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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#761

Post by rspeele »

aeternum wrote: post #650
lmkg wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's efficient if you define efficiency as hashes computed per watt. That's the metric by which less-efficient miners are driven out.

However, this does nothing for the overall energy efficiency of Bitcoin, which could be defined as transactions processed per gigawatt. If energy gets cheaper, that number only gets smaller.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#762

Post by jkuria »

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.

Mining for gold is even more inefficient. You've got dig earth several kilometers down, build massive infrastructure, use harmful chemicals to purify it, lose lives etc etc

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#763

Post by maclured »

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.…

> How much energy does watching porn consume?

Just about all of mine

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#764

Post by Nursie »

freerobby wrote: post #729
dsco wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Proof of space, too. See e.g. https://www.chia.net

Ugh, that seems like it just exchanges one form of waste for another. If it takes off the price of storage is likely to rocket in the same way GPUs have.

Let's not shoot ourselves in the foot, again, for another digital gold rush?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#765

Post by root_axis »

arithmomachist wrote: post #724
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.

At the very least the proof of work ought to compute something useful.

It can't be made useful because the output of a useful calculation can't be known in advance - otherwise it wouldn't be useful.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#766

Post by EastSmith »

nostrademons wrote: post #751
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…

Say you want to transfer a billion dollars 3000 miles. A billion dollars is 10 million Benjamins, which weighs 10 tons. You're not fitting that in a Tesla. More likely, you'll put it in an armored car and hire a few armed guards to go along with it. If you need to transport it overseas, you need a freighter (and a week) too. Now the energy cost of that Bitcoin transaction doesn't seem so bad. The institutional intere…

I can see smaller bitcoin transactions running on an alternative networks like Stellar, where assets (like bitcoin, USD, etc) can be issued by a trusted 3rd party.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#767

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

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.

Just like the mining rigs that produce bitcoin. It seems like you're conflating fixed costs (of plant and machinery) with marginal costs (of exchanging some amount of BTC vs fiat).

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#768

Post by nostrademons »

Aunche wrote: post #677
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…

The first paragraph is a fair consideration. The second is a complete stretch. It's not as if America would suddenly stop providing military support to Saudi Arabia if we suddenly switched to bitcoin. An America that historically used Bitcoin would be even more incentivized to "secure" fossil fuel nations.

Take a look at OPEC companies that have priced oil in other currencies:

Iraq started pricing oil in euros in 1999:

https://www.theglobalist.com/iraq-the-dollar-and-the-euro-5/

Iran started pricing oil in yuan in 2012:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-17988142

What's our geopolitical relationship with Iraq and Iran now?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#769

Post by rspeele »

paulsutter wrote: post #698
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…

Bitcoin uses electricity for security, not transactions. The transaction rate for bitcoin is basically independent of the hashrate

This is like saying my car's engine uses oil as lubricant, not as fuel. It's true, but I still have to change the oil every 5,000 miles. So I can still calculate the cost of oil changes into each mile.

Since transacting Bitcoin securely is the utility of the network, just as moving around is the utility of a car, it seems quite fair to judge the energy consumption of the network in terms of energy expended per transaction secured.

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