6 ms·
for comparison, even the high-end estimates of bitcoin’s total current power consumption are still less than 6 percent of the power consumed by the world’s bank
by gascan 9y ago
for comparison, even the high-end estimates of bitcoin’s total current power consumption are still less than 6 percent of the power consumed by the world’s banking sector.
Indeed, congratulations Bitcoin. You are able to process 2.3 transactions per second using only 6 percent of the power of the entire worldwide banking sector!
* VISA: 2,000 transactions per second
* ACH: 800 transactions per second
* MasterCard: 3,000 transactions per second (?)
* NYSE: Who even knows?
* Etc...
- ryanlol 9y agoWho cares? Bitcoins power use is hardly linked to it's transaction rate.
- annabellish 9y agoIndeed, transaction rate at bitcoin's highest points has been very low. Power usage is strongly correlated to price, while price isn't correlated to... anything.
- tim333 9y agoPrice is correlated to power usage. There's an odd sort of feedback loop where a rising bitcoin price causes more mining which raises the price of bitcoin and so on exponentially. You may ask why not just walk away and let bitcoin return to zero but there are a large number of people in the mining industry and similar with incentives to promote and prop it up.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoI would imagine people who like to breathe clean air and drink clean water would care.
- ryanlol 9y agoOnly the people who pay little attention and wildly overestimate bitcoins impact on these things. Besides, the "Who cares?" was mostly aimed at the irrelevant comparisons made by gascan.
- deadmetheny 9y agoBitcoin mining is proportional to how many there are, it will suck up more power with more miners performing difficult hash operations by design. Bitcoin is a fucking blight on the planet.
- tim333 9y agoThe guy who probably designed it writes "its prolific resource consumption and poor computational scalability is buying something even more valuable: social scalability." Not quite sure about that one myself. You can motivate a lot of people to do something social pretty well with fiat currency.
- freejulian 9y agoThrow in lightning and all of a sudden bitcoin can handle millions of transactions per second using only 6% of the power consumed by the world's banking sector. Not too shabby.
- gascan 9y agoI still find lightning incredibly ironic. To me, it looks like: * Gold =~ Bitcoin (2009) * Gold Standard =~ Lightning Network (2018) * Fiat Currency =~ (???)
- gruez 9y ago> * Gold Standard =~ Lightning Network (2018) the crucial difference is that nothing is held in reserve. ie. you don't have to trust that the bank is going to run away with your deposits.
- bunderbunder 9y agoSavings and loan banking, and the risks associated with it, is a separate thing from the basis of the currency. If Bitcoin-as-a-currency ever develops to the point that you can have a bitcoin-denominated savings account that earns interest, your bitcoin-denominated assets that you place into such an account will be just as susceptible to bank insolvency as any other kind of money you can deposit in a bank. That, and, I think you have the analogy backwards. It's not that nothing is held in reserve - that would be Tether ;) - it's that everything is held in reserve.
- tim333 9y agoFiat currency would probably be something like Fiat = Cardano (2019) or one of the other proof of stake non mining coins. (Or Credits tokens - buy those! I'm long them.)
- JustAnotherPat 9y agoAm I missing something, or is it inevitable that bitcoin mining will lose profitability again, possibly very soon? The problem is anecdotally outlined in the article. People are willing to mine bitcoin at a loss if need be and that makes mining rough for everybody because of the increased difficulty. The problem is it's too easy to mine bitcoin. As the article points out, all you really need is somebody to keep an eye on the servers. People will push it to the edge, at which point, a tragedy of the commons will ruin it for everybody. The only hope is for bitcoin prices to increase exponentially for all of eternity.
- user5994461 9y agoNot to mention that the banking sector is providing many millions of jobs.
- gruez 9y agothats because they provide services beyond processing transactions.
- kingofpandora 9y agoThat's the point: more services, more jobs are all part of the quoted energy consumption.
- bunderbunder 9y ago> NYSE: Who even knows? Semi-wild guess, based on [1] indicating yesterday's volume was 3.1bn, and knowing that trading volume on exchanges typically has big spikes near the open and close, they are probably able to comfortably handle upwards of a quarter million transactions per second. Also worth noting that the world's banking sector does a lot more than just processing transactions. [1]: http://www.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-tradingdiary2.html http://www.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-tradingdiary2.html
- zhte415 9y agoFYI a major global bank will typically do 2-4 billion transactions per day.