5 ms·
But considering the fact that the computations are useless, the energy is still wasted.
by johnnydoebk 9y ago
But considering the fact that the computations are useless, the energy is still wasted.
- mike-cardwell 9y agoWhy did you say "wasted" instead of "used" ? We put energy in, we get value out.
- kobeya 9y agoExisting trust-based financial infrastructure is extremely wasteful too.
- Artemis2 9y agoIf 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 agoI was referring to the entire finance and insurance industries which represent 7.2% of US GDP.
- eru 9y agoComparing 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 agoThe 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 agoYou 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 agoUsing 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 agoThe computations are not useless. They enable a decentralized currency which is a very valuable thing.