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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

#471

Post by patricius »

FabHK wrote: post #342
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…

> thousands of people believe it is worth paying for. Except, in good old libertarian fashion, they tend not to pay for it. First, the vast majority of the around $100 it costs to process a BTC transaction comes not from explicit fees, but from (invisible) money supply increase (the mining reward). That still neglects the environmental externalities, which are probably in the $30+ region.

The miners pay for the power, and they believe it is not a waste to do so.

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

#472

Post by lottin »

t0bia_s wrote: post #434
lottin wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not. Fiat money drives inflation. The adoption of fiat currency by many countries, from the 18th century onwards, made much larger variations in the supply of money possible. Since then, huge increases in the supply of paper money have occurred in a number of countries, producing hyperinflations – episodes of extreme inflation rates much greater than those observed during earlier periods of commodity money. http…

Hyperinflation is extremely uncommon, especially in developed countries, and when it occurs it's always caused by incompetent or corrupt governments, not by the currency itself.

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

#473

Post by ben_w »

earthling8118 wrote: post #461
303uru wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Bitcoin by itself cannot serve every American, regardless of power consumption, and that's by design.

It can't even serve every lunch in Vermont without extra layers running on top of it.

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

#474

Post by ben_w »

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?

This kind of thing is why we stopped using the gold standard.

On the other hand, BTC prices changes are so wild that it makes gold seem like a constant-value asset.

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

#475

Post by Detrytus »

RedNifre wrote: post #360
hk__2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure you can, what is called "Proof of work" in the context of Bitcoin is actually "Proof of money lost" in the form of paid electricity. If you taxed mining at 90%, you would also reduce mining and thus electricity consumption by 90%. (Ideally, this would be a global tax and not too high, since reducing mining too much would compromise security)

Relying on taxes instead of Proof of Work kind of goes against core premise of Bitcoin: not relying on centralized authority. To make sure that all miners pay taxes you need tax office to collect them. And of course some criminal miners would find a way to avoid those taxes, making it 90% cheaper for them to mount 51% attack.

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

#476

Post by nojvek »

Likely gonna get downvoted for saying it.

Wasn’t this the whole point of bitcoin? To guarantee a slow increasing supply of coins with a fine upper limit of 21 million bitcoins. Only 2 million more left and they get increasingly take more energy to mine.

There was a joke amongst my peers that the last bitcoin will take a Dyson sphere around the sun to mine.

Bitcoin makes sense as an instrument to hedge against inflation, but the charts correlate with stock market. So it is as speculative as the rest of market. Unlike say gold which usually has an inverse graph as a holder of value.

IMO the insane trading fees of bitcoin have ruined it for me.

I love what ethereum is doing with proof of stake.

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

#477

Post by acdha »

patricius wrote: post #470
acdha wrote: post #356

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. 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 w…

> What you call inefficiency (I guess in terms of power consumption) is a misuse of the term in a world where value is subjective

No, it’s simply recognizing that competing systems match or exceed on security without the same cost. You’ve effectively acknowledged this by saying that the system will be more usable and affordable by using something better designed which eventually clears in Bitcoin to reduce the number of expensive transactions.

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

#478

Post by rlpb »

mjburgess wrote: post #361
rlpb wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can rewrite the history arbitrarily No, you cannot do that. Transactions would still need to be signed by the corresponding owners. All you could do is reorder (and thus invalidate) some transactions, drop some transactions, or add some that weren't originally included. > Just dump everything into unusable addresses... Nope; that's not possible. You wouldn't have the signatures to do that even with 51% hashing powe…

You're right about the dumping; I was thinking more about the case where you controlled the protocol on the machines of a partitioned network (eg., so you release a new version of btc which uses exploitable crytography, etc.). In the case of a mere 51% at scale, hijinks are still quite possible from replays, reorderings, etc. I was more preoccupied by the case where the state's acting in its own borders with control…

> the case where you controlled the protocol on the machines of a partitioned network (eg., so you release a new version of btc which uses exploitable crytography

Such a change would be treated as a "monopoly money" fork by those wanting to transact, and ignored. "No I don't want your fake money; send me real BTC or GTFO". This is why miners cannot arbitrarily change the protocol in their favour even today.

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

#479

Post by [deleted] »

Pigalowda wrote: post #93
cookiengineer wrote: post #67

In the same context: How many top ranking games on steam waste the same amount of electricity? Shouldn't they be responsible for building fusion reactors, too, by that logic? If not, why?

This comparison doesn't make that much sense. Games are a product and bitcoin is a digital "currency" mainly used for financial speculation, fraud, gray and black market goods/services, and money laundering.

[deleted]

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

#480

Post by Drblessing »

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…

Right? Only 2.3% to support a decentralized, permissionless, censorship-resistant currency is such a bargain!

It's almost like if it wasn't valuable to society than it wouldn't make economic sense.

And here I thought America was a market economy.

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