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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

#101

Post by thecrash »

cesarb wrote: post #95
hombre_fatal wrote: post #85

The 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).…

Power is the input for a machine that performs calculations which can be used to get money. On a factory farm, power is the input for a machine that raises animals, which can be exchanged to money.

If your animal-raising machine is profitable, you absolutely want to put as much power into it as possible - raising more animals means more profit. Both machines can be optimized, but that just allows more production for the same energy use. There's no incentive to reduce energy consumption unless some other factor bounds the machine's capacity (for example lack of materials, hardware, labor)

Capitalism in general is a machine for consuming natural resources and converting them to profit as quickly as possible.

Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

#102

Post by stunt »

bluesign wrote: post #58
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #17

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/

In other perspective, how average US household can use 867 kWh in a month is unbelievable, where let's say Germany is around 300 kWh.

To be fair the average "new" house is the US is almost twice as big as the average new house in the Germany.

Also there is a link between weather and energy usage. An average household in Louisiana or California uses way more electricity than New York's average.

Germany ranks very high in terms of renewable energy ratio and I think that's more remarkable.

Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

#103

Post by cosmotic »

panarky wrote: post #96
cosmotic wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you referring to the low interest rate? I suspect that depends largely on which bank/currency you're referring to. Bitcoin sure doesn't fair very well, except if you invest at the right time. The bank is a known quantity.

Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

#104

Post by riprowan »

rspeele wrote: post #94
ddtaylor wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

Block space is always a little bit of a bidding war, even with zero fees. That's because each additional byte added to a block increases the time it takes to propagate the block by just a little bit.

When miners find a block, they race to get it published as quickly as possible to as many nodes as possible. If A finds a block, and stuffs it full of transactions; and shortly thereafter B finds a block, and includes no transactions, B might actually "win" the race because B can propagate his tiny block much faster than A. So each txn added incurs a tiny penalty just by virtue of adding to the payload.

> they decide which fork to run

In reality most hashpower is pooled and pools autoswitch between forks depending on which is more popular in the moment. So most people running miners are mining all forks.

Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

#105

Post by yunvme »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #17

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/

This is a dumb comparison. Bitcoin's energy consumption is necessary to secure a decentralized digital store of value. There is no alternative. It is electricity well spent.

Accordingly, you're using the wrong framework. Bitcoin's energy consumption prevents double spending, which is necessary for securing such a system. It isn't energy used to compute a transaction.

Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

#106

Post by yunvme »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #26
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #17

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.

To put it in perspective, ~$1,000,000,000,000 USD is being secured by a decentralized system by using that much electricity. How much electricity/oil/other power is used by the US military to ensure the US government stays in power and the US currency retains its value? Surely orders of magnitude more energy than what is used for Bitcoin.

The number of transactions that are completed on the base layer is not the relevant metric. As the technology matures and as Bitcoin is more fully monetized, transactions will happen on higher layers. The "high" energy cost is necessary to secure the decentralized system.

Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

#107

Post by _y5hn »

yunvme wrote: post #105
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #17

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/

This is a dumb comparison. Bitcoin's energy consumption is necessary to secure a decentralized digital store of value. There is no alternative. It is electricity well spent. Accordingly, you're using the wrong framework. Bitcoin's energy consumption prevents double spending, which is necessary for securing such a system. It isn't energy used to compute a transaction.

It's also a race to the bottom of maximizing spending/"security".

Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

#108

Post by CryptoPunk »

Bitcoin's reward per transaction and fee per transaction would be orders of magnitude smaller if it followed the community and Satoshi's original plan and allowed for blocks to grow to meet market demand.

Previous discussion on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26374566

Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

#109

Post by CryptoPunk »

obilgic wrote: post #3

How about all the people work for Visa etc and their commutes and all the other things that come with it. If you think about it Bitcoin is completely autonomous

I don't agree that PoW's massive energy consumption is excused by your argument, but it is true that for every employee an enterprise has to employ to provide its goods/services, there's massive associated energy consumption.

I remember reading that the extra food that a cyclist consumes, and the energy required to grow and transport it, far exceeds the energy that is used by a bus per passenger.

Humans are high maintenance machines, and cryptocurrency, in automating previously manual processes done by humans, could potentially result in major energy savings. But not in Bitcoin's iteration, where it's consuming as much energy as whole countries, to process only 300,000 transactions a day.

Re: Bitcoin network average energy consumption per transaction compared to VISA

#110

Post by panarky »

cosmotic wrote: post #103
panarky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you referring to the low interest rate? I suspect that depends largely on which bank/currency you're referring to. Bitcoin sure doesn't fair very well, except if you invest at the right time. The bank is a known quantity.

> Bitcoin sure doesn't fair (sic) very well, except if you invest at the right time

Historically, you could have bought 99.8% of the days Bitcoin existed and you would be up today.

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