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> like a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC For the sake of the children† and the diversity of the planet‡ let’s hope not, eh? I mean it’s just tremendously waste

> like a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC For the sake of the children† and the diversity of the planet‡ let’s hope not, eh? I mean it’s just tremendously wasteful to generate Bitcoin. I don’t mind it as a concept, I think it’s cool, but fuck me what a waste of energy. † Have none, don’t care. ‡ This tho.

arcticbull 6y ago
Each transaction requires enough power to run an average household for 22 days (or to drive a Tesla from San Francisco to New York) and produces as much ewaste as hucking half your iPhone out the window along the way. [1] Not to mention it likely makes international arms and drug dealing Bond villain Paul “Solotshi” Calder Le Roux the wealthiest man on earth. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-international-drug-dealer-maybe/ https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I knew it was wasteful, but that was orders of magnitude more than I thought.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Maybe the Great Filter is comprised of a civilisation ending crypto currency proof of work barrier.
- modeless 6y ago
  What's misleading about this is that the electricity is not consumed per transaction. The amount of electricity miners buy is proportional only to the block reward, which is fixed, plus transaction fees, which are small, times the price. The block reward is large now but halves every 4 years and eventually rounds down to zero, so the electricity consumption of bitcoin will eventually fall with certainty. Also, that guy is not Satoshi. Satoshi is almost certainly dead, and was probably Hal Finney.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    your first paragraph is a round about restatement of the fact that it consumes exactly as much electricity and produces exactly as much waste as I said it did. Once block reward gets to zero, unless people pay the $80 in power it costs to operate the network as a transaction fee it’ll be vulnerable to a 51% attack, so poof. Rip. Ok I provided a detailed article explaining why Paul Le Roux is probably Satoshi and you responded with nothing.
    - modeless 6y ago
      > unless people pay the $80 in power it costs to operate the network as a transaction fee it’ll be vulnerable to a 51% attack Your $80 is based on the current block reward which was set totally arbitrarily and is not in any way an estimate of the actual amount necessary to prevent 51% attacks in the future after the block reward disappears.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Right but after the block reward goes away lol, you’re going to have to pony up or 51%, and until the block reward goes down in 1500 days it’s 100% fair to say what I did about what a transaction costs.
- octocop 6y ago
  How much resources does it take to bring 1 kilo of gold out of the earth? You are saying it is wasteful without any comparison to something similar to bitcoin.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    That's a false comparison. If gold miners were to stop digging, global finance would continue just fine (with some temporary shocks to commodities markets, but nothing permanent). If Bitcoin miners were to stop wasting electricity, the entire operation would immediately stop working.
    - octocop 6y ago
      "All gold miners stop digging" isn't a realistic scenario. You basically said my comparison was false and then proceeded to give a false comparison.
- kneel 6y ago
  Now imagine how wasteful physical currency is, the infrastructure to store it and transport it, the useless Chase/BOA/WellsFargo branches and ATMs that exist everywhere. They could almost all be replaced with digital wallets and apps.
  - modeless 6y ago
    The real cost of a fiat currency is not in printing bills or running ATMs. It's the law enforcement and ultimately military might required to enforce scarcity and value of the currency. The cost of enforcing scarcity in Bitcoin pales in comparison to the amount the US spends defending the dollar globally.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      The army is a fixed and utterly irrelevant cost because in a world where bitcoin is the only currency, and I can't stress this enough, you still need an army lol.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Fun fact you can calculate for yourself that your argument carries no water. If you scale up Bitcoin to just what visa provides (not all cash, no MasterCard not the rest of the economic order) it would expend a few times more energy than the entire world produces today and produce a few times more ewaste than the entire world produces today. Therefore it cannot be by definition more efficient than traditional finance.
grapehut 6y ago
I think a lot of that energy would have otherwise been wasted (e.g. surplus power from times of the day or season), and I remember reading that the vast majority of it is at least renewable energy. At least it seems a lot better than assets too? Like take gold, people are happy spending up to the spot price in order to extract it from the earth, environmental damage be damned.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  There’s no such thing as free magical wasted energy that just happens to only be good for Bitcoin mining lol, there’s plenty of other things that can be done with it. Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price. Socialized across block reward in the form of inflation. When that ends of course nobody will pay the actual $80-100 per transaction in electricity actually required to secure the network making it vulnerable to a 51% attack.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > essentially free to store Ha, no. Theres a thing called "security" and if you don't pay for it your gold evaporates or walks away.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      The cost on a warehouse and security guards for a year is likely as much as a single Bitcoin transaction, in terms of energy anyways.
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        how much bitcoin can you transfer for $300k?
  - 314 6y ago
    > Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price. It's not really that simple. There is a different breakdown when you look at individual vs global costs. There is a cost to an individual for storing gold - e.g. building a vault, hiring a guard etc. This cost was the original incentive scheme behind the early banks - if we pool our gold storage then we can pool our security costs. Beyond that individual cost there is no additional global cost for storage. Bitcoin is free to store for an individual. Once funds are stored at an address in the blockchain they will stay there. Although the global cost is huge it is invisible at the individual level - nobody needs to participate in mining the chain to hold bitcoin. History suggests that individuals favor situations where the costs have been socialized and are not visible at the individual level.
0xy 6y ago
How many servers are powering banking mainframes, VISA and Mastercard services? It's not wasteful if it's providing transactional security. Just for perspective, there are THREE MILLION ATMs globally. And that's just ATMs, totally ignoring the infrastructure for the 60,000+ global banking institutions.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Well an easy way to know this makes no sense is that if you scaled up Bitcoin power consumption to visas current transaction volume it would require more power than the entire world produces and generate more e-waste than the entire world put together. Then multiplied a few times in both cases.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    Increasing the block size does not require a linear increase in mining capacity so this is incorrect.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Great so let’s just dial it up! Easy! When does it take effect? Right yeah, it doesn’t, and it won’t for all the same reasons it hasn’t yet. Including ideological zealotry about how you should be able to download the entire blockchain onto a USB drive. Among many other reasons.
      - 0xy 6y ago
        If it won't take effect then your energy analogy is absurdism. You can't hold opposite views.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        You misunderstood when I asked "when does it take effect" I meant when will they go ahead and make that change, then followed up with the assertion that they will not ever make that change and therefore this feature isn't particularly relevant.

arcticbull 6y ago

Each transaction requires enough power to run an average household for 22 days (or to drive a Tesla from San Francisco to New York) and produces as much ewaste as hucking half your iPhone out the window along the way. [1] Not to mention it likely makes international arms and drug dealing Bond villain Paul “Solotshi” Calder Le Roux the wealthiest man on earth. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-international-drug-dealer-maybe/ https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...

MattGaiser 6y ago
I knew it was wasteful, but that was orders of magnitude more than I thought.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
Maybe the Great Filter is comprised of a civilisation ending crypto currency proof of work barrier.
modeless 6y ago
What's misleading about this is that the electricity is not consumed per transaction. The amount of electricity miners buy is proportional only to the block reward, which is fixed, plus transaction fees, which are small, times the price. The block reward is large now but halves every 4 years and eventually rounds down to zero, so the electricity consumption of bitcoin will eventually fall with certainty. Also, that guy is not Satoshi. Satoshi is almost certainly dead, and was probably Hal Finney.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  your first paragraph is a round about restatement of the fact that it consumes exactly as much electricity and produces exactly as much waste as I said it did. Once block reward gets to zero, unless people pay the $80 in power it costs to operate the network as a transaction fee it’ll be vulnerable to a 51% attack, so poof. Rip. Ok I provided a detailed article explaining why Paul Le Roux is probably Satoshi and you responded with nothing.
  - modeless 6y ago
    > unless people pay the $80 in power it costs to operate the network as a transaction fee it’ll be vulnerable to a 51% attack Your $80 is based on the current block reward which was set totally arbitrarily and is not in any way an estimate of the actual amount necessary to prevent 51% attacks in the future after the block reward disappears.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Right but after the block reward goes away lol, you’re going to have to pony up or 51%, and until the block reward goes down in 1500 days it’s 100% fair to say what I did about what a transaction costs.
octocop 6y ago
How much resources does it take to bring 1 kilo of gold out of the earth? You are saying it is wasteful without any comparison to something similar to bitcoin.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  That's a false comparison. If gold miners were to stop digging, global finance would continue just fine (with some temporary shocks to commodities markets, but nothing permanent). If Bitcoin miners were to stop wasting electricity, the entire operation would immediately stop working.
  - octocop 6y ago
    "All gold miners stop digging" isn't a realistic scenario. You basically said my comparison was false and then proceeded to give a false comparison.
kneel 6y ago
Now imagine how wasteful physical currency is, the infrastructure to store it and transport it, the useless Chase/BOA/WellsFargo branches and ATMs that exist everywhere. They could almost all be replaced with digital wallets and apps.
- modeless 6y ago
  The real cost of a fiat currency is not in printing bills or running ATMs. It's the law enforcement and ultimately military might required to enforce scarcity and value of the currency. The cost of enforcing scarcity in Bitcoin pales in comparison to the amount the US spends defending the dollar globally.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    The army is a fixed and utterly irrelevant cost because in a world where bitcoin is the only currency, and I can't stress this enough, you still need an army lol.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Fun fact you can calculate for yourself that your argument carries no water. If you scale up Bitcoin to just what visa provides (not all cash, no MasterCard not the rest of the economic order) it would expend a few times more energy than the entire world produces today and produce a few times more ewaste than the entire world produces today. Therefore it cannot be by definition more efficient than traditional finance.

grapehut 6y ago

I think a lot of that energy would have otherwise been wasted (e.g. surplus power from times of the day or season), and I remember reading that the vast majority of it is at least renewable energy. At least it seems a lot better than assets too? Like take gold, people are happy spending up to the spot price in order to extract it from the earth, environmental damage be damned.

arcticbull 6y ago
There’s no such thing as free magical wasted energy that just happens to only be good for Bitcoin mining lol, there’s plenty of other things that can be done with it. Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price. Socialized across block reward in the form of inflation. When that ends of course nobody will pay the actual $80-100 per transaction in electricity actually required to secure the network making it vulnerable to a 51% attack.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > essentially free to store Ha, no. Theres a thing called "security" and if you don't pay for it your gold evaporates or walks away.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    The cost on a warehouse and security guards for a year is likely as much as a single Bitcoin transaction, in terms of energy anyways.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      how much bitcoin can you transfer for $300k?
- 314 6y ago
  > Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price. It's not really that simple. There is a different breakdown when you look at individual vs global costs. There is a cost to an individual for storing gold - e.g. building a vault, hiring a guard etc. This cost was the original incentive scheme behind the early banks - if we pool our gold storage then we can pool our security costs. Beyond that individual cost there is no additional global cost for storage. Bitcoin is free to store for an individual. Once funds are stored at an address in the blockchain they will stay there. Although the global cost is huge it is invisible at the individual level - nobody needs to participate in mining the chain to hold bitcoin. History suggests that individuals favor situations where the costs have been socialized and are not visible at the individual level.

0xy 6y ago

How many servers are powering banking mainframes, VISA and Mastercard services? It's not wasteful if it's providing transactional security. Just for perspective, there are THREE MILLION ATMs globally. And that's just ATMs, totally ignoring the infrastructure for the 60,000+ global banking institutions.

arcticbull 6y ago
Well an easy way to know this makes no sense is that if you scaled up Bitcoin power consumption to visas current transaction volume it would require more power than the entire world produces and generate more e-waste than the entire world put together. Then multiplied a few times in both cases.
- 0xy 6y ago
  Increasing the block size does not require a linear increase in mining capacity so this is incorrect.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Great so let’s just dial it up! Easy! When does it take effect? Right yeah, it doesn’t, and it won’t for all the same reasons it hasn’t yet. Including ideological zealotry about how you should be able to download the entire blockchain onto a USB drive. Among many other reasons.
    - 0xy 6y ago
      If it won't take effect then your energy analogy is absurdism. You can't hold opposite views.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        You misunderstood when I asked "when does it take effect" I meant when will they go ahead and make that change, then followed up with the assertion that they will not ever make that change and therefore this feature isn't particularly relevant.