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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#801

Post by rawtxapp »

ketamine__ wrote: post #800
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 team that works on it isn't interested in making any upgrades. It's pure religion at this point. They would argue that a chunk of the energy is renewable -- so that makes it better.

That is not true, when you have billions of dollars at stake you need to be a lot more careful with the changes you're going to implement, otherwise, it would jeopardize the whole network.

There are many upgrades that have and are happening, some examples: segwit, schnorr/taproot, lightning network, etc.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#802

Post by madacol »

I think the real value in Bitcoin is its immutability. I don't think there's any piece of information in the world as immutable as the first bitcoin block mined by satoshi.

This property is what powers amazing projects like OpenTimeStamps (https://opentimestamps.org/), this will become an essential tool for notaries all around the world, seriously!, and this has nothing to do with number of transactions, this scales to O(1) (you only need one transaction to prove as many things as there needs to be proved). Previous to bitcoin existence I don't think there was ever a distributed way of proving a piece of information existed previous to X, and even if there was, it was probably centralized or much much MUCH weaker than bitcoin. There's just no replacement, not even a million years as effective as bitcoin is for this, if I'm wrong please tell me! I want to know!

Most people here in favor of bitcoin argue about inflation, I understand the reasoning, and I'm from Venezuela, I pretty sure understand that value, but that's just missing the point, immutability >>> inflation protection.

And if we go to the smart-contracts terrain, that's a whole other world of very diverse and unexplored possibilities of values

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#803

Post by kosievdmerwe »

wonnage wrote: post #784
jkuria wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At least gold is useful for something though

Gold also doesn't require constant electricity expenditure to keep it's value and "utility"z

A kilo of gold once mined is perpetual. A bitcoin needs the whole network to keep running (and be large enough so that miners can't collude) to keep it's value.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#804

Post by flopunctro »

vruiz wrote: post #704
flopunctro wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the grand scheme, the "tons" (or rather, gigajoules) of energy wasted by the Proof-of-Work are nothing. The Sun radiation that hits Earth every second dwarfs this consumption. Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death e…

I was going to point that the universe is not relevant here, only humans, the energy we produce and how we produce it matters. But then I realized that either your comment must be tongue in cheek or you are trying to hard to rationalize this than there is no point on try to convince you.

Okay, I admit my comment was a bit rushed, and I apologize for that. It's not tongue-in-cheek, and I don't feel that I'm rationalizing things (but then, I guess I wouldn't feel it even if I were).

I was trying to view things in a bigger picture. Ofcourse we are using too much fossil fuels at this time. Ofcourse our functioning is pretty unsustainable.

What I am trying to say, is that sometimes high energy usage is acceptable. Should we stop launching things in orbit? Should we stop the LHC?

I think that for _some_ people, having a thing such as bitcoin is worth the energy expenditure. It is perfectly okay that for you, it _isn't_ acceptable. I am not trying to convince you of anything. Just affirming that there exists a subset of humans that find value in it, and therefore are willing to allocate resources -- be that electrical energy, fiat money, or mindshare.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#805

Post by kybernetikos »

Rallerbabs wrote: post #292
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…

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…

> Follow the big money

I worry that companies like PayPal are interested in btc precisely because they know it won't ever threaten them.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#806

Post by 2112 »

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.

> "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 [...] is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.

This is my main beef with the system we live in already.

See ; Bullshit Jobs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_jobs

"Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that argues for the existence and societal harm of meaningless jobs. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, which becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth."

I am not contesting the Bitcoin situation is ... interesting.

(edit = comment layout )

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#807

Post by Rallerbabs »

NickM wrote: post #549
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…

Things will be priced in bitcoin. You mean like how things are priced in gold now? Oh wait, we got off the gold standard specifically because of its high short-run volatility. Hmm....

Gold never even moved to medium of exchange. It couldn't.

Bitcoin can. And then it can move on to unit of account.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#809

Post by somebodythere »

xorcist wrote: post #725
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

So far no one has shown in practice how to run a decentralized proof of stake network. How do you bootstrap a node in the face of conflicting history? How do you handle network partitions? There are also open question surrounding security, prevent actors from colluding and so on. Most other blockchains do not even bother. At least the Ethereum people have the ambition to have something practical. Let's study the desi…

You can make near-zero-cost ETH and ERC-20 transfers right now using L2 solutions like state channels and rollups. There are also a few POCs of applications like Uniswap running on L2.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#810

Post by siculars »

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…

This is the classic trap of "failure of imagination". Failure of imagination can be fatal in that it obscures your vision of the future due to your own biases, perspective and lack of knowledge. It is critical for people to seek out knowledge they do not possess and perspectives they do not have.
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