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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#641

Post by MereInterest »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #621
frongpik wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that if I send you $100 worth of bitcoins, the network would spend 700 kWh? I find that hard to believe.

Analyses like this just take the energy cost of each block of transactions and divide it by the amount of transactions in the block. If the number of transactions in a block doubles, the average energy cost per transaction is halved. Another way of stating it is "the marginal energy usage of a bitcoin transaction is essentially 0".

Except that there is a maximum number of transactions per block. Across the entire network, by design, there can never be more than 5 transactions per second. This is stupidly small. If people received their biweekly paychecks in bitcoin, only 6 million people could be paid without going over that transaction limit, assuming that absolutely nothing else is done using bitcoin.

The marginal energy usage being zero is another way of saying that Bitcoin wastes the tremendous amount of energy that it does even if nobody is using it at the time.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#642

Post by px43 »

zadler wrote: post #427
px43 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why only healthy incentives? Could they not equally be unhealthy ones?

First off, "healthy" is subjective, and open to the interpretation of the builder. Second, why would someone work to build unhealthy incentives? Seems counterproductive.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#643

Post by UncleMeat »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #603
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…

You are leaving out significant amounts of energy consumed in the legacy financial system. Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag? Where’d that come from? Etc. I’m not sure that any of this is meaningful in any way.

How many people go speak to a bank teller to transfer funds? My bank can give me a mortgage for my home. The banking system is doing way way way more than counting how much people own and shifting that around.

If the concern is the cost of brick and mortar banks then we can solve that with technology much more effectively than btc.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#644

Post by _0w8t »

newswasboring wrote: post #619
_0w8t wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency are inefficient by the design only at creation. But once mined, in principle with the right setup transactions can be arbitrary cheap. It is similarly as with gold. It is expensive to dig it once, but once a coin is minted, it can be used for millions of transaction making transaction cost rather low.

Actually your analogy is flawed. Because the way bitcoin works you have to pay some energy cost per block and you have a limited time to use that block because the next block will be coming in in 10 mins. It would be more like we had to make new coins every 10 mins. Or am I missing something here?

Bitcoin probably is not fixable, but other designs are much better at supporting cheap transactions. There is nothing inherently expensive in maintaining the block chain.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#645

Post by nulbyte »

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…

> That simply increases the ranges so that it becomes a 3600 mile trip. Or 1800 mile roundtrip.

It would still be 3600 miles round trip. A round trip is just a two-way trip; the driving distance is still the same.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#646

Post by sharpneli »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #603
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…

You are leaving out significant amounts of energy consumed in the legacy financial system. Those bills cost energy to produce. The bank had to be built. There was a teller there, did they spend any energy driving to the bank that day? Did you use a duffel bag? Where’d that come from? Etc. I’m not sure that any of this is meaningful in any way.

The Visa kWh figure includes all that. The office workers and whatnot. The source is Visa corporate responsibility data. https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... that's for 2019.

They include air travel and whatnot. Basically the whole energy consumption of the company. Also including building stuff etc.

Visa doesn't share that in order to poke at Bitcoin. They share that because enviromentalism is hip nowadays. So they want to tell how they're improving their CO2 emissions as a company.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#647

Post by wruza »

Time to add another thing to Drake equation: Fb - the fraction of civilizations who didn’t fall prey for proof of work consensus. Others are invisible, cause they are very advanced, but all they do is mining crypto for food. To eat a sandwich you have to prove that it’s yours and a consensus is that it costs few MWh. Small islands of non-crypto trust appear millenia by millenia, but they are slowly marked as communism and disbanded by military consensus. It would be much faster, if military smart contract balance legacy didn’t require a petawatt-hour to sign one resolution with all conditionals, involving century-long testing of its code. Thankfully these groups do not form too often, because when you’re born, there is already a set of smart contracts that your ggggg-parent signed for your kin to obey. Maybe your ggg-children will have a chance with other families, if they manage to meet in the same aeon.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#648

Post by bccdee »

parliament32 wrote: post #483
bccdee wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One bitcoin transaction uses FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES more energy than one Visa transaction [1]. This is like lighting a cigar with a $500 bill and going "what, I have to light my cigars somehow, and inevitably it'll cost something. I spend money to meet my goals." [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...

Compared to the cost of lighting a cigar with a matchstick, it'd be more like lighting it with a penny. Despite Visa transactions being cheap, bitcoin transactions are also very cheap -- you spend more power turning on your living room light for a few seconds. Probably best if we keep things in perspective. Further: https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-vs-visa-electricity-consu...

Okay, so the gist of that article is that bitcoin burns about a third as much energy as the entire global institution of banking, based on some extremely back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Bitcoin's current market cap is about $600 billion. There are quadrillions of dollars worth of capital in the the world, mostly managed by banks. Bitcoin remains EXTREMELY inefficient in comparison.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#649

Post by Weebs »

pixelpoet wrote: post #392
nickpp wrote: post #332

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos? As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs.…

I tried to make this point on Reddit, and was downvoted to a smoking hole in the ground by people who were complaining that they can't get GPUs to play games, and that it's not eco-friendly. Of course, playing games on high powered GPUs is super eco-friendly, as are many other ways of making money... Half of them think people are mining Bitcoin on GPUs, and almost none of them know about Proof of Stake coins. Not tha…

Yes, high powered gaming isn't eco friendly either, but can we please stop ignoring magnitude and utility in this thread?

You can power a typical US household for almost an entire month using the energy of a single bitcoin transaction. What utility does Bitcoin bring with that single transaction? Is it worth the measurable harm it's doing to our ecosystem and human lives?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#650

Post by aeternum »

lmkg wrote: post #557
kqr wrote: post #546

And this is not surprising. Cryptocurrency is designed to be anti-efficient. "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy." This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.

My issue with it is even more fundamental than this: it is structurally impossible for Proof of Work to become more efficient. If you find a more energy-efficient way to mine, the correct decision is not to reduce your energy usage, but rather to use the same amount of energy to compute more hashes.

By computing more hashes, you raise the difficulty for everyone else mining so you do ultimately push out the less efficient miners.
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