This may or may not matter given your definition of anonymous, but to think your transaction will STAY anonymous forever is just asking for trouble.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#970

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 »

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 strikes me as a terrible argument. Yes, Visa is a small part of the whole system. It's also the only part that Bitcoin does anything to replace. Moving numbers from one column to another is trivial. If that were all the banking system needed to do we could run the whole world economy off my laptop with software I wrote in a month.

You can't do "non-final credit transactions" on Bitcoin.

You can't take out a mortgage.

You can't manage investments.

You can't pay for groceries without waiting a half an hour.

You can't buy a $1.25 pack of gum.

Bitcoin is complete and self-contained because it is inextensible and feature-poor. It cannot solve the problems the banking system solves. Its solution is the classic "you didn't need it anyway".

And then Bitcoin fans realize that yes, they did in fact need those things after all. We can watch them reinventing the entire modern banking system before our very eyes. The main differences are that they run everything on the world's worst database, they insist on calling their banks "exchanges", and that they think it's OK to have all their money stolen every so often.

(Bitcoin also lacks the ability to prevent money laundering or to enforce judgments. I'd consider that a bug. Other people might consider it a feature. In either case, it means Bitcoin is solving a much easier problem than normal banks.)

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