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Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

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Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#181

Post by lttlrck »

Taek wrote: post #164
merkaloid wrote: post #33

>Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction: 5.58 The one that surprised me the most

It's a bad stat. The electricity that goes into a block doesn't just confirm the transactions in the block, it also confirms all the transactions in all blocks prior to that block, and those transactions have a cumulative value of about $70 billion. The bleak picture painted on the article is an incomplete one by far.

Why is it a bad stat? Is having to confirm all transactions in all prior blocks not a direct result of a transaction? Why is the cumulative value relevant? I can see how there is a perceived value there but if the transaction didn’t happen it wouldn’t have been needed?

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#183

Post by Shorel »

rspeer wrote: post #100
chriswilmer wrote: post #88

This is a stupid comparison. The number of transactions can be increased by a factor of a 1000 easily while holding the amount of energy expended constant.

If it's so easy, please describe how.

The how is easy to explain with just the name of an implementation/fork: Bitcoin Cash.

The reason it has not happened for original Bitcoin is internal politics. If the number of transactions are limited then they are more profitable.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#184

Post by jcfrei »

Taek wrote: post #172
jcfrei wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoS as well as PoW depend on the assumption that a majority (either in terms of value invested in hashing power or invested in tokens) of the network is following the rules. If you try to double spend in a PoW system you are betting your current electricity usage on a new block becoming the longest chain and in a PoS system you are betting the tokens themselves - from an economic point of view those two systems are i…

No, in a proof of stake system collusion to rewrite history is essentially free. In a proof of work system, even if you collude you still have to spend a non-trivial sum of electricity to create that alternate history. Electricity that would be making you money via the block reward if you were using it honestly. It is provably more expensive to reconstruct history in a PoW setting, even when everyone is happily collu…

Whether it is more expensive or not is irrelevant. If a majority of the network (either in hashing power or number of tokens) decides to collude and start modifying network states for their own benefit then they will ultimately succeed. You argue that in a PoW system rewriting older blocks is more difficult than in a PoS system but that doesn't matter, because when a majority of the network becomes hostile and starts blocking all of your transaction attempts then the value of your coins immediately goes to zero. In a PoW system the records of your older transactions might be around forever but that's little more than damage control.

In such an adversarial environment proof of stake even has advantages over proof of work. If in a proof of work system a majority of the network starts to double spend or censor transactions, what can you do? You are essentially powerless because any fork (that tries to fix their malicious blocks) can be quickly taken over by the colluding miners. However in a proof of stake system you could simply fork once and destroy/invalidate all the tokens of the malicious miners.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#185

Post by colordrops »

IgorPartola wrote: post #178
colordrops wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash and coins are not a store of value and are also a fiat currency associated with a central authority. Gold is a better analogy.

You can't buy a pizza with gold. You can with cash. BTC is trying to do both, and is failing as a store of value right now due to volatility though that may change.

It's neither cash nor gold, but shares more properties with gold. And it certainly is not failing as a store of value, with a steady increase in value over an appropriate time window.

Btw, you can buy pizza with gold, I guarantee someone will take your gold for pizza.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#186

Post by davidad_ »

rspeer wrote: post #106
aqme28 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too hate seeing __ watt-hours per year. What's the point of the double time conversion? It's like saying "The movie starts in 3 kilometers per mile-per-hour"

I mean, I understand why, it's because often you want to relate it to cost, and electricity is priced in $/KWh, not in ($/sec)/watt.

I do wish energy were priced per megajoule. But I suppose this is probably a symptom, like miles-per-hour vs meters-per-second, of the non-metrication of time units at the relevant scales. (It takes order of an hour to drive somewhere, and order of an hour to run a laundry machine.) If we had a metric hour of a thousand seconds, a kWh would just be a MJ, no problem. And if we had a "metric year" of a million seconds, a "TWh/yr" would just be a GW. Unfortunately, it's pretty important to humans to track time in a way that lines up with earth's rotation and revolution, and there's no way to make that metric. (If French Revolutionary Time caught on, a second would be 1e-5 days instead of 1/86400 and an hour would be 1/10 of a day, and that would be a start, but the year/day ratio is pretty intractable.)

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#187

Post by cgmg »

amelius wrote: post #86
amelius wrote: post #68

> Electricity consumed per transaction: 165 kWh Thats about $20 in the US. If a transaction is that expensive, how can this system even work for transactions with a value of that order? Are large transactions "sponsoring" small transactions? What happens if more people use the system for small transactions? Will BTC become unusable?

So, if you look just at transaction cost the system clearly cannot sustain itself. But as more people buy into BTC, the system keeps from collapsing. If you ask me, that's starting to look like a Ponzi scheme in disguise ...

That sounds like the opposite of a Ponzi scheme. You're saying it becomes more sustainable as more people participate.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#189

Post by aqme28 »

rspeer wrote: post #106
aqme28 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too hate seeing __ watt-hours per year. What's the point of the double time conversion? It's like saying "The movie starts in 3 kilometers per mile-per-hour"

I mean, I understand why, it's because often you want to relate it to cost, and electricity is priced in $/KWh, not in ($/sec)/watt.

That's an arbitrary price though. Instead of 10¢ per KWh, we could price it as 36¢ per megajoule.

It's the same thing.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#190

Post by cma »

hypnoce wrote: post #91
alister wrote: post #44

You can't compare Bitcoin to Visa. Visa is merely a payment sytem -- a means of transfer of money that already exists. Visa is not money. Bitcoin however is money. As well as being a payment system. The correct comparison would be to compare the cost of Bitcoin to U.S. dollars or gold. Gold requires hundreds of dollars per ounce and untold energy to extract. U.S. dollars require the existence of a powerful economy an…

>Bitcoin however is money. Bitcoin is not money as we think in a modern way. If you think of money a way to exchange goods then yes Bitcoin is money. Modern money (printed piece of paper labeled in currencies in its materialized form. Just a sequence of digits on your bank account) is dept. That's why currencies have interest rates (IR). It is also possible to create money out of nothing. IR and volume are adjusted a…

> Bitcoin is closer to a commodity in the sense that it is finite

Bitcoin could be forked in the future to become inflationary. It has no permanent rules, things can change through consensus.

It isn't like gold (gold can be devalued through poeple losing faith in it, etc., but the supply of it doesn't inflate other than through discovery/mining).

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