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Comment by masswerk | Hacker News Reader

See also: "Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally" [1] – BTC begins to become a real problem.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-...

Indeed, and this is strongly determined by the price. As long as bitcoin doesn't influence the price of electricity, the relationship between its electricity consumption and price should be roughly linear. Meaning that if the price doubles, miners can afford to spend twice as much energy on proof-of-work in their competition to find blocks.

We're already at a price level where miners could afford to spend on the order of 2% of the world's electricity consumption (assuming an electricity cost of $0.05/kWh [1]). If the price rise continues, then bitcoin will start to push electricity prices up. Electricity grids may even become strained.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%286.25+bitcoin+%2F...

People have set oil fields on fire and killed millions of people to protect fiat currencies.

Bitcoin is a mere blip in my opinion. Prof of stake is coming and eventually bitcoin will not be able to keep up with others that have switched. So it will be fork or die.

> People have set oil fields on fire and killed millions of people to protect fiat currencies. Bitcoin is a mere blip in my opinion.

Agree completely. I simply don't understand all this noise about bitcoin energy consumption. It doesn't add up to even 1% of the damage these entrenched organizations cause. The only explanation I can come up with is they are too powerful to be messed with while cryptocurrencies are a safe target.

> Prof of stake is coming and eventually bitcoin will not be able to keep up with others that have switched. So it will be fork or die.

Absolutely! Once they all switch to better proof systems, we'll enjoy lower transaction fees and even higher decentralization. Proof-of-stake is already threatening to fork Ethereum, hopefully the miners will lose in the long run.

Bitcoin is outdated tech by now. Only reason it's still around is its history as the first and most well-known cryptocurrency.

Energy is the only physical thing you can put into the internet, and is the price to pay for having noone in control of this new permissionless fixed-supply global currency.

Think about how global resources are allocated on large scale, and how much control on this allocation have those who control the global money supply.

What would happen if there was a way to have a leveled playing field?

It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. There are much bigger problems out there that should be prioritized such as fossil fuels. By the time we've solved those, cryptocurrencies will hopefully have moved on to less expensive proof systems.

Cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin are already moving on. By marketcap, the second through fourth-largest blockchains either don't use miners or are getting rid of them within a year.

Indeed. Honestly bitcoin is already outdated technology. It enjoys its current position by virtue of being the first and most well-known cryptocurrency. Ethereum and Monero are much more important technologies, I hope they'll one day be able to switch to cheaper proofs so that we can spend less energy as well as less money in fees.

Are you posting this to start a flame war? Has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

The nature of Bitcoin's power use does directly matter to the pricing. The availability of "cheap" power is directly related to the price floor due to mining costs. If you can't afford to mine coins at a profit the network will shut down. That means either higher transaction fees, more efficient mining hardware, or a change to the network design (proof of work). Power consumption is very central to the future of Bitcoins and how you should consider pricing it.

Edit: fixing some sentence wording :)

The difficulty can adjust downward. If the price goes below miner costs, then some miners quit, difficulty decreases, and remaining miners become profitable again. The network keeps going just fine, without needing any changes.

A 50% hashrate dump right after a difficulty adjustment would result in the next epoch running at half-speed for 4 weeks.

Network would keep going, but if would not be "just fine".

No, certainly not: the ramp-up in price directly corresponds to trade and the load on the mining network. Hence, we've seen quite a significant increase in energy consumption, recently. The problem isn't going away, as long as BTC is traded in volume (for which valuation is an indicator).

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