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Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

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Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#31

Post by GBiT »

schwabacher wrote: post #18

The 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 th…

Well... Right now we have blocksize limited to 1 mb. If we will remove this limit and Bitcoin becomes a global currency, we can earn a lot from transaction fees. nChain estimates about 0.05 for a transaction if it will became us big as VISA. If you interested where is one youtube video talking about possible fees.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#32

Post by tradersam »

GBiT wrote: post #25
givinguflac wrote: post #3

That is an absurd amount of energy. This really changes my opinion on this being a feasible currency.

Energy is whats backing Bitcoins value. You need a lot of energy to create this valuable document - block

This is completely true; miners will mine the coin that gives them the best ROI. If Bitcoin's value decreases without an equal decrease in difficulty, the whole thing could crash quite fast.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#34

Post by virtuabhi »

mark024 wrote: post #15

demand & 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.

I think you are missing the point that the service which consumes so much energy should provide some value.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#35

Post by GBiT »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #7

Long term outlook for mining isn't good. Ethereum, for example, is moving toward Proof of Stake ( https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ ), and Bitcoin will become less profitable for miners soon, beginning with the activation of Segwit. The reason for the recent Bitcoin Cash fork, was that miners are terrified of losing control given the substantial investment required to maintain profitability. I…

Miners can choose to include more profitable transactions, skiping segwit ones.

POS will not work. you need to back Bitcoins value with something, and its electricity. Gov backing with gold.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#36

Post by rainbowmverse »

mark024 wrote: post #26
rainbowmverse wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been raising the issue of our civilization's wastefulness for years. Where have you been?

Don't remember seeing any article about how many houses we could power by not playing computer games.

A bit old, but it's one of the first results on Google.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/video-gamers-use-...

>> U.S. homes have about 63 million video game consoles, and together they use about as much energy as San Diego does in a year, according to a 2008 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#37

Post by politician »

GBiT wrote: post #25
givinguflac wrote: post #3

That is an absurd amount of energy. This really changes my opinion on this being a feasible currency.

Energy is whats backing Bitcoins value. You need a lot of energy to create this valuable document - block

That's a good point -- in earlier times slaves worked the mines to extract gold from raw earth. Gold was a good store of value because of its scarcity. Likewise, Bitcoin mines the electrical grid.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#38

Post by jstanley »

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.

Proof of Stake is just Proof of Work with hidden work.

Miners will crank whatever handle they can crank to increase their payout, up to the point where they spend more marginal effort cranking the handle than the corresponding marginal payout is worth. In PoW (in bitcoin) that handle is SHA256. In Proof of Stake, it's more obscure, but they will find it, and they will crank it, and you'll just be back where you started.

I'm not convinced PoS is a practical improvement on PoW.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#39

Post by TekMol »

schwabacher wrote: post #18

The 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 th…

    I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable
    about bitcoin can comment
I did and was quickly voted to the bottom.

    bitcoin can be competitive with
    centralized competitors like credit cards
In it's current form it can't. It's already running at max capacity. No further increase in transactions per day is possible.

If there will be a cryptocurrency that can handle as many transactions as Visa, it will be something else then what we currently call Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#40

Post by GBiT »

pedrocr wrote: post #22

Spending 800M$ a year in electricity alone to run a digital currency is massive and at 8$ per transaction seems incredibly inneficient. The comparison to the VISA network is incredible. Independently of your opinion of the value of Bitcoin in the long term the current network is definitely not more useful to society than the VISA network.

800M is not to run the network, its hard money. If 1 mb limit was removed today, this network can handle loads of VISA and more. Electricity is spent to create new blocks... Hard work is done to create new Bitcoin and verify transactions.
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