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I have found this article’s quality to be extremely low. The “fix” mentioned in the title is proof-of-work, with an explanation that spans one full sentence. Ac

I have found this article’s quality to be extremely low. The “fix” mentioned in the title is proof-of-work, with an explanation that spans one full sentence. According to the author, the annual electricity consumption of bitcoin mining is estimated to be 27.03 TWh. To compare, we have a very scientific “that’s still peanuts compared to the energy use of the internet”. Recall that the bitcoin network processes approximately 3 transactions per second when running in full gear. I dug up this report [0], which seems to be one of the most recent estimates of datacenter energy usage (US only unfortunately). The estimated energy usage for datacenters in the US is 70 TWh in 2014, and estimated to be 73 TWh in 2020. So bitcoin uses approximately ⅓ of the energy the Internet uses in the US. That is far from “peanuts”. 0: https://eta.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/publications/lbnl-1005775_v2.pdf https://eta.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/publications/lbnl-100577...

root_axis 9y ago
> that’s still peanuts compared to the energy use of the internet This is terrible reasoning. The internet services something like 3 billion users across millions of websites and applications, bitcoin is a niche toy that runs on the internet and services a few million users by the most optimistic projections. > the estimated energy usage for datacenters in the US is 70 TWh in 2014 So bitcoin manages to consume 1/3rd the energy of all US data centers to verify a handful of transactions that could be performed on a raspberry pi in a trusted environment.
jermaustin1 9y ago
Based on my energy costs of around $0.20/kWh, the electric bill for bitcoin would be around $5.5B. Where as the current value of all bitcoin is around $126.5B. At least it is worth more than it costs? I feel the internet provides more value per kWh than bitcoin does. At least, that is, until it doubles and triples a few more times.

root_axis 9y ago

> that’s still peanuts compared to the energy use of the internet This is terrible reasoning. The internet services something like 3 billion users across millions of websites and applications, bitcoin is a niche toy that runs on the internet and services a few million users by the most optimistic projections. > the estimated energy usage for datacenters in the US is 70 TWh in 2014 So bitcoin manages to consume 1/3rd the energy of all US data centers to verify a handful of transactions that could be performed on a raspberry pi in a trusted environment.

jermaustin1 9y ago

Based on my energy costs of around $0.20/kWh, the electric bill for bitcoin would be around $5.5B. Where as the current value of all bitcoin is around $126.5B. At least it is worth more than it costs? I feel the internet provides more value per kWh than bitcoin does. At least, that is, until it doubles and triples a few more times.