Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 499 posts

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

#281

Post by digging »

uni_rule wrote: post #248
digging wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ending crypto mining is the easiest no-brainer in the history of energy systems. Ending any profit-generating activity is incredibly difficult. I suspect you're not referring to ending it, but allowing it to be transferred offshore and losing the ability to regulate it. But if it's banned in the US, good luck getting every other country on earth to ban it in solidarity.

Considering how broadly unpopular the idea is to average people who don't aspire to own cryptocurrency (especially after FTX publicly ate its own organs) I don't see it being particularly difficult to find support for such laws in more liberal places such as the EU.

Again, if you can't stamp it out globally, you're very likely just shifting it to places that may care less to regulate it.

I would genuinely love to read a plan somebody has to end cryptocurrency on Earth, but I can't imagine one working even a little bit.

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

#282

Post by greyface- »

hk__2 wrote: post #170
jgilias wrote: post #103

The whole idea that you can sort energy usage into useful for society or not buckets is pretty ridiculous. Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn? The very idea of sorting energy use like that is a very slippery slope. We have markets for a reason. They help us determine how the aggregated society values one or another thing without relying on value judgment.

> The whole idea that you can sort energy usage into useful for society or not buckets is pretty ridiculous. > > Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn? As other have pointed out, Bitcoin relies on a larger and larger usage of energy by design . You could to a more energy-efficient Netflix, but you cannot do a more energy-efficient Bitcoin.

> larger and larger usage of energy by design

It's actually the opposite: its energy usage shrinks and shrinks, by design. Every 210,000 blocks (~4 years), the block reward (mining subsidy) drops in half. At the limit, it approaches zero, and the network can only afford to spend as much on energy as users pay in transaction fees.

Admittedly, "the limit" is quite a few years off, and there's a big subsidy still. I'm surprised we haven't seen taxing authorities go after block rewards specifically - they're why miners are currently willing to spend 10~20x on energy vs what users pay them for transactions.

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

#283

Post by pcthrowaway »

patricius wrote: post #253
acdha wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your first mistake is assuming that the power used to secure the Bitcoin network is a waste. It is clearly not, since thousands of people believe it is worth paying for. The second error is implicitly assuming that the number of people Bitcoin serves is correlated with it’s power usage. You could serve the same number of people as the banking sector does now without increased power consumption when you bring layer 2…

Millions of people play in casinos, that doesn't mean the energy they use isn't a waste and overall negative for society.

Bitcoin is like that times 1,000,000 when it comes to energy usage.

The energy and resources expended mining for diamonds is wasteful also.

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

#284

Post by manquer »

qqqwerty wrote: post #226
Symbiote wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is it bonkers ?

Bitcoins are just speculative assets . All crypto is, nobody is actually doing real economic transactions on them, I.e buying and selling services/goods for bitcoin. It is not practical to do so with transaction/gas fees .

If you think of it as an Asset transactions then it makes sense, those are always expensive.

A real estate deal for a house will have buyer agent, seller agent government taxes etc easily 5-10% , if you sell an artwork a gallery will probably charge upwards of 10-20% etc.

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

#285

Post by rendang »

Andrex wrote: post #274
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you HackerNewsGPT.

Would ChatGPT have omitted the article? Maybe ESL-ChatGPT

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

#286

Post by teachrdan »

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…

> At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation

You are completely ignorant. I'm not saying that in a mean way, I mean it in the purest sense possible: You have no idea what you are talking about.

According to the graph below, BTC goes up when inflation goes down. That is the opposite of a hedge! It proves that Bitcoin is not valuable due to "not having sound monetary systems."

Bitcoin is obviously a speculative asset whose value goes up when inflation is low and people have money to spend on speculative assets. The fact that we use 2.3% of our nation's electricity on it is unjustifiable.

https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-inflation/

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

#287

Post by throw0101d »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #222
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

As someone who has used cryptography† since he downloaded PGP 2.x in the early 1990s, and was around for the Crypto Wars (using the "non-us" Debian repos), I am aware what Bitcoin is technically-speaking.

† This includes using chained hashes:

* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=opie&sektion=4

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1760

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289

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

#288

Post by digging »

quandrum wrote: post #241
acdha wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's also the fact all the power draw of the traditional banking industry is also in the crypto and not accounted for in this analysis. Crypto still needs POS systems and accounts and large staffs in large offices and all the trappings of finance outside of mining.

That's an excellent point actually. In the current day, more-or-less every watt of crypto is actually on top of the traditional financial system and totally reliant on it.

That's not intrinsic to cryptocurrency, but it is part of the reality we're living in, which is what I want people to be looking at.

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

#289

Post by brvsft »

boc wrote: post #198
digging wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your suspicions are wrong, but you're welcome to add to the debate if you have anything to contribute.

I'll be upfront with you: bitcoin is probably the worst "tech" ever mass-adopted. That's my bias. 1. The banking industry is thousands of times more important that crypto for everyday Americans. It's what literally makes our entire economy run. Crypto is used for speculation. What you should be comparing bitcoin against is the energy it takes to list a few ETFs on an exchange, which is essentially the cost of a few h…

I disagree with your first point mainly because this is more of a symptom of what Americans want, not necessarily some sort of virtuous result of the banking industry. I'd also argue that it doesn't "make our entire economy run." What makes the economy run is people going to work and performing work, producing goods and services. Banking is merely an aspect of that, and it's perhaps propped up into a bigger piece than it may need to be because people prefer being able to (or in some cases need to) access credit to buy stuff.

I also somewhat disagree with (3) because it's ambiguous how many people constitute these mining facilities referenced in the article. You write it as though it means 137 individuals.

But overall I only dislike crypto because it has become a space for charlatans and people who want to get rich quick. Any original principles behind creating a new currency outside of fiat and actually using that for transactions have been forgotten since then and crowded out by people who pretend those principles still mean something but really just want XCOIN to moon.

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

#290

Post by Ekaros »

the_snooze wrote: post #78
sspiff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you're not idling your car, you're effectively redlining it 24/7.

Exactly. It's wasteful by design, with incentives to increase hash rates in the face of efficiencies instead of taking the savings. And the hashes are absolutely useless computations. No one benefits from the 99.99999% of hash guesses that don't "win" the block.

Hmm, just for fun I think that is missing like 10 or 20 9s. As per block hit chance is about one in 3e+23... 500EHash/s * 10min * 60s/min...
Post reply on HN