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It seems like a bad comparison, since you don’t need to mine gold just to move it around. Transferring ownership can be accomplished for the amount of energy it
by mikeash 9y ago
It seems like a bad comparison, since you don’t need to mine gold just to move it around. Transferring ownership can be accomplished for the amount of energy it takes to send a small electronic message.
- vasilipupkin 9y agoto move it around you need trucks which use gasoline
- mikeash 9y agoYou don’t need to move it to transfer ownership of it.
- vasilipupkin 9y agoby that logic, same thing applies to bitcoin. on a centralized exchange ownershp is just an entry in the database
- mikeash 9y agoIt would apply to bitcoin if that were the usual way to transfer it, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case.
- vasilipupkin 9y agowhat do you mean? most bitcoin volume is done on centralized exchanges, so that's exactly the usual way of trading it.
- mikeash 9y agoFrom some quick searching around, volume on the exchanges is around 500,000/day while volume on the blockchain is over a million. If that’s accurate (and it may not be, I’m not an expert on this and the sources I found might suck) then most volume is on the blockchain by a pretty good margin. I don’t know how much gold is actually shifted around physically, but the trading volume in a year is several times the actual amount of gold that has been mined, so I suspect the proportion of that which involves physical movement is tiny.
- vasilipupkin 9y agohttps://blockchain.info/stats https://blockchain.info/stats total USD transaction volume according to above about $1.3bln trading volume, according to https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/ - 6.7 bln most bitcoin volume is virtual, not generating actual transactions, by 5 to 1 margin. Not sure where you got your numbers
- mikeash 9y agoWhat is the difference between “Total Output Volume” and “Estimated Transaction Volume”? The former is pretty close to what I found.