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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are.

If your concern is about avoidable energy waste, you'd need to have a bizarrely weird misunderstanding of the scales here to pick Bitcoin as your hill to die on.

It's like when people complain about how much water you waste by leaving the tap on while you brush your teeth while my dad has the water rights to waste 10,000,000L/year of creek water because he owns a single cow. People have such little understanding of the relative scale of everything, so they laser-focus on whatever inconsequential, concrete morsel that sounds good to them.

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> The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several million US households.

That seems like a lot, no?

We still need to move to fossil fuel free energy with Bitcoin being a huge energy user or not. It seems like a lot but money has to be backed by something, a percentage of the total processing power on Earth makes sense.

None of the things you listed are on the same scale if that 621KWh is true. What you should say is: "crusading against people who leave their a/c on for 2 months when they are away, people who drive 2500 miles for fun every day, people who run their clothes drier for a month non-stop even though it's empty".

Regardless, I would be sceptical about that 621 KWh. Does not sound realistic...

It's in the design. Higher price -> more miners -> increased mining difficulty (due to design goal – 1 block per 10 min) -> more energy waste. Bitcoin was a fun prototype idea, but humans made it just evil. As usual, though.

Does this lead to the energy consumption increasing over time? I'm not too familiar with the technology.

Sure, increased mining difficulty means you have to do more computations to find a block. Here is the graph https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty

It also means there is a huge motivation to decrease energy consumption per computation.

If you decrease energy consumption per computation you can afford to buy more miners which then leads to an increase in difficulty and you end up wasting the exact same amount of energy.

If a bitcoin costs $30k then the amount of electricity you can afford to waste is exactly... $30k worth of electricity. Higher energy efficiency is just a competition among miners. Less efficient ones have to stop mining.

If anything that is contributing more to energy waste because you have to periodically replace old miners and not every miner managed to break even on their less efficient hardware by the time the latest hardware became available. It's probably less significant over the long term though because eventually there is a limit to how efficient bitcoin miners can be.

This is why reward is decreasing periodically, isn't it?

If you have more hashing power you have more chance of earning a block reward to it's effectively a competition for each entity to get as much hashing power as quickly as possible. You can either make the hardware more efficient (and throw away old hardware) or increase the amount of hardware and therefore energy consumption.

The security of the network is proportional to the amount of work put into it.

If the network wasn't consuming absurd amounts of hardware and energy, anyone could waltz in and use a perfectly reasonable amount of hardware and energy to break it. So yes, it does need to constantly increase as fast as possible. If it ever increased less fast, someone could eventually exploit that delta.

> This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are.

You didn'tconsider that the things you have listed cost money. There is an incentive to reduce them to the absolute minimum because you would go broke if you leased commercial property and put 200 clothes dryers running 24/7.

Mining bitcoin is a profitable activity. You can afford to do that. The price of bitcoin dictates how profitable mining is. The higher the bitcoin price and transaction fees the higher the margins and that means you can buy more miners and thus waste more energy. There is no limit to how much energy can be wasted. Every time you think this is an insane amount of energy it can always get worse. Right now it is only at approximately 80 TWh. In 10 years it could be at 300 TWh. In 20 years it could be 1000TWh. There is no reason why this shouldn't happen.

Bitcoin doubled multiple times in the last decade. The value of a bitcoin could easily outpace the reduction in block reward.

This depends on your moral framework. A large part of moral culpability is proximity. How close are you to the issue at hand, and how easy is it for you to take/not take some action. For example, worrying about poverty in a country on the other side of the world, when there are homeless people sleeping on a bench on your street. I can't possibly convince a mega corp to stop wasting energy, but I can try and waste less myself. I can't stop people from using Bitcoin, but I can try and develop/advocate for better alternatives. When all is said and done, is it better to have shrugged and done nothing, or done what was within your power to do? "All we have to decide, is what to do with the time that is given to us".

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