Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021 • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#131

Post by m00dy » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

acover wrote: post #29

hrhrhrhrhr wrote: post #8

Gold mining consumes 240.61 TWh per year, which is comparable to the electrical energy consumed by a country like Australia. Source: https://globalenergyprize.org/en/2021/11/24/the-bitcoin-gold...

> DePaul University suggests that this number should be closer to 35 tons of CO2 for jewelry, which accounts for roughly 50% of global gold demand. It is assumed that refinement uses a similar amount of power to recycling; therefore, a total of 79.9 MWh is used for the mining and refinement of each gram of gold used in jewelry. Each kilogram of recycled gold produces 37 tons of CO2 and uses 31.3 MWh of energy. This b…

Children workers are slaved to work in African gold mines

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#132

Post by FabHK » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

For comparison:

Worldwide Total final energy consumption is around 82,000 TWh/a, or 10 MWh/a per person (a bit more than 1 kW on average per person).

So, Bitcoin consumes more than 13 million people, or 0.16% of world energy consumption (total final energy, not only electricity - it's a higher share of electricity consumption).

Edit to add: Put yet another way, one BTC transaction burns as much energy as a person needs per month. Can't wait for the utopia where BTC is universally adopted!

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#133

Post by mwattsun » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

meribold wrote: post #109

mwattsun wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally, you would mine your Bitcoin in Iceland or Chile [1] with geothermal or hydro and buy corn from Iowa with it and the farmers there use it to buy power from the local windmill grid, so it's a battery in that sense. [1] https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/chile

It's a battery in the sense that you can use it to buy electricity?

Yes, energy in at one geographic location, energy out at another

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#134

Post by leshow » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

qwertygnu wrote: post #50

robomartin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blockchain is the single largest threat to banking, and that doesn’t come without a price. That's an interesting statement. The first question that occurred to me was: Why does banking have to be threatened? In other words, is this a solution looking for a problem?

Yes there are lots of problems with banking. Cryptocurrency does have a reason to exist, though of course we went and fucked it all up. It can help ordinary people outmaneuver oppressive regimes. It can perform that same core functions that banks can (i.e. keeping track of and moving around money) in a public and distributed way. The banking industry (often metonymically known as "Wall Street") is literally the canon…

> The banking industry (often metonymically known as "Wall Street") is literally the canonical example of greed.

And crypto isn't? The whole thing runs on FOMO

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#135

Post by scottiebarnes » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

sktrdie wrote: post #7

With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. No other system works so efficiently towards such goal. What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Since we only…

Energy isn't scarce, its actually abundant. At this particular moment, clean renewable energy capacity is more scarce than fossil fuel, but there is simply far more potential energy in solar, wind, nuclear, etc. Remember, our planet is bombarded by solar rays 24/7 and will continue to receive this energy for billions of years.

Human energy consumption has been exponential over time. We started by harvesting crops with our hands; then we we figured how to attach a plow to an ox, which increased our productivity, but required us to house, feed, and maintain the ox (energy). We figured out engines, electricity, interconnected computers, low earth orbit satellites; all requiring increased energy expenditure, but increasing our collective well-being and productivity.

Rather than scapegoat Bitcoin for our climate crisis, start by addressing: 1) externalities are not captured by fossil fuel prices (you need a carbon tax for that, to fund research and to de-incentivize fossil fuel consumption), and 2) governments actively subsidize fossil fuel industries.

Do those things, and Bitcoin will literally subsidize and accelerate clean energy infrastructure investment.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#136

Post by oneoff786 » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #112

sktrdie wrote: post #7

With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. No other system works so efficiently towards such goal. What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Since we only…

The worst part is that according to Cambridge some 40% of that is coal power [1]. Frequently the dirtiest coal power in the world, between Xinjiang (no longer, probably...) and Kazakhstan. Coal power causes excess mortality of anywhere between 25 and 278 deaths per TWh generated depending on how you're counting it and (most importantly) where it's generated. [2,3,4] Bitcoin's addiction to dirty coal killed between 15…

Is free energy a noteworthy feature of the WoW world?

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#137

Post by woodruffw » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

mwattsun wrote: post #79

smnrchrds wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about battery is that you can take the energy out of it. It stores energy. That's the entire point of a battery. How on earth can you do that with Bitcoin? If you can't, Bitcoin isn't a battery, it's a black hole.

Ideally, you would mine your Bitcoin in Iceland or Chile [1] with geothermal or hydro and buy corn from Iowa with it and the farmers there use it to buy power from the local windmill grid, so it's a battery in that sense. [1] https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/chile

That's not a battery -- that's a form of economic triage where you burn power to produce tokens that allow you to buy power somewhere else. To use the analogy: nowhere is the battery being "drained".

Edit: to make the analogy more complete: a bitcoin is, in effect, proof that energy has been wasted. Using a bitcoin to purchase renewable power from a windfarm is tantamount purchasing that power with empty batteries or empty oil drums.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#138

Post by elliotec » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

thathndude wrote: post #108

epolanski wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"technological development". Don't we already have plenty of more efficient coins out there?

I’ve never understood the BTC purists. I’m generally anti-crypto in any variety, but As far as cryptocurrency‘s go, bitcoin is really bad compared to so many alternatives. I’d just as soon see it all go up in smoke. But why does BTC reign?

Because it was first, and the word itself has permeated the psyche of society in ways that the other currencies haven't. People who know nothing at all about crypto buy into BTC because they've heard of it and heard it turns into money.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#139

Post by hetspookjee » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

svara wrote: post #61

PoW mining (at least), must be made illegal. I have no doubts that it will end by becoming illegal, the question is how and when. It boggles the mind that there is now essentially a worldwide tax on semiconductors, which is used to do... nothing of any value whatsoever. And this thing just keeps growing. The effects will be felt in more and more economic sectors. Something will have to give. So, the only question is:…

Imagine the savings of stopping to allow running arbitrary javascript in advertisements.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#140

Post by hocuspocus » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #126

hocuspocus wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's none. It's mind boggling that 12 years later, people like the parent poster are still claiming bullshit like that when there's literally zero evidence, rather the opposite. No country with underdeveloped banking and payment systems is interested in something like Bitcoin. They need something cheap and efficient, federated and... centralized! Many African countries are perfectly fine using M-Pesa.

There are a lot of countries where people need anything but centralised money. Because they have every reason not to trust the ones who would run the central authority. It's hard for some first-world country citizens to imagine that.

Political problems don't have technological solutions.

Telling these people to use Bitcoin is just giving their government another tool to send them to jail.