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Ethereum developers have been working extremely hard to move to proof of stake to remove this massive power requirement. It's too bad that wasn't mentioned in t
by ikt 6y ago
Ethereum developers have been working extremely hard to move to proof of stake to remove this massive power requirement. It's too bad that wasn't mentioned in the article.
- jamil7 6y agoSlide side track but I never get the complaints about power usage. It’d be great if crypto used less energy obviously but doesn’t fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?
- speedgoose 6y agoNo. Proof of work is insane and uses too much energy by design.
- coolgod 6y agoCan you explain why you think fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?
- vageli 6y agoTransporting physical currency requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure.
- rainbow-road 6y agoThe same physical infrastructure that is also used for transporting just about everything else? Anyway, most currency transfer these days is digital, so even that doesn't hold much water.
- vageli 6y agoWe use armored cars and people licensed to carry firearms for the transport of "just about everything else"? Also, most currency transfer being digital is a non-sequitor Businesses still need to move the money from their location to the bank regardless of the volume of transfers done digitally.
- _fq4v 6y agoYou are conflating fiat currency and physical dollars. The total sum value of physical currency is much less than the total amount of dollars in existence. Most dollars exist only as entries in a ledger.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoA centralised system built around reputational trust will always use less energy than one where trust is derived from compute time.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- viraptor 6y agoFiat also uses crazy amount of energy in absolute terms. But per-transaction costs are much lower for fiat.
- coolgod 6y agoCan you give some examples of ubititous systems in the real world which don't use crazy amount of energy in absolute terms? It would be helpful if you could provide an estimate for your notion of "crazy amount of energy" in terms of powers of ten kWh.
- viraptor 6y agoThey pretty much all do, I didn't claim otherwise. This is not the argument you're looking for :)
- redis_mlc 6y agoI know you're sealioning, but I've worked in payments and here's some examples for you: - the largest bank in Canada used one Tandem computer for all banking transactions until 2000 - ebay used one E10K for all auction transactions until 2000. (I actually worked in the data centers for those, and could have touched them if I wasn't concerned about possible grounding issues.) You're looking at a few kilowatts each for billions of transactions per day. So any comparison of bitcoin mining vs. banking is simply stupid.
- bjo590 6y agoI'd like to point you to this Vice article titled "One Bitcoin Transaction Consumes As Much Energy As Your House Uses in a Week". Meanwhile swiping a credit card uses slightly more electricity than a google query. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...
- seibelj 6y agoDoes it not seem strange to you that if a BTC transaction costs $1 to $5 in fees, yet supposedly uses $50 or more in “actual” electricity costs, there must be a disconnect there? There is energy in certain places (underground, hydro) that cannot be transported to wherever journalists are writing their papers as they spitball electricity calculations.
- robjan 6y agoMiners don't just receive the fees. They also receive the mined bitcoins.
- ikt 6y agoSo the first article doesn't mention Ethereum and another article doesn't mention Hydro. This is why journalism has a bad wrap. https://news.bitcoin.com/how-big-hydro-power-partners-with-bitcoin-miners-to-prevent-energy-waste https://news.bitcoin.com/how-big-hydro-power-partners-with-b... China’s southwestern Sichuan province, a mountainous region that is estimated to have over 50% of the Bitcoin network’s total computing power https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-rainstorms-china https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-rainstorms...
- robjan 6y agoThe amount of hydro electricity that can be produced is fairly static, so increasing hydro consumption means that other energy sources (mostly coal) are needed to pick up the rest of the demand.
- FuckButtons 6y agoNo, it does not, visa for example uses about 500,000 times less energy per transaction.