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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

#321

Post by Symbiote »

mandibles wrote: post #299
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

Ah, the old Visa vs Bitcoin comparison. It was wrong when it was first made in 2009, and it's wrong now. 1. Bitcoin is a final settlement system, akin to moving gold bars from one vault to another. It achieves this settlement in minutes and requires no trusted intermediaries. 2. Bitcoin's energy consumption is a function of price, not of transaction throughput, so the two are orthogonal.

You have almost 6 orders of magnitude available to make the comparison with whatever transaction method you prefer.

You could fly gold bars around in small planes, and it would still be more efficient than Bitcoin.

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

#322

Post by digging »

Symbiote wrote: post #244
digging wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You justified it above as being useful for scammers and speculative investors. It's rational to conclude the costs are not worth those supposed benefits.

Everything is useful for scammers. I don't know if crypto has significantly increased the rate of non-rich people being scammed.

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

#323

Post by 015a »

domoritz wrote: post #55
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,…

Still, generating energy even with solar has impact on natural resources and the environment.

Humans have an impact on the environment. That's just what humans do. You typing this comment had an impact on our natural resources and the environment. Me typing this response also did. You can play in the mud of trying to deign whether your comment is more valuable or meaningful to the world than Bitcoin, but you'll just end up muddy and you won't have found a path toward a better and more prosperous world.

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

#324

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

webignition wrote: post #267
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient I'm in Wyoming. My heat is direct electric. The house doesn't have ducting and Wyoming power is cheap.

A bit of a tangent, but do you mind saying what you pay per kWh? I'm currently on £0.36 GBP per kWh (about $0.45). Just wondering what counts as cheap!

In British Columbia:

9.75 cents per kWh for first 1,350 in an average two month billing period (22.1918 kWh per day).

14.08 cents per kWh over the 1,350 Step 1 threshold.

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

#325

Post by pton_xd »

teachrdan wrote: post #286
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…

> 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 sys…

> 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."

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

That graph is charting BTC price to BTC supply inflation, not general economic inflation (which is what I'm talking about).

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

#326

Post by null0pointer »

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

Bitcoin’s transaction throughput is artificially limited (hamstrung) and so not a useful denominator for comparisons.

In theory it’s possible for a Bitcoin-like blockchain to record all of Visa’s transactions in a single giga-block with only a single mining hash attempt.

Transaction throughput is not meaningful here.

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

#327

Post by wscott »

webignition wrote: post #267
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient I'm in Wyoming. My heat is direct electric. The house doesn't have ducting and Wyoming power is cheap.

A bit of a tangent, but do you mind saying what you pay per kWh? I'm currently on £0.36 GBP per kWh (about $0.45). Just wondering what counts as cheap!

https://www.globalenergyinstitute.org/average-electricity-re... us average: $0.18 Wyoming: yeah, cheap. But cold so a heat pump would still totally pay for itself.

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

#328

Post by sgift »

ziddoap wrote: post #188
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…

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?

Only if 100% of everything is powered by renewables that could be a good argument (but see below), because there's always opportunity costs: The energy production capacity used for crypto cannot be used for anything else, which means something else uses non-renewables now. Maybe an exception could be made if every crypto miner built their own renewable power source which provided all of the energy instead of relying on existing ones, but then the next point still stands:

Renewable energy production has externalities, same as everything else. The power production equipment has to be built, which needs materials. It has to be transported, which needs energy. It needs to be maintained and so on. Just saying "well, we can always add a few more renewable power plants, who cares?" would only be valid if we could produce them out of thin air.

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

#329

Post by lottin »

sackfield wrote: post #136

If this is economically unproductive work, why are the miners being rewarded for it? Is it just that the market hasn't figured out what the detractors here seem to know? Or is it that they don't understand as much about economics as they think they do?

Owners of bitcoins pay for all this unproductive work. They pay for it by buying the new bitcoins being issued by the miners every 10 minutes. So long as these idiots continue to buy the coins, miners can continue to waste resources.

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

#330

Post by rspeele »

Throw73747 wrote: post #146
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…

> 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system Out hashing does not give you any extra powers. Maybe you will be able to rollback a few minutes of transactions, that is all.

You can roll back transactions for whatever duration of time you were able to outspend the network. Critically, that can include your own transactions.

You mine quietly, outpacing the regular network, creating your own longer chain. Perhaps you do this for an hour, several hours, or a day. The only transactions on this chain are those in which you send your own coins to yourself -- maybe plus some random transactions from the mempool you throw in to help cover your own tracks. Meanwhile you spend those same coins (UTXOs) on the "honest" chain.

Once you are satisfied, you publish your longer chain. By the rules of the network the longest chain is the true one. Honest miners immediately begin building their blocks on top of your dishonest version of events. Since you are now working together with them, blocks are produced quickly. The honest chain dies.

Chaos would ensue.

Anybody who received coins on the dead chain can try to republish the transaction to the mempool and hope it gets mined again, so they get their money again. But if the sender is fast, they might realize they have a double-spend opportunity here, and submit a higher-fee transaction in which they sent those coins to themselves. It's a race. Of course, for your own UTXOs that were already spent in the dishonest chain, the race has already been won. Those double spends are successful.

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