5 ms·

That is only true for burning fossil fules. Considering that the Hover Dam can generate 2 GW peak, the bitcoin network could feasibly run on renewable energy.

koolba 9y ago
But as a lot of it happens in China, it's more likely to be powered by coal right?
- kobeya 9y ago
  No, a lot of it happens in Sichuan province specifically, because of the availability of hydroelectric power. Also Washington state for the same reason.
  - johnnydoebk 9y ago
    But considering the fact that the computations are useless, the energy is still wasted.
    - mike-cardwell 9y ago
      Why did you say "wasted" instead of "used" ? We put energy in, we get value out.
    - kobeya 9y ago
      Existing trust-based financial infrastructure is extremely wasteful too.
      - Artemis2 9y ago
        If I'm correct, 1718MW over a year is over 15TWh, which if Bitcoin were a country would place it 78th in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... I don't think Visa uses up as much energy as a small country for processing 7 transactions per second at full speed.
        kobeya 9y ago
        I was referring to the entire finance and insurance industries which represent 7.2% of US GDP.
        eru 9y ago
        Comparing finance's shares of GDP to bitcoin hashing power is useless. The power used for hashing is at best a lower bound on how much a bitcoin based finance system would need to run. (Eg even with bitcoins, you'd still have essentially the same stock market. You might be trading coloured coins on the blockchain, but people would still need to work to raise capital etc.)
        kobeya 9y ago
        The hashing power creates trust in settlement. Much of the financial industry is also about trusted settlement through other means. They are in fact quite comparable in that sense.
        eru 9y ago
        You are right that the hashing power basically produces trust in settlement. I guess where we disagree is in how much of a proportion effort in finance is spent on producing that kind of trust vs other activities (like eg capital allocation, or hunting for arbitrage activities etc).
        kyboren 9y ago
        Using that list, Cuba and North Korea immediately follow Bitcoin in energy consumption. Cuba or North Korea alone could never hope to gain control of the network: they could not supply enough power even if they redirected everything to malicious Bitcoin mining rigs. More realistically, even a country like Saudi Arabia (with a reported 272TWh) could not control the Bitcoin network in the long term--"wasting" 5.5% of your national energy consumption is not sustainable. This "waste" is actually a kind of security all its own.
    - jcoffland 9y ago
      The computations are not useless. They enable a decentralized currency which is a very valuable thing.
127 9y ago
Most miners are in China. Most power generated for those miners comes directly from coal. https://bitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/ https://bitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/
- TFortunato 9y ago
  Waiting for the inevitable: "What if we could guarantee that these coins were made only with renewable / sustainable energy sources, giving you the benefit of digital currency w/o the pollution", and the coming "It's like CO2 / renewable energy credits, but with blockchain!" startups.
idibidiartists 9y ago
using something that is practically infinitely abundant (renewable energy) to create an artificially scarce medium of exchange is illogical to say the least... why not use renewable energy itself as the self-valued currency?
- Setepenre 9y ago
  Energy price's are highly volatile because you cannot control the supply in a timely fashion nor store energy for later usage (in amounts that matters anyway), i.e it would be a worse currency. Scarcity is a good attribute for a currency. Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns. Which is what was used during the 2007 crisis. People do not realize how much worse the 2007 crisis would have been without the measures taken by the Federal Reserve. IMO, the attractiveness of bitcoin is about being a secure decentralized payment system everything else is fluff. Such a system takes some energy to work what a surprise... Do you guys think that all the financial institutions combined use less energy than bitcoin ? Bitcoin is probably using a lot less energy...
  - idibidiartists 9y ago
    Renewable energy is not an asset. It's energy. It's the basis of all life. It is infinitely abundant (until our Sun dies and the winds stop blowing) Unlike currency, energy has an intrinsic value as a unit of work (the 'joule' being that unit) Energy as a currency would get its value not from artificial scarcity but from its rate of flow in a surplus energy p2p exchange network. Satoshi himself mentioned this line of thinking back in 2009 [1] when I wrote about a hypothetical p2p energy economy, but he thought the Blockchain could power such an energy-as-currency-based economy, and he's actually right. You need to think of the Blockchain as the low level API and write high level currency schemes on top of it. I haven't given it much thought since then. 1. http://archive.is/5CbYM http://archive.is/5CbYM
    - jcoffland 9y ago
      > It is infinitely abundant It's not. One immediate limit is ground space.
eru 9y ago
To be truly accurate, you would need to look at the marginal impact. Ie even if bitcoin was purely running on renewable energy, it would still crowd out other users of renewable energy, and those might fall back to coal.

koolba 9y ago

But as a lot of it happens in China, it's more likely to be powered by coal right?

kobeya 9y ago
No, a lot of it happens in Sichuan province specifically, because of the availability of hydroelectric power. Also Washington state for the same reason.
- johnnydoebk 9y ago
  But considering the fact that the computations are useless, the energy is still wasted.
  - mike-cardwell 9y ago
    Why did you say "wasted" instead of "used" ? We put energy in, we get value out.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    Existing trust-based financial infrastructure is extremely wasteful too.
    - Artemis2 9y ago
      If I'm correct, 1718MW over a year is over 15TWh, which if Bitcoin were a country would place it 78th in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... I don't think Visa uses up as much energy as a small country for processing 7 transactions per second at full speed.
      - kobeya 9y ago
        I was referring to the entire finance and insurance industries which represent 7.2% of US GDP.
        eru 9y ago
        Comparing finance's shares of GDP to bitcoin hashing power is useless. The power used for hashing is at best a lower bound on how much a bitcoin based finance system would need to run. (Eg even with bitcoins, you'd still have essentially the same stock market. You might be trading coloured coins on the blockchain, but people would still need to work to raise capital etc.)
        kobeya 9y ago
        The hashing power creates trust in settlement. Much of the financial industry is also about trusted settlement through other means. They are in fact quite comparable in that sense.
        eru 9y ago
        You are right that the hashing power basically produces trust in settlement. I guess where we disagree is in how much of a proportion effort in finance is spent on producing that kind of trust vs other activities (like eg capital allocation, or hunting for arbitrage activities etc).
      - kyboren 9y ago
        Using that list, Cuba and North Korea immediately follow Bitcoin in energy consumption. Cuba or North Korea alone could never hope to gain control of the network: they could not supply enough power even if they redirected everything to malicious Bitcoin mining rigs. More realistically, even a country like Saudi Arabia (with a reported 272TWh) could not control the Bitcoin network in the long term--"wasting" 5.5% of your national energy consumption is not sustainable. This "waste" is actually a kind of security all its own.
  - jcoffland 9y ago
    The computations are not useless. They enable a decentralized currency which is a very valuable thing.

127 9y ago

Most miners are in China. Most power generated for those miners comes directly from coal. https://bitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/ https://bitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/

TFortunato 9y ago
Waiting for the inevitable: "What if we could guarantee that these coins were made only with renewable / sustainable energy sources, giving you the benefit of digital currency w/o the pollution", and the coming "It's like CO2 / renewable energy credits, but with blockchain!" startups.

idibidiartists 9y ago

using something that is practically infinitely abundant (renewable energy) to create an artificially scarce medium of exchange is illogical to say the least... why not use renewable energy itself as the self-valued currency?

Setepenre 9y ago
Energy price's are highly volatile because you cannot control the supply in a timely fashion nor store energy for later usage (in amounts that matters anyway), i.e it would be a worse currency. Scarcity is a good attribute for a currency. Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns. Which is what was used during the 2007 crisis. People do not realize how much worse the 2007 crisis would have been without the measures taken by the Federal Reserve. IMO, the attractiveness of bitcoin is about being a secure decentralized payment system everything else is fluff. Such a system takes some energy to work what a surprise... Do you guys think that all the financial institutions combined use less energy than bitcoin ? Bitcoin is probably using a lot less energy...
- idibidiartists 9y ago
  Renewable energy is not an asset. It's energy. It's the basis of all life. It is infinitely abundant (until our Sun dies and the winds stop blowing) Unlike currency, energy has an intrinsic value as a unit of work (the 'joule' being that unit) Energy as a currency would get its value not from artificial scarcity but from its rate of flow in a surplus energy p2p exchange network. Satoshi himself mentioned this line of thinking back in 2009 [1] when I wrote about a hypothetical p2p energy economy, but he thought the Blockchain could power such an energy-as-currency-based economy, and he's actually right. You need to think of the Blockchain as the low level API and write high level currency schemes on top of it. I haven't given it much thought since then. 1. http://archive.is/5CbYM http://archive.is/5CbYM
  - jcoffland 9y ago
    > It is infinitely abundant It's not. One immediate limit is ground space.

eru 9y ago

To be truly accurate, you would need to look at the marginal impact. Ie even if bitcoin was purely running on renewable energy, it would still crowd out other users of renewable energy, and those might fall back to coal.