Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 109 posts

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#81

Post by jcranmer »

frankenst1 wrote: post #72
dale_glass wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Citation needed. A BTC transaction is currently estimated to take 821 kWh. That's ridiculous. > BCH is a scam. Not because they assume that the removal of the block size limit comes without any costs, but because it regularly splits after influential but narcissistic 'leaders' attempt to grab more power and because its community continues to justify deceitful tactics to promote BCH and trick people into buying BCH…

> A BTC transaction is currently estimated to take 821 kWh. That's ridiculous. It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)? >> BCH is a scam. > I don't care about any of that, actually. I'm mercilessly meritocratic in this regard, and in my case, merit == processing transactions…

> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)?

I've done the math before, but I've forgotten the precise results I came up with. The results are in the realm of "Bitcoin uses more energy than that which is used to produce all the US [maybe all the world's] currency." Like, it's not even close--I think shipping gold bars on an airplane may be more energy-efficient than Bitcoin now.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#82

Post by frankenst1 »

dale_glass wrote: post #77
frankenst1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A BTC transaction is currently estimated to take 821 kWh. That's ridiculous. It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)? >> BCH is a scam. > I don't care about any of that, actually. I'm mercilessly meritocratic in this regard, and in my case, merit == processing transactions…

> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? The current system, which is far more efficient. > a) it has low security (a collusion of only 0.5% of Bitcoin miners can perform a 51% attack on BCH) Not a critical issue, since evidently it's not happening. I'm not putting in more than I can afford to lose. > - b) the community and their 'leaders' continuously lie and mislead the public about BCHs perform…

>> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what?

> The current system, which is far more efficient.

You keep repeating that. Do you have any sources to back that claim?

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#83

Post by robjan »

neither_color wrote: post #57
jmfldn wrote: post #2

""If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity." "We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh. "For Bitcoin." He says it also limits the number of transactions the system can process to about five per second. T…

If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity. If you spent the entire US federal budget on a global reserve currency that worked without a military that's a net positive for humanity though, isn't it?

Cryptocurrencies will not remove the need for a military. Anything that can be bought by a Bitcoin can also be "bought" by force, often more effectively.

As an example, how could bitcoin being the reserve currency fix the South China Sea dispute? There are still multiple countries who want the islands.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#84

Post by briefcomment »

frankenst1 wrote: post #80
briefcomment wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have questions about the Digital Currency Group, Blockstream, MasterCard, and the former head of the Bilderburg group, but I'll need to read up on that in depth to come to any conclusions.

Don't forget Epstein and the Illuminati.

You think the likelihood of all these things are comparable? The president of the Bilderburg group literally provided the bulk of the funding for Blockstream. That should be considered with some seriousness shouldn't it?

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#85

Post by frankenst1 »

jcranmer wrote: post #81
frankenst1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A BTC transaction is currently estimated to take 821 kWh. That's ridiculous. It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)? >> BCH is a scam. > I don't care about any of that, actually. I'm mercilessly meritocratic in this regard, and in my case, merit == processing transactions…

> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)? I've done the math before, but I've forgotten the precise results I came up with. The results are in the realm of "Bitcoin uses more energy than that which is used to produce all the US [maybe all the world's] currency." Like, it's n…

Impressive, I wouldn't know where to begin. Could you expand on which items you included and how you decided on how they were weighted?

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#86

Post by frankenst1 »

briefcomment wrote: post #84
frankenst1 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Epstein and the Illuminati.

You think the likelihood of all these things are comparable? The president of the Bilderburg group literally provided the bulk of the funding for Blockstream. That should be considered with some seriousness shouldn't it?

> You think the likelihood of all these things are comparable?

Epstein contributed funding to MIT Media Labs which run the Digital Currency Group which provided funding to Bitcoin developers. Boom. Conspiracy confirmed.

Conspiracy theories are just like playing a game of six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The reason why you need to introduce large players like MasterCard or AXA or whatever is because the larger they are the more likely you are able to draw a connection to anything in the world.

Unless you can produce a falsifiable prediction based on your conspiracy theory they are no more than an entertaining drinking game.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#87

Post by frankenst1 »

BobbyJo wrote: post #40
briefcomment wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People just want an asset that can't be manipulated away. If it takes tons of energy, or if it totally changes power dynamics, or if we need to transact in different ways, then so be it. No one is going to give up the opportunity to own something like this for any reason. Regardless of whether people like it or not, they will have to adapt, since there is probably no viable way to stop something like this when people…

Blockchains would be easy to stop if governments wanted. The power footprint of miners is easy to find, and wallets and transactions are easy to trace. The reality is, if a blockchain ever got large enough and widespread enough to impact a host government's currency, it could be shut down probably overnight.

> The power footprint of miners is easy to find. it could be shut down probably overnight.

This only works for single large-scale miners after you raided all factories/households with above average energy consumption. Many small miners would continue to mine from home (with average energy consumption levels) while collaborating in a global mining pool.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#89

Post by tacotime »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #34
mareko wrote: post #9

Luckily there is a whole new generation of PoS networks that don't rely on proof of work. Some even automatically buy carbon offset credits to maintain a carbon neural footprint.

I've been reading about proof of stake cryptocurrencies for years, and how they will solve the problem of bitcoin's energy usage. Yet the problem persists. What will it take to end bitcoin's predominance?

Maybe something like Chia (chia.net) that "farms" from pre-computed "plots" as proof of work? There is still an energy intensive cost to the initial plot creation phase, but it is soon amortized by the low cost farming phase, where the precomputed proofs begin to do their work. As SSD storage is expected to become less $/TB than HDD storage in about 5 years, this could make for a very energy efficient PoW scheme.

I don't understand enough to know if it's a design decision or a technological limitation but the barrier to entry for something like chia also seems much lower, hopefully democratizing the ability to participate in the creation/validation side of the network. Chia requires a single ~100GB plot file (and 332 GiB scratch space when creating the plot) to start farming, which is a pretty low bar. I don't have to buy an expensive special purpose bitcoin ASIC and I don't have to stake the equivalent of 68,416.96 United States Dollar (32 eth) to get started and start contributing.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#90

Post by solnyshok »

DougN7 wrote: post #69

I keep wondering what would happen if bitcoin disappeared tomorrow? Would the world be swimming in excess electricity? Would prices all over drop because of over supply? I’m not sure, but I doubt it.

if, by bitcoin you mean "all cryptocurrencies" then we would get cheaper electricity, CPUs, and especially - GPUs.
Post reply on HN