Just another thing people went wild for without thinking about externalities. You don't need to be a genius computer scientist to realize a thing that requires a constantly rising amount of processing power just to keep pace will eventually need an unreasonable amount of power.
Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
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Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
#12[deleted]
Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
#13Well...yeah. It's kind of by design, right?
I mean, it's either "work" or centralization, so that's the trade off bitcoin makes. The work is the disincentive against cornering, right?
Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
#14The reward for mining a block will go down over time. In the end, all mining will be financed via the transaction fees. Then the market will figure out how much energy should be used per transaction.
Does that justify wasting enough electricity to power Dallas, Texas in the mean time?
Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
#15demand & offer, if the energy were more expensive, fewer would mine and the difficulty would drop, I wish I could mine on my low powered laptop, but if you want to raise the pitch forks against bitcoin, on the same logic, we could stop playing computer games, watch movies/shows/tv etc, even using modern phones, the old nokias that lasted a week one one charge would do fine.
Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
#16I'm really confused by this article. Sometimes it seems like they're talking about bitcoin mining, then they start talking about transactions.
The act of mining confirms transactions in bitcoin.
Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
#17Byteball is not PoW or PoS, but has no energy waste for consensus.
Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
#18The statistic that stands out to me from this article is that 1 bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power 5.58 us households for a day.
I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable about bitcoin can comment - is it likely that this will continue as the mining reward decreases? How expensive will transactions be after that happens? And if smaller rewards reduce total mining and power consumption, how vulnerable does the blockchain become to attack?
What i'm wondering is if transaction costs in the 'end state' of bitcoin can be competitive with centralized competitors like credit cards, paypal, etc. given this level of power consumption?
Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
#19So the calculation is incredibly sensitive to the assumptions, that miners spend 60% of revenues on electricity and that they have an average cost of $0.05 per kw-h.
Anyone have any sense of how accurate either of those is?
Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
#20demand & offer, if the energy were more expensive, fewer would mine and the difficulty would drop, I wish I could mine on my low powered laptop, but if you want to raise the pitch forks against bitcoin, on the same logic, we could stop playing computer games, watch movies/shows/tv etc, even using modern phones, the old nokias that lasted a week one one charge would do fine.
People have been raising the issue of our civilization's wastefulness for years. Where have you been?