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Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
- toisanji 9y agoSuch a waste of energy for this experiment.
- givinguflac 9y agoThat is an absurd amount of energy. This really changes my opinion on this being a feasible currency.
- iaw 9y agoAs the network hash power increases that value will only go up.
- inborn 9y agodid you mean price will go up? either way it doesn't offset that high cost of use, so if humans here still value efficiency they might find it worthwhile to switch tools.
- GBiT 9y agoEnergy is whats backing Bitcoins value. You need a lot of energy to create this valuable document - block
- tradersam 9y agoThis is completely true; miners will mine the coin that gives them the best ROI. If Bitcoin's value decreases without an equal decrease in difficulty, the whole thing could crash quite fast.
- politician 9y agoThat's a good point -- in earlier times slaves worked the mines to extract gold from raw earth. Gold was a good store of value because of its scarcity. Likewise, Bitcoin mines the electrical grid.
- jstanley 9y agoAre you arguing that using the electricity you paid for is immoral, or are you arguing that using slaves is not immoral as long as you use them for something good? I don't see how your analogy applies.
- hwillis 9y agoSlaves are unimportant to his point. Gold being scarce means it was hard to counterfeit gold coins in a time when you couldn't mint coins in a reliable way. Likewise, the purpose of bitcoin mining is to verify transactions in a way that is hard to counterfeit, making it more difficult to get a majority share of mining. The difficulty enforces scarcity.
- jstanley 9y agoSorry, I thought it was a thinly-veiled moral argument equating bitcoin mining to use of slaves. Glad I was wrong.
- politician 9y ago
- hjnilsson 9y ago1/1000th of global energy production. Or the output of one nuclear power plant, or the same as all energy lost to friction for every car in the world. That really puts it into perspective.
- homero 9y agoMuch of the mining is done next to hydro plants in China.
- etatoby 9y agoStill, there is a fixed amount of hydro power available, short of building new dams. This puts Bitcoin's toll on fossil fuel. (If Bitcoin didn't exist, the hydro power would still be there and would be used for something else, therefore less fossil fuel would have to be burned in its place.)
- aianus 9y ago> If Bitcoin didn't exist, the hydro power would still be there and would be used for something else That's not a good assumption. There are many power plants in China in the middle of nowhere unconnected to much. It's completely plausible that the entire bitcoin network could run on clean energy that otherwise couldn't be used for much else because it's too remote (geothermal in Greenland or something).
- Digiconomist 9y agoI hope we're not building hydro power plants for the sole purpose of supporting the Bitcoin network. The energy may be "clean", but these projects have their own impact on the surrounding ecosystem.
- homero 9y agoSo far they're built next to pre-existing ones and using excess power
- 1001101 9y agoI agree. I've been racking my brain on ways to connect proof of work to something useful (like folding proteins, general purpose distributed computing, etc.)
- kobeya 9y agoDo that and it would no longer be useful as proof of work. Proof of work-i-was-going-to-do-anyway is not useful for securing the ledger.
- akvadrako 9y agoThat's incorrect. All that matters is you can't game the system by taking shortcuts or deciding what the problem will be beforehand; the work cannot be even partially computable without knowing the previous block.
- spiorf 9y agoBut there is no known function that has these properties and is useful in real world.
- akvadrako 9y agoSure and that puts it in the same camp as PoS and other currently unworkable schemes. A possible way forward; we don't know yet.
- Taek 9y agoNo, you are incorrect. The important aspect of proof of work is that it is very expensive to create an alternate history (maybe one where you didn't send $15,000,000 to the exchange, for example). If you are doing useful work, someone can pay for it, and you can use that payment to make an alternate history for free, defeating the security assumption of blockchains. Blockchains only work by probably wasting in order to build a history. If you aren't wasting, then it wasn't expensive to build the history (it was subsidised), and it wouldn't be expensive to build a different history (that one could also be subsidized)
- dane-pgp 9y agoIt's worth noting that this Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index (BECI) is not without controversy. A more detailed analysis is this one: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ and the author of that has specific criticisms of the BECI calculation: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/
- DigiEconomist 9y agoThe controversy is not exactly without controversy either. ;) I recommend having a glance at: https://digiconomist.net/re-serious-faults-in-beci https://digiconomist.net/re-serious-faults-in-beci
- spiorf 9y agoThe energy expended is the security of the currency. If a transaction is confirmed by 1 TWh of proof of work, that much energy is required to alter it, meanwhile the bitcoin network has expended even more energy. It is still young, and the exponential growth in energy consumption is going to stop as an equilibrium is reached.
- zik 9y agoIt's only a temporary situation. There's a lot of research going on into replacing "Proof of Work" blockchains with "Proof of Stake" which doesn't require any mining. Ethereum is likely to get Proof of Stake fairly soon. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will likely follow if it works out.
- mrb 9y agoMiners consume an amount of energy comparable to Christmas decorative lights in the US (alone) I never see anyone refer to these lights as "absurd" or "infeasible" :) http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ Also note that BECI overestimates the consumption: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/
- DigiEconomist 9y agoThe reality is that Bitcoin uses a not so negligible amount of energy versus a negligible amount of transactions on a global scale, using thousands of times more energy per transaction than the traditional system no matter how you look at it. That's not sustainable going forward. We also spent some time discussing the estimate, but you were unable to make a good case for alternate variables (you actually explicitly agreed with a majority of the method) and ended up quote mining our emails to make a bunch of false statements. Hence I had to post: https://digiconomist.net/re-serious-faults-in-beci https://digiconomist.net/re-serious-faults-in-beci
- TekMol 9y agoThe reward for mining a block will go down over time. In the end, all mining will be financed via the transaction fees. Then the market will figure out how much energy should be used per transaction.
- iaw 9y agoDoes that justify wasting enough electricity to power Dallas, Texas in the mean time?
- TekMol 9y agoObviously it generates enough value for some people that they are willing to pay for it. Watching television probably uses up even more energy. And I would argue it has a negative impact on life quality. But who am I to decide what people should value?
- iaw 9y agoWatching television does not use up more energy than mining bitcoin, that's the point of the linked article.
- TekMol 9y agoThe article states that the "electricity consumed for a single transaction" is equivalent to what 5 households use up in 5 days. Which seems to make you think that one would "use up" less energy by watching TV then by doing a Bitcoin transaction. But that is not true. Making a Bitcoin transaction uses up hardly any energy. The miners mine for the block reward. That is completely unrelated to transactions. They even mine if there are no transactions and generate empty blocks. If nobody made a Bitcoin transaction for a month, the energy consumption of that month would stay pretty much the same.
- alkonaut 9y agoIncandescent bulbs provided light and people were happy to use them. They were outlawed for the simple reason that the problem they solved wasn't efficient compared to other ways of solving the same problem. The same thing will happen to cars with internal combustion engines. People may value the sound of combustion engines or the warm glow of incandescent bulbs but as a society we don't care what they value since we share the effects of externalities.
- tehlike 9y agoFunny way to say this. Why not 1 us household for 5.58? Any reason for this? Edit: title seems to be fixed.
- brndnmtthws 9y agoLong term outlook for mining isn't good. Ethereum, for example, is moving toward Proof of Stake (https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ), and Bitcoin will become less profitable for miners soon, beginning with the activation of Segwit. The reason for the recent Bitcoin Cash fork, was that miners are terrified of losing control given the substantial investment required to maintain profitability. I don't think Satoshi ever thought mining would become so profitable, centralized, and political. If Satoshi had, he or she may have rethought the mining aspect of Bitcoin. It's the end of days for mining as we know it.
- GBiT 9y agoMiners can choose to include more profitable transactions, skiping segwit ones. POS will not work. you need to back Bitcoins value with something, and its electricity. Gov backing with gold.
- jaekwon 9y agoIncorrect. Bitcoin isn't "backed by electricity". You can't turn Bitcoin back into energy. The energy is used to secure a distributed ledger to prevent double spend attacks on ongoing transactions, in a really inefficient way, but don't call it "backing". PoS will succeed. It already has, we've set all the pieces. The thing is, you don't want to live in a world where Bitcoin and PoW dominate our financial transactions. That world is not livable. Bitcoin transactions are secured by spent electricity. PoS transactions are secured by cryptographic signature schemes and reputation of operational security. It's how the world already functions, just more replicated.
- Taek 9y agoIt takes a cryptographically provable amount of energy to reverse a Bitcoin transaction, and that amount is equal to the money spent on electricity mining blocks that confirm a transaction. Proof of Stake systems have no equivalent. They operate by trusting the staking parties are not colluding to create an alternate history. But if they do decide to collude, there is little thermodynamic cost to rewriting history. It's a fundamentally weaker system, and one that depends on trust. The whole value of proof of work is that it allows you to escape trust.
- raffomania 9y agoHas anyone read up on the proof-of-stakes algorithms mentioned in this article? I didn't hear of those before.
- schoen 9y agoThere's some Wikipedia coverage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake Maybe there's a better or more up-to-date introduction elsewhere.
- Taek 9y agohttps://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf Most bitcoin heavyweights who have researched proof of stake have concluded that it's not viable, and not worth further research in the context to trustless and decentralized systems.
- akvadrako 9y agoDon't count on them ever working - it may be mathematically impossible and at the very least it's a much bigger technical challenge than PoW.
- rspeer 9y agoApparently "terawatt-hours per year" is a unit that people use in public policy, but it strikes me as strange. Converting 16.22 TWh/year to a "more metric" unit, that's a sustained power usage of 1.85 gigawatts. So Bitcoin is constantly using more than enough power to make Doc Brown's eyes bug out.
- aqme28 9y agoI too hate seeing __ watt-hours per year. What's the point of the double time conversion? It's like saying "The movie starts in 3 kilometers per mile-per-hour"
- rspeer 9y agoI mean, I understand why, it's because often you want to relate it to cost, and electricity is priced in $/KWh, not in ($/sec)/watt.
- aqme28 9y agoThere it is again though! A Watt is a Joule/sec, so you shouldn't even use Watt-seconds as a unit. You mean $/Joule.
- davidad_ 9y agoI do wish energy were priced per megajoule. But I suppose this is probably a symptom, like miles-per-hour vs meters-per-second, of the non-metrication of time units at the relevant scales. (It takes order of an hour to drive somewhere, and order of an hour to run a laundry machine.) If we had a metric hour of a thousand seconds, a kWh would just be a MJ, no problem. And if we had a "metric year" of a million seconds, a "TWh/yr" would just be a GW. Unfortunately, it's pretty important to humans to track time in a way that lines up with earth's rotation and revolution, and there's no way to make that metric. (If French Revolutionary Time caught on, a second would be 1e-5 days instead of 1/86400 and an hour would be 1/10 of a day, and that would be a start, but the year/day ratio is pretty intractable.)
- aqme28 9y ago
- c3534l 9y agoI'm really confused by this article. Sometimes it seems like they're talking about bitcoin mining, then they start talking about transactions.
- iaw 9y agoThe act of mining confirms transactions in bitcoin.
- rainbowmverse 9y agoJust another thing people went wild for without thinking about externalities. You don't need to be a genius computer scientist to realize a thing that requires a constantly rising amount of processing power just to keep pace will eventually need an unreasonable amount of power.
- shrimpx 9y agoHumanity needs a constantly rising amount of processing power to keep pace.
- zik 9y agoIt's a temporary situation. Proof of Work which requires mining is likely to be replaced by Proof of Stake and other methods which don't require any mining. Ethereum is planning to try Proof of Stake in the next year or so.
- mrb 9y agoBitcoin does NOT need constantly increasing computing power. The hashrate and difficulty level adjust up or down as needed.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- diafygi 9y agoWell...yeah. It's kind of by design, right? I mean, it's either "work" or centralization, so that's the trade off bitcoin makes. The work is the disincentive against cornering, right?
- jaekwon 9y agoNo. There are sustainable alternatives to PoW. See Tendermint and the Cosmos Network, for example.
- mark024 9y agodemand & offer, if the energy were more expensive, fewer would mine and the difficulty would drop, I wish I could mine on my low powered laptop, but if you want to raise the pitch forks against bitcoin, on the same logic, we could stop playing computer games, watch movies/shows/tv etc, even using modern phones, the old nokias that lasted a week one one charge would do fine.
- rainbowmverse 9y agoPeople have been raising the issue of our civilization's wastefulness for years. Where have you been?
- mark024 9y agoDon't remember seeing any article about how many houses we could power by not playing computer games.
- rainbowmverse 9y agoA bit old, but it's one of the first results on Google. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/video-gamers-use-as-much-energy-as-san-diego/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/video-gamers-use-... >> U.S. homes have about 63 million video game consoles, and together they use about as much energy as San Diego does in a year, according to a 2008 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council
- glenstein 9y agoSure, we talk about plastic in the oceans and CO2 and electricity usage at a general level. But I think the commenter you are replying to is basically right that there isn't a sustained cultural conversation targeting the wastefulness of very particular forms of applied electricity usage. And I don't think a one-off article changes that since you can find one-off articles about practically anything. It seems weirdly specific to talk about bitcoin's energy cost this way when we don't single out, say, Clash of Clans or facebook posts about the Ice Bucket challenge and lament their specific energy costs. And I think the reason for the difference has to do with the idiosyncratic culture surrounding bitcoin rather than bitcoin being a unique harm in terms of electricity usage.
- antocv 9y agoByteball is not PoW or PoS, but has no energy waste for consensus.
- schwabacher 9y agoThe statistic that stands out to me from this article is that 1 bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power 5.58 us households for a day. I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable about bitcoin can comment - is it likely that this will continue as the mining reward decreases? How expensive will transactions be after that happens? And if smaller rewards reduce total mining and power consumption, how vulnerable does the blockchain become to attack? What i'm wondering is if transaction costs in the 'end state' of bitcoin can be competitive with centralized competitors like credit cards, paypal, etc. given this level of power consumption?
- GBiT 9y agoWell... Right now we have blocksize limited to 1 mb. If we will remove this limit and Bitcoin becomes a global currency, we can earn a lot from transaction fees. nChain estimates about 0.05 for a transaction if it will became us big as VISA. If you interested where is one youtube video talking about possible fees.
- TekMol 9y agoI'm hoping someone more knowledgeable about bitcoin can comment I did and was quickly voted to the bottom. bitcoin can be competitive with centralized competitors like credit cards In it's current form it can't. It's already running at max capacity. No further increase in transactions per day is possible. If there will be a cryptocurrency that can handle as many transactions as Visa, it will be something else then what we currently call Bitcoin.
- etatoby 9y agoIota?
- WikipediasBad 9y agoCorrect. Glad someone has heard of it at least on hacker news.
- spiorf 9y ago
- maxerickson 9y agoSo the calculation is incredibly sensitive to the assumptions, that miners spend 60% of revenues on electricity and that they have an average cost of $0.05 per kw-h. Anyone have any sense of how accurate either of those is?
- Digiconomist 9y agoJust want to note that 60% is the expected future (ultimately), but the current % is more like 22 (found by taking the total cost # divided by the total annualized mining revenue #).
- jstanley 9y agoSo in that case it's only ~2 houses rather than 5.58? Is this your website? Do you think the figure should be made more accurate?
- Digiconomist 9y agoAh no, it's 5.58 for the current 22%. If it actually gets to 60% it would be much worse.
- maxerickson 9y agoIf you aren't going to disclose your actual assumptions and methodology you should probably delete all the text that purports to do that. Will save people time.
- Digiconomist 9y agoHuh? It's all in the infographic. 60% is the target, but "production takes time" (see content here) hence the "ultimately". I'm not hiding the current number, it's in the key statistics. If you're interested in where the 60% comes from in the first place > it's based on the lifetime costs of a number of machines. It was on the page a while ago, but the index page itself isn't a research paper so I removed it. I'll give it a new spot soon, probably on this page (already containing the foundation of the method): https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electricity-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electricity-consumption If you just want to see some real-world numbers, check out my break-down a farm recently: https://twitter.com/digieconomist/status/898582265080446976 https://twitter.com/digieconomist/status/898582265080446976 (Note: subtle difference between part spent on elec & part spent on ongoing costs. I take costs and then 1 kWh for every 5 cents spent, so including overhead.)
- pedrocr 9y agoSpending 800M$ a year in electricity alone to run a digital currency is massive and at 8$ per transaction seems incredibly inneficient. The comparison to the VISA network is incredible. Independently of your opinion of the value of Bitcoin in the long term the current network is definitely not more useful to society than the VISA network.
- GBiT 9y ago800M is not to run the network, its hard money. If 1 mb limit was removed today, this network can handle loads of VISA and more. Electricity is spent to create new blocks... Hard work is done to create new Bitcoin and verify transactions.
- politician 9y agoThis is one of the reasons I prefer proof-of-stake schemes, despite the complexity, low power consensus is preferable given roughly equivalent tamper resistance. State collusion with mining pools is a credible threat to proof-of-work schemes.
- jstanley 9y agoProof of Stake is just Proof of Work with hidden work. Miners will crank whatever handle they can crank to increase their payout, up to the point where they spend more marginal effort cranking the handle than the corresponding marginal payout is worth. In PoW (in bitcoin) that handle is SHA256. In Proof of Stake, it's more obscure, but they will find it, and they will crank it, and you'll just be back where you started. I'm not convinced PoS is a practical improvement on PoW.
- jcfrei 9y agoThis is a misleading argument. Yes, miners will always spend more until marginal revenue == marginal cost. The problem with the proof of work system of bitcoin (and many others) is its inefficiency that only allows for a low transactions throughput. Proof of work has no inherent value for the system, it's simply a way to cap the network throughput to about 1MB per 10 minutes because anything lower than 10 minutes will make the network increasingly vulnerable to adversarial attacks [1]. There's got to be a way to increase network throughput beyond this while maintaining censorship resistance and decentralization. [1] C. Decker, Information Propagation in the Bitcoin Network: http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23...
- tylersmith 9y agoThe point is expend work to create signatures, creating a crytoeconomic cost to state changes.
- jcfrei 9y ago
- merkaloid 9y ago>Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction: 5.58 The one that surprised me the most
- Taek 9y agoIt's a bad stat. The electricity that goes into a block doesn't just confirm the transactions in the block, it also confirms all the transactions in all blocks prior to that block, and those transactions have a cumulative value of about $70 billion. The bleak picture painted on the article is an incomplete one by far.
- lttlrck 9y agoWhy is it a bad stat? Is having to confirm all transactions in all prior blocks not a direct result of a transaction? Why is the cumulative value relevant? I can see how there is a perceived value there but if the transaction didn’t happen it wouldn’t have been needed?
- Taek 9y agoIf the block had zero transactions in it, it still would have cost just as much energy to create. Similarly, if the price of the coin were 1/1000th but the block were full, it would have cost 1/1000th the price to confirm those transactions. What determines the cost/mining reward of a block is not the transactions in it, but the value of the chain as a whole.
- lttlrck 9y agoAh got it. Thanks.
- alister 9y agoYou can't compare Bitcoin to Visa. Visa is merely a payment sytem -- a means of transfer of money that already exists. Visa is not money. Bitcoin however is money. As well as being a payment system. The correct comparison would be to compare the cost of Bitcoin to U.S. dollars or gold. Gold requires hundreds of dollars per ounce and untold energy to extract. U.S. dollars require the existence of a powerful economy and trillion dollar military to keep the currency secure and desirable.
- Digiconomist 9y agoThe comparison to VISA is a common one. Whether it makes sense to use BTC in a certain way ultimately depends on the user and how they're using it. But honestly, as a medium of exchange Bitcoin simply doesn't make sense in most cases.
- spiorf 9y agoAt least until/if Ligtning networks is proved to work.
- IgorPartola 9y agoCompare it to cash and coins seems the most appropriate. How much energy does harvesting cotton, making into bills, and distributing it all over the place take? Don't forget those fun armoired trucks that have to cart it from place to place. Pennies famously cost more than $0.01 to produce because of the cost of metal. Metal that has to be dug out of the earth, trucked, smelted, trucked, stamped, trucked again.
- lemonycracket 9y agoThis. That site is spreading FUD and fails to show the true impact (in terms of energy and lives) of the current legacy financial system. Next thing you know they will demand you register carbon credits to run a mining rig.
- hwillis 9y agoAccording to this it costs almost 21 cents to "make" a dollar of bitcoins. According to the mint's 2015 annual report[1] they made 1,114 million dollars in circulating coins at a cost of .51 cents per dollar in coins. However bills cost 4.9 cents/dollar for $1 bills and half a cent per dollar for $20 bills. So the vast majority of money is much, much cheaper than a bitcoin. [1]: https://www.usmint.gov/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2015AnnualReport.pdf https://www.usmint.gov/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/...
- lemonycracket 9y agoIt would be nice to understand the Banking Industry Energy Consumption. Let's add up: - human time and labor for tellers - cost to feed floor traders cocaine - cost of ink,paper, etc Let's add that up and see what that looks like. We already know that FIRE (Financial Insuranc Real Estate) sectors siphon off about 40% of total economic value from GDP. 1/1000th of global energy for BTC and ETH is amazing in these early days. It will become orders of magnitude more efficient. Another FUD article that does not compare opportunity cost compared to the cost to run the current financial systems.
- amelius 9y ago> Electricity consumed per transaction: 165 kWh Thats about $20 in the US. If a transaction is that expensive, how can this system even work for transactions with a value of that order? Are large transactions "sponsoring" small transactions? What happens if more people use the system for small transactions? Will BTC become unusable?
- justinzollars 9y agoWow. Nice rough math! Thats ridiculous. Hopefully Ethereums POS (proof of stake) system will fix this.
- jaekwon 9y agoCheck out Tendermint and the Cosmos Network.
- jstanley 9y agoLarge transactions are not sponsoring small transactions. Transactions are priced by their size in bytes, so the monetary value of the transaction is totally irrelevant to the fee. People holding bitcoin are essentially sponsoring all transactions, if you want to look at it that way, because miners are making money both from fees and from new bitcoin that is created, which dilutes the value of all existing bitcoin.
- amelius 9y agoSo, if you look just at transaction cost the system clearly cannot sustain itself. But as more people buy into BTC, the system keeps from collapsing. If you ask me, that's starting to look like a Ponzi scheme in disguise ...
- rothbardrand 9y agoCheck your premises-- your transaction cost is inaccurate.
- 9y ago
- jacquesm 9y agoWhat the article fails to take into account is the huge volatility of BTC relative to the USD. So if you are going to make this calculation over a whole year then you have to split it up into many small calculations (for instance, per block with the going rate of BTC:USD at the time) and then accumulate in USD. On another note: a very large fraction of all bitcoin mining is happening in China and electricity cost there is quite different compared to the USA. So I seriously question the prime assumption leading to the quoted energy consumption.
- spiorf 9y agoThe energy expended is a guarantee of security and immutability. The fact that real world energy is expended is the thermodynamic guarantee of the irreversibility of a transaction. If you have access to the VISA database, and change something, you cannot have the cryptographic proof that it has not been tampered with. At the very best, you trust a VISA root key. With Bitcoin you trust math and physics, telling that if the whole network has expended 1TWh after my transaction, at least twice that energy will be necessary to reverse it, and the only data i need to prove that, is the blockchain.
- kybernetikos 9y agoI get that the energy is being used for something useful and cool, but when the energy cost to secure a single transaction could power 5 households for a day, then something is wrong and needs to be fixed. Surely even fans can agree there's a level at which it just doesn't make sense any more.
- joeyspn 9y ago> something is wrong and needs to be fixed It's already fixed with PoS... IMO the winner of the cryptocurrency-race will be a PoS-based coin.
- tylersmith 9y agoPoS deserves research but it's far from shown itself to be viable as the dominate consensus mechanism.
- Taek 9y agoA lot of research was done by heavyweights for PoS in 2012 and 2013. The consensus was that it was a fruitless pursuit and that PoS could not match PoW in terms of security and decentralization. Several papers have been written about it. https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
- chriswilmer 9y agoThis is a stupid comparison. The number of transactions can be increased by a factor of a 1000 easily while holding the amount of energy expended constant.
- rspeer 9y agoIf it's so easy, please describe how.
- Shorel 9y agoThe how is easy to explain with just the name of an implementation/fork: Bitcoin Cash. The reason it has not happened for original Bitcoin is internal politics. If the number of transactions are limited then they are more profitable.
- rspeer 9y agoI do not believe that Bitcoin Cash is 1000x more efficient than Bitcoin. It is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.
- Shorel 9y agoIt is not, each block in Bitcoin Cash can only hold 8x more transactions. Also, and more important: it is not necessary to for it to be 1000x more efficient, because no cryptocurrency currently has such a big amount of transactions per hour. It would be more wasteful to support 1GB blocks when they would go empty. But, and this is actually my claim, if volume transaction increases enough to saturate a Bitcoin Cash block, then they will increase block size, as many times as it is needed, as that is the proposed Bitcoin Cash strategy. In stark contrast with the Bitcoin 1MB blocks forever strategy. (I am assuming you don't think efficiency is measured in watts per transaction, because if you do, /facepalm)
- abalone 9y agoNote: Ethereum adds another 30% and is rapidly rising.[1] [1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
- z3t4 9y agoWhile it's a lot of power being used, it's pretty much all automated, versus any other currency that takes a lot of manual labor. Bitcoints biggest flaw in my mind is that there is no trust built in. After each transaction it should be possible to give a rating, so that each wallet/account has a reputation, it could work like "Pagerank". Trust is essential to Bitcoin and Bitcoin markets usually has either public trust, or rating and escrow added on.
- mrb 9y agoBECI is flawed, I wrote a critic of it some months ago: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci This motivated me to research and publish a more precise energy comsumption estimate, and I have been published in Bitcoin Magazine: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-bitcoin-miners-consume-reasonable-amount-energy-and-its-all-worth-it/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-bitcoin-miners-co... I always like to remind people that Bitcoin miners consume about the same amount of energy as Christmas decorative lights in the US. Kinda puts things in perspective...
- DigiEconomist 9y agoThe first piece is merely a defamation project and contains a lot of false information. You forced me to publish a statement (and release the emails we exchanged) on that here: https://digiconomist.net/re-serious-faults-in-beci https://digiconomist.net/re-serious-faults-in-beci The second piece contains a lot of cherry picking that I asked about in these emails as well, but never got a response to (instead my emails were quote mined to support those false statements). Nothing else to say to you. Everybody else is welcome to ask questions and discuss as usual.
- chinathrow 9y ago> I always like to remind people that Bitcoin miners consume about the same amount of energy as Christmas decorative lights in the US. Kinda puts things in perspective... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- GuB-42 9y agoWhat kind of unit is a TWh/year? Why not just use watts? By the way, 10 TWh/year is about 1.21 GW.
- Myrth 9y agoThe article says that Bitcoin could switch to proof-of-stake. Can it really do that and stay Bitcoin? I'm sure it would require at least blockchain split...
- cgb223 9y agoNext week in the headlines: "Bitcoin causes global warming"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- codecamper 9y agoI always thought it was purely ridiculous that bitcoin requires mining which eats energy. So freaking ugly. The genius that created bitcoin could not see that the cheapest form of energy is coal and that his idea will just spew more CO2 into the atmosphere. Or somehow this genius could not see that? OK, yes... Iceland's geothermal energy.
- Zamicol 9y agoPoW needs to die. PoS can be superior to PoW in every way except the problem of initial wealth distribution. PoW solves this problem elegantly. PoS currently has no meaningful alternative to this distribution method. What Ethereum is doing with using PoW to bootstrap wealth and then transition to PoS looks like a winning combination.
- decentralised 9y agoWhy don't we compare Bitcoin's energy footprint with that of all the banks, remittance shops and associated infrastructure instead? The PoW is quite expensive, but remember that mining is a subsidised activity amounting to billions of dollars worth of rewards for the miners, many of whom make extensive use of hydro-electric and solar power. There's the question of wether we need all this hashing power to protect the billions of dollars worth of bitcoin market cap. The truth is that ASICs mining was not anticipated and neither was the "arms race" that made mining into a profession. With Proof of Stake consensus algorithms taking front stage in Ethereum, EOS and other blockchain projects, PoW is bound to be abandoned or significantly changed.
- sowbug 9y agoBoth ASIC mining and the arms race were anticipated as early as 2008: "[As] the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware." https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09... "We should have a gentleman’s agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network. It’s much easer to get new users up to speed if they don’t have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility. It’s nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now." https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12.msg54#msg54 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12.msg54#msg54
- decentralised 9y agoYou're right.
- decentralised 9y agoI'm saddened with how many technologists here think of money. As if our current system of fiat currency is in any way reliable, let alone at the ultimate stage of its evolution as a technology of wealth transfer. If I look at the US currency as a technology that enables trade and cooperation, I notice: - falsifiable; see the North Korean super dollar; - pieces of metal alloy; coins are a souvenir from the past we shouldn't be bringing them into the future. - porous fibre carry bacteria; See here: http://www.newsmax.com/health/Health-News/paper-money-germs-bacteria/2014/04/21/id/566829/ http://www.newsmax.com/health/Health-News/paper-money-germs-... This makes me doubt if I can trust it and unlikely that I'll carry it on me. On the other hand Bitcoin and other cryptos are currencies from the future that we all can buy and use today. These are currencies designed to assure trust between unknown parties, so they are most definitely a means of exchange with no significant counter-party risk. As a store of value, they suffer from the same speculative price fluctuations all too common in the FX markets, as we can see with the GBP over the last year or so. In crypto, this natural movements are amplified because there are no jurisdictions and very low barriers of entry, so when the coin supply doesn't increase to meet the demand prices go up, as they should. And lets not forget that several countries have already moved to recognise crypto-currencies as legal tender, so demand is increasing by reaching wider portions of consumer market. As for crashes, to the best of my recollection, all major ones were caused by panic selling following news of major hacks (https://storeofvalue.github.io/posts/cryptocurrency-hacks-so-far-august-24th/ https://storeofvalue.github.io/posts/cryptocurrency-hacks-so...) or rumours of impending legislative crackdown in China and now in the US. The intrinsic value of crypto-currencies is in the platforms that support them, so not only the market cap but also what the project stands for and what it can deliver in terms of market proposition, for instance: - Ether is used to pay for resource utilisation on the Ethereum platform which I use to develop smart contracts, but the Foundation is re-inventing the internet so that's how I value the currency. - Monero, ZCash are in the forefront of cryptographic research and are some of the most accessible and privacy protecting financial instruments available so that's how I value them. - Bitcoin is all about economic resilience and self-sovereignty, unfortunately the in-fighting is bound to decrease its usefulness. (edit: formatting)
- westurner 9y agoHow does this compare to carbon-intensive resource extraction operations like gold mining? (Gold is industrially and medically useful, IIUC) See also: "So, clean energy incentives" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15070430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15070430
- raverbashing 9y agoI wonder what happens if/when the cost of mining becomes prohibitive This is a crash waiting to happen
- fab13n 9y agoIt can't: regularly (every 2 weeks IIRC) the hash difficulty is ajusted, so that with the average hashing power available during the last period, a new block would be found every 10 minutes on average. So if it becomes less profitable, some miners give up, the mining rate falls, and the difficulty is adjusted so that it becomes cheaper, hence more profitable, to mine.
- raverbashing 9y agoAh I see, I was not aware the difficulty could go down as well
- westurner 9y ago... Speaking of environmental externalities, In the US, "Class C" fire extinguishers work on electrical fires: From Fire_class#Electrical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_class#Electrical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_class#Electrical > Carbon dioxide CO2, NOVEC 1230, FM-200 and dry chemical powder extinguishers such as PKP and even baking soda are especially suited to extinguishing this sort of fire. PKP should be a last resort solution to extinguishing the fire due to its corrosive tendencies. Once electricity is shut off to the equipment involved, it will generally become an ordinary combustible fire. > In Europe, "electrical fires" are no longer recognized as a separate class of fire as electricity itself cannot burn. The items around the electrical sources may burn. By turning the electrical source off, the fire can be fought by one of the other class of fire extinguishers [citation needed].
- blondie9x 9y agoIt's such a waste of energy in a planet already burdened with climate change we worsen annually. Greed is crazy. What this is wasting is painful to see.
- honorable 9y agoVirtually every human business activity is ultimately conversion of energy into money. Even if an entrepreneur purchases other goods than energy (in the manufacturing process), their price is eventually dependent on their energy consumption. The price of hiring a human worker is also dependent on overall that person's energy consumption. There is no difference between mining BTC, gold or any other business activity. What matters is how much provision one can make but it also converges (decreases) to some value set by the free market.
- freech 9y agoTaking lots of energy is literally the point of proof-of-work. Criticizing Bitcoin mining for using lots of energy is like criticizing DNA evidence for being hard to fake.
- kaonashi 9y agoBitcoin is the very essence of the free rider problem, it derives its value from illicit goods and money laundering and uses real resources at an incredibly inefficient rate to do so.