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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

cbeci.org

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#981

Post by BelenusMordred »

Slartie wrote: post #925
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…

For some reason the Euro does not need all that "grossly oversized military" to be a proper, stable and usable currency. That alone kind of contradicts the entire grossly overstretched argument of this Nic Carter guy.

The European Union has a huge standing army if they were counted as one force? Over 1 million active personnel. The US by comparison has 1.4m and China 2.0m

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#982

Post by patchtopic »

mmoskal wrote: post #950
patchtopic wrote: post #911

A simple "back of the envelope" power use calculation of the possible power use of the bitcoin network, using the total hash rate from https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart ( 151.55 EH/s ) and assuming all Antminer S19 (110 TH/s for 3250 watts) gives me a total power use of 0.00445 TWH which is very different to the 121 TWH on the cbeci site.. even given the efficiency range of mining gear (like if s…

It's TWh per year, so you have to multiply your figure of 0.00445 TW (without H!) by 24*365.25 hours giving you 39TWh/year; I guess if you add cooling and different gear you can get to 120TWh/year. I agree it's kind of strange to measure stuff in TWh/year instead of just TW...

thanks! I missed that, yes now it makes sense, and is in the right ballpark.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#983

Post by amelius »

bobcallme wrote: post #897
amelius wrote: post #890

Bitcoin also enables ransomware.

> Bitcoin also enables ransomware. "Ransomware" has been a thing well before Bitcoin. Instead of Bitcoin, they would convince people to buy moneypaks or various gift cards.

Does that work on a large scale (automation), and/or with the large amounts of money like we have seen in recent cases in the news?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#984

Post by anigbrowl »

perfunctory wrote: post #852
anigbrowl wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I largely agree, the existence of volatile instruments (in the abstract) is a Good Thing in that it offers the possibility of rapid gains for people who are willing to accept risk but only have a small pile of capital, sort of like a poker game with no minimum stake (unless you want to treat the transaction fees as such). Where else can you take those sort of risks? Stock fads like $GME are notable for their ra…

> are notable for their rarity If you consider that there are gazillion crypto currencies, bitcoin is a rarity among them. How is it different from stocks?

I don't really understand your question. Lots of cryptocurrencies are very volatile, and cryptocurrencies are different from stocks insofar as they lack street addresses, SEC filings etc. (which is part of why they're so volatile).

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#985

Post by axiosgunnar »

lucb1e wrote: post #916
axiosgunnar wrote: post #618

When arguing with a Bitcoin-fanatic, try this line: "Yeah I agree that cryptocurrencies are interesting, perhaps some day one will replace the USD. It will probably not be Bitcoin, but rather some other cryptocurrency“. Watch how they recoil! For they have been found out, they do not actually care for financial freedom, etc., all these noble crypto goals which can also be achieved with a cryptocurrency that is not Bi…

> It‘s probably Yay, I was the 1%! Until I left in like 2015 when it became clear what a disaster it is and that it won't be able to fulfill its original purpose anyway. I'm very surprised the price is still soaring, shouldn't the best currency win? You seem to be right about the 99% idea, though the remaining 1% is not a true believer (you can't seriously be interested in the tech and miss this little fact) but rath…

What was it that made it clear it cannot fulfill its original purpose?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#986

Post by axiosgunnar »

charcircuit wrote: post #924
axiosgunnar wrote: post #618

When arguing with a Bitcoin-fanatic, try this line: "Yeah I agree that cryptocurrencies are interesting, perhaps some day one will replace the USD. It will probably not be Bitcoin, but rather some other cryptocurrency“. Watch how they recoil! For they have been found out, they do not actually care for financial freedom, etc., all these noble crypto goals which can also be achieved with a cryptocurrency that is not Bi…

I am sure most cryptocurrency fanatics understand that volatility is not a good thing for a currency and do not expect bitcoin to be the world standard for payments. Just because you won't end up paying your bills with bitcoin doesn't mean that bitcoin will be worthless.

Again, let‘s assume you are right, and Bitcoin is in fact 100% useful for doing X!

Are you happy? Sure you are, since being useful for X made the price soar!

...

Now let‘s pretend it wasn‘t Bitcoin, but some other cryptocoin that actually became the world's standard for X. Are you still excited? If not, you don't actually care about cryptocurrencies in general but want to make a quick buck with Bitcoin in particular.

This is the point I am trying to make.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#987

Post by esotericn »

bromuro wrote: post #833
esotericn wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send me money across the globe without a middleman or anyone being able to block that transfer. That's it. If you don't want that, you don't want that. Some of us do.

It doesn’t seem a good deal consuming so much energy for fixing that “middleman problem” - which I think it could affect 1% of the people?

If we don't stop using fossil fuels we are capital F Fucked, regardless of bitcoin.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#988

Post by madacol »

Nursie wrote: post #933
madacol wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scale…

If it was centralised, that's fine. Not everyone shares this decentralisaton fetish.

Why is it a fetish?, if something is centralized it means you need to trust that central party. Decentralization removes that dependency

In the bitcoin's case, to verify the immutability of *any block*, you only need some basic knowledge of cryptography, and all the blockchain after that block. You then need to sum all the proofs of work of every subsequent block and divide by the network's current hash power, that will give you the amount of effort (energy, cost, etc) needed today to create that amount of proof of work, and that's how you get a feeling of the mind-boggling immutability of bitcoin's block

In summary, you can, independently, verify how much work a piece of information in a bitcoin block has. You don't need to trust anyone

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#989

Post by tomxor »

andreygrehov wrote: post #979
tomxor wrote: post #878

A maximum of 178 things on the planet can consume >= to the electricity of Bitcoin. 99.44%/0.56% = ~178 (according to their estimate of 0.56% global use). So for the many comments invoking rhetorical comparisons: Bitcoin mining value per watt can be compared to no more than 178 things on Earth. Are we really saying there are only possibly 178 better uses for global energy than doing double SHA2 for no material value?…

You are comparing centralized entities to a decentralized one. I don't believe it's a fair comparison.

Being decentralized does not exempt it from value comparison, each node in the network serves the same purpose and is bound by the same rules.
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