15 ms·

The energy consumption of Bitcoin isn't new news. What continues to disappoint me, however, is how many people immediately jump to its defense with arguments ba

by lukev 7y ago

The energy consumption of Bitcoin isn't new news. What continues to disappoint me, however, is how many people immediately jump to its defense with arguments based on the value it provides, as if that offset its cost. What gets neglected is that the Bitcoin algorithm is inherently wasteful. By its very design, it results in an insane amount of duplicated, pointless computation. The question isn't whether something like Bitcoin can provide any value. The question is whether we have better options. And the answer is: we do, by far. From proof-of-stake (like Ethereum is moving towards) or trust-based models (like Stellar), technologies exist that grant almost all the benefits of Bitcoin at tiny fraction of the environmental (and monetary!) cost. I give Bitcoin credit for being an interesting "first answer" to an extremely hard problem. But it is in no way something that we should be doubling down on.

donatj 7y ago
With energy becoming more and more renewable, does it really matter if BTC uses a lot of it?
- viraptor 7y ago
  Until most mining moves to renewables, yes it does.
  - chroem- 7y ago
    It already is due to energy being the biggest mining expense. Miners congregate around inexpensive sources of hydroelectric/wind/solar energy.
    - viraptor 7y ago
      Ok, I should be more clear. Until we have enough energy that we're all running on renewables and adding more bitcoin-related load uses up spare capacity rather than increase overall usage - it matters. I mean, unless it's a dedicated power generating station, you're still using renewable power which is not used by someone else and overall we're supplementing that with coal and others.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  Renewable energy isn't zero carbon. At the very least you gotta produce the energy generating system somehow. Then maintain it.
  - celticninja 7y ago
    But renewable is all wasted if there is no demand. Hydro power used for bitcoin mining doesn't find a new user immediately if bitcoin stops and the power can't be stored long term so it can be wasted.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Hydro is the one type of renewable with built-in long-term storage.
      - celticninja 7y ago
        I think you misunderstand. Once the power is generated it can't be stored for long. And I understand your point but you can't hold water in a reservoir/dam indefinitely, at some point you either use it to generate power or you let it flow through without generating power because otherwise the dam overflows.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  So long as BTC is adequately carbon taxed, probably not.
- WizardAustralis 7y ago
  Don`t mix up the idea of renewable and infinite. Theoretically it can be done but until we each that point it definetly is not working like that.
- dx034 7y ago
  IT's becoming more renewable from a very low base. Electricity generated in most of the world is still dirty, electricitymap [1] has a good overview. [1] www.electricitymap.org
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It does, because it competes with decarbonizations of things our civilization actually needs. Once that's done, it'll still be ridiculous to try and base the economy on bitcoins, because proof of work scales so badly it'll happily eat any and all energy that's made available. Thousands of years from now, when humanity builds its first Dyson sphere, I would like to believe the collected energy will be used for purposes like making everyone's life long and prosperous, or propelling great starships across the void - and not just to secure the Bitcoin network.
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    And you're just going to ignore that we can do layer 2 technologies like lightning network?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Explain to me how they prevent the energy requirements of proof of work securing the entire cryptocoin infrastructure from growing significantly faster than the market using that infrastructure, and without compromising the whole reason behind cryptocurrencies in the first place, which is decentralization and lack of trust?
      - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
        Hm I'm not sure I understand, because the answer seems very simple: because they dramatically increase ratio of the number of meaningful transactions describing real economic activity to a MB of valueable block space (and therefore per watt of total global PoW calculation).
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        If all they do is increase the ratio, that's only constant scaling. So in no way does it compensate for the scaling of PoW energy use with respect to market size.
gruez 7y ago
>trust-based models (like Stellar) What you're describing is basically Libra with slightly better entities backing it. Transactions can be reversed by those "trusted entities" with no recourse by you and at no cost to them. At least with PoW and PoS (to an extent), attempting to reverse transactions has a cost. Speaking of PoS, were the issues with PoS ever solved? Specifically the "nothing at stake" problem. The Wikipedia page[1]'s list of implementations makes it sound like it's not at parity with PoW in terms of security. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
- somebodythere 7y ago
  In Casper proof-of-stake (Ethereum 2.0), staking on the "wrong chain" will result in part of your staking deposit being slashed on the winning chain.
- adrianN 7y ago
  I'd argue that people generally want systems where you can revert transactions that you made by mistake at almost no additional cost.
  - nfin 7y ago
    it is possible if you choose to use a third party. The good thing is that you don't have too! You are not forced. If I send money to a friend or familiy, I don't need a third party. A third party could be either a bigger financial company or just a trusted third party in a specific domain both people trust (and make a 2 out of 3 multi-sig with it, and if I get delivered what I want and the other side receives the payment, the payment processor has nothing to do, but could in case there is a dispute)
  - tuesdayrain 7y ago
    There's also a significant niche of people who want assurance that a transaction can never be reversed. For example online entertainers who get donations for thousands of dollars only to have them charged back months later.
- 7y ago
puranjay 7y ago
I don't even know what problem Bitcoin is solving anymore. I haven't seen a single website accepting Bitcoin as a payment in the last whole year.
- paulmd 7y ago
  the problem is largely allowing chinese nationals to extract hard currency past PRC capital controls (any electricity you burn is converted to BTC, and it's easy to bribe a local official to ignore it) and a side of russian mafia transactions (cryptolocker/etc) there really aren't any significant (legal) north american/european transactions that occur in BTC
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    Care to cite your sources?
- xur17 7y ago
  I regularly use it to pay for gift cards on cardcash for an additional 2% discount. It makes a lot of sense for sites selling items highly prone to fraud or with thin margins.
- sodafountan 7y ago
  It's solving a much much bigger problem than electronic payments (which was never really a problem in the first place unless you're overly concerned about privacy). We have a major problem with inflation in this world, you can't just put your money somewhere and have it retain its value anymore and it hasn't been like that for years, we're forced to play the stock market game which just consolidates power to big corporations and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind - bitcoin actually solves that problem, and just to drive that point home, if you'd invested in bitcoin and held during just about any given 365 day period throughout its ten year lifespan you'd have likely beaten the stock market in gains by a lot, that helps a ton of people, especially young people who are saddled by debt. We have countries that have no reliable form of currency at all, again bitcoin solves that problem. I agree with some of the sentiment of the article, bitcoin's energy consumption is something to keep an eye on and if we can seamlessly move to an algorithm that's greener then so be it but you have to realize the tremendous amount of good that bitcoin is doing for the world and will likely continue to do as it becomes scarcer and scarcer, don't knock a technology that can single handedly lift a continent like Africa out of poverty. *edit: Nothing like defending bitcoin on Hacker News and getting downvoted to oblivion, hey rather than downvote why don't you point out exactly what you disagree with so we can have a discussion
Iv 7y ago
I am really surprised that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general) hasn't solved its energy use yet and is still legal. I thought the world would switch to proof-of-stake coins and gradually make bitcoins harder to use.
- exit 7y ago
  > I thought the world would switch to proof-of-stake coins and gradually make bitcoins harder to use. if proof of stake were implemented with the same security guarantees as proof of work, the bitcoin utxo set would be migrated over to it.
- newguy1234 7y ago
  Bitcoin is pure free market. People keep it because of its history - same as how people buy gold coins.
  - CaptainZapp 7y ago
    Except I'd put far more stock into gold coins (or gold in general) as a store of value. But that's just me.
    - celticninja 7y ago
      And there are enough people that take the converse position, that allows bitcoin to grow
      - CaptainZapp 7y ago
        Comparing this chart[1] with the chart found on this page[2] I very much doubt that assessment, specifically in terms of volatility. Note the very, very different scale of those charts. [1] https://goldprice.org/de/gold-price-history.html https://goldprice.org/de/gold-price-history.html [2] https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Bitcoin_history https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Bitcoin_history edit: clarification
      - arcticbull 7y ago
lacker 7y ago
I think we aren’t quite there yet with Ethereum and Stellar. Proof of stake is promising, but it hasn’t rolled out yet. It’s possible that the migration leads to unforeseen problems, or fails entirely. The trusted models like Stellar aren’t operating at the same financial scale as Bitcoin. The question there isn’t technically whether they can handle the transactions per second, but socially whether they are as resistant to censorship as Bitcoin is. In the end, more people want Bitcoin than want Ethereum or Stellar. And people are willing to pay a lot of money to get it, money which in large part goes indirectly to miners’ energy expenditure. Perhaps, in the long run, the more efficient consensus mechanisms will prove superior to proof-of-work. But it hasn’t happened yet.
- konschubert 7y ago
  > In the end, more people want Bitcoin than want Ethereum or Stellar. This is an accident of history more than anything. I think the distribution will look different once the monetary cost of Proof of Work starts to impact the Bitcoin ecosystem.
  - keymone 7y ago
    When will the monetary cost of gold mining start impacting gold ecosystem?
    - konschubert 7y ago
      That analogy does not hold if you think about it
      - keymone 7y ago
        why?
        konschubert 7y ago
        Look, if you bring an anology into an argument then it’s in you to explain why it holds, it’s not on others to refute it. Ever heard of the bullshit asymmetry principle? Anyways, to answer your question: High cost of mining in gold is what limits the supply. High cost of mining in a cryptocurrency is not needed to limit supply.
conception 7y ago
The other side is that people who mine bitcoin have to have basically “free” energy - margins are too tight. So while it’s wasteful, people aren’t burning coal or gas to produce bitcoin in the big bitcoin farms. Hydro and geothermal rule.
- BadRedWp 7y ago
  Free or stolen, some miners steal electricity to or bribe officials.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Where they could instead be replacing fossil fuel-based capacity.
- lukev 7y ago
  The headline article talks extensively about how this is not the case.
shan224 7y ago
I have yet to see any POS that doesnt devolve into centralization or obfuscated POW. You say pointless computation. I say layers on layers of security protecting the most sound monetary policy in human history
- xg15 7y ago
  > protecting the most sound monetary policy in human history That's a political opinion. But regardless of its validity, I'm not convinced that this justifies a single Bitcoin transaction producing as much CO2 as 700,000 Visa transactions.
  - rax0m 7y ago
    Comparing Visa transactions to Bitcoin transactions is definitely comparing apples to oranges. A Bitcoin transaction on the blockchain is layer 1. A visa transaction is layer 3 or 4? Lightning network is layer 2 and you could have >700,000 transactions in a lightning channel before settling on chain, so there you go Bitcoin layer 2 is more energy efficient than the common financial system layer 4.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  And I say it's denominating trust in watts. Think about it from the opposite direction: trust is a ridiculously effective optimization of group dynamics, and humans come equipped with it by default. It allows us to engage in trade and cooperation without paying the cost of perfectly, mathematically, enforcing the rules. It takes a problem that would be O(n!) and reduces it to something on the order of O(nlogn), at very little loss in the optimality of the result. Taking this shortcut is a no-brainer, it would be immensely stupid not to do it. It so happen that historically, we took that trade-off and built a civilization on it. It worked well. It works well*. And what bitcoin does is trying to make our economy run on O(n!) overhead, because some individuals think that a political ideology based on not trusting other people is somehow a good idea.
konschubert 7y ago
I think bitcoin won’t be able to compete long term because one way or another, it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense. I hope we recognize this rather sooner than later, such that we can stop wasting so much energy.
- trickstra 7y ago
  > it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense. They are. How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? And so far it seems like the users are happy to pay what it costs. The fact that you don't see the benefit doesn't mean there isn't any for them.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? With speculation on currency (it's the primary use of Bitcoin) and theft - the latter less so, given the very high centralization of hashing power, but it was and still is common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for.
    - keymone 7y ago
      > common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for Define “common” and provide sources for your claims please.
      - jacobush 7y ago
        Monero Javascript miners are common to this day.
        krageon 7y ago
        They're an easy way to donate to people in places where it is hard to transfer money. What exactly is the argument you are making here? Presumably the people running those things are definitely paying for their power one way or the other.
keymone 7y ago
You’re wrong. If you think Bitcoin’s mining is wasteful you don’t understand what is valuable in Bitcoin. If you think there is duplication - you don’t understand how modern bitcoin mining even works. Proof of stake doesn’t work and trust based models are the very thing bitcoin is designed to save us from. If you have ideological bias here I won’t try to convince you, only time will.
mcnichol 7y ago
Hashing solved a problem of limiting supply and spreading the work in a dynamic way to prevent takeovers. Energy consumption would be dramatically less if ASICs weren't a thing. In hindsight it is obvious they would be built but give me a break. What they accomplished was a decentralized balancing of power based on economics, crypto, and distributed computing. It is beyond remarkable. So tell me, what is the carbon footprint of FedNet and all of the banks clearing the 3,000 tx/s demands and their collective datacenters... What, you thought what we had today was free? Are you aware that these numbers shared are not even 1% of the worlds consumption of energy or a quarter of what the us alone uses in merely datacenter costs! I hate these fud charged articles with no balance, basis, or actual science.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  > So tell me, what is the carbon footprint of FedNet and all of the banks clearing the 3,000 tx/s demands and their collective datacenters... (a) whataboutism is a logical fallacy. (b) If every Visa transaction took 625kWh, it would use 38X the entire world's power generation capacity and 3X the worlds entire rate of e-waste generation. Just Visa, not MC, UnionPay or Amex. Visa is literally 700,000X more efficient, and getting more efficient as technology does. Bitcoin becomes more wasteful as technology improves. > I hate these fud charged articles with no balance, basis, or actual science. A study from Cambridge University backs it up and is linked. Just because it doesn't agree with your preconceived notions doesn't make it "not science" all of a sudden. You could just be wrong.
  - mcnichol 7y ago
    > (a) whataboutism is a logical fallacy. This isn't whataboutism. There is a system being used. Contrast it with what currently exists. > Bitcoin becomes more wasteful as technology improves. You misunderstand hashing difficulty. This guy is a known troll spreading FUD. Look at all of the links he has posted. It is not science. Stop embarassing yourself and read a layer deeper into the people writing the articles. https://hackernoon.com/the-reports-of-bitcoin-environmental-damage-are-garbage-5a93d32c2d7 https://hackernoon.com/the-reports-of-bitcoin-environmental-...
andirk 7y ago
And USD is guarded by guns, bombs, wars, lies, and so on. None of these currencies have free protection. That said, I do like Prime Coin's use of their energy going to finding prime numbers which (I assume) is useful to mathematicians.

by lukev 7y ago

donatj 7y ago

With energy becoming more and more renewable, does it really matter if BTC uses a lot of it?

viraptor 7y ago
Until most mining moves to renewables, yes it does.
- chroem- 7y ago
  It already is due to energy being the biggest mining expense. Miners congregate around inexpensive sources of hydroelectric/wind/solar energy.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Ok, I should be more clear. Until we have enough energy that we're all running on renewables and adding more bitcoin-related load uses up spare capacity rather than increase overall usage - it matters. I mean, unless it's a dedicated power generating station, you're still using renewable power which is not used by someone else and overall we're supplementing that with coal and others.
mehrdadn 7y ago
Renewable energy isn't zero carbon. At the very least you gotta produce the energy generating system somehow. Then maintain it.
- celticninja 7y ago
  But renewable is all wasted if there is no demand. Hydro power used for bitcoin mining doesn't find a new user immediately if bitcoin stops and the power can't be stored long term so it can be wasted.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Hydro is the one type of renewable with built-in long-term storage.
    - celticninja 7y ago
      I think you misunderstand. Once the power is generated it can't be stored for long. And I understand your point but you can't hold water in a reservoir/dam indefinitely, at some point you either use it to generate power or you let it flow through without generating power because otherwise the dam overflows.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
So long as BTC is adequately carbon taxed, probably not.
WizardAustralis 7y ago
Don`t mix up the idea of renewable and infinite. Theoretically it can be done but until we each that point it definetly is not working like that.
dx034 7y ago
IT's becoming more renewable from a very low base. Electricity generated in most of the world is still dirty, electricitymap [1] has a good overview. [1] www.electricitymap.org
TeMPOraL 7y ago
It does, because it competes with decarbonizations of things our civilization actually needs. Once that's done, it'll still be ridiculous to try and base the economy on bitcoins, because proof of work scales so badly it'll happily eat any and all energy that's made available. Thousands of years from now, when humanity builds its first Dyson sphere, I would like to believe the collected energy will be used for purposes like making everyone's life long and prosperous, or propelling great starships across the void - and not just to secure the Bitcoin network.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  And you're just going to ignore that we can do layer 2 technologies like lightning network?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Explain to me how they prevent the energy requirements of proof of work securing the entire cryptocoin infrastructure from growing significantly faster than the market using that infrastructure, and without compromising the whole reason behind cryptocurrencies in the first place, which is decentralization and lack of trust?
    - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
      Hm I'm not sure I understand, because the answer seems very simple: because they dramatically increase ratio of the number of meaningful transactions describing real economic activity to a MB of valueable block space (and therefore per watt of total global PoW calculation).
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        If all they do is increase the ratio, that's only constant scaling. So in no way does it compensate for the scaling of PoW energy use with respect to market size.

gruez 7y ago

>trust-based models (like Stellar) What you're describing is basically Libra with slightly better entities backing it. Transactions can be reversed by those "trusted entities" with no recourse by you and at no cost to them. At least with PoW and PoS (to an extent), attempting to reverse transactions has a cost. Speaking of PoS, were the issues with PoS ever solved? Specifically the "nothing at stake" problem. The Wikipedia page[1]'s list of implementations makes it sound like it's not at parity with PoW in terms of security. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

somebodythere 7y ago
In Casper proof-of-stake (Ethereum 2.0), staking on the "wrong chain" will result in part of your staking deposit being slashed on the winning chain.
adrianN 7y ago
I'd argue that people generally want systems where you can revert transactions that you made by mistake at almost no additional cost.
- nfin 7y ago
  it is possible if you choose to use a third party. The good thing is that you don't have too! You are not forced. If I send money to a friend or familiy, I don't need a third party. A third party could be either a bigger financial company or just a trusted third party in a specific domain both people trust (and make a 2 out of 3 multi-sig with it, and if I get delivered what I want and the other side receives the payment, the payment processor has nothing to do, but could in case there is a dispute)
- tuesdayrain 7y ago
  There's also a significant niche of people who want assurance that a transaction can never be reversed. For example online entertainers who get donations for thousands of dollars only to have them charged back months later.
7y ago

puranjay 7y ago

I don't even know what problem Bitcoin is solving anymore. I haven't seen a single website accepting Bitcoin as a payment in the last whole year.

paulmd 7y ago
the problem is largely allowing chinese nationals to extract hard currency past PRC capital controls (any electricity you burn is converted to BTC, and it's easy to bribe a local official to ignore it) and a side of russian mafia transactions (cryptolocker/etc) there really aren't any significant (legal) north american/european transactions that occur in BTC
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  Care to cite your sources?
xur17 7y ago
I regularly use it to pay for gift cards on cardcash for an additional 2% discount. It makes a lot of sense for sites selling items highly prone to fraud or with thin margins.
sodafountan 7y ago
It's solving a much much bigger problem than electronic payments (which was never really a problem in the first place unless you're overly concerned about privacy). We have a major problem with inflation in this world, you can't just put your money somewhere and have it retain its value anymore and it hasn't been like that for years, we're forced to play the stock market game which just consolidates power to big corporations and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind - bitcoin actually solves that problem, and just to drive that point home, if you'd invested in bitcoin and held during just about any given 365 day period throughout its ten year lifespan you'd have likely beaten the stock market in gains by a lot, that helps a ton of people, especially young people who are saddled by debt. We have countries that have no reliable form of currency at all, again bitcoin solves that problem. I agree with some of the sentiment of the article, bitcoin's energy consumption is something to keep an eye on and if we can seamlessly move to an algorithm that's greener then so be it but you have to realize the tremendous amount of good that bitcoin is doing for the world and will likely continue to do as it becomes scarcer and scarcer, don't knock a technology that can single handedly lift a continent like Africa out of poverty. *edit: Nothing like defending bitcoin on Hacker News and getting downvoted to oblivion, hey rather than downvote why don't you point out exactly what you disagree with so we can have a discussion

Iv 7y ago

I am really surprised that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general) hasn't solved its energy use yet and is still legal. I thought the world would switch to proof-of-stake coins and gradually make bitcoins harder to use.

exit 7y ago
> I thought the world would switch to proof-of-stake coins and gradually make bitcoins harder to use. if proof of stake were implemented with the same security guarantees as proof of work, the bitcoin utxo set would be migrated over to it.
newguy1234 7y ago
Bitcoin is pure free market. People keep it because of its history - same as how people buy gold coins.
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  Except I'd put far more stock into gold coins (or gold in general) as a store of value. But that's just me.
  - celticninja 7y ago
    And there are enough people that take the converse position, that allows bitcoin to grow
    - CaptainZapp 7y ago
      Comparing this chart[1] with the chart found on this page[2] I very much doubt that assessment, specifically in terms of volatility. Note the very, very different scale of those charts. [1] https://goldprice.org/de/gold-price-history.html https://goldprice.org/de/gold-price-history.html [2] https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Bitcoin_history https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Bitcoin_history edit: clarification
    - arcticbull 7y ago

lacker 7y ago

I think we aren’t quite there yet with Ethereum and Stellar. Proof of stake is promising, but it hasn’t rolled out yet. It’s possible that the migration leads to unforeseen problems, or fails entirely. The trusted models like Stellar aren’t operating at the same financial scale as Bitcoin. The question there isn’t technically whether they can handle the transactions per second, but socially whether they are as resistant to censorship as Bitcoin is. In the end, more people want Bitcoin than want Ethereum or Stellar. And people are willing to pay a lot of money to get it, money which in large part goes indirectly to miners’ energy expenditure. Perhaps, in the long run, the more efficient consensus mechanisms will prove superior to proof-of-work. But it hasn’t happened yet.

konschubert 7y ago
> In the end, more people want Bitcoin than want Ethereum or Stellar. This is an accident of history more than anything. I think the distribution will look different once the monetary cost of Proof of Work starts to impact the Bitcoin ecosystem.
- keymone 7y ago
  When will the monetary cost of gold mining start impacting gold ecosystem?
  - konschubert 7y ago
    That analogy does not hold if you think about it
    - keymone 7y ago
      why?
      - konschubert 7y ago
        Look, if you bring an anology into an argument then it’s in you to explain why it holds, it’s not on others to refute it. Ever heard of the bullshit asymmetry principle? Anyways, to answer your question: High cost of mining in gold is what limits the supply. High cost of mining in a cryptocurrency is not needed to limit supply.

conception 7y ago

The other side is that people who mine bitcoin have to have basically “free” energy - margins are too tight. So while it’s wasteful, people aren’t burning coal or gas to produce bitcoin in the big bitcoin farms. Hydro and geothermal rule.

BadRedWp 7y ago
Free or stolen, some miners steal electricity to or bribe officials.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Where they could instead be replacing fossil fuel-based capacity.
lukev 7y ago
The headline article talks extensively about how this is not the case.

shan224 7y ago

I have yet to see any POS that doesnt devolve into centralization or obfuscated POW. You say pointless computation. I say layers on layers of security protecting the most sound monetary policy in human history

xg15 7y ago
> protecting the most sound monetary policy in human history That's a political opinion. But regardless of its validity, I'm not convinced that this justifies a single Bitcoin transaction producing as much CO2 as 700,000 Visa transactions.
- rax0m 7y ago
  Comparing Visa transactions to Bitcoin transactions is definitely comparing apples to oranges. A Bitcoin transaction on the blockchain is layer 1. A visa transaction is layer 3 or 4? Lightning network is layer 2 and you could have >700,000 transactions in a lightning channel before settling on chain, so there you go Bitcoin layer 2 is more energy efficient than the common financial system layer 4.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
And I say it's denominating trust in watts. Think about it from the opposite direction: trust is a ridiculously effective optimization of group dynamics, and humans come equipped with it by default. It allows us to engage in trade and cooperation without paying the cost of perfectly, mathematically, enforcing the rules. It takes a problem that would be O(n!) and reduces it to something on the order of O(nlogn), at very little loss in the optimality of the result. Taking this shortcut is a no-brainer, it would be immensely stupid not to do it. It so happen that historically, we took that trade-off and built a civilization on it. It worked well. It works well*. And what bitcoin does is trying to make our economy run on O(n!) overhead, because some individuals think that a political ideology based on not trusting other people is somehow a good idea.

konschubert 7y ago

I think bitcoin won’t be able to compete long term because one way or another, it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense. I hope we recognize this rather sooner than later, such that we can stop wasting so much energy.

trickstra 7y ago
> it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense. They are. How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? And so far it seems like the users are happy to pay what it costs. The fact that you don't see the benefit doesn't mean there isn't any for them.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? With speculation on currency (it's the primary use of Bitcoin) and theft - the latter less so, given the very high centralization of hashing power, but it was and still is common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for.
  - keymone 7y ago
    > common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for Define “common” and provide sources for your claims please.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Monero Javascript miners are common to this day.
      - krageon 7y ago
        They're an easy way to donate to people in places where it is hard to transfer money. What exactly is the argument you are making here? Presumably the people running those things are definitely paying for their power one way or the other.

keymone 7y ago

You’re wrong. If you think Bitcoin’s mining is wasteful you don’t understand what is valuable in Bitcoin. If you think there is duplication - you don’t understand how modern bitcoin mining even works. Proof of stake doesn’t work and trust based models are the very thing bitcoin is designed to save us from. If you have ideological bias here I won’t try to convince you, only time will.

mcnichol 7y ago

Hashing solved a problem of limiting supply and spreading the work in a dynamic way to prevent takeovers. Energy consumption would be dramatically less if ASICs weren't a thing. In hindsight it is obvious they would be built but give me a break. What they accomplished was a decentralized balancing of power based on economics, crypto, and distributed computing. It is beyond remarkable. So tell me, what is the carbon footprint of FedNet and all of the banks clearing the 3,000 tx/s demands and their collective datacenters... What, you thought what we had today was free? Are you aware that these numbers shared are not even 1% of the worlds consumption of energy or a quarter of what the us alone uses in merely datacenter costs! I hate these fud charged articles with no balance, basis, or actual science.

arcticbull 7y ago
> So tell me, what is the carbon footprint of FedNet and all of the banks clearing the 3,000 tx/s demands and their collective datacenters... (a) whataboutism is a logical fallacy. (b) If every Visa transaction took 625kWh, it would use 38X the entire world's power generation capacity and 3X the worlds entire rate of e-waste generation. Just Visa, not MC, UnionPay or Amex. Visa is literally 700,000X more efficient, and getting more efficient as technology does. Bitcoin becomes more wasteful as technology improves. > I hate these fud charged articles with no balance, basis, or actual science. A study from Cambridge University backs it up and is linked. Just because it doesn't agree with your preconceived notions doesn't make it "not science" all of a sudden. You could just be wrong.
- mcnichol 7y ago
  > (a) whataboutism is a logical fallacy. This isn't whataboutism. There is a system being used. Contrast it with what currently exists. > Bitcoin becomes more wasteful as technology improves. You misunderstand hashing difficulty. This guy is a known troll spreading FUD. Look at all of the links he has posted. It is not science. Stop embarassing yourself and read a layer deeper into the people writing the articles. https://hackernoon.com/the-reports-of-bitcoin-environmental-damage-are-garbage-5a93d32c2d7 https://hackernoon.com/the-reports-of-bitcoin-environmental-...

andirk 7y ago

And USD is guarded by guns, bombs, wars, lies, and so on. None of these currencies have free protection. That said, I do like Prime Coin's use of their energy going to finding prime numbers which (I assume) is useful to mathematicians.