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Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos?

As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs. Some are essential, some could be considered trivial. But they are all important for their consumers.

Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system. While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy, for much more trivial reasons.

Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

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If maintaining the infrastructure for something a miniscule percentage of the world's population benefit from requires more energy than entire countries, surely it's worth interrogating whether the benefits outweigh the costs?

I'm not against bitcoin anymore than I am against unnecessary taxation but since bitcoin uses electricity at an insanely unnecessary quantity it should be taxed to the hilt to make up for increased environmental and infrastructure costs that are borne onto the 99.999% that do not participate in the scam.

Tax the externality of actually burning carbon. That's what we actually want to discourage, right?

How much does it cost to maintain the dollar? It's reserve status is propped up through trillions of dollars spent on the military industrial complex. How much energy does that waste? Massive taxation on Bitcoin, simply because it's energy usage is easily calculated, is questionable.

Most of it is renewable energy.

edit: 39% of it, as in a lot of it and that number should go up as the world is phasing out dirty energy for cleaner energy sources.

Its really not[1].

> However, the CCAF’s report specifies that the 76% refers to the share of hashers who use renewable energy at any point. It estimates that only 39% of hashing’s total energy consumption comes from renewables.

> Behind hydroelectricity, coal (38%) and natural gas (36%) are the energy sources hashers favour most.

[1]https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-....

Only? I guess that if 40% of the worldwide energy production came from clean sources, all news outlets would count that as a massive success.

Yes. As they should. Its a much bigger achievement. I don't think these things are related.

Which could be used for... heating? Lighting? Cooking? Cars? Something useful?

While you might disagree with that, Bitcoin is useful.

@s1artibartfast, then it comes down to, who decides what's considered useful? In many ways, the market does, right? If it was useless trash, it wouldn't have any value, but that's clearly not the case.

I think that is the fundamental disagreement. Many people do not view bitcoin as doing anything useful. If it is useful, how does it compare to other solutions for the same problems.

This is for Raw transaction App person. What is bitcoin useful for? Laundering money out of China I give you. Do cartels accept bitcoin yet?

Genuinely curious, what it is useful for?

@ecommerceguy, for protecting my wealth against dilution by endless money printing, stimulus and bailouts of broken companies/banks.

I strongly believe that the current financial system is completely broken, so I'd like to opt out of it as much as possible.

You're free to do so, buy a plot of land and grab a plow.

Don't ruin the planet for everybody else so that you can sit on your un-diluting hoard of tulips like a dutch dragon.

I think most of that is hydro-power or geothermal energy, as in some situation, these produce excess energy locally at times.

This is not the same as "renewable" energy, it's locally bound opportunistic energy. Hydro- and geothermal power is limited and almost exhausted already. These power sources are not chosen because they are ecologically neutral, but because mining is portable and can opportunistically use temporary cheap sources, like hydro-electrical dams build before the intended consumers arrived. Nothing in Bitcoin inherently favors sustainable energy sources, over cheap supply. In the coming years, we will have to bite the bullet and chose very expensive endeavors over what the market suggests. Bitcoin doesn't fit this future. It's suggested "value" is nothing compared to humanity's survival.

The issue is that energy is largely fungible, at least when limited in space and time. Occasionally renewables are over-produced and can't be transmitted elsewhere, but often every kWh of green energy wasted on bitcoin mining is a kWh of non-renewable energy that has to be created to meet other demands.

> interrogating whether the benefits outweigh the costs

What does this mean, in practice? Who investigates and what is the outcome?

Do the things OP listed above warrant a similar investigation?

I don't think it matters who you ask to investigate it, everyone except bitcoin users themselves will realise that it's an absurd waste of electricity, for very little added value.

Again, reading the original comment, you can apply your very same line of reasoning to " Playing video games?" or the rest of the examples. Should all the people who don't play videogames also get together and ban gaming because they themselves don't benefit from it and it consumes "too much"?

Why do you stop taking into account scale? Gaming as a whole does provides entertainment to a large number of people and thus consumes large amount of energy. While bitcoin is providing benefits (real or imagined) to a very small fraction of people and consuming more electricity than a _whole country_. If red dead redemption was played by 10 people but consumed electricity equivalent to 100 people's daily life then we would be talking about regulation there too.

BTW, afaik bitcoin has 5million users and Argentina's population is 44 million. Also, this energy consumption by 44million people includes all the activities you can think of to add to this argument.

Scale does not inherently excuse. Energy for gaming could be routed to feeding/warming the poor; should 100 die of starvation/hypothermia so that 1,000,000 can play Fortnite? do you really want to continue such reasoning?

Yes I do. This is why my country had a space program before we solved all our social issues. You need to look at how much good an activity actually does vs how much resources it will consume. Entertainment is a good thing so is space exploration. But ISRO did not consume more resources than all other social improvement plans combined. Bitcoin is consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country. _Combined_

Gaming is also consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country __Combined__. Entertainment is a good thing, but watching a movie consumes a lot less resources than playing games so why are games acceptable? What about VR? VR uses a lot of GPU computations for something a small fraction of people use. Surely people playing VR could use some other form of entertainment that is less resource consuming.

Or then we let people use their own resources the way they see fit.

in your example 100 bitcoin users would let a million of people die of starvation/hypothermia so that they can play blockchain.

scale in general does not excuse, but consumption per capita should.

A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour

If you keep it on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is 876 KW/year.

Which is not very much.

At 120Tw/year with 5 million users BC consumption per capita is an astonishing 24,000kw/year (or 24Mw)

Every bitcoin user consumes 27 times the energy consumed by a (quite powerful) gaming console turned on non stop (which is never the case)

That's why there have been campaigns around the World to replace incandescent bulbs with the energy efficient ones.

Compared to the traditional ones the new light bulbs can save up to the 80% of the energy, compared to a bitcoiner, a non bitcoiner can save ~97% of the energy by simply playing videogames.

> A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour

You need to take in the manufacturing costs, costs to develop software, costs to run servers too, otherwise you're only measuring marginal energy consumption for a new user.

Marginal energy consumption for a new Bitcoin user is probably small too.

No you really can't. Gaming employs large amounts of people, sustaining economic growth as well as innovation (GPU development was originally sustained by demand related to gaming) . Bitcoin has little economic impact relative to its energy use.

The money spent by interested parties indicates otherwise.

Feel free to present a case where the economic impact of gaming is less than Bitcoin (feel free to include every crypto-currency ever made in that comparison).

Market caps in speculative, unregulated markets aren't indicators of economic relevance. Gaming facilitates billions in production on a yearly basis. Crypto related activity produces very little in comparison. And no, someone buying billions worth of Bitcoin doesn't count (just like people buying GameStop stock doesn't reflect the economic impact of the gaming industry).

Don’t move the goalposts. Bitcoin has little economic impact relative to its energy use you wrote. Oh, but it does. Miners created something of value, others bought with real money substantially greater than the cost of creation - and durable enough to resell indefinitely (with mundane care & handling). The only ones fit to establish “economic relevance” here are those who actually bought Bitcoin, with an estimated total resale value of $650B. Picasso's Les femmes d'Alger was sold for $179.4 million in May 2015; the economic impact of Pablo painting for a few days was indeed enormous. Those vs gaming, where while making/marketing games is profitable the tremendous energy going into playing them produces no lingering resale value of any form.

Your point is true until it's not true, or Bitcoin fails.

You could make the same argument about any nascent technology that hasn't succeeded or failed yet.

Rather than a case, how about a framework to evaluate going forward: the market. Given enough time, I'm pretty sure the market will root out the "real value" of bitcoin and keep assessing the "real value" of gaming.

Let's watch for 5-10 years. If you're right about bitcoin, I bet its price will be much lower and you can gloat. If you're wrong, I bet its price will be much higher (because I agree with the basic assessment that gaming "feels" much bigger today). Luckily, we can both place our bets based on our best assessments of the future.

How confident are you that you can present a substantive case against bitcoin that matches the diligence that Ross Stevens has done for years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lczPTYf_tvA

Money spent by interested parties only indicates that there is money to be made. It doesn't mean anything about the usefulness of bitcoin.

I think video games are a silly waste of time but I don't necessarily want to outlaw it. If playing one round of Mario Kart consumed several megawatt hours of energy though, I don't think anyone would want it to be allowed.

This is the slippery slope logical fallacy.

We already do apply such laws. Car manufacturers are required to sell a certain number of EVs. Emissions must meet standards. Appliances have energy ratings. etc. etc.

If Bitcoin were regulated so that those using the excess output of hydroelectric or other fixed output systems could do so for free, but everyone else was taxed appropriately, then that would actually probably do very little because that is largely the situation already: far from being an anonymous decentralized anarcho capitalist future, it is just large organized crime syndicates in China and Russia generating the transactions. And for all these reasons, the US should make it illegal.

So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources? You can't see the issue with that?

And that still doesn't really answer whose job it is to ban all these things, and what mechanism would be used to enforce it.

> So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources? You can't see the issue with that?

There is a difference between majority not liking and only like 0.2% of the world consuming more energy than _a whole country_. There are 5million bitcoin users, they are consuming more electricity than 44 million people's daily lives. Think about the scale of imbalance here.

While the phrase "a whole country" sounds dramatic, that doesn't really put the usage into perspective compared to those other examples.

For example MGM claims their properties in Nevada consume 171 MW. That's more than 65 of the countries from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Let me rephrase that. 5 million people are using more energy for small parts of their daily transactions than 44 million people in their entire daily lives. Sounds pretty dramatic to me. Even if we say that the argentinian electricity consumption is 10x lower than anywhere else, it will still be 5million people's partial amounts of transaction and 4.4 million people's daily lives (which includes all the transactions they make daily).

It is good practice to question if a technology is worth the social cost of wasting so much electricity. This is literally how Bitcoin is built, as it keeps growing, it keeps consuming an insane amount of electricity, for a very little amount of transactions per day. This is call ethics, doesn't mean it should be illegal, but there is value in questioning it and investigate if perhaps there are better solutions than wasting energy.

If the majority is 99% and that other fraction of 1% use an ENORMOUS amount of resources on their hobby, then yes it is reasonably to consider making it illegal.

You conveniently omit the social cost.

Enforcing could be done via banning any payment with bitcoin.

Well not really. Most people buy coins because they believe the price will climb and never use them for buying. For the retailers who accept bitcoin many are in smaller countries where the law wouldn't apply and many semi-legimate uses (ordering weed by mail) would continue to accept payment this way because their activity is more illegal (carrys a bigger punishment) than the new bitcoin law would.

What is the point of BTC price climbing if you wouldn't be able to convert it to cash or pay for goods?

> So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources?

If they produce a net negative for the majority and only benefit a small number of people, then yes.

We don't go around driving tanks, do we?

I love tanks, but there's a reason why we can't drive them to go to the mall.

"for very little added value"

That's an awfully subjective claim and one I find to be contentious. I think even today Bitcoin's impact on global politics has already provided massively more value to global society than all of the resources it has spent on electricity.

What positive impact on global politics is it that Bitcoin has had that motivates all the energy spent?

Money laundering

> Who investigates and what is the outcome?

The public? Something that benefits a few at the expense of the many is the canonical case for regulation.

(I don’t think we should ban or even really regulate Bitcoin. Not at this point.)

> at the expense of the many

I think you've misunderstood something. Those people are buying their own electricity...at their own expense. So, you want to bring arbitrary restrictions to electricity - as if we didn't have enough issues with net neutrality already.

The market could solve this problem properly if there were a global carbon tax, but unfortunately, there isn't.

Assuming bitcoin is using carbon poluting sources. Some of the bigger miners in China use hydro/dam energy. The miners in Iceland are using geothermal.

from @umanwizard:

>The market could solve this problem properly if there were a global carbon tax, but unfortunately, there isn't.

"Solve it"? How so? Crypto mining is largely powered by renewables (40% according to one source in Sep 2020). It is a race to find the most energy efficient way create power to make it worthwhile to mine, which has some positive effect on society by driving innovation. No idea if that is a net positive, but this is not black and white issue at all the way many here are framing it.

> Crypto mining is largely powered by renewables (40% according to one source in Sep 2020).

That’s one source and less than half does not mean “largely” in standard English usage. More importantly, almost nobody uses Bitcoin so a key question would be how that’d change if usage could be scaled up to, say, even 0.1% of daily transactions.

For bitcoin to use an equivalent amount of carbon as visa per transaction, it'd need to be 99.9999% powered by renewables and visa would need to be 100% powered by fossil fuels.

Except that most of the energy is subsidized by China or other countries.

Ah, so they are paying for the adverse effect on the climate. That's alright then. /s

We have solar power, hydroelectricity, nuclear power, wind turbines...if the mere fact of electricity existing has an adverse effect on the climate, I can tell you one thing:

It's not bitcoin's fault.

Cool. 63% if electricity still comes from fossil fuels: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix

So, ca. 76 of those TWh/year are still carbon heavy.

Yes - nowadays I think pretty much everything that uses a lot of energy comes under scrutiny, and, in particular people look to see if the same outcome can't be achieved with less energy

That’s...what money does: evaluate supply vs demand, identifying the relationship of value between options, decided by those with a vested interest. Such a system inherently evaluates cost vs benefits in a holistic networked manner (vs wishful thinking by the uninvolved).

let the market decide then, step away- don't mine, don't use Bitcoin if you prefer

gold mining uses tons of energy we knew automobiles will pollute the environment, why didn't we stop using them altogether?

The market won’t decide optimally because the costs (climate change) are socialized across the whole population but the benefits are not.

It’s basically saying if you don’t like pollution don’t pollute, which is flawed in ways I don’t have to explain.

The Personal Responsibility Vortex is a decent explanation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjNRtrZjkfE

ya then debate about it, write about it, learn about it

may be you are right , may be you're wrong

just don't be too sure that you know better than most

But then again, gold actually has legitimate uses that benefits most people (electronics).

Automobiles pollute, sure, but the vast majority of people benefit from vehicles.

But what, if any, benefit does bitcoin offer to the public - other than being a speculative asset?

We have several times more bars of gold than the amounts used for industry/jewellery, we could have stopped mining it decades ago if that was a serious argument.

yes, keep learning

gold is not that useful in utility sense tbh, less than 10% is industrial use.

Being able to store their wealth without being affected by the endless money printing is the benefit.

We should spend money creating public transit infrastructure to reduce the useof cars in urban areas. Not only is it more efficient in terms of transportation, it wastes much less energy and emits much less CO2. The fact that we haven't is a policy failure.

Incidentally, why would we ever let the market decide when the market consistently throws externalities under the bus?

I will agree with "letting the market decide" on the energy expended in Bitcoin when there is an effective and globally enforced carbon emissions tax that adequately compensates the potential damage caused by these emissions.

Other industries and activities, such gold mining, automotives, food production, tourism, etc., must of course also be covered by said carbon tax. However, what makes Bitcoin particularly noxious compared to them is that it intrinsically carries a financial incentive to expend more energy as time moves on.

The market is deciding. It is destroying our world. But for market winners there is no problem for a long time to come, while 'the market decides' ever more in their favor.

We are lazy.

The original Model T could run on ethanol (not perfect, but better than gasoline in many regards for pollution, and back then IDK if they would have noticed) and Henry Ford was fond of the idea of biofuels; at the time I think he was fond of Potatoes for the purpose.

I wouldn't attribute this to only laziness. At the time people weren't yet aware that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change. It's also pretty cheap to just pump fossil fuels out of the ground. On the other hand, people back then did know that fried potatoes taste quite good. And you can turn them into vodka too.

The problem with biofuels derived from crops in that era is that people were actually starving to death on a regular basis.

Capitalism always seeks a very local optima of maximizing profit with absolutely no question about the cost of "externalities". I put that in quotes because on a finite planet (that at the dawn of industrialization felt infinite) there's no true externality.

Energy is how our society is able to maintain its existence and current quality of life. If you over extended that energy usage you are looking towards total collapse of that system. That's what "unsustainable" means, that the system cannot be sustained in it's current state indefinitely.

We already rely on fossil fuels to over extended the carrying capacity of the planet for humans by nearly and order of magnitude. Ignoring climate change and other sustainability issues, the inevitable end of fossil fuels would mean billions of lives lost, even if we were able to stabilize the current global population.

I suspect, ultimately we will learn that humans are no different than bacteria in a petri dish: completely unable to do anything but consume all available resource even at their own eventual peril. But if you have any hope that we as a species can avoid the fate of any other species placed in a similar situation, then you, at the very least, have to recognize that "markets" can't solve this problem.

What you are talking about is a typical Malthusian understanding of reality. At some level, there are physical limits that cannot be exceeded. On a practical level, those limits are vastly beyond what we can currently comprehend or use, and the entirety of human history is a testament to doing more and more with less and less. (With blockchain technology being a notable exception of always doing the same amount of stuff with more and more resources)

Also, as a small aside... the concept of an externality is not about pollution or waste. It is about a cost that is imposed on people other than the individual responsible for the cost. The finitude of the planet is immaterial to the existence of externalities.

But how do you set differential electricity prices by type of use? That seems nightmarish to try to enforce. So you criticize the miners, but what can actually be done about it?

We do that somewhat by limitations in the grid itself. A simple example is that different kind of outlet you use for your washer dryer machine.

The kind of outlet one sees for 240V is to keep you from plugging your 120V iPhone charger into it, not because it's any kind of limitation on the grid. You can have European-style (or Australian, or Vietnamese, or...) outlets in your U. S. house if you like, and pull 220V out of every outlet in your house, you'll just have to do a ton of rewiring. (Theoretically; if I've forgotten something, it's because I've never heard of anyone converting a U. S. house to use non-U. S. appliances.)

Agreed, but there's more to it I think. The primary design goal of the system is don't accidentally start a fire or electrocute yourself. The other effect however is the inverse, a mechanism by which the power company can come up with the right distribution of transformers to get the power to your home. If you have not been wired by an electrician to handle that much electricity, your block may not be sufficiently wired and fused to deliver that much. Because presumably the electrician checks such things before putting buildings on the grid.

Is there such a thing as a 120V-only USB charger?

Well, if we're going to get all pedantic and stuff, I'm pretty sure those old iPhone chargers came with a non-swappable U. S. 120V plug. But for the life of me I can't find one lying within arm's reach at the moment.

What's different about it? All my 230v devices use the same outlet and plug. Or is that on a different voltage and current, power rating alltogether?

If you don't have a 240V circuit handy you can just find two 120V circuits on opposite phases and wire them together

> a minuscule percentage

This is true right now considering how nascent this is, but what happens if adoption picks up?

One thing I’d like to see discussed is what the marginal power cost of Bitcoin is. From where I sit, the vast majority of power consumption is fixed per block, and occurs regardless of whether you have 1 or 10,000 transactions.

Bitcoin is valuable even if adoption never does pick up. It's a money system with certain properties that can't be found anywhere else, and it's a money system that's that's half decent.

The existence of Bitcoin forces all other money systems around the world to be at least as good as Bitcoin, or citizens will flee into Bitcoin.

Bitcoin adds value simply by existing, even absent serious adoption.

How many products and services are bought every day with conventional monetary systems?

How many products and services are bought every day with Bitcoin?

I suspect BTC will have as much impact on conventional currencies as a fly landing on an aircraft carrier.

Bitcoin also spends about as much money as a fly landing on an aircraft carrier. Sorry Argentina, but you just don't use that much electricity in the context of the global economy.

Companies like Tesla are buying Bitcoin, not because they intend to transact with Bitcoin but because it gives them protection against inflation within the US economy, and it gives them a stash of money that cannot be forcibly shut down, allowing them to do business even in jurisdictions that don't want them there.

If you are looking at just the "products and services" you are missing the forest for the trees.

There’s so many things wrong with this comment.

Until people start accepting bitcoin for bread, rent and salaries, Tesla most certainly does not have a “stash of money that cannot be forcibly shut down”. It has something that might be able to be exchanged into a local currency to buy those things.

What’s more, that stash of bitcoin most certainly could be forcibly shut down at the stroke of a pen. Tesla is a public US company listed on a US stock exchange. If the USA decided tomorrow to criminalise BTC, Tesla would be left with a huge 1.5bn hole in its accounts and a huge number of very pissed off investors.

Moreover, if Elbonia doesn’t want Tesla there, how in the hell are Tesla cars going to arrive at ports? How are they going to be registered? How are Tesla going to deploy charging infrastructure? BTC has exactly squat to offer in terms of dealing with jurisdictions that don’t want them there.

BTC isn’t some magic wand that lets you operate in a fairy dimension where none of the rules of reality apply.

Just because Tesla doesn't have the ability to sell cars in Elbonia doesn't mean they don't have some form of commerce requirement with Elbonia. Maybe they are paying devs to work on the UI, or paying a computing company to run simulations.

Bitcoin is already accepted by many for rent and salaries. Bread is not likely to ever happen because transactions are too inefficient, but that doesn't mean you can't viable have an economy based on larger exchanges.

I often wonder if the release of Zelle around 2017 (near instant, fee-free transactions between personal and business bank accounts between certain US banks) was motivated by a perceived crypto threat.

I mean, that’s been pretty standard in every country I’ve dealt with outside the USA for a long long time.

If anything, I’d say that’s more a reflection of the poor state of the USA banking sector than its currency.

vs the rise of Venmo and Square Cash?

The power consumption is linked to network size and has nothing to do with the block itself. If anything the marginal power cost is linked to the price of a Bitcoin, as the higher it climbs the more incentive to mine, the greater the competition and therefore the greater the mining difficulty/energy required. The only way to really lower energy consumption is to lower the price I can get for a Bitcoin but with the current economic conditions I don't see that happening anytime soon.

How is power consumption related to network size? I agree that the power consumption of the network is directly related to the value of the bitcoins mined (and I supposed the transaction fee/tip size).

I think by 'network size' the GP is referring to the network hashrate.

For proof of work networks to function securely, the network as a whole must have a much higher computation rate than an attacker.

Obviously capabilities increase the whole time, so the bitcoin network needs to be able to adapt - to do this, it adjusts its 'difficulty' approximately every two weeks. The power usage corresponds directly to the difficulty level set by the network.

If you add more miners, the difficulty will increase, and power consumption will go up, if miners leave, the difficulty will decrease and power consumption will go down.

Network size increases competition to mine blocks faster, leading to demands for higher hash rate, leading to higher power consumption.

That's not how Bitcoin mining works.

A certain amount of bitcoin -- the amount determined by a schedule that was defined before the network became operational -- is given as a mining reward every 10 minutes. The incentives of the individual miners is such that the expenses of the miners (collectively) equals the mining reward -- and the major mining expense is electricity.

If the mining reward is cut in half, the electricity consumption of the network is cut in half, too.

In contrast, if the rate of transactions changes or the number of miners change, electricity consumption stays the same. (More precisely, the expenses of running the network equals the mining reward plus any transaction fees, and since the blocks are of fixed size, for more transactions to compete for space in the blocks increases transaction fees, but I am guessing that transaction fees are currently a small fraction of the mining reward.)

I think you are _very_ mistaken.

> If the mining reward is cut in half, the electricity consumption of the network is cut in half, too.

That's not true it all -- there is no difficulty adjustment when the reward is halved. There may be pressure on some miners to stop mining, but that adjustment is not immediate and can also be compensated for by change in the price of bitcoin.

> In contrast, if the rate of transactions changes or the number of miners change, electricity consumption stays the same.

Given the network is operating at peak transaction rate already, there's not much change here. Neither block size nor the transaction count has a meaningful affect on the computations required to "solve" a block. The merkle tree for the transactions is computed once, but most of computation is finding a nonce, that combined with the rest of the block header, produces a hash with a certain number of leading zeros.

Changing the block size or transaction count doesn't meaningfully change electricity consumption.

It is how the mining works from a bird's eye view.

> A certain amount of bitcoin -- the amount determined by a schedule that was defined before the network became operational -- is given as a mining reward every 10 minutes. The incentives of the individual miners is such that the expenses of the miners (collectively) equals the mining reward -- and the major mining expense is electricity.

The 10 minute rate is true, but the expense is not collective. I as a miner am in active competition with my fellow miners and am incentivised to find ways to decrease costs (electricity), but only mine. In fact it would be in my best interest to increase the electricity cost of a competing miner in order to force them off the network, and if I win the block it is only my personal power backing that block.

> If the mining reward is cut in half, the electricity consumption of the network is cut in half, too.

Not necessarily. If the reward is cut in half but the price of BTC has risen considerably since starting mining operations then I will remain on the network as the profit is sufficient to continue. This is why the "halving" event that Bitcoin goes through has never had a major impact on either the price of BTC or the scale of mining operations globally.

> In contrast, if the rate of transactions changes or the number of miners change, electricity consumption stays the same. (More precisely, the expenses of running the network equals the mining reward plus any transaction fees, and since the blocks are of fixed size, for more transactions to compete for space in the blocks increases transaction fees, but I am guessing that transaction fees are currently a small fraction of the mining reward.)

This is very wrong. The expense of running the network is equivalent to all the energy burned by the entire network in order to find the next block. This isn't felt by the individual miner in any way other than a potential increase in competition to find the block, but taken as a whole the network is for example now considered to be using the total energy consumption of Argentina.

Almost, but because of the incentives, the greater the adoption, the more valuable each individual block reward actually is. The more valuable each individual block reward is, the more energy you can afford to spend attempting to mine it.

You can't fit 10,000 transactions in a block on BTC.

True. Let's let one guy, then, decides how our energy should be consumed.

Maybe that guy deciding shouldn't have financial motivation, incentive, e.g. be part of the MLM scheme that they're incentivized to have succeed regardless of the costs, e.g. the guy having a conflict of interest?

Via Tesla, bitcoin is now implicitly held by all investors in the S&P 500, including, very likely, you. You are now a benefactor of bitcoin's growth, whether you're aware of it or not. This trend, where bitcoin quietly confers benefits to growing constituencies of people who remain completely unaware of the fact, will continue.

And, at the same time, there are many people, in less fortunate circumstances, for whom the benefits of bitcoin are felt much more acutely: https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1357757736394444800

The "minuscule percentage" you quote (without reference) is very likely already clearly incorrect and will continue, over time, to become more incorrect.

When the alternative is simply just using Proof of Stake and lowering the energy consumption by an estimated 99%, yes, we can be judgmental of how others use energy in this specific case. It's not Bitcoin/PoW or no cryptocurrencies at all, that's a false dichotomy, if that's what you're implying.

PoS lacks fairness.

To participate in PoS, you need an existing stash of coins, which is inaccessible for many individuals from countries where cryptocurrencies are outlawed. Not forgetting to mention that participation in consensus would indirectly require going through KYC.

PoW, on the other hand, is akin to buying Bitcoin with electricity - a borderless natural resource.

> PoS lacks fairness.

I dislike the way that cryptocurrencies have managed their initial allocations, but it's way better than the way that fiat currencies have managed their initial allocations (usually encoding generations of violence, rascism and oppression).

To 'participate' in PoS (by which you mean mining a block I suppose), you can buy all the stake you need from other people, just like if you want to 'participate' in stock ownership, or land ownership or ownership of nearly anything else in the world.

> PoW, on the other hand, is akin to buying Bitcoin with electricity - a borderless natural resource.

Well.... if you try to mine BTC these days with a standard computer on a standard electricity tarif, you're not going to have a fun time.

Given the fact that to reasonably 'participate' in PoS you need only the kind of computer you already have and an easily acquired stake, while to reasonably 'participate' in many forms of PoW you need unusual, expensive custom hardware and cheap electricity, I'm not at all convinced that PoW has anything better to say about 'fairness'.

> I dislike the way that cryptocurrencies have managed their initial allocations, but it's way better than the way that fiat currencies have managed their initial allocations (usually encoding generations of violence, rascism and oppression).

Just a nit, but I would argue that those encoded privileges are still present; just now with the added indirect layer of "People who were adjacent to the cypherpunks mailing list circa 2009"

> a borderless natural resource.

Wow, I never knew ASICs grew on trees.

Moreover, anyone who can stake their tokens to produce blocks will never sell you enough tokens that you'll be able to compete with them for future block rewards. Put another way, the value of a staker's token-minting stake is at least equal to the expected ROI over its lifetime (much like how the value of a stock is worth its expected dividends over time). PoS is a digital manifestation of a hereditary aristocracy -- you can almost never buy your way in; you have to be a first mover.

You need WAY more than just electricity. In order to have any chance of receiving any amount of bitcoin, you also need specialized equipment, connection to the network, and access to a mining pool.

Those three things would give a government interested in banning cryptocurrencies plenty of leverage to disrupt mining operations in their country.

All they would need to do is regulate the import of ASIC mining hardware; sinkhole any traffic that looks "bitcoin-y" (damn the collateral damage, we're fighting fascist communist pedophile terrorist drug traffickers here!) and similarly block access to any known mining pools.

They could go even further and introduce severe and draconian penalties to anyone producing, possessing, or using cryptocurrencies (which of course would be selectively enforced).

At this point, once you factor in the real-world element, the fact that, in theory, you only need electricity to produce bitcoin becomes such a small part of that equation.

I think at that point why not use PoS (or better yet, a DPoS scheme), if there isn't any real-world benefit to PoW? I think the tradeoff of introducing a small amount of revocable trust in exchange for RADICALLY reduced energy consumption is pretty clearly worth it, given the real world constraints.

You can participate in most(all i am aware of) PoS chains with any amount of underlying tokens, in the same way you can participate in a mining pool if you lack the hashrate to mine independently.

There will be independent PoS validators who can afford upfront costs, but there are independent miners too who purchase lots of hardware. In PoS the next block is randomly distributed, so those with better hardware dont outperform. So you can validate off a solar powered raspberry pi or nuc if you'd like and not underperform someone with a highend gpu, so the hardware cost is much lower, added to this in long run it will be cheaper to participate in staking than having to replace gpus/asics to mine with.

I don't see how this leads you to think it is unfair in comparison to mining? Upfront costs pretty similar, running costs cheaper, long term hardware replacement costs much less.

They both require large financial investments don't they? And both PoW and PoS have pooling options if you want to invest less.

I'm not seeing much difference in terms of accessibility. In theory PoS is easier because PoW requires actual hardware and/or more technical knowledge.

You pay electicity with fiat money.

Solar panels are a thing. Depending on the region you are setting them up in, a couple dozen panels and a battery could reliably power an ASIC 24/7.

Hydro, wind are other possibilities.

“You don't need to buy electricity, you can just build your own power plant!”

Sure. You can easily create your own conventional fiat currency too, you just need to set up your own nation.

PoW lacks fairness, most of the rewards go to folks who can allocate capital to very expensive mining operations. I would actually argue that PoS might be more fair/accessible than PoW is now.

What is fairness? In voting, we usually consider a system which permits those with more money to vote more times to be unfair. PoW is fair only if wealth is distributed fairly.

In voting, we consider voting more than once to be a criminal offense.

(For values of "we" denoting various constitutional democracies of the so-called free world.)

Good luck with that. The bitcoin core folks can't even agree to change blocksizes to increase transaction throughput. Switching to PoS is highly unlikely.

True, but the rest of us can switch blockchains.

Good luck with that too.

It's already being done. There is a ton of financial transactions in the DeFi space happening on Ethereum right now and other protocols on other chains are rapidly being developed and rolled out.

I'm not saying ether is a ghost town, I'm saying good luck making bitcoin an irrelevance to the point its energy use drops.

Ether is the number 2 coin and has been steadily gaining on Btc. Do you think everyone uses Btc exclusively?

No, but I don't think ether uses PoS either (though I know they've been trying to move to it for years).

Further, whether or not some folks move to ethereum is more or less irrelevant to whether BTC carries on doing what it's doing. The problem is not individuals making the switch, it's getting enough people to switch in order to reduce the energy footprint of BTC.

They've been trying for years but now it's been running smoothly in production for several months. They plan a few minor tweaks, then after watching it some more they'll migrate the legacy chain to it. That's a fairly simple software engineering task, rather than the difficult research challenge that PoS has been until recently.

The other big change on the way is a massive increase in scalability, which I'm hoping will help move the market in a more sustainable direction.

> $X is now considered by some important for our future finance system. While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy, for much more trivial reasons. [...] Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

Et voilà!

"Some" people think $X is now important, and thus, the rest of the world shall no longer be able to produce judgements on either $X or "those people".

I think it is definitely up for debate, and we can ask questions such as how absurd $X actually is (or is not), how absurdly wasteful (or not) $X is, how many "some people" is, whether the assumption that $X is important for $Y is true (or not), etc.

Please...

Important difference between Bitcoin and everything else you mentioned: there is no incentive to improve the energy-efficiency of mining. We went from CPU to GPU to ASIC mining, each time reducing the per-hash energy consumption, and all the miners did was hash more using the same amount of energy. Whereas, for example, the energy used to watch porn -- energy spent by all the routers, switches, and servers involved -- will be reduced if technological improvements allow the same task to be accomplished with less energy.

Spending material wealth on mining is what makes it secure. We work on improving the per-hash cost because it makes it more difficult for someone with a brilliant technological innovation to compromise the security of the system.

And there is incentive to improve the total energy use. Every participant in the system pays for the electricity that secures bitcoin in the form of inflation and transaction fees. If some alternative to Bitcoin can provide all the same benefit but with less inflation and lower fees, then there is a good reason to switch to that alternative. And people are trying to innovate here continuously, the blockchain sector at this point is getting more investment than the AI sector.

Basically your argument is, "Bitcoin may not incentivize improvements in energy efficiency, so we should scrap Bitcoin and use something more efficient." Great, let's do it. The technology is already here, in fact, the technology was always there. Have a consortium of banks operate a distributed public ledger. The banks will charge fees to include transactions on the ledger, just like miners charge fees now, and the economic incentives to raise or lower fees will be similar -- but the fees will be lower because the consortium members will not need to cover the electricity cost of mining, only the cost of operating their servers.

The only problem Bitcoin mining solves is the lack of identification among the miners (i.e. the "Sybil attack" problem). Seems pretty obvious to solve the problem by introducing identity, particularly given that the large miners / mining pools are not really anonymous. Sacrifice the small miners who contribute little to the system, set up a consortium, and enjoy whatever benefits the distributed ledger provide without the waste.

(Yes I know, banks are evil, how dare anyone suggest that we acknowledge any authorities in a system, why should we trust the banks, etc.)

This is a pretty classic HN take. "It's really easy... just do X".

This is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, if it's that easy, then just do it!

aka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Nope, not the same. Bitcoin mining does not "produce" hashes, it "produces" Bitcoin blocks. All that changed with the improvement in hashing speed is the number of hashes that must be computed before a block is added to the block chain.

i dont follow. moving from cpu to gpu to fpga to asics (each a gain in efficiency) did not reduce electricity consumption, because it in effect accelerated the rate at which the hashing complexity was raised by the network, in effect negating up any efficiency gains. that's exactly the phenomenon.

One bitcoin transaction uses FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES more energy than one Visa transaction [1]. This is like lighting a cigar with a $500 bill and going "what, I have to light my cigars somehow, and inevitably it'll cost something. I spend money to meet my goals."

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...

Compared to the cost of lighting a cigar with a matchstick, it'd be more like lighting it with a penny. Despite Visa transactions being cheap, bitcoin transactions are also very cheap -- you spend more power turning on your living room light for a few seconds. Probably best if we keep things in perspective.

Further: https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-vs-visa-electricity-consu...

Okay, so the gist of that article is that bitcoin burns about a third as much energy as the entire global institution of banking, based on some extremely back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Bitcoin's current market cap is about $600 billion. There are quadrillions of dollars worth of capital in the the world, mostly managed by banks. Bitcoin remains EXTREMELY inefficient in comparison.

When it became blindingly apparent that mining diamonds, gold and rare earth metals was proving harmful to societies (pollution, war etc.) countries put into place regulation to ensure that future mining would be conducted in ways to try and eliminate these harms.

Mining bitcoin is a growing contributor to energy consumption, and subsequently environmental damage and harm.

Similar precedent?

Kind of but not really. People aren't upset at _how_ bitcoin is using electricity, they are upset at how much bitcoin is using electricity.

If you want to save the environment, regulate the production of electricity irrespective of how that electricity is put to use. Let the market figure out how to allocate the electricity to various tasks.

Energy consumption does not necessarily mean environmental harm. That's not a law of the universe at all.

Where do you think energy being consumed comes from?

Depends on the source, right? For example, in Iceland it's mostly geothermal power plants. And that's why electricity is so cheap there, and that's why, despite being one of the smallest countries in terms of population, it is #4 for Bitcoin mining: https://www.cryptoknowmics.com/news/bitcoin-mining-top-5-cou...

That’s a neat slight of hand trick you’ve pulled off there, connecting Bitcoin to entertainment in order to shame those of us concerned about Bitcoin energy usage.

Everything else you’ve listed provides subjective value to the user, which makes them hard to attack. Who can say what the value of skiing is to a society in terms of kWh? There is no way to objectively compare the value of energy spent on a ski lift vs. driving to see friends; that’s all subjective value.

But the issue is that Bitcoin isn’t supposed to provide subjective value, it’s supposed to provide objective value; it’s literally supposed to be money. Once you remember that it’s supposed to literally be money, then comparisons to ski lifts become extremely disingenuous. It also becomes fair to compare Bitcoin against other competitors that provide the exact same service to society, comparisons that make Bitcoin look very wasteful indeed.

it does provide objective value. bitcoin is a store of value. digital gold.

even if it never proves to be a viable currency, a secure digital store of value is objectively useful. especially if you're in a country experiencing institutional failure, risk of hyperinflation and so on.

> it does provide objective value. bitcoin is a store of value. digital gold.

The only reason I don't laugh at these arguments is because I'm utterly exhausted by hearing them. The value prop for bitcoin is, fundamentally, circular. It's valuable because it's money (like gold!), but when you point out how it's an objectively crap currency, it's suddenly a store of value. When you ask why it has value, it's because it's the currency of the future. Round and round it goes.

> even if it never proves to be a viable currency, a secure digital store of value is objectively useful.

I mean, you're just asserting that it stores value. But, why does it have value?

> But the issue is that Bitcoin isn’t supposed to provide subjective value, it’s supposed to provide objective value; it’s literally supposed to be money.

Money's value is also subjective, I'm not sure what you think is objective about it.

Sounds like you're just trying to dodge the comparison.

Definitionally, money’s value is not supposed to be subjective.

> Definitionally, money’s value is not supposed to be subjective.

Not only is that not true, but if to was it would just render “money” a non-concept, because definitionally value (in general, not just of money) is subjective.

Ah, the “everything is subjective” rabbit hole. No thanks, that’s never a useful conversation.

The purpose of any monetary system is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. That’s why humans make money; to avoid the need to barter or depend on social credit systems that don’t scale well. This provides us some objective goals with which we can compare and contrast monetary systems against; while what one does with money is subjective, we can objectively compare the efficiency and ease with which a monetary system can facilitate transactions. In this area Bitcoin does terribly. This is probably why Bitcoin advocates have mostly moved onto “it’s a store of value”, that’s more a more defensible proposition.

> Ah, the “everything is subjective” rabbit hole

“Everything is subjective” is a (reasonable) epistemological argument about all access to data about the world being through subjective lenses, and thus all conclusions about the world being grounded in subjectivity. But that's not the sense in which value specifically is subjective.

Value specifically is subjective because value is dependent on the subjective utility functions of people who have (or who might seek to acquire) the good and it's competing/alternative goods.

> This provides us some objective goals

That's about the value of a monetary system not the value of money, but both the specific goals, and more particularly how they are weighted against each other, remain subjective and the source of considerable disagreement.

> we can objectively compare the efficiency and ease with which a monetary system can facilitate transactions.

Ok. How much does ease of use matter for the value of a currency? 50%? 20%? 80%? What about all it's other characteristics?

You can certainly be objective when comparing each characteristic in isolation but the value of the currency depends on how all of them are weighted against each other, and that is completely subjective.

Just like the value of anything else. Even the same person might change the weights they use to value something depending on what's going on in their life.

Ah, I see where this went wrong. I really should have been using the word "utility", not "value". This would've gone much smoother if I'd used that word throughout instead of "value".

The original poster's argument was that we all "waste" power watching pornography and going on skiing trips, so how dare we judge Bitcoin. My counter argument is that they're mixing up energy usage between subjective and objective utility in an attempt to shift Bitcoin into a harder to compare category.

Subjectively, how can we judge the relative utility of a kWh spent on entertainment? The utility of each of the activities listed (minus Bitcoin) are all literally in the eye of the beholder; we can't possibly hope to compare the utility of a kWh spent on pornography vs. skiing. Obviously we can compare energy usage per minute of each, but comparing the utility of a kWh spent running a ski lift vs. PornHub's servers really just breaks down to which form of entertainment you value more.

My issue is that Bitcoin is supposed to do something objective; it's supposed to be money. This means that we absolutely can (and should!) sit down and compare it against its alternatives on numeric values, such as kWh consumption. The moment one starts actually comparing Bitcoin against its direct competitors in measurable categories it starts looking really bad, which is probably why its proponents try to prevent that.

> You can certainly be objective when comparing each characteristic in isolation but the value of the currency depends on how all of them are weighted against each other, and that is completely subjective.

Back to value now.

Ideally currencies aren't supposed to have value per se, rather other things are supposed to have value in terms of it. Obviously this runs into the reality of multiple currencies and exchange rates, but at the local level it actually works this way. You and I might disagree about the relative value of a product, but we express our own disagreement in terms of dollars. We don't disagree about the relative value of the dollar itself. This is why inflation is usually measured in the shift of common goods and services in terms of dollars, since measuring the value of the dollar itself is a fool's errand.

As far as the value of Bitcoin in terms of USD, that's a subject that has been pretty thoroughly dug into. I doubt that I'll add anything new and interesting here.

What do you mean by "objective value"? My belief is that such a thing doesn't exist.

> Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

It's impossible to have a good debate if you from the get-go insult everyone that disagree with you and heighten bitcoin to something not allowed to be criticized because some people believe it can be important in the future. As if that absolves something from all sins.

> Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system

Yeah, but those people are wrong. It's perfectly reasonable to judge them for doing harmful actions in service of a wrong belief.

Beliefs that used to be "wrong" and now are considered right: abolitionism, homosexuality, marijuana.

How do you know this is a wrong belief that will stay wrong?

The existence of other beliefs that were overturned, even ones with a high emotional value now does not support unrelated ideas.

Put more simply: just because gay rights campaigners were ultimately vindicated doesn’t mean you’re their modern equivalent.

> How do you know this is a wrong belief that will stay wrong?

How do you know it won't?

Just because some beliefs that used to be "wrong" are now considered "right", does not mean all beliefs that used to be "wrong" will in the future be considered "right".

As the quote says, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Maybe a better comparison would be mutually assured destruction. Enormous, world-level resources spent towards trying to ensure an outcome for something that no one wants to have happen. Those enriched along the way were the purveyors, not the population.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I think often of how wrong it is that we allow indoor marijuana production in places like Canada and the Western USA where it's legal. What a horrible waste of energy.

I don't know for certain, of course; I just very strongly suspect it.

Ah, the brave crypto millionaires marching and fighting for human rights.

Why are they wrong? People who consider Bitcoin important are not a homogeneous mass — are you saying all those people are wrong, or some portion of it?

I believe that everyone who thinks Bitcoin is important to the future of the global financial system is wrong about that particular point. (They might be fine people in other ways, or have other reasons to like Bitcoin, sure).

Ok but why.

Here is a primer on why BTC and crypto are important to the future of the global financial system.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/2021/02/...

Why are they wrong?

They're completely ignoring the concept of magnitude, and realistically their claim is "we use energy for other stuff, so there's nothing wrong with using massive amounts of energy for X". They're making an implicit premise that using large amounts of energy, which causes harm to humans, is okay. If you accept that premise, okay fine, but I don't.

As another poster here shared, a single transaction uses upwards of hundreds of kwh. That kind of energy that moves thousands of pounds hundreds of miles, or power a typical US household for almost an entire month.

If you think this creates a financial system that's much more transparent and solid than the current one which is completely broken, than that energy usage is worth it. Also you shouldn't look at it in terms of energy/transaction, the energy consumption isn't a function of transactions.

A fully trusted and decentralized financial system is great, but it's not going to change the fundamental power relations that cause so much harm in our society. To me that makes the process not worth it

I believe the research is useful, but to base an international currency around it with these costs is not

As long as it stops a few people in the world controlling the money supply, that's a big win from my perspective.

I've never really understood why people ascribe such magical capabilities to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has really bad wealth inequality, arguably worse than the rest of America does.

> If you think this creates a financial system that's much more transparent and solid than the current one which is completely broken, than that energy usage is worth it.

Bitcoin is capable of handling 4 transactions a second. If you've created a financial system that consumes more energy than Argentina and can't actually handle the transaction requirements of a decent sized mall, then I'd begin to wonder what definition of "solid" you're using.

> Also you shouldn't look at it in terms of energy/transaction, the energy consumption isn't a function of transactions.

We can look at energy consumption per block, but there's no way to slice and dice this in a way that doesn't make Bitcoin look like a massive waste of energy compared to competitive systems.

Because Bitcoin is not important to our future finance system. It does not solve any problem that any meaningful fraction of people cares about.

While you might believe that, the market disagrees with you.

That is not true. For example I hold bitcoin. But I also don't believe that bitcoin will replace the financial system or will serve any real purpose in the future. I am just speculating on its value.

People speculate on loads of assets which have no real life utility. For example, art or classic cars.

Just because you are speculating doesn't mean other who also hold it are speculating. Personally, I hold it because I don't want my dollars to get perpetually diluted because of endless money printing, stimulus, bailouts, etc.

Also, Bitcoin has value and if you wanted, you unlock it and spend your money without even selling your asset, there was a discussion the other day about defi, highly recommend checking out MakerDAO if you want to have a practical use for your Bitcoins.

You're getting a lot of replies but I don't see anyone answering the initial questions. Some really rough math for playing video games:

Assuming I'm playing with someone across the country, I hop 13 routers in a quick traceroute.

Assuming each router is commercial hardware (~400W) and my traffic completely saturates them, that's 5,200W.

Plus the two machines at the end of each line, assuming they're beefy gaming PCs/servers with 1,000W power supplies at 100% load just for this game. That's 2,000W.

Playing a 30 minute Starcraft game comes to 3.6kWh, or two orders of magnitude less than a bitcoin transaction. It's almost certainly less than that since my assumptions were very conservative.

~~~

For something live like a concert, a 54,000 sqft hall uses about 1,100 kWh of power per day (lighting, HVAC). Plus 15kW of speakers for a 6 hour concert is 1,190 kWh. Divided by the 6000 people attending, is 0.2 kWh per attendee. Adding a 10 mile solo drive per person is about 3 kWh. Or again about 2 orders of magnitude less.

~~~

These aren't good comparisons when I could do hundreds of each of the activities you listed for the cost of one transaction.

and this post reeks of missing the point. people should be judged for how they consume energy because excess consumption is simply wasteful, and in the middle of the ongoing global catastrophe called climate change - isn't something we can exactly afford

obviously this raises the question of what is and isn't excessive, but I think there are apparent cases where the benefits of excessive energy consumption people clearly don't out weight the cost - see flying, cruises, rampant shopping, etc.

I think Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies fall into that category, especially when there are other coins that require nearly as many resources to function

> Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

No, seeing a bunch of rich nerds wasting massive amounts of energy in a time of environmental crisis so they can make millions convincing people a store of value is actually a currency, and then getting mad about it, is not hypocritical.

> While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy,

It's not. It's a massive waste. Stop killing the planet.

Hell, just consider that it's a store of value that costs $12B+ / year to secure.

I don't know that name-calling adds much value to the conversation, but I will say it's a failing strategy to try and make value judgements for other people. The way forward is technological advancement. That has always been the case. We're not going to solve climate crisis by stifling anything as should be evident just by looking at China. I'd imagine we're all much better off supporting green energy rather than pointing fingers at anyone who has a different value judgement for how that energy should be used.

>How much energy does watching porn consume?

I guess if you got stats on how much porn they watch in Argentina you would be well on your way to answering this question. Same for the rest.

I think the more interesting thing is: as bitcoin becomes more difficult to mine energy needs go up, but countries are working hard to bring their energy usage down. Can bitcoin be overtaken on the downward journey by a country, or will it always be bitcoin overtaking countries on its upward swing. Is there some country decreasing its usage as bitcoin increases its, and the two pass each other like ships in the night.

What is the next country most likely to be surpassed by bitcoin?

Stats not even needed.

If the enegry used in Argentina <= energy used in bitcoin transactions.

and, if people living in Argentina are doing any of the things listed (watching porn, etc).

Then the energy used to watch all the porn in Argentina must still be included as part of the Energy use of Argentina; thus less than the use of bitcoin. (I guess this would have to assume the porn is also hosted in Argentina; but I would imagine at least 1 porn unit is hosted and viewed internally to Argentina).

obviously, but you still don't know how much greater the bitcoin amount is the porn amount.

Also how much bitcoin is mined in Argentina, obviously less than 50% of the world's bitcoin - but how much less!?!

If those damned Argentinians would just mine bitcoin exclusively, we could all get on with our lives.

We also need to talk to South Africa about Youtube.

> as bitcoin becomes more difficult to mine energy needs go up

Difficulty adjusts up and down as needed to maintain an average of 1 block every 10 minutes, it doesn't just tend to infinity.

It's mostly correlated to the block reward, miners won't spend more money on energy than they get back from mining blocks.

I may be confused here. But the regulation mechanism to get to 1block/min is to ask miners to do more computations, right? Making the problem harder in this context does have the effect of more power consumed. A block is an answer to the riddle who's parameters are being regulated. So the block rate is not important, number of computations is. And that is directly linked with power consumption.

It's 1 block every 10 minutes.

The difficulty adjustment goes both ways, if blocks start taking longer than 10 minutes to be mined (for example if some large miner stops mining for some reason) the difficulty goes down, which likely means less energy is used.

You're correct that the actual adjustment is on the number of computations, so the correlation to energy use isn't direct, different machines can be more or less efficient at making those calculations.

So basically the more popular bitcoin is, more inefficient it is. Great.

Not necessarily, depends on the ratio between users and value of the block reward.

I mean it's just a standard economic argument concerning the use of scarce resources. All your examples have a higher impact on the real economy vs. Bitcoin. As in, these industries employ large numbers of people and sustain economic growth to some degree, in contrast Bitcoin services a comparatively limited population engaged in limited productive activity relative to its energy use.

People are free to be judgmental about anything they like.

Even more directly - How much energy does all the world's "legacy" Fintech use?

Banks, exchanges, government tax agencies, accountants, money printing, retail cash machines (ATM, registers, etc) and all the way to gold mining.

If you want to analogize 1:1, a bitcoin transaction consumes approximately five hundred thousand times more energy than a visa transaction [1].

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...

Please read. Nic Carter is a good place to start. https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...

"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 correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the military and diplomatic strength of the U.S. government to ensure all of the above are working smoothly.

Any energy comparison must take the above into account – including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar. As those who make this comparison inevitably fail to mention, the dollar’s ubiquity is partly due to a covert arrangement whereby the U.S. provides military support to countries like Saudi Arabia that agree to sell oil exclusively for dollars. It’s worth noting that the grossly oversized U.S. military, whose presence worldwide is necessary to backstop the international dollar system, is the largest single consumer of oil worldwide."

Obviously there's more infrastructure behind USD transactions than just Visa. But that doesn't change much about my initial comparison — Fedwire energy costs are low and amortize across many transactions, as is true of the rest of the infrastructure you list.

And if you want to start talking about the Fed and US imperial power, then we have to start talking about the bitcoin hype industry which exists to pump the value of various cryptocurriencies. Cruises, conferences, etc, etc. Besides, it's not as if we could get rid of US imperialism or oil extraction by switching from USD to BTC. You're just naming tangentially-related institutions with high externalities, not actual costs of USD transactions.

This is a deliberate obfuscation on the massive inefficiency in Bitcoin's transaction infrastructure. We don't need to talk about geopolitical power to talk about Bitcoin's transparent wastefulness.

But you're also not counting all the people, buildings, surrounding systems needed to make the VISA network work.

Nor am I counting the infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin mining. This tabulates only the energy expenditure of the computers performing the transactions.

A better comparison with Visa is perhaps an intra-exchange transaction, such as Bakkt? Or perhaps a Bitcoin Lightning transaction?

When bitcoin provides 1% of the services that the "legacy" financial world does, let's talk.

Nobody uses the gold standard anymore.

I tried to make this point on Reddit, and was downvoted to a smoking hole in the ground by people who were complaining that they can't get GPUs to play games, and that it's not eco-friendly. Of course, playing games on high powered GPUs is super eco-friendly, as are many other ways of making money...

Half of them think people are mining Bitcoin on GPUs, and almost none of them know about Proof of Stake coins. Not that I want to excuse the egregious power consumption of PoW coins, but I do wish the holier-than-thou crowd would at least do a little more research.

Yes, high powered gaming isn't eco friendly either, but can we please stop ignoring magnitude and utility in this thread?

You can power a typical US household for almost an entire month using the energy of a single bitcoin transaction. What utility does Bitcoin bring with that single transaction? Is it worth the measurable harm it's doing to our ecosystem and human lives?

I wasn't ignoring it, only pointing out that they were ignoring the eco-unfriendliness of their preferred use of GPUs (single users with single GPU, also not mining fulltime probably since it's in their PC). Please tell me you see the hypocrisy.

I'm personally fully onboard with Bitcoin and all PoW coins being crap and wish they would die, leaving only PoS coins in the crypto space.

Some people are really out of touch. By the time they found out about Bitcoin in the past couple years it had moved past GPU mining almost a decade ago.

The price of all cryptocurrencies more or less move in tandem, so that when Bitcoin has a good time, so does all the cryptocurrencies that can be mined with GPUs.

Most people have a job and game part-time. GPUs in gaming rigs are not powered on 24/7. Let's be honest about this.

> How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos?

The difference is that, for all of these, the incentive is to lower the energy usage. For Bitcoin, the incentive is to increase the energy usage, until the amount of energy used costs the same as the amount of Bitcoin received by the miners.

The almighty dollar rights all wrongs. If I’m paying for it, what do you care? This is a slightly dressed up Tragedy in The Commons.

What if the externality is not into the price? When the externality of it (pollution, global warming, etc) is not within the price, then yes, we do care, because you aren't paying the true cost and you transfer that cost to me.

If you have a carbon tax? Then sure. But if you dump all your emission on the rest of us and wash your hand because "you paid for it", then yes, we will question the value of a waste of energy because that's really the only thing we can do.

Yes, you are agreeing with me. A tragedy in the commons is a negative thing. That’s why I used that language.

Yeah I don't really understand -- normally people buying things (energy) at a price the supplier is willing to sell is good. If energy is priced appropriately, this shouldn't be a problem.

Are people concerned with the negative externalities of energy usage? If so, it seems like the real issue is that all energy use is "bad", anything that causes people to severely increase their energy usage is especially bad, and bitcoin is one such thing.

But even though it's bitcoin in practice, the real issue seems like not being able to correctly price energy.

> Are people concerned with the negative externalities of energy usage?

YES.

> anything that causes people to severely increase their energy usage is especially bad

YES.

This is not hard. The earth's climate is being affected by the emissions from our energy demands. Most nations are trying to control emissions and one major way of doing that is energy efficiency. Bitcoin comes along and is anti-efficient, incentivises using as much power as is still (just about) profitable in mining, and creates nothing but a speculative financial instrument on the back of it. It looks like the worst kind of insult to anyone that gives a crap about climate change.

Maybe this is too idealistic, but like I said, the root issue feels like energy not being priced correctly (i.e., in a way that captures the true costs of energy consumption to the climate/planet).

Rough analogy to "safer systems over safer processes": if an intern presses a big red button that brings down google, the problem isn't that they pressed that button, it's that there's a button any intern can just press to bring down google.

The fact that the market allows trades that are net negative is a bug. Bitcoin just happens to be the intern that pressed the button.

BUT, if we're in a state where we can't get rid of the big red button, it seems reasonable to get people to stop pressing it in the interim.

Pricing in the 'true' externalities is a hard problem in itself to define. It's a problem that would require some sort of global standard (maybe in 20 years then), and one that would be pushed back upon by a large number of industries and interests.

There are baby steps in some places, and there is massive progress in some countries towards renewables and carbon-zero energy. But in the current state, huge increases in energy consumption are a bad thing.

So I think we're in a state where we could potentially get rid of the big red button but a lot of people don't really want to and the realistic chances of doing so are basically zero. And in that situation, yes, we call out the button pressers.

> If energy is priced appropriately, this shouldn't be a problem.

It's not a problem only in the ethical framework of the free market, where the morality of any kind of consumption is judged only by its cost to society.

So for example, in the free market ethics, it's perfectly acceptable, when the water is generally scarce, for somebody to have a swimming pool in their garden (definitely not a necessity in that situation), as long as he can pay for it.

But many, if not all, societies do not fully accept this ethical framework. Often, we collectively agree to limit frivolous usages of extremely scarce resources.

Climate change. Carbon taxes don't exist right now. So you aren't paying for it.

People who use disproportionately large amounts of electricity should absolutely be judged (yes, this includes things other than btc).

Yes, I agree. This is why I described it as a tragedy in the commons.

Some people do say that whatever anything costs is what it is worth.

If Bitcoin uses that amount of energy now, imagine how much it will consume when a large amount of the population actualy uses it for payments.

How many people use it for payments is not the right metric, it’s not the payments that cost a lot of electricity it’s the competition to win block rewards where more energy means a higher chance of mining a block.

Indirectly, if a lot of people use it for payments it may be worth more and attract more mining competition.

Bitcoin and most(all?) crypto currencies pretty much suck for payments. I think a BTC transaction costs around $16 USD just to get it on the blockchain now. Plus transactions are not private, and they are permanently public, so even if your BTC Address is unknown today, doesn't mean it won't be known tomorrow.

There are perhaps, some reasonable arguments for using crypto-currencies, but buying groceries is not on the list. Buying Houses... *MAYBE*, since that information is already public anyway.

Like it or not, we live on the same planet. I have to smell your farts, and inhale your air pollution, and your CO2 output ruins my climate. You can use energy however you want when you pay for all the externalities yourself. Right now, you can't. In aggregate, this concept is known as social responsibility.

If you combine the energy costs of delivering streaming video and the client side costs of playing video and executing JavaScript I have no doubt porn far outstrips Bitcoin. Hell, I bet JavaScript bloat from adtech alone and exceeds the totally energy budget of France.

There are 3.4 billion internet users.

It takes about 30 W to watch video in a browser [1].

Assuming every internet user watches 85 minutes of video per day [2] (517 hr/year), video consumption is 52 TWh per year. Or less than half of than the bitcoin network.

Google uses 12 TWh per year [3]. Assuming Google is entirely focused on serving the world's video (it likely could), that still is ~half of the bitcoin network.

(France consumes about 480 TWh per year [4])

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/microsoft-internet-explore...

[2] https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/video-110520

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/10/21/googles-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France

Seems like I lost my bet if those numbers are correct, kudos on doing the math!

Bitcoin isn’t religion (although it has many religious-like followers), so there aren’t dogmas you cannot question.

Energy usage of it is ridiculously high and people are totally allowed to question how wasteful it is, no matter if you allow them to.

But here's the thing: This article didn't say anything bad about Bitcoin's energy usage. It's simply quantifying it.

If quantifying the energy usage of Bitcoin makes you angry, you should probably self-reflect a bit.

This is a very unbiased source, and nothing they have published is untrue.

I mostly agree. As long as the price of energy is adequately priced, we should be able to make our own decisions on what amenities we need. You need a F150? Great, but be prepared to pay for its use. Naturally, the question immediately becomes, who decides what is adequate, which is not fun.

Incidentally, I am learning about bitcoin now since it is clearly becoming mainstream and it is related to my job. I am trying to build a miner ( I don't want one click zerohash solutions for variety of reasons ) on Ubuntu derivative ( POPos ) and now I am stuck troubleshooting pool connections. Anyone could recommend a reliable resource? I am starting to get really aggravated by having to google every single error encountered.

> As long as the price of energy is adequately priced.

It's not, and doing so is a hard problem, requiring a global solution, against the wishes of many interests and industries. It doesn't seem likely any time soon.

Why is not wanting to waste electricity on Ponzi schemes so triggering?

They're emotionally invested in cryptocurrency being the future. When people challenge them by suggesting that it's basically bad all the way down, they lash out.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”

It is a really low form of argument to simply use the word "triggering". Implying that the original poster doesn't have any real reasoning behind what they are writing, no original thoughts or responsible viewpoints that they have worked on - instead that they are "triggered", - thus are reacting in a simply emotional way. Implying that somehow all of their argument can be simply discarded.

Really? You mean that just because you have used the word "triggering" (there are no other meaningful arguments in your comment), that would somehow invalidate an argument? What grade is that logic from?

Lol at calling anything “low” as a form of argument and expecting to be heard

Agreed. Governments and financial institutions are having to resort to "virtue" and "value" arguments against bitcoin, instead of technical arguments:

- Bitcoin consumes so much energy! Think of the planet!

- Iran, China, and Russia mine bitcoin! They are our enemies!

Indeed it does reek of hypocrisy. Oh, now you care about the environment and international competition? Please...

A maximum of 178 things on the planet consume >= to the electricity of Bitcoin.

99.44%/0.56% = ~178 according to their estimate. So if you want to compare, the premise is that there are no more than 178 things on Earth more valuable per watt, no more than 178 things to compare to... That is absurd.

The problem is that Bitcoin doesn't need to use this much energy. We've now discovered distributed consensus algorithms that don't rely on Proof of Work, so it's really quite terrible we still waste so much by using an outdated consensus algorithm.

A lot of the interest in BTC is driven by media and the fact that it is the oldest and original blockchain solution. The newer solutions like Ethereum, and even newer like Cardano and Polkadot are game changing because they use proof of stake instead.

Bitcoin can be used as a store of value (among other garbage text that people have thrown into the blocks as a joke) but the newer blockchain solutions also allow from "smart contracts" which BTC does not.

Personally I don't see why Elon Musk invested so much in BTC instead of things like ETH which are much better solutions and stores of value.

I'm not aware of any other consensus algorithm that is proven to be as secure as PoW.

They are known as "proof of stake".

The way it works is that "validator" nodes confirm the blocks. The validators are randomly chosen based on the percentage they have staked.

You stake by owning the coin and locking it up using a staking mechanism tied into the protocol. This locks up your coins for a set period of time.

If a validator does not validate correctly or fakes the transactions then they run the risk of being "slashed". Slashing means they forfeit what they have invested.

Usually you need to stake $10K+ USD but there are also pools where people can combine their money.

Both pools and proof of work mining farms suffer from large groups consolidating the validation power.

One of the newer blockchains (Caradano) introduces the concept of a penalty for large pools in favor of having lots of smaller validators to make the network more resilient to a single group having too much validation power. This encourages decentralization.

Proof of Stake has proven quite robust. None of the larger PoS coins have been compromised (despite much theoretical discussion), and newer ones such as Cardano seem to address early objections. Peercoin has been around for a while without any issues.

The fact is, I see all of those massive distributed consensus algorithms as much more robust than they appeared initially. 51%/double spend attacks in practice are extremely hard to occur because of the exposure/publicity of the ledger and how hard it would be to capitalize on crashing the currency (PoS/PoW does not change it).

> Proof of Stake has proven quite robust.

They're not mathematically provable and the jury is still out. Attackers who know some exploit might be waiting for the much larger Ethereum to switch to PoS so they can reap maximum profit.

Here's the paper of Cardano's provably secure PoS algorithm https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/889.pdf

Excellent questions with interesting answers. OP’s observation begins a fascinating discussion. I’ve been roughing out minimal cost of living, finding baseline around 5¢/hr; need to re-cast to kWh units.

How many of those directly convert electricity into profit?

How many of those businesses have been rent seeking countries/states/locations that subsidize electricity for their populations?

Electricity is one of those things most of society has deemed an essential good, and as such has subsidized it for the poorest among us. Bitcoin farmers are abusing that system to turn the government subsidies into personal profit for a handful.

Let's not even begin to equate THAT to someone going to a concert put on for the benefit of and at the cost to those participating.

Well it's like any other business that runs on electricity. AWS converts electricity directly into profit. They provide a service for paying customers, just like a miner does. I'm sure many datacenters are located in places where electricity is cheap, hell I bet some datacenters get it even cheaper with lobbying.

Can you list an example of AWS building a datacenter, in secret, in a location with subsidized power? I GUARANTEE YOU Amazon lets the local municipality know when they're building a new datacenter and they aren't getting subsidized rates.

> Electricity is one of those things most of society has deemed an essential good, and as such has subsidized it for the poorest among us.

Sounds like an argument for giving subsidies to the poor instead of anyone using electricity.

Watching porn and playing video games do not have structural ratchets essentially forcing ever-greater porn-watching or game-playing.

Wait a minute . . .

> Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

Are you actually seeing this or are you conflating criticisms of bitcoin with criticisms of bitcoin miners? Because I feel like I see a lot of the former and very little of the latter, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

It's a salvo in the imminent central banks attack against this serious threat, that would compete with their fiat experiment. They are not sure yet whether to use the environmental angle or the "terrorist use of Bitcoin" like Yellen announced .

> reeks of hypocrisy says the bitcoin holder that profits from it's adoption.

I own zero cryptocurrency, they are not aligned with my investment strategy. But I do think they are an experiment worth pursuing.

This is the most concise and crystallized attempt at putting this (certainly popular and in some ways inevitable) argument into relatable words. Kudos.

I do agree that most of these articles are picking on bitcoin.

I think the main problem people have is the actual result of the mining is useless, say compared to using all those computers for MI or Folding @ Home.

I think a better solution would be to get rid of these random bytes and replace them with a Folding @ Home or similar solution, where the computing power you donate results in you getting X bitcoin. Things that are a positive on society, rather then a negative.

But then again that is me being judgmental on others, maybe people care a ton about that string of random alphanumeric characters.

The actual result of mining is defending the network against double-spending (and censorship, to a degree — though this is more fragile). Insofar as you believe that Bitcoin-the-currency is itself a social positive, the mining process has a positive effect. (But also a very meaningful cost, which leads us to a subtler question — is it a net positive?)

this is a really dumb argument that is trotted out every 4 years. There's also already a FoldingCoin that's been around since 2014. https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/foldingcoin/

For PoW to work it must be a costly signal. If you introduce positive externalities of mining (such as Folding @ Home) the system isn't sustainable.

Mining a single bitcoin block takes way way more energy than every one of the things you listed. Somebody on a different thread estimated you could drive a Tesla down the whole California coastline for the energy used processing a single BTC transaction.

So yes, I absolutely do judge people who leave an SUV idling in their driveway 24/7 because "you never know when I'll need to jump in and run away from government agents"

> Somebody on a different thread estimated you could drive a Tesla down the whole California coastline for the energy used processing a single BTC transaction.

Bitcoin energy consumption is not a function of the number of transactions. A node broadcasts a transaction which miners then include in a block which, within limits, can have an arbitrary number of transactions. It is the Proof of Work(PoW) contest to find a valid hash for the block at a certain level of difficulty that creates a valid block.

Further, with Layer 2 solutions, a single transaction in a Bitcoin block can be "dense" with the value of an arbitrary number of transactions that occurred in Layer 2. That is Bitcoin providing the settlement layer.

Importantly, because Bitcoin is a timechain where the current blockheight represents the entire history of Bitcoin.

"The average cost per transaction isn’t an adequate metric for measuring the efficiency of Bitcoin’s PoW, it should be defined in terms of the security of an economic history. The energy spend secures the stock of bitcoin, and that percentage is going down over time as inflation decreases. A Bitcoin “accumulates” the energy associated with all the blocks mined since its creation. LaurentMT, a researcher, has found empirically that Bitcoin’s PoW is indeed becoming more efficient over time: increasing cost is counterbalanced by the even greater increasing total value secured by the system."[0]

[0] : https://danhedl.medium.com/pow-is-efficient-aa3d442754d3

> within limits

And those limits come up to the theoretical maximum of was it 7 or so and in practice around 4

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second

Also PoW is hilariously inefficient. Because the amount of energy one needs to spend is basically related to the amount of value one could grab by cheating, so if all economy would be based on Bitcoin we'd be talking about basically cooking the planet due to PoW.

When Satoshi originally devised PoW it was more about owning the hardware and using that as basis for voting. Energy costs were miniscule. He simply didn't foresee the, now obvious, result that it will became a function of burned energy rather than amount of hardware out there.

> And those limits come up to the theoretical maximum of was it 7 or so and in practice around 4

> https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second

The link you provided indicates transactions added to the mempool per second! The mempool is a cache of broadcast transactions from which miners pick transactions to be added to the next block.

At the current block height, 2700 transactions were in the block. https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000007a3688746c1d0...

> Also PoW is hilariously inefficient. Because the amount of energy one needs to spend is basically related to the amount of value one could grab by cheating

Your statement is entirely unclear. Could you restate it? For Steelman purposes, I'll ignore the non-sequitur about cheating.

You claim that algorithm x is inefficient in absolute terms? Assuming you're an engineer, you know that engineering operates by comparisons and tradeoffs. PoW is how Bitcoin provides final settlement of transactions and unforgeable costliness compared to existing systems of money (e.g. fiat) and money transfer(e.g. visa, paypal, swift) which are all centralised and built for censorship, while bitcoin is decentralised and censorship resistant. And it provides final settlement of transactions every hour for thousands of transactions. "Finality" and "Unforgeability" are the terms you should attend to. These are both tied to hashrate which is tied to the profitability of mining the heaviest chain.

"Bitcoin has unforgeable costliness, because it costs a lot of electricity to produce new bitcoins. Producing bitcoins cannot be easily faked [..]" [0]

"So what are settlement assurances exactly? They refer to a system’s ability to grant recipients confidence that an inbound transaction will not be reversed. Wire transfers using a messaging system like SWIFT are popular in part because they are practically impossible to reverse. They are considered safe for recipients because originating banks will only release the funds if they are fully present in the sender’s account. [...] recipients of a Bitcoin transaction can have extremely high confidence that, once buried under a few blocks, a transaction is unlikely to be reversed."[1]

> When Satoshi originally devised PoW [...] Energy costs were miniscule.

I'm not sure what you mean. In general, energy costs seem to be dropping over time https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy

> [Satoshi] simply didn't foresee the, now obvious, result that it will became a function of burned energy rather than amount of hardware out there.

I'm wary of trying to interpret Satoshi, but here are his own words:

"I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste. [...] Each node’s influence on the network is proportional to its CPU power. The only way to show the network how much CPU power you have is to actually use it." [2]

[0]: https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-w...

[1]: https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurance...

[2]: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/327/

2700 transactions for 10 minutes comes at 4.5 per second. So yeah, matches.

> Your statement is entirely unclear. Could you restate it? For Steelman purposes, I'll ignore the non-sequitur about cheating.

By cheating I meant making a sidechain that would become longer than the mainchain, thus enabling a double spending attack. If the amount of money to be made in double spending attack is higher than honest mining someone will make it, the only thing protecting against that is that the cost of mining must be large enough compared to value being transferred.

>I'm not sure what you mean. In general, energy costs seem to be dropping over time

Back when it was CPU mined. Before even the first GPU mining. It was just about proving that you have an actual HW dedicated into the task.

Exactly as mentioned in the quote that you said. He didn't have a clue that it would become dedicated HW that has only a single function, burning energy to calculate SHA256 and nothing more.

Also do note that the whole concept of non mining node was foreign. Instead of the original design of nodes that mine we're in situation where nodes don't mine and most mining happens in centralized farms.

> By cheating I meant making a sidechain that would become longer than the mainchain, thus enabling a double spending attack.

A double spend attack can only spend the attackers coins.

> If the amount of money to be made in double spending attack is higher than honest mining someone will make it, the only thing protecting against that is that the cost of mining must be large enough compared to value being transferred.

That's precisely the game theory and why the network remains secure. It's addressed in the whitepaper and fundamental. Economic incentives are the security model. [0]

I'm not sure what the rest of your points have to do with settlement finality and assurances so I can't address them.

There's been a decade of analysis of Bitcoin engineering. I'm yet to hear anyone venture an original criticism that hasn't been rigorously and extensively rebutted already since genesis.

[0]: https://blog.lopp.net/are-chinese-miners-threat-bitcoin/

> 2700 transactions for 10 minutes comes at 4.5 per second. So yeah, matches.

The reason I linked to a block was so that you could see that transactions can have arbitrary numbers of outputs. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26099812

The only reasonable metric is energy usage per NECESSARY effect. If bitcoin spends inordinate amounts of energy on storing historic transactions, that is not our problem. That is not a value most people care about.

That argument is similar to saying a nuclear power plant is ridiculously expensive because it started operating last week and is currently only connected to a single factory.

The energy usage of Bitcoin doesn't meaningfully go up with more transactions, so pretending that each transaction uses some specific amount of energy is just misleading.

Not really, a nuclear power plant will generate energy for decades, bitcoin will just keep wasting energy.

And if the maximum daily number of transactions is more or less fixed, and the total energy spend is also relatively stable, then it’s very easy to calculate the energy cost per transaction.

> And if the maximum daily number of transactions is more or less fixed, and the total energy spend is also relatively stable, then it’s very easy to calculate the energy cost per transaction.

You don't understand how transactions work.

A transaction can have arbitrary value, an arbitrary number of inputs, and an arbitrary number of outputs.

Therefore Bitcoin has infinite throughout and 1 hour confirmation/finality latency.

An example:

My company has 100 engineers each paid USD10k in bitcoin per month. We generate 1 transaction worth USD1M with 100 outputs.

Similarly when paying numerous suppliers for hardware, machinery, logistics, transportation, catering. 1 transaction of high value with numerous heterogeneous outputs.

Transaction count is not the correct way to measure the throughout of the Bitcoin network at a given block height or over several retargets.[0]

[0]: https://medium.com/@hasufly/an-analysis-of-batching-in-bitco...

It still seems like a valid metric, you just need to multiply the number of bitcoin transactions with some factor for the average number of outputs. That number will be pretty low and quite stable over time.

> The energy usage of Bitcoin doesn't meaningfully go up with more transactions,

No it just always always goes up regardless of transaction volume as the block-difficulty increases infinitely. You've built a system that by design can literally only become less efficient.

It's actually even worse and stupider than if it were a per-transaction energy usage.

> No it just always always goes up regardless of transaction volume as the block-difficulty increases infinitely.

[sigh] The difficulty adjustment is so a block is issued on average every 10 minutes. It therefore does not increase infinitely but both increases and decreases depending on the amount of hashpower in the network.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

Has it ever decreased?

> What is the maximum difficulty?

> There is no minimum target. The maximum difficulty is roughly: maximum_target / 1 (since 0 would result in infinity), which is a ridiculously huge number (about 2^224).

Furthermore nothing about bitcoin is "necessary", even in some loose consumer-demand sense of the term.

- There are other, better cryptocurrencies that don't bake the planet.

- There are other, better financial infrastructures that process more transactions and provide a better stable store of value.

- There are other, better distributed computing networks that do more than calculate sha256 over and over again.

> That is not a value most people care about.

People in a free market pay for what they care about. To date, those who use Bitcoin have been happy to pay for the energy the network consumes. In the end, that is all that matters.

Markets don't account for externalities. That's the reason this is an issue — people as individuals are willing to pay for the energy they spend mining cryptocurrency, but as a society it's a huge waste of energy and a massive source of carbon that is entirely unnecessary. Like, I don't just want to say "the tragedy of the commons" over and over again, but you can't just wave your hands and go "the free market will ensure that we don't emit too much carbon"

> individuals are willing to pay for the energy they spend mining cryptocurrency, but as a society it's a huge waste of energy and a massive source of carbon that is entirely unnecessary.

Society is made up of individuals. Assuming you don't believe a small cabal of individuals should, in the name of society and ideology, force other individuals to follow their dictates, the questions then are:

- will eliminating Bitcoin really reduce carbon emissions to a meaningful extent compared to other sources of carbon emissions?

- How much are individuals willing to pay to reduce carbon emissions? i.e. skin in the game. One way to pay to reduce Bitcoin's carbon emissions would be to sufficiently/relentlessly short Bitcoin to tank the price or develop/invest in an alternative green currency and let the market decide which is best.

- How much, in carbon emission, are individuals willing to pay for the benefit of a given technology like Bitcoin?

I'm not saying people are not willing to pay for it, I'm saying it's inefficient and specifically that the metric mentioned is not relevant.

> I'm saying it's inefficient

Compared to what else that provides a decentralised, censorship resistant monetary network without trusted third parties required to secure it?

> the metric mentioned is not relevant

It's relevant in explaining the energy usage relative to economic value and architecture of an engineered monetary system.

If you have a metric that can explain Bitcoin's design and value proposition with respect to energy consumption better than Dan Held's explanation, you should propose it and logically demonstrate your idea's superior explanatory and predictive power.

I'd really like to know the energy cost of HD streaming in general. Including god damn hi-res GIFs.

I've always wondered what the cost for HDCP encryption on our media wastes.

> How much energy does watching porn consume?

Just about all of mine

> Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system.

Really? give us a source, one who isn't either a grifter, a shill, or a criminal.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/2021/02/...

Bitcoin may not be around for ever if it isn’t upgraded to be more efficient, but public and private blockchains are here to stay and have real use cases.

You can be a salty Luddite if you want, but assuming proponents are mostly grifters, shills, or criminals just tells me you don’t have a clue.

"As such, DeFi may potentially contribute to a more robust and transparent financial infrastructure."

check your comprehension.

Does it count if they're all three?

Oh, come on. All of those things, except for travel, draw roughly zero watts compared to Bitcoin.

One Bitcoin transaction is about 750 kWh. That's enough to power a typical home for a month. It's enough to drive about 500 miles in an electric car, or (with vigorous handwaving based on EPA numbers) about 200 miles in an efficient gasoline car.

Bitcoin uses about 1/3 the energy of all the datacenters in the world. There are about 120 million Bitcoin transactions per year. If we assume 360 million people are using services that run in datacenters (obviously too low), one Bitcoin transaction uses as much electricity as the server time to support one user across all the services they use for a year.

>Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

This is an engineering problem.

A transaction or a block? Multiple transactions are recorded in a single block. The massive computational power is used to certify and lock down blocks at a time, not individual transactions.

A transaction. A block can hold a limited number of transactions, so the throughput is limited. It works out to about four transactions per second on average.

The cost to "mine" a whole block is even more ludicrous.

That energy consumption provides a ton of benefits for a very large group of people.

The energy consumption of Bitcoin makes a few thousand people rich and that's about it.

Yes other things consume a lot of energy, maybe even more, but that doesn't justify the energy consumption of Bitcoin.

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