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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

#301

Post by triceratops »

MichaelNolan wrote: post #110
triceratops wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it work like that? Why do utilities encourage customers to become more efficient when they could sell more power and make more money instead? And even if it's true, an expansion of generation capacity is only useful if it's eventually freed up for non-crypto uses, right? Otherwise it's just a wash.

> Why do utilities encourage customers to become more efficient when they could sell more power and make more money instead?   Depending on where you live, the State likely requires the utility to spend some portion of its revenue on efficiency. Valois a prime example, overall the state uses far less electricity per person, which is at least partially because of decades of efficiency initiatives. And secondly, i…

> most publicly regulated utilities make very little on selling electricity, they instead make a guaranteed profit on capital investment. So total kWh sold is less important overall

That's what I thought too. Building new capacity is expensive and time-consuming; utilities would rather run their existing capacity at full blast and reduce demand.

Which means these cryto miners haven't financed 2.3% additional generation capacity in any meaningful sense. Unless they have special contracts with utilities to specifically fund new power plants and transmission.

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

#302

Post by rightbyte »

jcranmer wrote: post #195
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 is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry. I ran the numbers a few days ago (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234766 ). Bitcoin miners plausibly use more energy than the entire traditional banking sector. Not just on a per-transaction basis (which is blindingly obvious if you think about it)…

"There are 2,595,852 people employed in the Commercial Banking industry in the US as of 2023" -- Google Blackbox Content Steal

So less than 1% of US pop. in banking sector. And I guess banking use less power than e.g. mining, manufacturing per worker ...

Bitcoin probably uses more energy then the banking industry and their workers living their lives.

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

#303

Post by acdha »

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.

Bitcoin is designed to be inefficient: the network adjusts to use more power as it becomes available. None of the other things you mentioned have that mechanism where greater usage makes them need more power for everyone who was already there.

The closest you might come is something like road traffic where the situation gets asymptomatically worse as more people start driving, but even that is much better than Bitcoin because people aren’t just driving because they can and will reduce their driving when traffic is unpleasant. Bitcoin is somewhat uniquely poorly-architected in a way which deters adoption but has also become a quasi-religious point preventing the design from being fixed.

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

#304

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

The most interesting and fitting comparison IMO is the comparison to gold mining:

https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/comparisons estimates 175.34 TWh per year for Bitcoin mining and 131 TWh per year for Gold mining.

Most gold is used in a similar way like Bitcoin (hoarded as a store of value because people believe that other people will continue to consider it valuable).

With Bitcoin mining, I believe the only relevant environmental issue is the power consumption (there's also some e-waste but I assume that's negligible compared to the power). With gold, the power consumption is a complete afterthought, the massive amounts of toxic waste and the abuse of workers are much bigger issues.

I'm shocked that both industries seem to be consuming a similar order of magnitude to be honest (I expected Bitcoin mining to be more energy intensive compared to gold).

In terms of value stored, gold stores low double-digit trillions, Bitcoin about one trillion.

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

#305

Post by Scoundreller »

sk55 wrote: post #114
mjburgess wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "security" of btc cryptocurrency is proportional to how much energy it wastes; that's radically different than the banking system. The more billions it costs to run bitcoin, the more it costs to 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system. It would be useful it some state, eg., russia or china, would just cut off networks and forge bitcoin network traffic -- and hence bring the whole thin…

Not really. Proof of stake offers a very energy efficient way to secure transactions. That is what Ethereum runs on.

I think the most efficient is a stable coin where you skip the step of actually backing it.

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

#306

Post by null0pointer »

mjburgess wrote: post #145
snapcaster wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they seal the network in their borders? Why would that bring the whole thing down? Countries that shut down internet don't seem to bring that whole thing down in any sense

Cryptocurrencies are peer-to-peer systems. If you control the network they're on, you can do anything you like. Take the peer-to-peer traffic of the cryptocurrency network of any area, prevent it from getting outside that area (ie., just block it talking to IPs outside some range) -- then to that network , you can trivially control the total hashing power. So split any cryptocurrency network into small segements, the…

> So split any cryptocurrency network into small segements, then add your machine to that network with a false history, design the network to be small enough, and your machine will out-hash the rest, and so it's history will win. Rinse-and-repeat.

You cannot forge history, even with 100% of the hash power. Firstly, each transaction is cryptographically signed with the keys of the sender address. Secondly, each full node within the segmented network will have the full history.

The only thing you can do is publish different blocks to the segmented network than the blocks the outside network has. You cannot create arbitrary transactions. You can only censor others’ transactions within the segmented network. Since the mining difficulty will not adjust instantaneously your segmented network will fall behind the outside network in block height unless you control more hashing power than everyone else mining Bitcoin on either network combined. So as soon as anyone in your segmented network re-establishes connection with the outside network (and they will, they could receive a physical hard drive with the blockchain on it and rebroadcast to segmented nodes) all your work is for nothing.

You might say “yeah well I’ll publish an entire fake history that is MUCH longer than the outside network with lower difficulty so I can stay ahead”. Well, actually you can’t, because if you wanted vastly more blocks between Bitcoins inception and the present then the difficulty will necessarily be much higher because that’s how difficulty gets set, by how quickly blocks are produced. You would have to change the difficulty adjustment algorithm, creating a fork between your own malicious node(s) and the other nodes in your segmented network. Oh and by the way, you _still_ can’t create arbitrary transactions.

> The global bitcoin system is well within rearch of a hostile state 51%'ing it

I’ll believe it when I see it. They honestly have a better chance outlawing it and imprisoning anyone who’s ever used it.

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

#307

Post by wiseowise »

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 is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.

That’s irrelevant. Banks aren’t going anywhere, end of story. Maybe not in a current form, but they’ll stay, just because of sheer amount of infrastructure built on them.

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

#308

Post by lottin »

55555 wrote: post #79

There's an argument to be made for crypto to be used to turn power that wouldn't otherwise be economical / linked to the grid / used into money, which can then be turned back into power (in a purely economic sense) later. For example wave energy could power GPUs in the middle of the ocean, with no need to then transmit electricity to shore. Solar could be captured in the middle of the desert. Some oil rigs are mining…

This argument is nonsense though. The energy that is used to secure the bitcoin network is spent. It can't be recovered later.

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

#309

Post by 015a »

cr__ wrote: post #76
015a wrote: post #28

The crypto industry financed a 2.3% expansion of the US's power generating capacity. I don't care what we're spending energy on. Being stingy about it just makes all of us poorer. There's a quadrillion-cubic-kilometer flaming ball of plasma in the sky. We have the ability to generate literally infinite electricity; and quite literally the only way we get to that is by increasing the amount of electricity we're using,…

Your argument does not make sense. Increasing usage does not magically increase capacity by the same amount. Even if it did, the increased capacity resulting from the increased demand would not make electricity cheaper, since the corresponding demand would already exist. In general, increasing demand for a resource increases the price for that resource.

Increasing usage trivially and obviously increases capacity by ~the same amount. A toddler could understand this, because obviously the lights are still on. We use more and more energy every year (except 2020, for obvious reasons). There aren't rolling blackouts. Thus, capacity responds to usage.

I don't know why you're reaching for the word "magically". There's nothing magical about the mechanism of how this happens. Its just market dynamics. If explaining it by calling it "magic" helps you understand it better, though, then that's fine.

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

#310

Post by pton_xd »

lottin wrote: post #269
pton_xd wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, the international monetary system is perfectly functional, as evidenced by the fact that it supports the global economy just fine. Bitcoin is neither an alternative to the international monetary system, nor a hedge. It's a joke. A gambling instrument for financially illiterate people.

> No, the international monetary system is perfectly functional, as evidenced by the fact that it supports the global economy just fine.

Obviously it is functional, I never said it wasn't!

Inflationary systems have a lot of benefits -- they encourage consumption, erode the value of debt over time, etc. But there are downsides, too. Savings and purchasing power are destroyed over time. They encourage investment in hard assets like real estate and BTC to protect wealth. And so you get some waste, too. There is no free lunch.

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