The idea is the switch to proof of stake will likely fix this particular problem if it works.
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Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#52Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#53What a ridiculous article. Household air-conditioning wastes energy. Running your television wastes energy. Serving up webpages for The Guardian is apparently a waste of energy. If the problem is that the price of energy does not encompass the negative externalities it creates, then we need a Pigouvian tax on it. The price rises, and miners reassess whether or not they are profitable in a carbon-neutral world. The au…
> What a ridiculous article. Household air-conditioning wastes energy. Running your television wastes energy. Serving up webpages for The Guardian is apparently a waste of energy.
All of these provide some form of value to the user. I have yet to see what value bitcoin provides over USD. Okay, so we now have another medium of exchange, so what? Why is that worth the 1000x energy consumption per transaction over payment processors like Visa?
All your examples, by the way, have gotten more and more energy efficient over the last 50 years. Bitcoin is going in the opposite direction for payment processing.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's zero. Exchanging banknotes or coins for goods or services does not consume electricity. Can't believe this was "sincere question".
Many bitcoin proponents believe that bitcoin can fully replace the current financial system so whenever the energy consumption problem comes up you should expect to hear someone talking about how much banks spend on air conditioning every year.
I doubt that they still believe that, as much as they are highly incentivized to claim that. Bitcoin is a disasterous enterprise as it continues to scale poorly. But hey, some people get rich (for a while) and others get to have a waking ideological wet dream, so who cares if it’s a tragic exercise in “printing” entropy and calling it value.
Whataboutism isn’t going to change that.
Besides, hasn’t the world suffered enough for the sake of grasping ideologues? Does everything need to be seen through these same bland lenses? This is a truly maddening and mad use of a currently limited resource with globally damaging externalities, and it produces nothing except waste heat.
If the average Joe really understood this, and just how modest the real potential of blockchain tech probably is, there would be lynchings.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#55This article is based on some incredibly bad estimates, and reaches an outrageously large conclusion. Let us assume that 100% of all mining rewards go to electricity (and none to buying mining equipment, paying employees, servers, or networking), and let us further assume the electricity costs $0.01 / KWhr, which is cheaper than one can buy basically anywhere. From flippening.watch, BTC paid miners $20,797,200 yester…
Your original point does not hold after correcting your 3-orders-of-magnitude error. The Guardian article estimates that bitcoin is on track to use 42 TWh of electricity this year. Your corrected estimate, 87 GW, is 762 TWh annually.
Your contention that the Guardian article made an "outrageously large" estimate of bitcoin electricity consumption is contradicted by your own estimate, after you fixed the units-conversion mistake in it.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#56Is there a reason the proof of work can’t do something more useful, like protein folding?
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#57fast forward to a Dyson sphere for crypto mining
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#58Is there a reason the proof of work can’t do something more useful, like protein folding?
Yes, it puts drug companies into unfairly advantaged position (as it gives them extra value) which centralizes the system, therefore decreases its security.
This is detailed in the original Hashcash paper from Adam Back
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#59Is there a reason the proof of work can’t do something more useful, like protein folding?
It might be possible if the work was provably altruistic. Otherwise, any value the miner gains will be factored into the cost of mining.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sincere question: what's the energy usage for e.g. USD or EUR? Using VISA transactions for fiat currency, BTC uses 5K times more energy per transaction than VISA. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is...
from the article you linked: > Of course, VISA runs call centers, offices, and a whole lot else on electricity as well, which isn't counted in this comparison. But those hardly matter due to the extreme difference between the two figures. --- I think this absolutely needs to be counted, because it is an operating cost of the entity. With bitcoin, there are no call centers because by design, the transactions are irrev…
Visa could easily declare all transactions irreversible and close down their call centers if it made any economic sense to.