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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying!

EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Well what's arguably even more horrifying is according to "Estimated average energy efficiency of bitcoin mining hardware" no significant changed happened since 2014. I imagine we went from CPU to GPU to ASIC in couple of years and now for more than a decade, no change, just more.

I'm not sure what data you looking at but we went from 8300 J/TH in 2014 to 33.4 J/TH in 2023. So... what are you talking about?

They have a graph at the bottom with the name I provided "Estimated average energy efficiency of bitcoin mining hardware"

You're reading the graph wrong, but I still have no idea how you are. Joules per terahash has declined from 8297 in 2014 to 33 in 2023 (the latest year they have data), a 99.996% reduction, or a 250x improvement in efficiency.

Well, improved energy efficiency just means more hashes/s and the difficulty adjusting. There's nothing to be gained in terms of the security or efficiency of the network as a whole by making the hardware faster, it's only good for whoever makes and uses that hardware.

Since when is incentivizing low cost renewable energy horrifying?

My first link shows that Bitcoin consumes roughly 40GW and my second link shows that the UK roughly does too.

There are a lot of ifs and buts here ... but the amount of power used to support the BT mechanism worldwide is roughly the same as the power consumption of the entirety of the UK.

Because every unit of electricity causes climate change and burns resources (even renewable sources of electricity - they just burn them slower). From a societal point of view we are dumping huge amounts of electricity and resources into a hole to accomplish nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a database and a trusted third party at a billionth of the cost (or less).

The vast majority of transactions are speculation on what other people might pay for a bitcoin (i.e., a line on a spreadsheet). And even then, that speculation and trading often occurs on secondary markets which rely on trusted third parties - thus rendering the entire ordeal even more pointless.

Better shoot down the sun then.

You’re right. I’ll setup the database. Everyone can trust me, honest!

In the long run BTC as a universal digital global currency will be more efficient than the fiat currencies it replaces.

That dreams is dead. Bitcoin is never going to be a universal digital currency. No-one (*) uses it for that purpose now, because they discovered it was rubbish as a cash system

(*) Approaching no-one on a global scale.

Bitcoin cares not for how much energy it uses, just how valuable the energy it uses is. This does not make more energy available to anyone else or reduce the price.

What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.

Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine.

AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.

> gas that's normally burned off at the well site

Funny thing about that. Civilized governments put a stop to that, by fining flare-offs to make it economical to not do that.

They still do it in North Dakota

I hadn't heard of this. Do they just allow the gas to go into the atmosphere instead? I've always heard that's worse than burning it

flare-offs are much better than releasing raw methane into the atmosphere because methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2

Did they require the methane be captured? I thought flare-offs were done because the methane gas is something like 1000x worse than the CO2.

> What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.

WTF? Hydro is rarely wasted because it's so dispatchable. Typically, it can only happen during high water seasons. Same for the gas power plants.

> Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible.

Like coal.

An interesting point is that any nation state or corporation can focus resources on either AI or BTC, but not both at the same time. BTC is a sure bet in the long run while AI is potentially capable of delivering a faster ROI with no hard guarantees. As BTC FOMO hits every country on Earth it's likely that AI will take a 100+ year backseat to massive state sponsored BTC operations. It's not hard to imagine a situation where governments restrict AI HW manufacture and limit electricity for AI as a means of supporting the national BTC effort.

"BTC is a sure bet in the long run "

7 transactions per second is NOT a sure bet.

And don't discount the negative sentiment around bitcoin as the nest of types that deserve to be completely wrecked financially, because they add no value to society, as in a Ponzi scheme. It seems inevitable to me this scheme is going to end some day and nobody is going to give a damn. It'll be the "Good Riddance Coin", filled with negative sentiment.

At 7 TSP BTC is far more fungible than Gold.

That doesn't make any sense at all.

> We can't know how much power AI uses.

I call shenanigans on this statement. We can and most certainly can tell how much power AI is using. The upper bound is the total datacenter usage.

Out of curiosity, do you have an estimate on that?

Might I point out this instance of Elon's company using gas powered generators to boost power at their data center:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-musk...

We have no idea what's happening in private data centers around the world.

Again shenanigans. This is an arguing technique from the bitcoin maximalists who would proclaim something to be false when a google search would show otherwise.

You've drank some kind of kool-aid. You've been gaslit. Don't do it to the rest of us.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65564#

Oh I've been a decentralist long before anyone coined the term "Bitcoin Maximalist". I've been watching haters whine and complain the whole time. Speaking of google searches, you could have easily looked up the use of hyrdro power yourself and found that it's a common practice.

Speaking of, I just did a Google search asking if we know how much power AI is using and this was the AI response: "It is difficult to determine the exact amount of power AI is using because most leading AI companies do not disclose specific data"

It doesn't matter how much you hate Bitcoin, it's here and it's not going away. You should probably get over it.

BTC enthusiasts have very creative arguments for why their currency isn’t the a complete disaster for the climate. Like pointing fingers.

The good that BTC will do in the long run is worth the investment. Civilization getting out from under fiat currencies - once and for all - is a massive step in the right direction.

I'm curious as to what's your time horizon for "in the long run". When is this transition to bitcoin going to happen?

decades

And what does sucking up all that low cost electricity to waste on a frivolity do to the price of electricity in general?

Cmon you remember supply and demand right

Meanwhile, Hedera remains carbon negative and 7 orders of magnitude more efficient than Bitcoin.

"Today, Hedera is performing the equivalent of over 10,000,000 transactions and 788,000 transactions for the same amount of energy it takes Bitcoin and Ethereum to process 1, respectively."

[0]: https://hedera.com/blog/going-carbon-negative-at-hedera-hash... [1]: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160701/

Databases either?

I find extremely funny that I came across this spammy comment while sitting on a vulnerability in their code because my attempts of contacting them have been unsuccessful

Here you go! https://hedera.com/bug-bounty/

Everything is orders of magnitude more efficient than bitcoin.

No money is more efficient than bitcoin.

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