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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

#461

Post by earthling8118 »

303uru wrote: post #160
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 going to compare the entire banking system, which services essentially every American to this complete waste of time and resources which services a vanishingly small number of people? >The point is the amount of crypto being mined. Is it? According to who? You? What's the utility of crypto? I've yet to see any materialization other than casino and funding terrorism.

How would the power usage of bitcoin scale if it did serve every American? Until that question has an answer I don't think this argument can be considered valid. It's an incredible waste as it is, but just dismissing it outright doesn't make sense. If the number of transactions scaled up would the power usage become more reasonable?

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

#462

Post by FabHK »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #394
FabHK wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proof of Stake is the widely deployed consensus model which isn't designed to waste energy. Nicely put. PoS is still around a million times more wasteful than the effective work it does, though.

Different PoS chains will have different characteristics, but I was curious about this claim so I dug up some numbers for Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Visa: Transactions in 2023: Bitcoin: 174310000 Ethereum: 583530000 Visa: 212600000000 Energy consumption: Bitcoin: 167.8 TWh/yr Ethereum: 0.0067479963 TWh/yr Visa: 197.57 TWh/yr (2021?) Energy consumption/tx Bitcoin: 962.652745 kWh Ethereum: 0.011564 kWh Visa: 0.929304 kWh I…

> curious how you're arriving at your figure

Hi, sure. The nodes in the EVM do not collaborate to split the work, rather, they all perform (basically) the same work. So, you could instead run Ethereum with one node that connects to the net and receives transactions, processes them (around 20 per second - it's not exactly a lot of processing), puts them into blocks, and sends out the complete blocks. It would perform exactly the same as the current network, and would consume, say, 4 W (a Raspberry Pi, say).

The one difference is that it would have to be trusted, which is the big no-no. But that's the effective work being done.

But the validators burn around 1 MW (that lines up with your figure approximately) and are paid $5m a day to do that work. And 1 MW / 4 W is a factor of 250k, which I rounded up to 1m considering all the other activity around Ethereum, though feel free to round it down to 1e5.

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

#463

Post by MichaelZuo »

VikingCoder wrote: post #456
MichaelZuo wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It already exists it’s called gold. There are some hassles associated with physical storage and transport of gold but not 2.3% of total US power consumption worth of hassles.

To people who love gold, I always want to ask what you think should happen if Elon Musk claims a meteor one of his robot ships landed on, that's got 1000 times more gold inside it than there is gold on Earth. What do you think should happen?

Why should anyone respond and speculate based on a hastily written hypothetical? You need to put in some genuine writing effort for folks to take it seriously.

Offer some substantial, falsifiable, claims/arguments/etc.

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

#464

Post by lovich »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #437
lovich wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> state violence. It’s obsolete. Lol, that’s what I’m talking about with cult leader vibes. That is completely delusional

It’s fascinating how history informs us about the evolution of state power and its reliance on violence to enforce compliance. Reflecting on the industrial age, we see how the permanence of factories and infrastructure bolstered the state’s capacity for coercion—a tool leveraged to an extreme in fostering ideologies like communism. The physical nature of wealth, exemplified by gold bars, presented an opportunity for…

Crypto enthusiasts have barely dealt with state violence. You are such a fraction of economic activity that you barely register on the radar of actual powers. Fuck with the money that states control in a manner where one with a military feels threatened by it, survive their reaction, and then ill believe you that crypto has managed to make violence obsolete.

I am going to use a meme to make a flippant point here, but this is what crypto enthusiasts sound like when they say theyre overcoming fiat currencies and there is nothing countries can do to stop them

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/778/145/b6f...

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

#466

Post by sak5sk »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #236
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…

Hedging against inflation with a wildly volatile asset. Genius. You might lose 30% of your value, but hey, you didn't lose that 3.2% to inflation!

you can't be serious, have you seen how much bitcoin is up?

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

#467

Post by sak5sk »

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…

exactly. oooh, computing uses energy! Surprise! Now do porn consumption.

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

#468

Post by patricius »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #283
patricius wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Value is subjective, so it is by definition wrong to say that something is objectively a waste. It depends on who you ask.

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

#469

Post by patricius »

rspeele wrote: post #292
patricius wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your first point kind of makes it impossible to call anything a waste, right? Everything we do in society is paid for by somebody so it must all be worthwhile. For the second point, are you talking about Layer 2 solutions that track cryptocurrency in a centralized database, like an exchange, where most transactions happen? Basically just traditional banking but with crypto as the unit of account. Or are you talking a…

Maybe Lightning Network will scale, maybe not. But VISA or Mastercard could build on top of Bitcoin and allow many more transactions than the base layer does. You would use the base layer for final settlements.

Already now you can get a VISA/Mastercard and use that to spend Bitcoin. But of course, every layer on top of Bitcoin presents its own set of trade-offs in terms of trust and security.

What constitutes waste is completely subjective.

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

#470

Post by patricius »

acdha wrote: post #356
patricius wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is a logic error: securing a financial system is not waste but paying more than you need to is. If my bank secured my money by paying an army of dudes with guns to sit around watching cash and did transfers by putting a check on the corporate…

What you call inefficiency (I guess in terms of power consumption) is a misuse of the term in a world where value is subjective. It is efficient and necessary for the use case and value it provides. You can argue it is ineffecient compared to Proof of Stake for example, but Proof of Stake is a completely different system and has a completely different incentive structure.

I’m saying also that L2 (and L3, … Ln) is a way to scale the number of users without increasing power consumption. Every time you add a layer, there are other trade-offs for the benefits gained. But at the base layer you still have the benefits of not having a central authority censoring and controlling exchange of an economic good.

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