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Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
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Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
#92Bitcoin's primary use case isn't the same as Visa's. Visa is good at processing many small transactions. Bitcoin is good at storing value over time, across borders, without censorship. Since Bitcoin is useful without many transactions, it's deceptive to measure its energy usage per transaction. It would be equally useless to cite Visa's 10-year stored value percentage gain vs. gold, because preserving value over time…
A bank is good at storing value over time. I'd argue that bitcoin is not, considering all the lost wallets and wild swings in value.
From my limited vantage point, BitCoin's actual use cases are underground/gray markets and speculation.
Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
#93Not sure why Visa is a relevant comparison. I can setup a dozen nodes on AWS and build a crypto with a million times the transaction capacity of Bitcoin. Obviously the downside to this is centralization; someone can be banned or censoredfor any reason. Blockchains are first decentralized, permissionless, censorship resistant solutions.
But you dont need PoW for being decentralized, permission less and censorship resistant. See https://xrpl.org/carbon-calculator.html instead and ignore visa/mastercard PoW is still the worst even worse than than paper money.
Not sure these models are accurate as they don't provide citation.
They seem to equate kwh to some co2 emissions value and just multiplies them to create a comparative value.
Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the correct block size for a PoW cryptocurrency?
That's almost like asking "what is the correct number of sushi restaurants for a city?" The answer is a function of the marketplace. 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 h…
But wouldn't we always want block space to be at least a little bit of a bidding war? After all anything I add to the blockchain is stored permanently and massively georeplicated.
Miners don't have to store the full chain, end users don't need to store the full chain, but somebody has to store it. Seems like those people, the people running full nodes, should have the final say on how big the blocks are and therefore what the throughput of the network is. I guess in reality, they do, since they decide which fork to run. Right?
Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
#95The judgemental overtone of these comparisons never makes sense to me. We supposedly draw the line on how others spend their energy when it comes to bitcoin and nowhere else. Animal agriculture is a great place to look when it comes to senseless energy expenditure just to produce products that please our taste buds, if this were something we actually cared about, but we don't. 800-1200kWh are consumed to prop up a si…
> We supposedly draw the line on how others spend their energy when it comes to bitcoin and nowhere else.
Nowhere else has an incentive to use as much power as possible. With your example of animal agriculture, the incentives align towards a lower energy expenditure (if a farmer spends more on energy, either the profit is lower, or the extra cost is passed to the customer, who then has an incentive to consume less). With Bitcoin, the incentive aligns towards a higher energy expenditure (for a given Bitcoin price and amount of transaction fees, a miner which uses more energy gets a higher portion of the block rewards and transaction fees, so the collective energy usage of all miners converges towards using all of the block rewards and transaction fees to pay for energy).
Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
#96Bitcoin's primary use case isn't the same as Visa's. Visa is good at processing many small transactions. Bitcoin is good at storing value over time, across borders, without censorship. Since Bitcoin is useful without many transactions, it's deceptive to measure its energy usage per transaction. It would be equally useless to cite Visa's 10-year stored value percentage gain vs. gold, because preserving value over time…
A bank is good at storing value over time. I'd argue that bitcoin is not, considering all the lost wallets and wild swings in value. From my limited vantage point, BitCoin's actual use cases are underground/gray markets and speculation.
Banks are not good at storing value over time, that's why institutions and high net worth individuals are searching for alternatives.
Banks store government money which depreciates gradually in good years, and devalues rapidly in bad years. It's all one direction, toward zero, it never gains value.
On top of the relentless depreciation, add the risk of bank insolvency.
Banks are terrible stores of value.
Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you dont need PoW for being decentralized, permission less and censorship resistant. See https://xrpl.org/carbon-calculator.html instead and ignore visa/mastercard PoW is still the worst even worse than than paper money.
Not sure these models are accurate as they don't provide citation. They seem to equate kwh to some co2 emissions value and just multiplies them to create a comparative value.
The paper is linked on the page > https://xrpl.org/assets/pdf/xrpl-sustainability-methodology-...
The conversation is just multiplied yes.
Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's almost like asking "what is the correct number of sushi restaurants for a city?" The answer is a function of the marketplace. 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 h…
But wouldn't we always want block space to be at least a little bit of a bidding war? After all anything I add to the blockchain is stored permanently and massively georeplicated. Miners don't have to store the full chain, end users don't need to store the full chain, but somebody has to store it. Seems like those people, the people running full nodes, should have the final say on how big the blocks are and therefore…
> But wouldn't we always want block space to be at least a little bit of a bidding war
Once we get to the point where everyone can do 10 TXs per day without a bidding war, then maybe. But also consider that we can currently store every single bit of communication in the 1980's on a chip about the size of my finger. History seems to tell us that what we think is a large amount of data becomes commonplace in a few decades.
Probably another way to look at it is that people regularly open their mobile phone or browser and view a few minutes of video and transfer 300MB - 1GB of data to do so. During that same time the transactions of the entire world economy could have been transferred.
Well they also decide what to put in the blocks they mine. Nobody forces anyone to put something in a block. And, yes, they also can decide which fork to run.
Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intuitively, it seems to me that the 741 kWh number for a single transaction cannot be a marginal number (i.e., the cost of the transaction itself without factoring in overhead). That's just way too high - it would be around $100 in electricity per transaction. The difference is important because as Bitcoin adoption increases the number of transactions will increase and the cost-per-transaction will fall dramatically…
> The difference is important because as Bitcoin adoption increases the number of transactions will increase No, the maximum number of transactions per block is fixed (actually, the maximum size of a block is fixed, but there's a limit to how small each transaction can be). > and the cost-per-transaction will fall dramatically. No, because of the limit on the number of transactions, the cost per transaction will incr…
> No, the maximum number of transactions per block is fixed (actually, the maximum size of a block is fixed, but there's a limit to how small each transaction can be).
This has nothing to do with whether the number of transactions will increase.
>No, because of the limit on the number of transactions, the cost per transaction will increase (users have to pay a higher per-transaction fee to increase the chance of it being included in a block, and miners are incentivized to use the extra income from transaction fees to buy more power).
My point was that they seem to be counting overhead beyond the marginal transaction cost, and if they are, then the number they report will fall as the transactions increase. You seem to be talking about how the marginal cost per transaction will increase.
Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intuitively, it seems to me that the 741 kWh number for a single transaction cannot be a marginal number (i.e., the cost of the transaction itself without factoring in overhead). That's just way too high - it would be around $100 in electricity per transaction. The difference is important because as Bitcoin adoption increases the number of transactions will increase and the cost-per-transaction will fall dramatically…
No, that number sounds like a marginal number to me. Someone else commented that miners pay an average of like 4 cents per kWh, which works out to about $30 of electricity costs to miners per transaction. Recent per-transaction miner fees are currently in the $10-20 range, but don't forget the winning miner gets a reward that's currently ~$330,475 per block.
That's terrifying if true. 741 kWh per transaction seems absurd.