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This seems completely outrageous to me. I had seen similar numbers thrown around casually in the past but still found it hard to believe to be true, (despite be

• elznebelyk 7y ago
  Bitcoin Core is 100% a tire fire, Cryptocurrency, like Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash are on the other hand killing it.
• jxcl 7y ago
  (Edit2: I interpreted your use of "outrageous" to mean surprising or unbelievable. If instead you meant inciting to outrage, then I agree, it is.) My opinion is that if you find this outrageous then you don't understand the core principles of Bitcoin. The difficulty of mining a block on the network goes up with the amount of mining being done to maintain a constant block mining rate. There are massive bitcoin mining warehouses in China, and for each one that opens all of them are less effective at mining, but still consume the same amount of energy. So, yeah, it's pretty much a tire fire. Edit: to add to this, many industries can use technology to produce more value with less energy. Bitcoin is fundamentally unable to do this for the same reasons I mentioned above. When bitcoin specific mining hardware first came out, it briefly gave an advantage to the first people to have it, but then the advances were completely neglected when they became widespread.
  • spookthesunset 7y ago
    To summarize your excellent summary: bitcoin wastes energy by design. It cannot keep all the “features” it’s supporters value without wasting energy.
    • baroffoos 7y ago
      Proof of stake sort of solves this. In theory those with the most money can spend the most on mining equipment and get the biggest payout. Proof of stake short circuits this and just gives the biggest payout to the ones with the most money.
• aeternum 7y ago
  Wasteful compared to what though? How much energy, human capital, and resources are consumed by the banking industry? If (and big if) bitcoin is able to replace a significant fraction of the banking industry it will be extremely efficient in comparison. Per-transaction measures isn't the right metric since the Bitcoin blockchain can still be successful as a reconciliation backbone without being used for small everyday purchases.
  • shsjxjbsbs 7y ago
    There’s no indication I’m aware of that Bitcoin is removing any labor or equipment from the banking system. So far all I’ve seen is traditional banking layering crypto on top.
    • iopq 7y ago
      it's cheaper to transfer Bitcoin and immediately convert to fiat than to do a wire transfer from overseas. Then you're using the home banking system like ACH in the US and SEPA in Europe Wires cost me $50+ because of intermediary banks, even if I don't pay anything at my own bank, someone is getting a big cut.
      • shsjxjbsbs 7y ago
        Don’t companies like TransferWise already do international payments electronically without the need for a blockchain? I definitely support lowering the amount of human labor required for payments, but I don’t see the need for many coal plants worth of computers randomly hashing a bunch of junk over and over again when a normal efficient server can do it. Every bitcoin exchange I’ve used required me to physically write something on paper and show it to a human, so it seems like the human labor in the banking system is a regulatory issue, not a technical one.
        • iopq 7y ago
          Maybe to sign up, but to actually make trades it's just taking orders off the book.
• snagglegaggle 7y ago
  Perhaps look at it another way: this is what people will pay to avoid tyranny.
  • Analemma_ 7y ago
    That's not an accurate statement, since the pollution costs of Bitcoin are an externality not being paid by the people using it. It's more like Bitcoin users are dumping costs on the unconsenting public to avoid the "tyranny" of AML/KYC banking regulations.
    • snagglegaggle 7y ago
      That's great, but you could argue that AML/KYC has pollution costs of a different nature in regards to personal liberty. Whether or not they do me suggesting that is about as baseless as suggesting bitcoin has huge negative externalities. Without explicit evidence of a market failure it's probably fine to assume that negative externalities are factored into sticker price of goods as the opportunity cost of product X eventually must take into account those externalities as applied to everyone.
      • TylerE 7y ago
        Yes, in these sense laws against theft "pollute" the personal liberty of thieves.
        • snagglegaggle 7y ago
          How are KYC laws against theft...?
          • TylerE 7y ago
            They're literally there to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes.
            • 7y ago
• qroshan 7y ago
  Indeed. Cost of running this public tamper-proof database is $4B + Personnel + Amortizing cost of ASIC Forms, Say $6B Where does the money come from? This Database isn't selling any service to Enterprise or Government or Public to get revenue. So, the $6B money has to come from Bitcoin holders or new suckers. Every year it has to get $6B new money just to maintain the current value of Bitcoin.
  • mindfulplay 7y ago
    Darkweb, murderers, VCs and drugpeddlers can help run this network of "decentralized futuristic currency" or whatever buzzcrapwords people use for Bitcoin ...
  • SI_Rob 7y ago
    A bitcoin miner is in essence a kind of inside-out electrical meter: It measures, with remarkable precision, how many electrons (bundled as SHA256 operations) you burn to support the network finding a block, rather than how many you bought, assuming you even bought them at all. The question is not how many you burned, which is what the mining algo answers with such precision, but how much you paid for them in the first place, which it can offer no insight into. Some possible shortcuts to paying retail prices for electron mining fuel: 1. You're a large business power customer and pay vastly discounted rates on a contract basis. 2. You're stealing some or all of your power, either by pirate wiring or by paying some official to look the other way, or a little of both. 3. Your mining operation is a pork barrel project with funding secured from your local government's (either clueless or remarkably pragmatic) business development office. Sometimes there may be a legitimate exit plan for this, like repurposing the new datacenter facility you built, after wringing every mining penny from it possible, to host cloud services or as the core of some government-sponsored technology park. 4. You may have been mining quite along time and now have enough early coin held back from the $100 days to slowly sell off into the retail market at 80x profit, or borrow against. It may even be that this reserve of held back coin is partly responsible for the thin liquidity in the market, and consequent bubbled-up price. 5. You publicly, or covertly own or have an interest in one or more of the mining pools and public exchanges, and retain a share some of the Tx and conversion fees which helps subsidize the mining costs. 6. Same as above but for mining rig manufacturers and fabs. Mine on newly manufactured chips for a few days or a week before shipping (for 'testing' purposes ofc) and you get to stay ahead of the difficulty curve as well as get free subsidy from your own customers.
• krick 7y ago
  I'm afraid that the moment you chose to use the word "wasteful" it became a philosophical discussion and they don't typically have final words at all. The stripped down reason you see it as wasteful is that you have some set of beliefs about what is "right" and "meaningful" (many of which, I'll take liberty to say, most likely likely NOT consciously thought out) and since the core technical principle behind Bitcoin is simple enough, it's easy for you to see it does something that seemingly does not contribute to the fulfillment of what you consider "meaningful" (i.e. performing tons of computation that essentially compute nothing "meaningful"). Technical principles behind markets, industries or your own existence are not simple enough, so you cannot see through them and decide at a glance that they are "wasteful". And since you generally avoid falling into philosophical discussions (rightfully so), this is good enough for you. This doesn't mean that they achieve something that will turn out "obviously meaningful" to you (I'm cynical enough to assume they actually not), it's all just too complicated to tell at a glance. If this is all too abstract, I'm saying that Bitcoin is actually doing something, and this something is much more complicated than the technical principle you can easily see behind it. You should take this into consideration when thinking about what this giant CO₂ emitting machine actually is. It is not a machine for computing hashes, as it might seem from a purely technical perspective.
  • wmf 7y ago
    Or you could say Bitcoin is wasteful because PoS accomplishes the same thing with 99.99% less energy.
    • cwkoss 7y ago
      PoS opens up new threat models concerning the tyranny of the majority. PoW utilizes the honest indicator of un-forgeable expense to mitigate this class of risks.
      • spookthesunset 7y ago
        A class of risks that the normal financial system doesn’t have. My bank doesn’t expose me to “double spend” attacks.
• cjbprime 7y ago
  > Is there any more to discuss on the topic of Bitcoin being outrageously wasteful? The carbon estimate seems very poor. > Since we know the average emission factor of the Chinese grid (around 700 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour), this can be used for a very rough approximation of the carbon intensity of the power used for Bitcoin mining. The reason many miners are in China is that they can access cheap off-grid renewable sources of energy there, such as excess hydroelectric, so using an on-grid CO2 estimate doesn't work.
  • spookthesunset 7y ago
    I love when bitcoin promoters claim that bitcoins massive waste of energy is okay cause “it’s totally renewable”. Setting aside the non-trivial ecological damage caused by dams.... all that renewable energy could have been used to power something that actually adds value to society. Instead it is getting flushed down the toilet solving useless math problems so that a relative handful of people can milk a larger set of rubes for all their money. Oh, and enable criminals to continue their criminal behavior....
    • kinghajj 7y ago
      > all that renewable energy could have been used to power something that actually adds value to society. If the miners are using excess production, then by definition, that power could not have been used for anything else; otherwise, some consumer in the grid would have used it!
      • jacobush 7y ago
        Haha, so naive. In a perfect economy, yes. In the real, world, in China. Good luck.
        • dnpp123 7y ago
          It's written in the page that they're Carbon Emission Footprint are totally biased and flawed: > The table below features a breakdown of the energy consumption of the mining facilities surveyed by Hileman and Rauchs. By applying the emission factors of the respective country’s grid You just need to read.
• rolltiide 7y ago
  > Is there any more to discuss on the topic of Bitcoin being outrageously wasteful? Or is this pretty much the final word? Its not the final word, but it is something to vigilantly monitor in case the following changes: Most bitcoin energy use is from mining, and that mining uses renewable energy or energy waste byproducts. Source: my experience with mining companies that don't publicly disclose how they do this profitably. So for now, try to corroborate it yourself. I would say that 70-80% of bitcoin mining is not a wasteful use of energy and that merely estimating the energy numbers doesn't tell you anything about the source. What I mean by "not wasteful" means that it isn't pulling away from another use of energy that was ever going to happen. This wasted energy is usually in the form of byproducts around other power facilities that cannot be economically converted and transported to residential and commercial areas. This is where bitcoin mining shines: Bitcoin mining does not need a robust internet connection and does not need to occur in residential or commercial areas. A computer with a satellite connection can submit hashes to the bitcoin network, and pools further make it practical to have lower latency, because they merely pay out based on your contribution to the pool. So miners that use energy waste byproducts (converting those byproducts to electricity at the source and taking transformers there) often times are doing a favor to the power company or whoever is there. What to monitor: if nation states start competing over power of this network, they may disregard the economic feasibility of doing so, and then it will be incredibly wasteful uses of electricity.
• zucker42 7y ago
  I've thought of a good way to put this perspective. The block reward is 12.5 BTC (and fees are neglible), which is $100000. There's a new block every ~15 minutes, which means 35000 blocks per year. ($100000 * 35000 / 73 TWH) = $0.048/KWH. So miners spend at most $0.05 per KWH on electricity. Assuming they spend 60% on electricity, they spend ~$0.03 per KWH, so not an outrageous price. The problem is BTC grew too big too fast. The block reward is very large, but once it drops to the magnitude of fees ($2000 / block), we'll probably see a decrease in the energy usage to the (perceived?) value of decentralized payment system. Also, this shows the need for governments to drastically increase taxes on carbon producing forms of electricity.
  • belltaco 7y ago
    >Also, this shows the need for governments to drastically increase taxes on carbon producing forms of electricity. Which will disproportionately hurt the poor.
    • wmf 7y ago
      That's why some people suggest rebating the carbon tax as basic income.