Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#411

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

celticninja wrote: post #244

CaptainZapp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except I'd put far more stock into gold coins (or gold in general) as a store of value. But that's just me.

And there are enough people that take the converse position, that allows bitcoin to grow

Don't forget the blatant price manipulation from exchanges and scammers! Search numbers show fewer people care now than ever and yet the price is pretty high. You should be surprised by that because the block reward requires $5.25B in new money to enter the market to maintain the price, and yet...

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#412

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

keymone wrote: post #394

noxer wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why exactly aren't you fine with that? You run a node and you decide which nodes you want to connect your node to. If such a node gets a Tx it will be relayed to your node and the other way around. It's not like your node would copy their validation and just agree with what they agree. Every node always enforces all the rules. So your node checks if a Tx is valid anyway and if you get invalid Tx from a node you trust…

> Why exactly aren't you fine with that? because i don't want to trust anyone. XRP is not trustless or decentralized enough. > Every node always enforces all the rules. So your node checks if a Tx is valid anyway and if you get invalid Tx from a node you trust it wont make your node accept that Tx. as i said - validity is trivial. i asked you to not bring it up but you did anyway. > majority of the validators say Tx…

> because i don't want to trust anyone. XRP is not trustless or decentralized enough.

And yet you trust the Internet to get packets to HN. You trust the government to administer the roads, the schools, the army, the police, the firefighters, and so on for days. The FDA to verify your drugs, Agriculture to verify your food.

You trust so many people every single day to make it through from breakfast to dinner, and yet this is where you draw the line for some reason you can't really quantify.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#413

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

trickstra wrote: post #292

danmaz74 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now the share of the world economy running on Bitcoin is negligible, yet its energy consumption is relevant. If that share became consistent, the price of Bitcoin would increase by many orders of magnitude, and mining bitcoin would become more and more competitive in relation to other uses of energy, and would increase in tune - that's why I say inordinate. PoW is just unsustainable by design.

Bitcoin's energy consumption is also by design self balancing - increase the price of electricity, less electricity will be used. With the same benefits for the network.

Not really, it's self-balancing with respect to the efficiency of the technology around it. As tech gets better, Bitcoin gets worse to compensate.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#414

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

reportgunner wrote: post #258

me551ah wrote: post #193

The most powerful supercomputer in the world reaches 143 petaflops, bitcoin network in comparison reaches 80704290.84 Petaflops. Granted that a majority of this computing power is in the form of custom ASIC's, but the figure is really staggering. And all of the 80704290.84 Petaflops, consume 73.12 TWh to repeatedly calculate SHA256 ! What could be the world's most powerful network does absolutely nothing but crunch h…

Big number scary. Orange coin bad!

If this is the level of intellectualism I can expect from the Bitcoin community the power consumption is starting to make sense!

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#415

Post by daniel_ameli » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:32 PM UTC

One bitcoin transaction is not directly comparable to one transaction on other payment systems. One bitcoin transaction can represent thousands or millions of transactions. It isn't fair to say bitcoin requires this amount of electricity. Different people all over the world choose to spend electricity to try to find new bitcoin. The amount of new bitcoin is exponentially decaying to zero. It's like telling someone their gold jewelry uses up too much electricity because someone they don't know is spending electricity to mine gold. Some amount of mining is necessary for the security of the network. Most global endeavors use electricity, whether it is traditional finance or video games. Bitcoin mining believed to be one of the greenest industries (a very high percent of electricity comes from solar, wind, and hydrolelectric). This is due to some of the cheapest electricity in the world being from green energy in remote places (and bitcoin mining is extremely portable)

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#416

Post by keymone » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:32 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #412

keymone wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why exactly aren't you fine with that? because i don't want to trust anyone. XRP is not trustless or decentralized enough. > Every node always enforces all the rules. So your node checks if a Tx is valid anyway and if you get invalid Tx from a node you trust it wont make your node accept that Tx. as i said - validity is trivial. i asked you to not bring it up but you did anyway. > majority of the validators say Tx…

> because i don't want to trust anyone. XRP is not trustless or decentralized enough. And yet you trust the Internet to get packets to HN. You trust the government to administer the roads, the schools, the army, the police, the firefighters, and so on for days. The FDA to verify your drugs, Agriculture to verify your food. You trust so many people every single day to make it through from breakfast to dinner, and yet…

What you’re saying is basically “things are horrible so why don’t you just bend over and let somebody fuck you in this other aspect as well”.

Yes, that’s where I draw the line today. Governments used to challenge our right to free speech and even right to live free - we don’t accept that anymore. In my opinion it’s time to untangle governments and money. You’re free to disagree of course and you’re free to entrust all sorts of strangers to make all sorts of decisions in your life, just don’t expect others to do the same.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#417

Post by cwkoss » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:46 PM UTC

aaron_m04 wrote: post #375

cwkoss wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the traditional stock market has significantly greater environmental externalities, even proportionally to net value. Greed creates waste in all venues.

I think you're comparing apples and oranges here. We're talking about just keeping track of who owns what amounts of a commodity. That part is using terawatt hours per year! I am very doubtful that the "keeping track of who owns what amounts" part of the stock market is anywhere near that.

One fairly-big sql database could do that.

Determining who has the rights to make changes to what data, auditing changes, auditing ever-changing access control rights, systematically changing these rules to adapt to technological advancements, etc. is the function which Bitcoin accomplishes that you are discounting from your perceived cost of the traditional stock market.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#418

Post by cwkoss » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:49 PM UTC

Kbelicius wrote: post #313

cwkoss wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what is the cost of the system which enables the USG to reliably prevent the execution of erroneous trades? Tens to hundreds of thousands of highly paid bureaucrats, accountants, risk managers, regulators, legislators, clerks, lawyers, law enforcement, judges, etc. Obviously the purely digital systems consumes more compute, but I think you're discounting many of the true costs of the existing system.

The system doesn't just enable the USG to reliably prevent the execution of erroneous trades. If you think that tens to hundreds of thousands of highly paid bureaucrats, accountants, risk managers, regulators, legislators, clerks, lawyers, law enforcement, judges are there just to prevent erroneous trades... It seems that you are discounting a vast amount of things that the system does besides preventing the executio…

Yes, I am being superlative. However the traditional system would not function without all those parts - bitcoin effectively accomplishes many of these functions with compute alone, while traditional stock market uses compute for a much more limited scope. I simply want to point out this vast discrepancy in scope of comparison.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#419

Post by zornado » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

Bitcoin is good for the economy because it encourages spending. It's better than having a electricity as a resource and not using it. Miners buy equipment which is income to the producer. Also increases employment in the power plant and the factory producing the equipment.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#420

Post by aey » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 8:16 PM UTC

spookthesunset wrote: post #198

aey wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is. There is no engineering reason why it’s so expensive to move numbers around in a bank. In comparison the search engine market is 170 billion. If a google sized company or decentralized network could reduce the 2 trillion global spend on payments to 170b, that would be fantastic regardless of how much it spends on preventing double spends.

Dude. That $2 trillion is all of finance. Finance is a hell of a lot more than preventing double spends (which don’t exist outside of bitcoin). On a per transaction and even global domestic product basis, the cost of our financial system is tiny. By comparison the cost of bitcoins financial system by any metric is astronomical.

Read the report, it's 2 trillion of revenue for payments only, not all of finance. That report doesn't cover trading, derivatives, mortgages, etc... 1 trillion of payments revenue comes from credit lines, about 1 trillion is fees moving money around.

Bitcoin is just one settlement layer. There is no reason for my day to day transactions to settle there. My day to day payments can be settlement on a chain with much higher throughput and faster finality and different security assumptions.

There is also no reason why I can't lend my funds to 100m user credit cards directly without a middleman through software either.

So whats the cost comparison of moving $100,000 out of China into the the US via bitcoin vs the traditional banking system?