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How much power is drawn by the "ever-expanding" racks of servers powering other stores of value? How many servers are running in the banking and financial indus

by nnfy 9y ago

How much power is drawn by the "ever-expanding" racks of servers powering other stores of value? How many servers are running in the banking and financial industries just to enable non pseudonymous transactions of value? This article is sensationalist nonsense. I would argue it is a positive point that a globally tradeable cryptocurrency with billions in market cap only requires the energy of a "small city."

djrogers 9y ago
> a globally tradeable cryptocurrency with billions in market cap only requires the energy of a "small city." It only sounds good because we haven't really considered the scale here, so let's scale that up a bit. What if even 1% of non cash financial transactions in the US were handled with BTC? For 2015, that would have worked out to about $1.8T. How big would BTC need to be to handle that? Well, it looks like last year it's estimated to have done a little over $100B, so it'd have to scale somewhere around 15-20x to even cover 1% of one country's transactions... [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/2016-payments-study-20161222.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/2016-p... [2]https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?timespan=1year https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?...
- tonyztan 9y ago
  AFAIK Bitcoin mining difficulty adjusts depending on how much processing power is on the network, not how many transactions are being processed.
  - uncoder0 9y ago
    Correct and certainly not related to the value of those transactions as GP implied.
- nnfy 9y ago
  You may have a point, except you haven't mentioned how many city's worth of power non-btc transactions currently require, not to mention the additional inneficiency of hundreds of thousands of staff which could possibly be reduced in number because of the distributed ledger. I really don't think things are as clear cut as the article implies, but I dont have numbers for the amount of energy consumed by modern electronic value transaction and storage. Edit: also, "city's worth" as a measure of electricity, as in the article, is a terrible choice because it immediately biases the reader and does not convey much useful information. My GPU maxes at 300W; the article provides no way of conversion. Never mind that a small city may be a suburb using one hundredth of the power used by a small city center full of servers and a handful of skyscrapers.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    > you haven't mentioned how many city's worth of power non-btc transactions currently require No, I didn't but the article did, and it's cited elsewhere on HN - Visa for example uses 1/7000th of the energy per transaction...

by nnfy 9y ago

djrogers 9y ago

> a globally tradeable cryptocurrency with billions in market cap only requires the energy of a "small city." It only sounds good because we haven't really considered the scale here, so let's scale that up a bit. What if even 1% of non cash financial transactions in the US were handled with BTC? For 2015, that would have worked out to about $1.8T. How big would BTC need to be to handle that? Well, it looks like last year it's estimated to have done a little over $100B, so it'd have to scale somewhere around 15-20x to even cover 1% of one country's transactions... [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/2016-payments-study-20161222.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/2016-p... [2]https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?timespan=1year https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?...

tonyztan 9y ago
AFAIK Bitcoin mining difficulty adjusts depending on how much processing power is on the network, not how many transactions are being processed.
- uncoder0 9y ago
  Correct and certainly not related to the value of those transactions as GP implied.
nnfy 9y ago
You may have a point, except you haven't mentioned how many city's worth of power non-btc transactions currently require, not to mention the additional inneficiency of hundreds of thousands of staff which could possibly be reduced in number because of the distributed ledger. I really don't think things are as clear cut as the article implies, but I dont have numbers for the amount of energy consumed by modern electronic value transaction and storage. Edit: also, "city's worth" as a measure of electricity, as in the article, is a terrible choice because it immediately biases the reader and does not convey much useful information. My GPU maxes at 300W; the article provides no way of conversion. Never mind that a small city may be a suburb using one hundredth of the power used by a small city center full of servers and a handful of skyscrapers.
- djrogers 9y ago
  > you haven't mentioned how many city's worth of power non-btc transactions currently require No, I didn't but the article did, and it's cited elsewhere on HN - Visa for example uses 1/7000th of the energy per transaction...