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Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

digiconomist.net

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Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#281

Post by Digiconomist »

maxerickson wrote: post #276
Digiconomist wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah no, it's 5.58 for the current 22%. If it actually gets to 60% it would be much worse.

If you aren't going to disclose your actual assumptions and methodology you should probably delete all the text that purports to do that. Will save people time.

Huh? It's all in the infographic. 60% is the target, but "production takes time" (see content here) hence the "ultimately". I'm not hiding the current number, it's in the key statistics.

If you're interested in where the 60% comes from in the first place > it's based on the lifetime costs of a number of machines. It was on the page a while ago, but the index page itself isn't a research paper so I removed it. I'll give it a new spot soon, probably on this page (already containing the foundation of the method):

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electricity-consumption

If you just want to see some real-world numbers, check out my break-down a farm recently:

https://twitter.com/digieconomist/status/898582265080446976

(Note: subtle difference between part spent on elec & part spent on ongoing costs. I take costs and then 1 kWh for every 5 cents spent, so including overhead.)

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#282

Post by Shorel »

rspeer wrote: post #215
Shorel wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do not believe that Bitcoin Cash is 1000x more efficient than Bitcoin. It is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.

It is not, each block in Bitcoin Cash can only hold 8x more transactions.

Also, and more important: it is not necessary to for it to be 1000x more efficient, because no cryptocurrency currently has such a big amount of transactions per hour. It would be more wasteful to support 1GB blocks when they would go empty.

But, and this is actually my claim, if volume transaction increases enough to saturate a Bitcoin Cash block, then they will increase block size, as many times as it is needed, as that is the proposed Bitcoin Cash strategy. In stark contrast with the Bitcoin 1MB blocks forever strategy.

(I am assuming you don't think efficiency is measured in watts per transaction, because if you do, /facepalm)

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#283

Post by maxerickson »

Digiconomist wrote: post #281
maxerickson wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't going to disclose your actual assumptions and methodology you should probably delete all the text that purports to do that. Will save people time.

Huh? It's all in the infographic. 60% is the target, but "production takes time" (see content here) hence the "ultimately". I'm not hiding the current number, it's in the key statistics. If you're interested in where the 60% comes from in the first place > it's based on the lifetime costs of a number of machines. It was on the page a while ago, but the index page itself isn't a research paper so I removed it. I'll gi…

Okay, I'll rephrase: An explanation of where each number in the table comes from would be more interesting than the current text.

It would also be useful to separate the table so that one contained the information meant to be conveyed by the index and another contained the impressive comparisons to countries and households and stuff.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#285

Post by vsl »

oh_sigh wrote: post #284
TomK32 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% in Hongkong, which is also where the most HKD are circulated.

OP asked "in the world"

If BTC was circulated in only a Hongkong-sized area, that would be a fair comment. It isn't, the area of its circulation is the world.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#286

Post by _coldfire »

etatoby wrote: post #76
homero wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the mining is done next to hydro plants in China.

Still, there is a fixed amount of hydro power available, short of building new dams. This puts Bitcoin's toll on fossil fuel. (If Bitcoin didn't exist, the hydro power would still be there and would be used for something else, therefore less fossil fuel would have to be burned in its place.)

There's huge energy oversupply in Sichuan province, you can't just keep storing hydropower infinitely, it has to be released to protect the dams.

All this outrage is misguided, the market incentives mean miners go to where the cheapest power is, all the industrial scale mining is located next to large renewables sources in China, Pacific NW, Scandanvia/Iceland.

The largest ethereum mine in the world is 100% renewable.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#287

Post by _coldfire »

spiorf wrote: post #115
politician wrote: post #23

This is one of the reasons I prefer proof-of-stake schemes, despite the complexity, low power consensus is preferable given roughly equivalent tamper resistance. State collusion with mining pools is a credible threat to proof-of-work schemes.

The problem with POS is that you do not have a mathematical guarantee of immutability. It costs nothing to try to stake on different blocks, and every counter-measure relies on the fact that the network is not partitioned. This would be fatal in case of a remote crash vulnerability, because an attacker could partition the network at will. Or a nation/state could cut internet access. Without real world energy, you los…

The only proven countermeasure so far is delegated proof of stake, which has "trusted" parties doing the staking. But this goes against the idea of decentralisation.

Some people wonder if pure proof-of-stake is even possible. Ethereum is likely going with DPOS, yet to see a single solution to the nothing-at-stake problem.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#288

Post by ForHackernews »

Buge wrote: post #259
ForHackernews wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever want to spend an asset that's increasing in value? Seems like a useful currency should be mildly inflationary.

Why not dump your entire life savings into it right now? Because there's risk, it fluctuates, there's no guarantee it will always go up. People need to decide to what degree do they want to invest and be exposed to the risk and reward. Say someone decides they want 1BTC of exposure, and are contemplating buying an item of 0.01BTC. Would that really be a big deal? Small changes in the degree of exposure shouldn't be a…

> Why not dump your entire life savings into it right now?

Plenty of the bitcoin true believers have.

Everything you're talking about makes sense for investing in a commodity, not for a currency.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#289

Post by mcv »

decentralised wrote: post #223
mcv wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a single bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power 5 households for a day, that certainly makes me not want to do any bitcoin transactions anymore. I knew it was wasteful, but this article is really putting it into perspective. And because of the proof-of-work system, the wastefulness is intentional; you have to prove you've wasted enough time and energy to be allowed to mine a bitcoin.

> If a single bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power 5 households for a day, Care to share a source for this claim? I think you might have gotten transaction and new block generation mixed there, but I may be wrong, of course.

I got it from the article, but several responses say that it's a misrepresentation by the article, and that more transactions would not consume significantly more energy.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#290

Post by SamBam »

alister wrote: post #109
IgorPartola wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare it to cash and coins seems the most appropriate. How much energy does harvesting cotton, making into bills, and distributing it all over the place take? Don't forget those fun armoired trucks that have to cart it from place to place. Pennies famously cost more than $0.01 to produce because of the cost of metal. Metal that has to be dug out of the earth, trucked, smelted, trucked, stamped, trucked again.

A literal comparison to paper bills isn't quite right. A small sheet of linen/cotton paper could represent $1, $100, or hundreds of millions of dollars (eg., a stock certificate of a million shares of Apple stock). You have to compare Bitcoin to the concept of money, like U.S. dollars, but not literally the paper. A comparison to bars of gold is OK however since that is money and not a representation.

> A comparison to bars of gold is OK however since that is money and not a representation.

Bars of gold certainly are a "representation" of money. They are only worth something so long as we all say they are. (Besides the little bit of intrinsic value from electrical wiring.) If people stopped saying gold was worth anything, it wouldn't be.

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