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Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

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Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#221

Post by FireBeyond »

pton_xd wrote: post #193
librish wrote: post #33

2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. This is the type of tragedy of the commons issue where regulation is needed. For any one actor they can justify spending infinity energy as long as their ROI is positive. There are enough justifications out there that it's easy to convince oneself that you're doing the world a favor ("I'm just librating finance and fighting the good fight against the central…

> 2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. It kind of is! But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation. As governments print increasingly more money, and the amount of BTC stays the same, each BTC becomes worth more. It's very simple. The demand for such an asset is apparently…

> But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems.

Are you implying that BTC is a "sound monetary system"? Because many people will argue with that.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#222

Post by JoeCortopassi »

throw0101d wrote: post #11

Keep going back to: >> Explain Bitcoin as completely as possible in a single tweet. > It's like if idling your car 24/7 occasionally produced solved Sudoku puzzles that you could then exchange for heroin. * https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/113524359527398604... Edit: per /u/tgamblin (of Spack fame), this was originally from @Theophite.

Bitcoin is cryptographically secured distributed accounting ledger, that created a novel way to incentivize participation

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#223

Post by banannaise »

digging wrote: post #57

I'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…

Energy consumption by banking? We can calculate that.

All commercial buildings in the United States used about 6.8 trillion BTUs, or 2 trillion kWh (2 petawatt-hours), of power in 2018 [1]. That's just over half of the 3.9 petawatt-hours used by the country as a whole [2]. Of that, 16% was consumed by offices [3], so we're down to 8%. That's all office buildings, so what percentage of office building space is devoted to banking? Does banking use more than 1/3 of total office space in the United States? If so, you have a point. That seems highly unlikely.

(Datacenters used less than 0.1 petawatt-hours in 2020 [4], or about 2% of total energy consumption. Again, I doubt banks were using the lion's share of that, so it doesn't move the needle much.)

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/commercial...

[2] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/power-and-utilities...

[3] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/office.php#:~....

[4] https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-center-e....

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#224

Post by digging »

eli wrote: post #187
digging wrote: post #57

I'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…

1. There's no need to compare to traditional banking. 2% of all US power is a lot -- the comparison is to all other uses of electricity . (But per-transaction traditional banking is orders of magnitude more efficient.) 2. "I haven't read the study but maybe it's wrong and maybe the real number is way way less"? C'mon. Give me a break. Trusting that an EIA report is generally accurate is not evidence of being "emotion…

> "I haven't read the study but maybe it's wrong and maybe the real number is way way less"? C'mon. Give me a break. Trusting that an EIA report is generally accurate is not evidence of being "emotional." Handwaving it away without even reading it is.

That's not what I said. I said the author of the article did read the study and describes it as possibly wrong. In fact the article does actually mention a range given, "0.6% to 2.3%", which isn't orders-of-magnitude huge but nearly a 1:4 ratio. Usually if someone says, "I have this big scary number," and you find out the actual number is 25% of what they told you, you're allowed to be skeptical of the conclusions they draw from their math.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#225

Post by patriksvensson »

fromMars wrote: post #86

What happened with Ethereum's proof of stake? Have there been successful alternatives that eliminate the need for mining?

It's running proof of stake, successfully for over 512 days!

Uses validators instead of mining, the power footprint of the ENTIRE network was reduced by 99.995%.

Crypto isn't power inefficient, BITCOIN MINING is power inefficient.

Can't wait for the typewriter (Bitcoin) to be replaced by the computer (Ethereum).

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#226

Post by qqqwerty »

Symbiote wrote: post #149
digging wrote: post #57

I'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…

Visa used 189GWh in 2017, worldwide, of which around half was data centres [1]. That handled 111.2 billion transactions, so about 1.7Wh per transaction (half for datacentres). Bitcoin used 844670Wh per transaction [2]. [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... [2] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

That is bonkers if true. To put some context around that, our EV can drive around 4000 miles on that amount of energy. Meanwhile, I am not sure you could even unlock the car on 1.7Wh.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#227

Post by pton_xd »

FireBeyond wrote: post #221
pton_xd wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. It kind of is! But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation. As governments print increasingly more money, and the amount of BTC stays the same, each BTC becomes worth more. It's very simple. The demand for such an asset is apparently…

> But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. Are you implying that BTC is a "sound monetary system"? Because many people will argue with that.

Not at all, I'm saying BTC is an asset that hedges against unsound monetary systems.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#229

Post by amarant »

Symbiote wrote: post #149
digging wrote: post #57

I'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…

Visa used 189GWh in 2017, worldwide, of which around half was data centres [1]. That handled 111.2 billion transactions, so about 1.7Wh per transaction (half for datacentres). Bitcoin used 844670Wh per transaction [2]. [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... [2] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

This is the relevant comparison! In another comment I asserted that I would be surprised if Blockchain doesn't use at least 2 orders of magnitude more energy per transaction than traditional banking.

Seems I was off by about 5 orders of magnitude, in Blockchains favour!

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#230

Post by tdeck »

webignition wrote: post #89

I live in a house house exclusively warmed by electric heating (underfloor downstairs, wall-mounted upstairs). The heating system takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with no other direct benefits. As a whole the heating system can be quite power-hungry during cold periods. A crypto mining rig takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with the possible benefit of creating so…

This is actually a product: https://heatbit.com/
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