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That is an absurd amount of energy. This really changes my opinion on this being a feasible currency.
by givinguflac 9y ago
That 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 agoCorrect.
- hwillis 9y agoEnergy doesn't back bitcoin, it just stops the currency from inflating. Or it would, if mining could always produce new bitcoins, but IIRC its supposed to stop after a while. The difference being that a bitcoin does not entitle you to some unit of energy or work produced from it. The energy used to verify bitcoin transactions is just lost.
- 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