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So another story about Bitcoin‘s energy consumption. Sigh. What we should really be interested in is its actual carbon foot print. You can’t just translate energy usage into CO2 emissions. These are a function of geolocation and energy efficiency of the underlying hardware. It’s actually pretty tricky to calculate that. If anybody's interested, here is a careful analysis of Bitcoin's carbon foot print (2019): https:/…
It’s not really directly related. Miners load hash rate to get a better chance at the next block, the transactions just go along for the ride. This would be true regardless of how much hash power is cumulative.
I mean, I know people are commenting on whether the comparison is valid, but regardless, the BTC energy cost at at 741 kWh for a single transaction is pretty close to the average monthly household energy usage in the US of 867 kWh [1]. That seems pretty nuts on its face to me. [1] https://electricityplans.com/kwh-kilowatt-hour-can-power/
To put it in perspective, a single bitcoin transaction can power the average american's household electricity needs for... an entire month.
https://jamie-dyer.medium.com/why-i-hate-bitcoin-38fad90b37e...
The link doesn't state whether it's counting only the energy costs incurred by VISA, or if it includes the energy costs of making a transaction on the SWIFT payment network that VISA, Mastercard, banks, and other institutions run on top of. Obviously to do a fair comparison you have to take SWIFT into account, otherwise you're not capturing the true energy cost of making a VISA payment. https://www.investopedia.com/a…
If the chart were anywhere close to 1:1 I could understand wanting to nitpick little details, but in this case go ahead and double/triple/quadruple the estimate, and it's still shocking.
It's worth mentioning that this kind of comparison is strange. Bitcoin mining does not get more difficult or change in any way with the number of transactions you mine. Mining always occurs on a single 80-byte header, and the entire transaction portion of that is a Merkle hash tree. The point here is that if Bitcoin would actually finally increase the block size of their chain (like Bitcoin Cash and others have done)…
What is the correct block size for a PoW cryptocurrency?
In the case of cryptocurrencies, the answer is likely a combination of what miners and users can support. The goal is to be large enough that we don't have throughput problems and block space doesn't become a bidding war.
It's also worth mentioning that this doesn't mean the end-users have to be able to run nodes themselves or on mobile phones, since that makes use of a process called Simple Payment Verification (SPV) where they only process block headers and get the blocks they are interested in, but still verify the consensus of the network.
But, it also depends on what you see cryptocurrencies as. If you want them to replace traditional cash and create a "digital cash" world, then you want to see them accepted and used anywhere at a very large scale. In that world-view you have millions of transactions regularly and miners get paid with the sum of lots of small fees.
However, if you think that cryptocurrencies should only be used as a speculative asset or as a "digital gold" then you don't care much about it actually being transacted, and in that case fees as high as $50/tx are fine because you don't have any expectation that the world will be using it at scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To put it in perspective, a single bitcoin transaction can power the average american's household electricity needs for... an entire month.
What is that in money, 50 bucks? (Live in Germany, we have very high energy prices, so I relly don't know. Single in 50sqm Appartment, paying 47euros per month for a 100% renewable plan.)
So roughly somewhere between $70-$150.