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Comment by jamil7 | Hacker News Reader

Slide side track but I never get the complaints about power usage. It’d be great if crypto used less energy obviously but doesn’t fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?

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No. Proof of work is insane and uses too much energy by design.

I'd like to point you to this Vice article titled "One Bitcoin Transaction Consumes As Much Energy As Your House Uses in a Week". Meanwhile swiping a credit card uses slightly more electricity than a google query.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...

Does it not seem strange to you that if a BTC transaction costs $1 to $5 in fees, yet supposedly uses $50 or more in “actual” electricity costs, there must be a disconnect there?

There is energy in certain places (underground, hydro) that cannot be transported to wherever journalists are writing their papers as they spitball electricity calculations.

Miners don't just receive the fees. They also receive the mined bitcoins.

So the first article doesn't mention Ethereum and another article doesn't mention Hydro. This is why journalism has a bad wrap.

https://news.bitcoin.com/how-big-hydro-power-partners-with-b...

China’s southwestern Sichuan province, a mountainous region that is estimated to have over 50% of the Bitcoin network’s total computing power

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-rainstorms...

The amount of hydro electricity that can be produced is fairly static, so increasing hydro consumption means that other energy sources (mostly coal) are needed to pick up the rest of the demand.

Can you explain why you think fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?

Transporting physical currency requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure.

The same physical infrastructure that is also used for transporting just about everything else? Anyway, most currency transfer these days is digital, so even that doesn't hold much water.

We use armored cars and people licensed to carry firearms for the transport of "just about everything else"?

Also, most currency transfer being digital is a non-sequitor Businesses still need to move the money from their location to the bank regardless of the volume of transfers done digitally.

You are conflating fiat currency and physical dollars. The total sum value of physical currency is much less than the total amount of dollars in existence. Most dollars exist only as entries in a ledger.

A centralised system built around reputational trust will always use less energy than one where trust is derived from compute time.

No, it does not, visa for example uses about 500,000 times less energy per transaction.

Fiat also uses crazy amount of energy in absolute terms. But per-transaction costs are much lower for fiat.

Can you give some examples of ubititous systems in the real world which don't use crazy amount of energy in absolute terms? It would be helpful if you could provide an estimate for your notion of "crazy amount of energy" in terms of powers of ten kWh.

They pretty much all do, I didn't claim otherwise. This is not the argument you're looking for :)

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