Has anyone estimated when it will not longer make economic sense to mine Bitcoin?
Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
201–210 of 499 posts
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heating your house with direct electricity is wasteful. You should get a heat pump. You will get your money back in no time. This changes the equation.
Seriously, I want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient
Maybe the UK? (their housing standards and heating solutions are some of the worst I've ever seen in the developed world)
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#203I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
> There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry. This is your first mistake: the traditional banking system does not have a security model predicated on the ability to waste power. Bitcoin does, and it’s dynamic so there’s no way to waste less power which isn’t explicitly ceding control. The second error is tr…
Just in case, there are solutions to scale transactions count outside "7 per second", where these "7 per second" transactions are used to settle a larger set of transactions happening on the layer 2.
Also, when talking about extra service payment networks like Visa offering, like anti fraud, gotta remember that at least part of problems this service solving is caused by the design of the network itself. And while it is not obviously energy hungry service, it is part of what everyone is paying 2-3% in credit card processing fees.
I would love to see a solid comparison of traditional banking total cost vs Bitcoin (if it would replace traditional fi), but it is certainly not as simple as the above, if even possible...
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#204Power usage by itself is meaningless. The real question is the power providing utility or not. Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad. They provide real benefit and utility. But, perhaps power wasted on cloth dryers and Christmas lights are a western frivolity. So, the real argument is Bitcoin useful or not. Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.
> Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad.
No, but lots of people think the amount of energy they consume is bad, and lots of people and spent on trying to reduce the amount of energy.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#205What happened with Ethereum's proof of stake? Have there been successful alternatives that eliminate the need for mining?
PoS instead of PoW is about 1000x more efficient, meaning that instead of being about 1,000,000,000x more wasteful than the work it effectively does it's only about 1,000,000x more wasteful.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market. The free market is often at odds with society at large, which is why we have regulations to protect society from the free market.
Except it's not a free market. Those same regulators also give tax breaks to large inefficient corporations and tell small businesses they must close down for arbitrary intangible public health reasons, while the large corporations can remain open. In both examples, it's the regulators whom are detrimental to society, not the free market. Virtually everyone that champions regulations are not for regulation, but for i…
The free market cant solve big societal issues we are staring down the barrel of. We need coordination at the highest levels of human civilization and not some handy wavey hope a million monkeys will reach the answer.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#207I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
You're brave to even remotely hint that you're in favor of crypto on HN! > Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist. Despite a few people specifically calling this sentence out as 'ridiculous' or whatever, I think this is a completely valid point. If 100% of the energy powering something comes from renewables, who gives a shit?
I don't even like it, I kind of wish it hadn't been invented, but rationality is vanishingly rare when it's discussed. And I am certain many will say the same of everything I post.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's like people can't understand it was engineered to be un-killable
On this scale? Easily detected and killed. Just check their power bill. It has gotten completely out of hand. What was intended to be run on personal computers has become a juggernaut of rampant egregious resource consumption.
Hey I'm the government man here to audit your power bill.
Please go over everything you spend your power on and the government will tell you whether you can continue to have power/internet.
Hey, why are you nervous? Oh looks like it was just a hot summer.
...oh what's this... sorry you don't have a heat pump, we will take your A/C, now spend 50k on a new heat pump one. Better get started it's going to be a hot one.
edit: do not downvote your government energy auditor, it will not help your opened case.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#209Due to the extremely competitive nature of Bitcoin mining, the miners must seek out the cheapest power on the market. By definition, cheap power has low demand, so the miners are not crowding out other "higher" uses of the power. In many cases, this power would be otherwise wasted. In some cases, miners are capturing vented or flared waste gasses from other processes (gas wells, landfills). Many miners have power pur…
> In many cases, this power would be otherwise wasted.
What do you mean, "otherwise"?
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#210I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
Given that renewable energy produced is not infinite, any waste of energy can be assumed to use coal since not wasting that energy would reduce the amount of coal power needed at any given moment.
Now, the above argument is only relevant if we can prove that Blockchain transactions actually are a waste of energy, and you seem to attempt to argue against that as well, by asking for a comparison with the traditional banking system.
I'm not sure that the traditional banking system add a whole uses less energy than Blockchain as a whole, but I AM sure that the traditional banking system handles several orders of magnitude more transactions than all Blockchains does combined, and absent any proof to the contrary, I'm assuming the traditional banking system is not using more than an order of magnitude more energy than Blockchain(since that would mean that traditional banks use around 23% of American energy, which is an absurd amount of energy)
As long as Blockchain uses more energy per transaction than traditional banking, it's a waste of energy, relatively speaking. And while I don't currently have any good sources to prove this point, I see very little reason to believe Blockchain isn't using at least 2 orders of magnitude more energy than traditional banking per transaction.