Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index • Hacker News Board

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#711

Post by notahacker » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

yunesj wrote: post #696

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you compare the money (resources) spent bitcoin mining and the money (resources) spent operating the world’s central banks, then the costs are similar.

The world's central banks do not use more electricity than Argentina, and they handle a lot more money.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#712

Post by pimterry » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

Quite a few people have noted that this is a lot, but there are caveats (how much does the _whole_ banking system use, how much is cryptofinance worth to society, etc etc).

There's a more important point though: you can have cryptocurrencies without this horrendous waste of energy.

There are functional cryptocurrencies that are _not_ backed by proof-of-work, and don't have the same catastrophic environment impact. Notable candidates include Stellar (backed by Stripe [1], using a consensus protocol with a distributed web of trusted servers) and Cardono (which includes Ethereum-like functionality, using proof-of-stake). They're newer, and they will evolve further, but they're already functional and dramatically more efficient (by many orders of magnitude).

They're not even that niche: Cardono is #4 by market cap & Stellar is #12 [2].

There are interesting arguments for crypto being valuable, but there are very few arguments for Bitcoin or proof-of-work specifically is valuable (and for why the current price isn't a huge bubble). Burning this quantity of power is tragic and totally unnecessary.

[1] https://stripe.com/blog/stellar

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#713

Post by mdoms » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

janoside wrote: post #612

Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global…

On the other hand Visa actually works for its intended purpose.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#714

Post by Mc_Big_G » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

Are the calculations for traditional finance energy consumption accurate? Do they account for all of the physical devices required? Credit card readers, POS systems, banks, offices, credit cards, mailers, etc... It all requires an immense amount of oil and other resources to keep that machine rolling.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#715

Post by NickM » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

_0w8t wrote: post #613

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.

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.

This is completely incorrect. Transactions are processed as part of mining. You cannot simply stop mining and continue doing transactions for free; the whole point of the mining process in a PoW cryptocurrency is that mined coins are given out as a reward for helping to secure transactions.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#716

Post by chaostheory » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

dsco wrote: post #710

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.

There’s also proof of stake which requires a lot less energy. I think a lot of nuance is missed when discussing Bitcoin and its consensus mechanism as the only way of running a blockchain

When is that rolling out for Ethereum

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#717

Post by bcheung » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

Unless BTC changes to a "proof of stake" model like the majority of other new cryptocurrencies that are out there, it will see a large chunk of its marketshare replaced.

There's already a big shift from BTC to more technically sophisticated solutions like Ethereum (ETH).

tThe newest protocols like Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT) are even more efficient in terms of number of transactions that can be securely handled per second.

Bitcoin also suffers from long wait times because you need to wait for the current block to be finalized. The sheer amount of electricity required just to confirm a transaction is not a viable long term solution for e-commerce.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#718

Post by meowkit » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

moonbug wrote: post #514

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.…

> Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system. Really? give us a source, one who isn't either a grifter, a shill, or a criminal.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/2021/02/...

Bitcoin may not be around for ever if it isn’t upgraded to be more efficient, but public and private blockchains are here to stay and have real use cases.

You can be a salty Luddite if you want, but assuming proponents are mostly grifters, shills, or criminals just tells me you don’t have a clue.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#719

Post by bcheung » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #675

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.…

Oh, come on. All of those things, except for travel, draw roughly zero watts compared to Bitcoin. One Bitcoin transaction is about 750 kWh. That's enough to power a typical home for a month. It's enough to drive about 500 miles in an electric car, or (with vigorous handwaving based on EPA numbers) about 200 miles in an efficient gasoline car. Bitcoin uses about 1/3 the energy of all the datacenters in the world. Ther…

A transaction or a block? Multiple transactions are recorded in a single block. The massive computational power is used to certify and lock down blocks at a time, not individual transactions.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#720

Post by bcheung » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

gnramires wrote: post #524

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.…

The problem is that Bitcoin doesn't need to use this much energy. We've now discovered distributed consensus algorithms that don't rely on Proof of Work, so it's really quite terrible we still waste so much by using an outdated consensus algorithm.

A lot of the interest in BTC is driven by media and the fact that it is the oldest and original blockchain solution. The newer solutions like Ethereum, and even newer like Cardano and Polkadot are game changing because they use proof of stake instead.

Bitcoin can be used as a store of value (among other garbage text that people have thrown into the blocks as a joke) but the newer blockchain solutions also allow from "smart contracts" which BTC does not.

Personally I don't see why Elon Musk invested so much in BTC instead of things like ETH which are much better solutions and stores of value.