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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#501

Post by nprz »

janvanbergen wrote: post #302
Rallerbabs wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow the big money. Michael Saylor from Microstrategies: $1B. Elon Musk from Tesla: $1.5B. GrayScale: not sure how many dollars, but they own >550,000 bitcoins. Big money is of the opinion that bitcoin is an excellent store of value. Only a matter of time before it becomes a medium of exchange. And later on, a unit of account. By that time, you won't be asking yourself what 1 bitcoin is worth anymore. Things will b…

Bitcoin will never become a standard currency, it's slow, it has zero privacy (if I send you money once you can see ALL my transactions), it is EXTREMELY energy inefficient. Even if you believe crypto will one day become the standard (which I dont), it won't be bitcoin because there are better alternatives; proof of work is dumb, bitcoin has a finite supply of bitcoins, etc.

Other comments in this thread are claiming bitcoin makes it much easier to launder money. So which is it? Zero privacy or increased privacy and anonymity?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#502

Post by csomar »

baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…

Sure, let me help you: Apple, Amazon, Tesla and some third-world real-estate have made x100+ gains in the last 20-30 years. It's not the fact that you are getting old, but that speculating about future yield is a business.

There is no reason to speculate about Bitcoin, the same as there is no reason to speculate about real-estate land going up in Antarctica .

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#503

Post by UncleMeat »

onyb wrote: post #404
baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…

Once you understand Bitcoin, there's no way why you'd go back to the legacy system. It's not Bitcoiners getting freaking rich; it's them adopting a superior store of value that is being selected as the winner in a free market. Most people are perfectly happy entrusting their (fiat) money with the banks, and asking permission for accessing their funds. Bitcoiners, on the other hand, have tasted the freedom of self-cus…

These kinds of posts are so frustrating. "Blub currencies". They insist that everybody skeptical of BTC's utility must simply be ignorant. This is a deeply uncharitable way of discussing almost any topic.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#504

Post by amackera »

sharpneli wrote: post #440

At that rate and assuming 4tx per second a single Bitcoin transaction consumes 165kWh. A Tesla battery is bit over 50kWh. So let's round that to 3 full charges of Tesla battery. That's 350km/220 miles of range per charge. In total 1050km or 660 miles of driving. So basically if you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there…

The downside of driving your tesla with a case full of bills is that there's no immutable world-wide distributed record of your transaction making it irreversible.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#505

Post by Taek »

dieortin wrote: post #322
doctorwho42 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in your boat, when it was first explained to me in a hacker space at college when it was first growing and priced at a few cents per 100++ Bitcoin. All I could see was a waste of energy and resources (time, energy, hardware). It will always be a drain on society, and it scares me that it hasn't failed because we see it draining our GPU industry to the point that market prices have gone insane and availability is…

It’s not draining the GPU industry. No one buys GPUs for mining Bitcoin anymore, they use ASICs.

Even as just ASICs there's something of a drain, Bitcoin ASICs consume fab production which means less remaining production capacity for GPUs.

This is an equilibrium that should eventually fix itself, but while Bitcoin and crypto mining is growing they are making a material dent in the global semiconductor economy.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#506

Post by bccdee »

AnonsLadder wrote: post #373
doctorwho42 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in your boat, when it was first explained to me in a hacker space at college when it was first growing and priced at a few cents per 100++ Bitcoin. All I could see was a waste of energy and resources (time, energy, hardware). It will always be a drain on society, and it scares me that it hasn't failed because we see it draining our GPU industry to the point that market prices have gone insane and availability is…

You're looking at it from a totally wrong perspective. The U.S. government can print as much dollars as they want, whereas BTC cannot. The government does not care about green energy unless they can profit from it. To say that you did not buy BTC because of "wasting energy" is a very odd way to cope. You guys are so hung up on energy consumption, a meme, that you're forgetting the real intrinsic value of Bitcoin.

Haha wait wait, so energy consumption is "a meme," but having a fixed supply of money is apparently a totally good idea and not at all a meme. We don't care about deflation, we don't care about monetary policy, we want a gold standard where instead of gold we just burn absurd quantities of carbon. lol

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#507

Post by NickM »

px43 wrote: post #393
baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…

Hey there. I'm one of those people who read Schneier's Applied Cryptography in highschool in the 90s, and immediately recognized the groundbreaking potential of using asymmetric cryptography for currency. I work in information security, and have seen first hand how our existing financial infrastructure is held together with string and scotch tape. For 10 years or so, every time I heard about some big credit card thef…

I think you are very confused.

Asymmetric cryptography is a completely separate, much older technology that has nothing directly to do with cryptocurrencies.

Furthermore, Bitcoin does nothing to solve the kind of fraud problems you are talking about, and in fact makes the consequences of them much worse, since you no longer have a central authorities that can reverse fraudulant transactions and the like. The "double spend" problem refers to a problem in distributed systems, not applied security.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#508

Post by rapnie »

whoisninja wrote: post #447
dixego wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If maintaining the infrastructure for something a miniscule percentage of the world's population benefit from requires more energy than entire countries, surely it's worth interrogating whether the benefits outweigh the costs?

let the market decide then, step away- don't mine, don't use Bitcoin if you prefer gold mining uses tons of energy we knew automobiles will pollute the environment, why didn't we stop using them altogether?

The market is deciding. It is destroying our world. But for market winners there is no problem for a long time to come, while 'the market decides' ever more in their favor.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#510

Post by csomar »

Jonnax wrote: post #23

From what I understand bitcoin currently has a $20+ transaction fee with a transaction time takes 60 minutes+ With these issues in addition to the high power consumption, how will Bitcoin become a usable currency?

It's already a usable currency. You overpay the fee to get your transaction confirmed in the next average 10 minutes. You use lightening (though support is still limited) to have cheap and fast confirmations and you settle later.

Also, it's still faster and cheaper than an international SWIFT.

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