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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

#331

Post by alchemist1e9 »

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.

It takes both intellectual and emotional maturity to understand and accept the wisdom and power of free markets. Bitcoin is delivering what the market wants an uncensored currency outside the control of governments.

This is only the beginning of the outrage over Bitcoin, wait until it does another 10x gain in value and fiat currency failures grow worldwide. The next few decades will require a lot of popcorn to watch the show when calls to ban it only result in more rapid spikes in it’s value appreciating.

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

#332

Post by FabHK »

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…

Re 1. The traditional banking industry does a lot (a lot!) more than moving entries in a ledger from A to B. That, in fact, is a minuscule part of what's going on.

Re 3. My rule of thumb is that crypto uses about 1% of world electricity production [1]. I'm surprised that the US has such a disproportionate high proportion of mining, indicative of cheap energy & lax regulation?

[1] Note that electricity is roughly a fifth of energy production (the rest being fuel for transportation/heating).

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

#333

Post by frantathefranta »

tgamblin wrote: post #27
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.

This is stolen from @Theophite, sadly now banned: https://images.app.goo.gl/Rv5SK1qqWXZVNSZ56

Still posting under @revhowardarson AFAIK

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

#334

Post by pcthrowaway »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #239
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…

Thanks for pointing out that the amount of power consumed is speculative and "up to" - it's reported as a fact in the headlines everywhere. We can get a reasonable upper bound: the block reward is 6.25 BTC + fees (the blocks I saw tended to have around 0.5 BTC in fees), so let's be generous and say 7 BTC per block. 144 blocks per day are 52560 blocks or 368k BTC per year. Currently, they're worth 47k each, so $17.3B/…

It's an "estimate" but if the mining operations of these 137 miners have known addresses (which I assume they have to for compliance), it's going to be accurate within 20%. The block reward is irrelevant, we just need to look at the hashrate of the network

Basically, take the overall hashrate of the entire network which is determined from the block difficulty (this fluctuates and was likely higher when bitcoin was more valuable, though not necessarily), and assume all blocks are mined by operators running state of the art mining hardware (realistically 90-98% of blocks will be mined by people running hardware that's 80-100% of the maximum possible efficiency, and any miners running worse hardware will be consuming more energy, but we can pretend they're all on the best hardware)

Using that, you can get the overall hashrate of the network. Once you have that, you can take the percentage of blocks mined by these 137 miners in a year. Again, be generous and assume they're all running state of the art hardware. If 10% of all blocks are mined by these 137 mining ops, guess what, they're using 10% of the total energy being inhaled by the network.

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

#335

Post by rspeele »

null0pointer wrote: post #326
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

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.

It's meaningful since Bitcoin is the most popular, most energy-consuming crypto and it has this limitation, with no plans of changing.

"Well, it's supposed to suck like that" doesn't change that Bitcoin is consuming tremendous amounts of energy to serve very, very few customers.

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

#336

Post by [deleted] »

bdcravens wrote: post #66
jonathan-adly wrote: post #38

Power 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.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#337

Post by fifilura »

webignition wrote: post #240
GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm in the UK, a small town in Wiltshire. The town I live in is bisected by a MOD railway and, from what I understand, permission was never granted for whatever was needed to supply natural gas on my side of the tracks. This rules out some of the more common traditional heating systems found in these parts. We bought the house ~two years ago. The building itself was (and still is) quite sound but was a wreck in terms…

Thank you for answering!

Yeah there are lots of reasons to not get a heat pump, floor heating is one of them.

And your gp post was not unreasonable, and food for discussion.

But what part for your setup would you replace with GPU heating?

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

#338

Post by gregable »

andy81 wrote: post #319
downrightmike wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about bitcoin mining is that it requires more power, the more power you use. They network can work on far smaller resources.

That would require the price to drop proportionally (or waiting for halvings).

So in the limit, buying POW coins is using that money to consume energy. Selling the coins is taking that money away from energy consumption.

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

#339

Post by alchemist1e9 »

acdha wrote: post #257
psychlops wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What better currency competition is out there?

Almost all of them? It hasn’t had much impact on the real economy so clearly most people do not consider it better.

The entire history of fiat currency is a combination of warfare and currency collapse.

Why was the Bank of England created? To wage war.

Perhaps “wasting” 2% of the world’s electricity supply will look a lot better when civilization scale money laundering and currency collapse is a thing of history, not to mention the curb on national budgets being allocated to war machines!

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

#340

Post by 015a »

lgleason wrote: post #80
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,…

Can you substantiate the claim that crypto financed a 2.3% expansion of the US power generating capacity? Most power companies are encouraging people to use less electricity, especially during peak periods, instead of encouraging more use to be able to sell more electricity because of grid limitations etc..

Utility companies very reasonably and correctly do both. People, and organizations, can do two things. Maybe even more than two.

On the short term, using less energy is important because it helps smooth over demand curves. If everyone suddenly plugged in an EV tonight, the grid would crash, because demand grew too fast for the utility providers to keep up. That is bad.

On the long term: every metric that measures quality of life correlates with energy usage. On the long term: this is the path of kardashev type 1 for our great-great grand children. Blanket the earth in solar panels, turbines, and nuclear (and sure, some fossil fuels are good to). Solar panels aren't free to build. The market needs a reason to build them. I don't really care what the reason is. "Crypto" feels better to me than "turning on your heater and opening the window during the winter" as someone else in this thread suggested. Trying to quantify "how much better" feels like a waste of time that could be spent building more power plants.

My statement "crypto financed a 2.3% expansion of US power generating capacity" is obviously dramatic; the mechanism isn't precisely A causes B. Its dramatic toward the aim of communicating the message that Demand creates Capacity, and if you believe Capacity is Good (which is not something up for belief or debate, unless you're Ted Kaczynski) then it logically follows that Demand is Generally Good.

That does not mean nor force the conclusion that All Demand Is Equally Good. I never said that. But, generally, it is good.

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