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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

• ffggvv 6y ago
  proof of work is immoral if you’re an environmentalist. that’s why tesla acquiring BTC was especially egregious
  • koonsolo 6y ago
    Exactly my thought. They could have picked a more environment friendly cryptocurrency (e.g. Nano). It would also had a relative bigger impact on the price, and so Tesla could have made a lot more money with such a move.
• peteretep 6y ago
  Genuine question: how much does this matter if much of it is renewables and cheap hydro? I feel like the negative externalities of using a lot of electricity are very very tied to where that electricity came from
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Is there reason to believe even a majority comes from renewable sources? And then, how much of that clean energy could be powering other things which are instead using fossil fuels?
    • Layvier 6y ago
      At least in Europe, the lowest prices (even negative sometimes) for electricity are when renewable energies are producing a lot (e.g. when there's a storm in the north sea). If bitcoin mines are plugged on the real time market of electricity they would have an incentive to turn on when there's a lot of renewable energy produced. Assuming mines optimize their mining schedules on that, there's a scenario in which it could even help soak up the low prices and push investments into renewables.
      • lucb1e 6y ago
        Maybe, but only running miners when electricity is cheap doesn't work for a proof of work currency. 51% attacks would consist of an individual turning on their ASIC on a windless day. You need a large base load for it to be secure.
    • peteretep 6y ago
      I’d half remembered mining clusters near large hydro projects in China. As to the opportunity cost, getting the electricity from one place to another where it can be used if you have a local glut isn’t easy, aiui
    • celticninja 6y ago
      A lot of mining is done close to hydro dams, this power was in some cases waste power that would be unused. So it is swings and roundabouts, I don't think any new coal power stations are being built to mine bitcoin but bitcoin miners have taken advantage of excess electricity production to site their mines where power is cheapest.
  • foepys 6y ago
    Even if it were all green energy, why not use it to produce aluminum or to get rid of coal instead of wasting it on math puzzles?
  • madflame991 6y ago
    That would depend on how much heat the computations/mining itself generates - has to be some - and the total effort to make graphics cards or other hardware for a lot of clients that would not really exist if crypto wouldn't be a thing
  • throwaway2245 6y ago
    This is a bit too hypothetical: the most generous estimate I can find is that Bitcoin is still using 61% non-renewable energy, in as much as farms are favourably set up in places with cheap energy (somewhat but not entirely correlated with renewable energy).
  • nemetroid 6y ago
    According to their mining map[1], 35% of the global hashrate happens in Xinjiang. From Wikipedia, it looks like most major power stations in Xinjiang are coal driven[2]. 10% is in Sichuan, which appears to be largely hydro-driven[3]. 1: https://cbeci.org/mining_map https://cbeci.org/mining_map 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_stations_in_Xinjiang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_stations_i... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_stations_in_Sichuan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_stations_i...
    • simonebrunozzi 6y ago
      It seems [0] that roughly 40% of crypto mining uses renewables. Yesterday I wrote a lengthy post about the topic [1], if you're keen to know more. [0]: https://www.smart-energy.com/renewable-energy/renewables-powers-almost-40-of-proof-of-work-cryptocurrency-mining/ https://www.smart-energy.com/renewable-energy/renewables-pow... [1]: https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitive-answer-a010b0826f2a https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...
  • josalhor 6y ago
    If you freed all those resources, you could equivalently reduce fossil fuel consumption (up to 0%, of course). So I say it matters very much.
    • Spooky23 6y ago
      If you made it a crime to fly to tropical islands to enjoy the beach in the winter, you would enjoy a reduction in fossil fuels too, and people would be more productive than loafing about on the beach. End of the day, people choose to spend resources on things that provide utility to them.
  • raziel2p 6y ago
    Even if all of Bitcoin uses renewables, that's demand for renewable energy that drives prices up, which will lead other energy consumers to either pay more or pick less expensive non-renewable energy sources instead.
    • peteretep 6y ago
      I don’t think power markets are that fluid in most of the world
      • lucb1e 6y ago
        If energy demand suddenly halved, I do think we would choose to turn coal plants off before solar panels. Of course Bitcoin isn't half of any country's energy, but proportionally it works the same way. There is no reason not to turn it off except some daredevils' get-rich-quick scheme falls apart.
  • roland35 6y ago
    One argument I've heard it's that it increasing the power demand beyond what renewables can handle. Reducing total power consumption would be more ideal.
• Havoc 6y ago
  Perhaps not all of it is entirely "wasted" though. I've largely been able to avoid heating this winter as a result of crypto mining. A computer pumping ~300W into the air 24/7 is remarkably effective for a small apartment
  • 0xQSL 6y ago
    With a heat pump you'd get about 3x the heat for the same amount of power
    • hundchenkatze 6y ago
      But a heat pump gives you about 0x the amount of bitcoin.
    • krtkush 6y ago
      But will that heat pump mine bitcoins for me?
      • betterunix2 6y ago
        No but you could use the money you save on electricity to buy bitcoin if you really want to own it (a better question is why anyone would want to hold bitcoin?).
  • IgorPartola 6y ago
    Electricity is one of the most inefficient ways to heat a dwelling. I think natural gas is still considered to be several times more efficient but I haven’t looked at it in a few years. Of course if you are also getting benefits from the crypto you mined that will offset the cost.
    • AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
      Electricity is 100% efficient in a resistance heater, in that all the electricity used is turned to heat. However, it is considerably more expensive per unit heat than natural gas, even though you may only get 70-90% efficiency with your boiler or furnace. A heat pump can be even more efficient, though. An electric heat pump can be more than 100% efficient, in that each watt of electricity can be used to move more than 1 watt of heat into your home using the heat pump.
• EGreg 6y ago
  And as Bitcoins get more scarce and get adopted by more and more banks and companies as reserves, the value of mining rewards is only going to continue rising, until Bitcoin will consume more electricity than the rest of the world combined. (Around the time it is worth $1.2 Million a coin.) Change my mind. Bitcoin rewards miners in Bitcoin, which is the ultimate deflationary “store of value”, and has the world mindshare as such. Even if a network arose that was better in every technological way, if it was a “sidechain” to Bitcoin, then BTC would just be locked up as people migrated to that network, so “unstaked” Bitcoins on the original network would become even more scarce, thus mining rewards would go up even more. Bitcoin would be a store of value / collectible just like gold, except its supply would always be shrinking and mining rewards rising. PS: Consider I am right. How would governments even begin to stop it, if this use of electricity would net the provider more profit than powering a home?
  • foepys 6y ago
    How does it scale when a block can only contain about 3,000 transactions?
    • EGreg 6y ago
      It doesn’t. Proof of work is the wrong architecture. We started https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org to solve the problem. Others started other projects. But it doesn’t do anything to demand for Bitcoin because nearly all of it is for Bitcoin as a store of value and deflationary investment that will go up, up, up. Yes it was called a cash system in the original whitepaper - but somewhere around 2013 the narrative shifted from Peer to Peer Cash to Store of Value. And it has stuck. This is a copout but it works! Bitcoin has all the features to be a great store of value and nothing more... Bitcoin is now a store of value and you dont need it to scale if once in a while someone wants to move $50K from their savings account to their checking account to actually use. They can also have Nexo, BitPay etc as debit cards backed by BTC reserves. So why do you need Bitcoin to be a good currency too?
    • charcircuit 6y ago
      It doesn't. Bitcoins themselves will eventually be migrated of the bitcoin network so that they can be used with the rest of the defi ecosystem.
• paulpauper 6y ago
  Criticism a about bitcoin power consumption betrays an understand of even elementary economics. Replace bitcoin with beanie baby, and one could have made a similar argument in the late 90s about beanie babies causing a fabric shortage or fabric being wasted on toys that could instead be used for better purposes. When the beanie baby market crashed, the problem effectively fixed itself, as there was this sudden glut of fabric. Additionally, increased demand for bitcoin production means more power will generated, similar to how increased demand for cloth due to beanie baby production lead to more total cloth being produced overall. It is not like cloth for clothes was diverted to create beanie babies. The increased production of power to mine bitcoins is funded by bitcoin profits, and represents a consensual economic transaction between two parties, not wastefulness. Of course, then you can talk about externalities such as climate change but I am ignoring this for now and just talking about the criticism of wastefulness.
  • lmilcin 6y ago
    That doesn't explain how humanity can reach collective consensus to burn energy to further ruin our planet because we can't reach collective consensus on how to efficiently exchange goods and services. That's what, you know, governments are supposed to be fixing. I am being brainwashed on a daily basis to turn off electronic devices, I pay extra for electronic devices to be marginally more energy efficient, I am crossing local law if my car idles for more than 60 seconds but it is fine to be burning energy on massive scale as a detail of computing algorithm. Not to mention I can't buy decent graphics card because of how prices are inflated by miners. Let's face it. If you are mining bitcoin you are effectively engaging in a destructive operation where you accept small extra payment for burning much larger amount of energy away. While the rest of the world tries to minimize our carbon footprint you are wasting part of the infrastructure that makes it possible for a cut.
  • tedunangst 6y ago
    Was there a fabric shortage in the 90s?
    • Spooky23 6y ago
      Beanie babies created impacts far beyond fabric. - Consider the small plastic pellets, which will eventually work their way into delicate ecosystems and devastate the ecology for a millenium or more. - Since beanie babies were considered a store of value, countless tons of plastic storage bins and millions of cubic feet of climate controlled storage space are consumed to store beanie babies. - Back of the napkin calculations indicate that over a billion dollars has been spent heating and cooling beanie babies since 1996. - Beanie babies take up alot of space, driving demand for self-storage facilities. - When sold on the internet, consider the electricity, excess heat, etc generated by Ebay, as well as the carbon footprint of producing and disposing of cardboard, tape, labels, etc and the carbon consumed in shipping them. - The human toll is real as well. At least a dozen UPS drivers have been seriously injured while delivering beanie babies.
• dstick 6y ago
  Question that came to mind after reading the headline: could this become a future reason for governments to criminalise the trading / use of Bitcoin because of negative environmental effects? On the surface it seems the value of Bitcoin is directly tied to its energy consumption and thus environmental harm. I get that Bitcoin itself is decentralised and cannot be banned outright. But could it be neutered in such a way that renders it more and more worth / useless?
  • Nursie 6y ago
    If governments banned the on/off ramps to normal currency, then yes it would be effectively neutered. There is an audience that wouldn't care, but it's a small audience.
    • jiriknesl 6y ago
      Yes, but the narrative is that Bitcoin is innovation and any government against it is basically against innovation. If I wanted to neutralize it, I would do something like Bait&Switch. Support banks running own cryptos until point where general public will see no difference between BTC and private cryptocurrencies and leave BTC users with their wallets and even when it will remain legal and everything, the "crypto revolution" would be taken by usual suspects (the establishment). However, I wouldn't like to see it. I prefer world currency to be run by nerds over bankers and politicians.
      • tal8d 6y ago
        Canada actually tried that, at least once - maybe twice. When it became clear that the government was talking about a pre-mined, non-transparent, centralized fedcoin - everybody laughed and then ignored it.
      • Nursie 6y ago
        As the other commenter says - nobody would care about those, because the only reason people are interested is the speculation. Stable cryptocurrencies are really only of interest to a small group of decentralisation fetishists, and stable, centralised cryptocurrencies are of interest to basically nobody.
• IgorPartola 6y ago
  Slightly off topic, but does anyone have any good resources on how alternative consensus protocols work, like proof of stake and proof of importance? I either see really simplistic explanations or ones that assume a lot of domain knowledge. I also recently saw a crypto coin that claims to be energy efficient, and I don’t quite understand how that’s possible without the possibility of a 50.1% attack.
  • aspic 6y ago
    You're perhaps thinking of https://nano.org https://nano.org ? A brief description of it's Open Representative Voting (ORV) consensus mechanism: "A consensus mechanism unique to Nano which involves accounts delegating their balance as voting weight to Representatives. The Representatives vote themselves on the validity of transactions published to the network using the voting weight delegated to them. These votes are shared with their directly connected peers and they also rebroadcast votes seen from Principal Representatives. Votes are tallied and once quorum is reached on a published block, it is considered confirmed by the network." Suggested read: https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/orv-consensus/ https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/orv-consensus/
    • gnrlst 6y ago
      If only Nano had first-mover advantage! I'm rooting for it though, it's everything BTC should have been.
    • koonsolo 6y ago
      I'm a huge Nano fanboy since the RaiBlocks days. It definitely deserves more attention, since it's a pretty solid technology and was distributed pretty fairly. But even in this crypto bull market, everybody seems to ignore it, except for the fanboys on Reddit.
    • nightcereal 6y ago
      Satoshi would be really proud of nano.
    • harwoodleon 6y ago
• knuthsat 6y ago
  Yet the amount of environmental destruction and pollution done by Argentina to support their massive livestock industry is something Bitcoin will never achieve.
  • abyssin 6y ago
    One could argue that livestock is more useful than Bitcoin, since it feeds people. Of course I agree we should reduce meat consumption.
  • K0nserv 6y ago
    Two things can be bad
    • knuthsat 6y ago
      Cool, I guess this fast function in our code that is measured in ms is of same badness as this slow function in our code that is measured in days. Given that we are not interested in what these functions do, my choice would be to optimize the fast function. Electricity used by Argentina generates massive amounts of destruction and pollution. The electricity used by Bitcoin is probably not even close.
      • forgetfulness 6y ago
        It's a bit hard to begin arguing against someone who thinks that a country of people is less deserving of using energy than a massive online gambling scheme riddled with scams, that happens to consume as much energy as 45 million people. Where does one even start?
        • knuthsat 6y ago
          I'm not sure where I said what you believe I think. My opinion is that using more electricity than Argentina is not as dramatic as the comments make it out. Bitcoin is never going to be as destructive to the environment as these countries. Saying that PoW is immoral or that Bitcoin is horrible because of electricity use is fine. But the immorality or horribleness is magnitudes away from what the rest of the stuff using electricity does to the world. If we want to optimize something, make reductions, Bitcoin is at the bottom of the list, rationally.
• bjd2385 6y ago
  Does anyone have any figures on what regular banking systems use for accepted/official currencies? I feel like this has blown up so much that it makes sense to compare and contrast.
  • Nursie 6y ago
    Bitcoin provides very few of the services that regular banking systems do, and to a far, far smaller audience. Unless that's taken into account, such a comparison is meaningless.
  • unkulunkulu 6y ago
    I doubt counting this per transaction volume will yield close results, mining is computation intensive by design. Absolutes are a curiosity, but comparing those is not constructive imho
  • tgv 6y ago
    I have the idea that banking for a country the size of Argentina uses much, much less energy than bitcoin mining, yet serves more people than bitcoin.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Argentina has 45 million inhabitants. Bitcoin has like 300k transactions per day. Every person in Argentina could do three transactions per year (300e3/45e6×365) and it would already exceed the transaction count of Bitcoin. Yet Argentina's banking system uses less energy than Argentina, and so their banking system must be more efficient than Bitcoin. That's assuming that a transaction comparison even makes sense, which it doesn't really because: Bitcoin is not a currency. People use it as a way of getting rich, which they could also do with any other currency by just having a limited number of numbered paper bills, some guarantee that no more will ever be printed (e.g. agree that nobody will use a bill number higher than 10 million), and publishing on a forum who owns a specific bill number. It doesn't need proof-of-work to function as an investment scheme.
• JustFinishedBSG 6y ago
  If we could burn bitcoin apologists we would have infinite energy because you are the densest bunch I've ever met https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
  • paulpauper 6y ago
    i wish I could downvote or report this threat of violence
    • formerly_proven 6y ago
      > you are the densest bunch I've ever met Indeed!
  • ttt0 6y ago
    Damn, I knew the governments hated cryptocurrencies and will try to shut it down at some point, but I haven't realized there was such hostility towards it.
    • K0nserv 6y ago
      Consider the position of someone who believes bitcoin adds zero(or even negative) value, but consumes astronomical amounts of, often dirty, electricity while the world faces a climate emergency. Further, since this is a technical forum, all of this work to compute trillions of SHA hashes. On the flip side you have a bunch of peopple who rely on bitcoin as an investment vehicle and are therefore very invested in its continued growth. It's understandable that emotions run high about this topic imo
    • Spooky23 6y ago
      It has attention, so it's a sexy thing to snark at. When the Elon boom bursts, folks will be back to complaining about cow flatuence, birds getting killed by solar panels, or whatever the shiny environmental crisis of the day is.
• Jonnax 6y ago
  From what I understand bitcoin currently has a $20+ transaction fee with a transaction time takes 60 minutes+ With these issues in addition to the high power consumption, how will Bitcoin become a usable currency?
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    It won't and even BTC enthusiasts have given up on that. They narrative is now that BTC is a "store of value".
    • onion2k 6y ago
      It won't It won't for small transactions. Buying a car or a house with BTC could still be viable in the future.
      • gambiting 6y ago
        I still don't see how. When we bought our house in the UK I sent the entire transfer from my phone, paid 0 fee, and it arrived 30 seconds later. Why would I use bitcoin for it?
        • leesalminen 6y ago
          I’m currently buying a house internationally. International wire transfers take multiple days and I have to produce all sorts of documents for the receiving country’s government showing the source of the money. It’s an annoying and lengthy process. I’d much rather send BTC to a wallet than this.
          • Hamuko 6y ago
            Are you saying that if you were buying a house with Bitcoin that the government wouldn't want to see where the money is sourced from?
            • 6y ago
• simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  I'm tired of this BS about Bitcoin and pollution. So tired that yesterday I wrote this [0]. Of course you might be in complete disagreement with me, but please read it and let me know what you think. Be kind. I am trying to have a good conversation about it, not to impose my view. [0]: https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitive-answer-a010b0826f2a https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...
  • addicted 6y ago
    You ask commenters to be kind and say you want to have a good conversation but start your comment by declaring the viewpoint you disagree with as BS. I would suggest that is not an effective way of starting a conversation.
    • simonebrunozzi 6y ago
      I should have explained the "BS" part at the beginning of my comment in a different way. I think that comparing Bitcoin energy consumption with a country (it used to be Chile, now Argentina), while technically correct, misses the big picture. I also avoided a discussion on the true cost of having a global currency like the US$, which one might argue pollutes far more (military, etc).
      • JKCalhoun 6y ago
        > I think that comparing Bitcoin energy consumption with a country (it used to be Chile, now Argentina), while technically correct, misses the big picture. I think a comparison like that actually is the big picture. Maybe your arguments point though to more nuance.
    • newsclues 6y ago
      People don’t want conversations about Bitcoin, they want to defend their financial positions.
    • addicted 6y ago
      In the spirit of actually answering your question, first let’s just say that complaining about critics treating something named BitCOIN by its creators and something that has been promoted as an alternate currency from its creators to at least a decade of its supporters as a currency (Its the top cryptoCURRENCY) as currency is unfair to say the least. The whole shift of calling it a store of value as opposed to currency that Bitcoin supporters have started over the past couple of years is very clearly a post hoc justification for its existence. The problem, however, is that BTC isn’t even a very good store of value. Golds pricing has never collapsed 10x over the matter of months and nor has it risen 5-10x over the matter of months. As a result BTC isn’t even a very good store of value. It’s currently, at best, a pure speculative asset. It’s like the GME trading from a week ago taken to its logical extreme. A speculative asset that has no relationship to its underlying fundamentals. Much like how GME’s price was completely divorced from any fundamentals of the company, BTC is like saying let’s do that thing, but why even bother with tethering GME the stock to an underlying company. Let it just exist on its own. That’s what BTC is at the moment. GME if GameStop didn’t exist.
• simias 6y ago
  If this trend continue we may well seal our fate by crunching useless numbers at a global scale for the sake of greed and because we seem incapable of trusting each other. If this was written in a novel we'd deem it a bit too much on the nose really.
  • minikites 6y ago
    We've already destroyed the planet through greed (let's be real, we're not going to fix climate change). If you were a writer you would be writing history, not speculative fiction.
  • sparkie 6y ago
    The greed is the chairs of central banks and the policymakers who are debasing other monies (some people benefit more than others from this). If they weren't debasing other people's hard earned value, there would be no need for bitcoin. But since they are, and are doing it at an increasing pace, the demand for bitcoin is inevitable.
    • simias 6y ago
      You'll have to explain to me how replacing inflationary currencies with a deflationary one makes any sense in that context. Inflationary currencies punish those hoarding money, deflationary currencies reward them. The idea that bitcoin is good for the less fortunate and bad for rich people is pure propaganda and not based on reality. It's going to make a bunch of early adopters very rich, and that's about it.
      • sparkie 6y ago
        Bitcoin will benefit anyone who wants to save (create capital). It will not be kind on those who merely want to consume. It's low time preference vs high time preference. Not all rich people have low time preferences. Particularly those who are involved in the fiat system and who benefit from the expansion of debt. They think in quarters. And not all poor people have high time preferences, but under fiat, saving money is highly discouraged because it loses purchasing power. People are encouraged to spend or invest in stonks - where the markets are rigged to benefit the big players. Everyone benefits in a society where capital is accumulated, rather than debt. As for "rich versus poor," this is a distraction because their is nothing you can do about it besides resorting to theft, which makes the problem worse. The problem has always been "thieves versus hard workers." The current system is one where central banks and those close to them are stealing the time that other people have put into labour by deliberately devaluing their money.
• jqpabc123 6y ago
  Bitcoin is Crypto 1.0. There are better ways to do this. But people remain infatuated with Bitcoin.
  • doomroot 6y ago
    If something ever overtakes Bitcoin in the same way that Facebook overtook MySpace it’ll disprove the entire Bitcoin thesis. Currencies have to be stable. I expect a winner take all scenario here and Bitcoin to be that winner.
    • chrisco255 6y ago
      What "Bitcoin thesis"? Nakamoto had no such assertions in the original whitepaper that other cryptos would never outcompete Bitcoin.
      • celticninja 6y ago
        The only way to out compete bitcoin now is on features. Which if successful in an altcoin can easily be integrated into bitcoin.
        • mikeyjk 6y ago
          'easily' seems quite an assumption. It would depend on the change. Some changes would require giant rewrites.
        • chrisco255 6y ago
          "if" successful? Ethereum has had smart contracts now on-chain for 5-6 years and they are producing new abstractions and value add to the crypto ecosystem like decentralized exchanges, derivatives, crypto collectibles, savings and loans, conditional execution logic of smart contract based on external data from oracles (for things like prediction markets, insurance, price feeds, etc), etc etc. Turing complete smart contracts on-chain are a game changing innovation and Bitcoin won't go near it. They have ossified the protocol around the digital gold paradigm while Ethereum is creating a whole new platform with distinct network effects and value add. There's no reason why Ethereum's market cap can't exceed Bitcoin's. You know, there's asset classes that exceed gold's market cap, after all.
• nullcat 6y ago
  Imagine if all real currency was replaced by bitcoin. How much green house gases would be generated to keep our economic engines going and also who would be genrating this money? What would the economic outlook of the world look like during covid if it happened in a world where all currency was bitcoin?
  • sinocat 6y ago
    The world would definitely be a bad place.
• panpanna 6y ago
  Well, we need to build houses with bitcoin miners for heat generation. (Idea stolen from guy on reddit who actually did this)
  • Hamuko 6y ago
    And who is gonna foot the bill for the mining?
    • celticninja 6y ago
      You already pay to heat your house, what if you could be paid to hear your house?
      • Hamuko 6y ago
        Your house is not necessarily heated with electricity. Running an ASIC 24/7 would use up like $285 worth of electricity per month if you pay 12 cents for each kilowatt-hour.
        • BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
          So about the normal amount for heating a house here in Canada.
        • lucb1e 6y ago
          > Your house is not necessarily heated with electricity. But it will be anyway, that's a matter of a few decades now. If you're currently replacing your heating system, I should hope you're switching to electricity. Though I'd say let's get a heat pump and save like 2/3rds of the energy compared to making the heat from scratch. Depending on the climate you might need some additional heating a few weeks per year, and then yeah sure let's do mining, but that's not a stable basis for a cryptocurrency's security.
  • BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
    Although I am not a fan of cryptocurrency popularity (mainly because of the potential to destabilize the macro economy), and I don't know much about this company: https://qarnot.com/en/home/ https://qarnot.com/en/home/, but I find they have a great name suggestive of thermodynamically optimal computing, Carnot being the father of thermodynamic efficiency. Carnot came up with thermodynamics to optimize steam engines, maybe making him the most steampunk of scientists. Thermodynamically optimizing bits is an echo of that for the cyberpunk age.
• yrral 6y ago
  This is a rehash of a previous post of mine regarding electricity consumption: Back in the days where all our electricity came from fossil fuels, I completely agree that marginal electricity usage was bad for the environment. However I think that thought has persisted with us even though it is no longer true 100% of the time. With renewables sometimes the marginal cost of electricity to our environment is near 0 or even negative (eg, during periods of higher winds and lower demand.) I predict that in the future as bitcoin mining becomes more and more of an efficiency game that you will see bitcoin mining be kind of a load balancer the grid, effectively turning off during peak demand (or low supply) times and contributing to the base load during regular times. For example, it may even help the economics of building new wind plants. Eg, currently it may not be profitable to build a new wind plant because base load is too low that the excess power generated would need to be sold off at 0 or even negative prices. However if bitcoin mining could be turned on during these times and off during periods of high demand, there will need to be fewer peaker plants in operation and it would positively affect the economics of opening a new wind plant. Bitcoin mining only cares about the cost of electricity at a given time, it is not like most other electricity demands that are very time based. With the large variance of electricity generation by renewables, I think bitcoin can in the future help smooth demand according to the real supply/demand curve. It's kind of like a different implementation of the Tesla utility grid batteries. Instead of deploying power, you force the grid to build more renewable capacity (that the miners are paying for) that you use except in peak periods, where you turn off and effectively provide the grid with more power. Edit: here is an article of a bitcoin mining company doing just that: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/bitcoin-miner-is-scoring-700-profits-selling-energy-to-grid https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/bitcoin-m... https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2020/05/21/how-this-billionaire-backed-crypto-startup-gets-paid-to-not-mine-bitcoin/?sh=1a6f86e97596 https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2020/05/21/ho...
  • knuthsat 6y ago
    Using fossil fuels for electricity is very nice. Imagine all the forests that stayed intact in remote places of the world that just started burning oil.
  • donutloop 6y ago
• divs1210 6y ago
  How much electricity does the world monetary system use?
• ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
  The mining of Bitcoin uses this amount of electricity. How much resources does the mining of gold use? Afaik, 3000 tons of gold are mined per year. Which is worth about $150B. I would expect the mining uses resources of about $150B as well? By my calculation, the value of bitcoins mined per year is $15B: 900 Bitoins per day = 328500 Bitcoins per Year 328500 * $45000 = $15B So I would expect that Gold mining uses about 10x as much resources as Bitcoin mining.
  • avaldeso 6y ago
    What's your point? Gold is useful. One of the most versatile metals. You can find gold almost en every electronics, or medical implants, or scientific equipment, or in space telescopes. BTC isn't even useful data. It's just a number. What an utterly disingenuous comparison.
    • emteycz 6y ago
      Bitcoin is useful too. It's impossible to quickly and reliably transfer money between many places (e.g. Africa and Europe, USA and Africa, USA and EU) by any other way than Bitcoin. African banks will steal your money if they have a chance to claim it was lost in transport. Transfers between EU and USA take so much paper and gasoline (to travel to banks) that Bitcoin must be more ecological. And transfers between many country pairs are totally impossible without Bitcoin.
      • avaldeso 6y ago
        There's levels of usefulness. Not dissing your argument but gold is still way more useful. There's has to be better ways to solve the problem you mention. Like they say, Bitcoin is a solution looking for a problem.
        • emteycz 6y ago
          Gold is not much useful to millions of Nigerians while Bitcoin is praised daily there. I think if there was another solution, we would be using it already.
• qznc 6y ago
  Bitcoin every consumption halves every two years since the mining profit halfs. Thus mining bitcoins becomes less profitable and thus more energy efficient over time. In the other, if the price increases faster than the mining yield drops, efficiency is decreased.
  • celticninja 6y ago
    This is incorrect. The mining reward halves every 4 years, but if the price of bitcoin goes up then so does the value of the reward. Also it is a bit of an arms race so more power is required to power more machines,to mine the same number of bitcoin.
• epalm 6y ago
  Forgive my ignorance but aren't there a finite number of bitcoins? A casual search says the world has mined 18.5 million out of a total of 21 million, after which, doesn't the mining process stop, along with the current environmental impact?
  • detaro 6y ago
    No it doesn't, since the primary purpose of mining is processing transactions, not creating new bitcoins. The created bitcoins are merely an incentive to mine.
  • chrisco255 6y ago
    Bitcoin has a halving mechanism, every 4 years the rate of new BTC mined drops by half, so that BTC will take over a century to actually reach 21 million (2140).
  • celticninja 6y ago
    Mining is what powers transactions as well as generating new coins. Once all 22 million coins are mined it is assumed that transaction fees will replace the coins miners earn . So mining will always remain in some form or another, and also the size of the network is what makes it safe.
  • FabHK 6y ago
    Indeed. The "Coinbase" mining reward (currently 6.25 BTC per block mined) halves every 4 years. The theory is that the proportion of fees (currently only 10%-20% of the total reward miners make) will increase and make up for the reduction in coinbase. Currently, a successful block makes 6.25 BTC * 45000 BTCUSD = 280k USD in Coinbase, or around 100 USD per transaction, plus a 10-20 USD fee per transaction. As Coinbase drops (or BTCUSD drops), users will have to pay around 100+ USD per transaction in fees, or the rewards to miners will drop and some will go offline, resulting in a reduction in difficulty and less energy wasted.
• Proven 6y ago
  That's a non-issue.
• donutloop 6y ago
  Fight the bitcoin climate crisis: https://senatusspqr.medium.com/fight-the-climate-crisis-usenano-6e7c22d45b0e https://senatusspqr.medium.com/fight-the-climate-crisis-usen...
• progforlyfe 6y ago
  If I understand the system correctly, the vast majority of bitcoin energy consumption comes from the mining process, which is not strictly required (at least not anymore, with 18+ million BTC now mined and in circulation). I can spin up the bitcoin software on my home PC to participate in the network, sending and receiving bitcoin, and confirming some transactions, and the power consumed would be low. Much less than running a 4k graphics 3D game. Because of that, banning bitcoin ownership and trading seems to be overkill or missing the point... Just regulate/limit mining, or even better put a capacity on electricity usage or have tiers where the more you use, the more expensive it is, making mining not worth it after a certain point. All that said, government regulation will be extremely challenging here as it would require cooperation of nearly every country on Earth, and we've seen how difficult that is.
  • celticninja 6y ago
    You don't understand the system correctly. Mining bitcoins is also confirming transactions, which is the sending and receiving of bitcoins. Yes you could use your home PC but you would never find a block and so never confirm a transaction.
  • rich_sasha 6y ago
    Mining Bitcoin is a necessity if you want to transact, so you can't eliminate it. Basically, validating transactions is very costly, so people doing it get rewarded with "mined" bitcoin. If miners stop mining, you cannot transact in it, at least with the current "proof of work" approach. There are some alternatives, like proof of stake, but they are not mainstream yet.
  • ruste 6y ago
    The mining process is _how_ transactions are verified and recorded. Bitcoin doesn't work without it. Mining is a misnomer. You aren't finding bitcoin. It's a reward for solving a problem that proves you participated in helping record transactions for the network.
  • nannal 6y ago
    > Just regulate/limit mining, or even better put a capacity on electricity usage or have tiers where the more you use, the more expensive it is, making mining not worth it after a certain point. Isn't that the exact method used, electricity is metered, the more you use, the more expensive it is. Yes it drives up the price for everyone else because there's demand, but by that argument we would need to look at other energy intensive activities, like heating and driving, which feels like a step backwards.
• kaba0 6y ago
  What’s your opinion on Corda? It has a different view on trust, than other cryptos (and it is not even crypto if we are being pedantic)
• insert_coin 6y ago
  There is no problem, energy is "free", but still, the source of the electricity should always be a concern not just for bitcoin but for everything. Nuclear, solar, wind? good. Hydro, natural gas? less good but ok for now. Carbon, oil? we need to replace those plants asap. Bitcoin or anything really should be allowed to use however much energy it is economically feasible. The real question is, why is there no better use for that electricity than to compute numbers? How our economies became so stagnant the best return for capital investment is bitcoin?
• ucha 6y ago
  As a store of value, bitcoin does not compare to fiat but to other forms of hard money such as gold. During Bretton-woods, the US dollar and other currencies were redeemable for gold and no one was saying that the US dollar was polluting the world because gold mining is polluting. Comparing the environmental impact of gold and bitcoin is an open question. Gold mining pollutes the world in ways bitcoin never will. It creates ocean waste [1], long-lasting mercury pollution [2] and more. As renewable become cheaper than fossil fuels, bitcoin will create additional demand for cheap renewable and accelerate the green transition. Because a mine could be moved essentially anywhere, it can be placed exactly where cheap renewable source of energy can be collected, thus maximizing the return on investment for renewable power plants, for example with geothermal in Iceland [3]. [1] https://www.earthworks.org/blog/drawing-the-battle-lines-over-papua-new-guineas-ocean-dumping-problem/ https://www.earthworks.org/blog/drawing-the-battle-lines-ove... [2] https://theconversation.com/gold-rush-mercury-legacy-small-scale-mining-for-gold-has-produced-long-lasting-toxic-pollution-from-1860s-california-to-modern-peru-133324 https://theconversation.com/gold-rush-mercury-legacy-small-s... [3] https://www.wired.com/story/iceland-bitcoin-mining-gallery/ https://www.wired.com/story/iceland-bitcoin-mining-gallery/
  • friendzis 6y ago
    > bitcoin will create additional demand for cheap renewable and accelerate the green transition Bitcoin does not create demand for renewable energy. Bitcoin only creates demand for energy. If bitcoin had significant demand for "cheap renewable energy", then we should have seen bitcoin mining operations concentrating in locations where renewable energy is abundant and land is pretty much useless for anything else. This has not happened in reality. Furthermore, even if we assume that bitcoin does put demand on renewable energy, since bitcoin mining does not replace other consumers, it is an additional overall energy demand. As long as bitcoin energy consumption grows faster than new renewable installations it effectively runs on carbon.
  • SiempreViernes 6y ago
    Uh, there wasn't really anyone talking about environment issues in the 1940's, which is when the system was created, and global warming wasn't established as a firm concern until the 1980's by which time Bretton Woods was dead.
• dd36 6y ago
  It’s an energy virus and needs to be stopped.
• jf22 6y ago
  Remember, the earth is burning. Crypto is a huge environmental issue.
  • samuel 6y ago
    It's completely meaningless because GWh aren't interchangeable. A hydro o thermal energy source too far from inhabited places could be used for bitcoin mining and its CO2 footprint would be near zero. I'm not saying you are wrong but this requires a far more exhaustive analysis.
    • jf22 6y ago
      So we'd build energy production away from where people live just to mine a digital currency?
    • lucb1e 6y ago
      There are transmission losses, but they're not that great. Please point out which power plants were built especially for proof of work mining. The others were apparently built with something else in mind and their power is now being wasted on western people's get-rich-quick schemes.
  • mikeyjk 6y ago
    The government's of the world seem concerningly content underplaying this. I'm glad I don't have kids.
  • paystaxes 6y ago
    If all crypto was mined with renewable energy, would it be a huge environmental issue?
    • jf22 6y ago
      Yes. Renewable doesn't mean without a carbon or other cost. All energy usage and production takes resources from the planet.
    • lucb1e 6y ago
• durnygbur 6y ago
  15 years ago we had been leaving computers running in the background to download and share data over P2P networks, nowadays it's to mine cryptocurrencies. How sad.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    At least there was a point to the former: you got content. With bitcoin, just move the money to Helium or something and if everyone does it, you have the same investment scheme. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about Bitcoin, it's just that everyone agrees to put money into it. We can easily move away and still have an investment scheme. You can't easily move away from downloading movies yet still have that movie on your hard disk to watch. There is a difference here.
• jpxw 6y ago
  I’m no expert, but https://nano.org/ https://nano.org/ seems to solve this quite nicely.
• nomoreusernames 6y ago
  this is beyond stupidity. first we waste all that material and brainpower in stupid wars where we destroy what we build, and kill those who remember how. and then comes captchas and passwords which steal so many hours from all the humans alive. and now things like this, it really pisses me off tbh. this should be used to find cures to peoples suffering. like the value should be real.
  • _alex_ 6y ago
    you must have had some REALLY bad captcha experiences to put it on the same scale as war
• nedsma 6y ago
  People/companies who invested significantly in BTC will go to extreme measures to defend their investments. Anything negative said about BTC will be faced with various whataboutisms, how it uses renewables, it's a value store and other marketing talk. It's also pathetic that Tesla and Musk are pledging $100M for a CO2 capture solution, whereas in reality Bitcoin is adding 35MT (mega tons) of CO2 per year.
• keiferski 6y ago
  Isn't this only a meaningful statistic when compared to the energy generated by current currency production and maintenance? Considering what the U.S. does to support the dollar, it's probably not even remotely a comparison.
• codecamper 6y ago
  In other words, Tesla just went carbon positive.
• sbolt 6y ago
  Does anyone know how much energy the global gold mining industry uses?
  • choward 6y ago
    Why does that matter? Nobody uses the gold standard anymore.
    • sbolt 6y ago
      Both gold and Bitcoin are stores of value with high production costs, Bitcoin gets a lot of heat for its electricity consumption but I haven’t seen anyone ask the same for gold.
      • lucb1e 6y ago
        That's ridiculous. Gold is used for jewelry (arguably the same thing as money, okay), electronics, medicine, as a food additive, glass coloring, photography, satellite coating, radio telescopy, aircraft cockpit windows... try opening Wikipedia some time. I can't quickly find what percentage of gold is purely mined for the purposes of being locked up in a vault somewhere as value store. If it is a sizable majority and it uses as much power as entire countries, then we should make this practice illegal as well. But that is two big "if"s that you aren't answering (you're just asking questions, hinting at "see this other thing is also bad!", without adding anything to the conversation). And even if you would then it still doesn't mean that we should just carry on with the easier-to-stop-because-it-has-no-practical-uses method. FYI I used to own Bitcoin. I also made money with it, and I bought products with it. Back in 2013. I know the technology deeply, as a tech nerd with too much time (back then) this was great and I learned many things about the tech as well as economics. But it has since become clear that the only purpose it can realistically fulfill is being an investment scheme, which you could also do without proof of work. Anyone who still uses this is either (and I mean this genuinely) blinded by the money they're hoping to make, waving away arguments using logical fallacies, or misinformed.
• alfl 6y ago
  Energy consumption doesn't cause emissions. Energy production causes emissions. Reducing consumption (by shaming it, in this case) means less investment in production, because there's less demand. This could slow the green energy transition.
  • SiempreViernes 6y ago
    Uh, less consumption also causes less production, maybe you missed that bit? And historically consumption has not lead to the green energy transition on its own, so it's a bit weird to assume it does it now.
    • alfl 6y ago
      I directly call that out: less consumption causes less production, so will reduce investment in production. If we're talking about emissions of bitcoin we're already talking about second and third order effects, so let's follow it all the way through.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    That makes no sense. We don't have enough renewable electricity yet to replace existing electricity consumers, and 90% of energy consumption is non-electricity and will still need to be switched over to be electric (insofar as we can), let alone if we invent a new waste of electricity in the form of a get-rich-quick-scheme. We don't need more problems. Don't use proof of work systems, or admit that you're in it for your personal gain and the planet can turn to semi-literal hell for all you care.
• snickms 6y ago
  If the goal is to educate the public on the scale of power involved, a comparison with a commonly used service would help a lot IMHO. Something like 'Bitcoin consumes 14 times the energy of Google and half (according rough estimates) that of Youtube' would make things easier to grasp before hitting the reader with country comparisons. FWIW here is my list of 'if a service were a country': Google Guatemala Bitcoin Argentina Youtube South Africa (unreliable data) [Edit] whoops - no references https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+consumption+of+google%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons... https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+consumption+of+youtube%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
  • flush 6y ago
    Thank you for such a high quality comment.
  • riffraff 6y ago
    I think the average person would find it easier to imagine the consumption of a country than that of a an internet service. Both are basically unintelligible, but at least the country one is something that one can _imagine_ from their experience, if wrongly (my house consumption:country consumption = 1:population). I bet few people on hackernews itself have any clue what the energy consumption of google might be, and have no way of relating to it.
  • andreygrehov 6y ago
    That is correct, but not a fair comparison, imho. Google, as a centralized entity, is one of a few companies devoted to go 100% green. Bitcoin consuming that much energy is akin to saying that production of wine all over the world is 14x what's being produced in France. Where's the logic?
• Miner49er 6y ago
  How much of that would be wasted otherwise though? You want cheap electricity to mine Bitcoin, so any energy that would otherwise be wasted is ideal. Before Bitcoin, some energy was literally just thrown away. With Bitcoin, it can be put to use for a profit instead.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Electricity thrown away is a very very trivial amount compared to the amount Bitcoin uses. And there are still surpluses that are thrown away. Bitcoin doesn't magically tap into the grid and run only when there is a surplus; virtually all miners run it regardless of the current energy price on wholesale markets.
• px43 6y ago
  Please put on your critical thinking hat for a minute. Using electricity is not the same as contributing to carbon emissions. Bitcoin is mostly mined in areas overflowing with excess green energy, and thus contributes negligibly to carbon emissions. The idea that all electricity generation is bad and therefore all electricity usage is bad is completely ridiculous. Instead of working so hard to figure out how to hate on some technology you feel like you missed out on, maybe try understanding it for a minute, and realize the massive net benefits it offers to society.
  • kwanbix 6y ago
    Do you have numbers to back what you are saying or you are just pulling numbers out from thin air?
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Bitcoin is mostly mined in areas overflowing with excess green energy I thought it’s mostly mined in China?
    • trogsworth 6y ago
      My understanding is that there's a surplus of hydroelectric dams, that were built far from any reasonable amount of electricity demand, which is why there's excess green energy in (parts of) China.
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Bitcoin is mostly mined in areas overflowing with excess green energy Source? I thought it’s mostly mined in China?
    • emteycz 6y ago
      Exactly! Seems like your knowledge about Chinese electricity might be outdated.
    • apexalpha 6y ago
      Yes, and most of the mining in China happens in Sichuan, which has considerable renewable energy from hydro. I think maybe 95%+ of Sichuans electricity is hydro.
• baxtr 6y ago
  Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking rich? I simply can't answer what BTCs and other crypto coins are actually good for. Can someone help me out here?
  • shp0ngle 6y ago
    It’s good for telling other people to buy more and checking price daily.
    • octocop 6y ago
      And making whiny comments on HN when it's mentioned.
  • hobofan 6y ago
    Determining fully decentralized consensus between arbitrary participants (or at least one of the best approximations of that). In Bitcoin that consensus is limited to transactions, in Ethereum with smart contracts it can be used for much more (though that might require additional layers of incentivation to work properly, depending on the use case).
    • grey-area 6y ago
      Nobody actually wants fully decentralised irreversible consensus between arbitrary participants on a public ledger because it is slow, costly and doesn’t solve real-word problems of identity verification, trust, reversible transactions, private transactions etc etc. People have tried and failed for years to find a compelling use for it. It’s a very interesting experiment in social engineering but I find it difficult to find a concrete example of bitcoin being useful. Making some people very rich at the cost of others is not sufficient justification. If anything fewer people are actually using bitcoin now for real transactions not involving speculation on prices than in 2015 say.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• sub7 6y ago
  Can't wait for the (American/Chinese/Russian) secret 4000 qubit computer to make a mockery of that ledger and all the culty idiots who bought into it. There's a 0.9+ correlation between Tesla and BTC. If we're not near the end of the bubble, we're definitely not more than a few cycles away.
  • MaheshC 6y ago
    I like your ideas and username
• peter_retief 6y ago
  I had a concept that used crop futures as a virtual currency, deforming a "cloth" with "root growth" to generate randomness. The money would go to finance food production and the currency would accrue an actual dividend once it reaches the market.
• ryanmarsh 6y ago
  I do not understand the motivation behind the alarm of BTC mining energy utilization. In terms of pollution there are much easier targets with obvious net negatives for civilization. I'll give you one example, Teflon is a fantastic product but it does not need to coat every piece of cookware. PFOA's are likely in the blood of every American. What motivations must one have to not see freeing billions of humans from the control of central banks as something good for humanity? Could the energy consumption of bitcoin mining be merely an engineering problem or are we being asked to eschew bitcoin mining (an cryptocurrencies) for the oh-so energy efficient global financial system? Something smells...
• yalogin 6y ago
  Why do they have to mine bitcoins at this point? There are enough in the market just transact and trade with them.
  • sparkie 6y ago
    Mining is the process by which new blocks of transactions get added to the ledger. There are no transactions if nobody is mining. When a miner mines a block, they are rewarded with the sum of all fees paid by transactions in the block, plus a subsidy, which is 50 >> height/210000. The subsidy is the process by which the available bitcoin supply is released into the market - a predictable rate which cannot be accelerated. Miners can chose to NOT claim the subsidy if they want, but would be doing so at their own loss.
• blondie9x 6y ago
  This is disgusting. Why is this stupid useless asset allowed to proliferate without regulation? Why are we not concerned about harvesting this blockchain at the cost of the planet? This is silly. Bitcoin needs to be regulated like other industries. It’s polluting just the same. Regulation now please.
• pulse7 6y ago
  So on one hand Elon Musk is buying bitcoins which consumes so much energy and on the other hand the same Elon Musk is promoting "green energy" with Teslas...
• blondie9x 6y ago
  Anyone who buys and takes part in mining this currency is taking part in the proliferation of climate change and the destruction of the planet. Until you can say all mining is done sustainably and all server production doesn’t not use rare earth materials or cause significant e waste, mining and Bitcoin itself should be regulated. Period.
• blondie9x 6y ago
  Climate change progress is being offset by the rise of harvesting digital currencies and the mining and production of parts that go into computers that power the harvesting and production of the currency.
• blondie9x 6y ago
  Can we please regulate Bitcoin the way we regulate over heavy consumption and pollution industries? This doesn’t even take into account the production and mining of rare earth materials to power the super computers mining Bitcoin.
• nickpp 6y ago
  How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos? As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs. Some are essential, some could be considered trivial. But they are all important for their consumers. Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system. While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy, for much more trivial reasons. Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.
  • louwrentius 6y ago
    That energy consumption provides a ton of benefits for a very large group of people. The energy consumption of Bitcoin makes a few thousand people rich and that's about it. Yes other things consume a lot of energy, maybe even more, but that doesn't justify the energy consumption of Bitcoin.
  • minitoar 6y ago
    The almighty dollar rights all wrongs. If I’m paying for it, what do you care? This is a slightly dressed up Tragedy in The Commons.
    • IndySun 6y ago
      Some people do say that whatever anything costs is what it is worth.
    • alecbz 6y ago
      Yeah I don't really understand -- normally people buying things (energy) at a price the supplier is willing to sell is good. If energy is priced appropriately, this shouldn't be a problem. Are people concerned with the negative externalities of energy usage? If so, it seems like the real issue is that all energy use is "bad", anything that causes people to severely increase their energy usage is especially bad, and bitcoin is one such thing. But even though it's bitcoin in practice, the real issue seems like not being able to correctly price energy.
• AnonsLadder 6y ago
  It's hilarious to see the naysayers about Bitcoin say that BTC is not usable. Now it's worth almost 50 grand and all they can come up with is expensive transaction fees which in hindsight, are really not that expensive, and the energy consumption of maintaining the Bitcoin network. It sure is a lot better than using human lives, usually & most likely forced labor, to mine real Gold. Right? After all, energy is free when you're using solar power to mine your Bitcoins or any other coins. Does the energy really goes to waste when it provides heating? Etc? It just seems like people are running out of excuses at this point. I wonder what they'll be saying when BTC hits $100,000.
  • kgwgk 6y ago
    Twice a silly price is still just a silly price.
  • enraged_camel 6y ago
    >>It sure is a lot better than using human lives, usually & most likely forced labor, to mine real Gold. Right? Bitcoin is purported to be an alternative to fiat money, not gold. And most governments can print fiat money at will, with virtually no energy.
    • bhupy 6y ago
      > Bitcoin is purported to be an alternative to fiat money, not gold. And most governments can print fiat money at will, with virtually no energy. That's not completely true. Bitcoin is purported to be an alternative to fiat money because it's purported to be an alternative to gold. The argument for Bitcoin as a replacement for fiat money actually rolls up 2 big arguments into 1: 1. That fiat money should be replaced with money backed by some commodity like gold (the Goldbug argument) 2. That cryptocurrency is the ideal underlying commodity because it's more easily transferrable than gold. To clarify, I don’t have a strong position on either of these arguments.
    • hoseja 6y ago
      And what is the cost of the massive capacity for and monopoly on violence that nation-states derive this capability to print money out of thin air from?
• nahuel0x 6y ago
  a good and rational use of resources, it's not like we are in the middle of a planetary ecological disaster or a possible end-of-civilization climate change crisis. Capitalism at its finest.
• birracerveza 6y ago
  This site is called Hacker News, and yet there is a surprising amount of resilience to accept the utility provided by Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, with the same old tirades that keep being repeated ever since Bitcoin was worth less than $1. The ecosystem has grown and has been finding real world applications. If you are still of the opinion that cryptocurrency is exclusive to buying drugs, laundering money and scamming people, you have a lot of catching up to do.
  • louwrentius 6y ago
    I am very interested in actual real-world applications. Because I'm following HN and I haven't seen any. Currently, it seems to me that Bitcoin is mostly an enabler for crypto-ransomware and other illegal stuff.
• CyberRabbi 6y ago
  Political clickbait. Many global activities use more electricity than Argentina. Please ban
• nathias 6y ago
  Complaining about Bitcoin now uses more electricity than Lichtenstein
• fritzo 6y ago
  Does gold coin use more gold than Argentina?
• hebrox 6y ago
  Yesterday I read "What Bloomberg Gets Wrong About Bitcoin’s Climate Footprint" [0] where the writer tries to make a case that you shouldn't compare Bitcoin to VISA, but more to something like the dollar. While I don't agree with his whole story, for example including the US army in the costs, I thought it was an interesting way of looking at it. Edit: he also points out that after all Bitcoin has been mined, the electricity use will probably change. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bloomberg-gets-wrong-bitcoin-climate-133717808.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bloomberg-gets-wrong-bitcoin-...
• tekromancr 6y ago
  Honestly, the only scheme I have seen that seems like a reasonable trade off of trustlessness and energy efficiency is DPoS.
• sharpneli 6y ago
  At that rate and assuming 4tx per second a single Bitcoin transaction consumes 165kWh. A Tesla battery is bit over 50kWh. So let's round that to 3 full charges of Tesla battery. That's 350km/220 miles of range per charge. In total 1050km or 660 miles of driving. So basically if you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there with a Tesla rather than send a Bitcoin transaction. Or alternatively 330 miles roundtrip. For each single transaction. It is hilariously inefficient system. It is literally better to drive a full car and give things physically than use Bitcoin. A small addenum: Visa apparently uses 146kWh for 100000 transactions. Coming at 1.46wH per transaction. That can drive a Tesla for 9 meters (0.4 seconds of driving at 80km/h) or alternatively keep a nice led lamp lit for an hour. And that includes everything the company does, not just the actual transaction but the upkeep of their offices etc divided by the amount of transactions they perform per year. EDIT: Apparently on 2020 it was 741kWh per transaction in practice and/or I made a tiny error in my calculation. Either way it's even better! https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co... That simply increases the ranges so that it becomes a 3600 mile trip. Or 1800 mile roundtrip.
  • Taek 6y ago
    The energy that goes into a Bitcoin transaction doesn't just pay for the one transaction. It also pays for the security of all the value stored in the rest of the system, and that's actually where most of the revenue for mining comes from - inflation, not fees. But also, Bitcoin transactions aren't typically buying coffee from your local store. It's very often international, and Bitcoin transactions offer a finality and immediateness that can't be found in other financial systems. But also, in many cases Bitcoin is your only choice to transact at all. Our business keeps getting rejected by payment processors such as Stripe and PayPal, and at this point Bitcoin is our only option to get revenue from Europe. As a result, Bitcoin is making things possible for us and our users that simply aren't possible at all without Bitcoin. If you think the fees are absurd, make a system that gives all the same benefits to us without costing so much. So far, we don't have an alternative, and we are very grateful that Bitcoin exists as an option.
• ajmurmann 6y ago
  The only real reason to be upset about this is carbon emissions. If we could properly price those into the price of energy and products the Bitcoin energy consumption would be a non-topic
• werber 6y ago
  I would love to see this done on a per country basis. Like x percent of y countries energy goes towards Bitcoin.
• inglor_cz 6y ago
  Well, how much could you make selling Argentina? Would there even be a buyer?
• klntsky 6y ago
  Why don't we care about how dynamic typing contributes to global energy consumption? Runtime overhead for preserving type info in memory (on large quantity of machines) is probably comparable to crypto mining (which is performed on very few machines in comparison).
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Because that can't be trivially understood to be wholly unnecessary. Who is to say that it doesn't make programming a lot faster and saves a lot of development time? Conversely, Bitcoin really is unnecessary given all the alternative investment, payment, and timestamping schemes that don't use proof of work. It's a matter of picking the easiest battles first. Bitcoin -> clearly evil -> why not move to another investment? Why not tax it for its environmental damage, like we tax other things that cause damage that the government later has to clean up?
• moonbug 6y ago
  Bitcoin needs to be exterminated.
• dosenbrot 6y ago
  I like the fun-facts on this page: "The amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the USA alone could power the Bitcoin network for 1.8 years" Where is the discussion about the smart home devices using that much energy? This is horrible, thats twice as the Bitcoin network and this is just the USA. I would really like if someone estimate the energy usage (with all trucks and cars and people and companies and buildings and so on) of other things than just whole countries, maybe the "normal" financial system, or plastic bottles or something everyone is using (like idle smart devices). I think most people missing the main point: Energy is to cheap. Most miners are in China, an they seem to pay nearly nothing for the energy (else they would'nt do it). This would mean they waste Energy on EVERYTHING, not only Bitcoin mining. In Germany I would never even think about mining Bitcoin, since I have to pay 0,35€ per kWh. But if I would buy thousends of miners and waste 5MW of energy, I would have to pay roughtly 0,15€ (maybe even just 0,05€). So wasting energy is profitable, is'nt this strange?
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    I’ve been getting ads from my power company about “energy vampires” reminding me to turn off or unplug unwanted devices for decades. There is an outrage about that wasted power; you’ve just missed it. Oh, and we’re getting more efficient about household energy usage every single day. Those always on lights used to be 60W incandescent bulbs, now they’re 6-7W LEDs. The same cannot be said about the Bitcoin network, which is growing in energy consumption.
  • positr0n 6y ago
    I didn't have time to dig in to the sources but I wonder if that fun fact is still true. Back in the day your VCR and TV used to consume a large amount of power in standby. These days a device on standby consumes pennies of power a year. Of course there are a lot more electronics in the average home these days...
• taftster 6y ago
  The pressures for electricity demand has helped drive research and innovation in renewable energies. In some way, the quest for bitcoin has helped renewables get off the ground. I personally don't mind this extra demand on our electric production, as I believe it will help get us to a renewable energy sources even sooner.
• kqr 6y ago
  And this is not surprising. Cryptocurrency is designed to be anti-efficient. "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy." This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.
  • lmkg 6y ago
    My issue with it is even more fundamental than this: it is structurally impossible for Proof of Work to become more efficient. If you find a more energy-efficient way to mine, the correct decision is not to reduce your energy usage, but rather to use the same amount of energy to compute more hashes.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • aeternum 6y ago
      By computing more hashes, you raise the difficulty for everyone else mining so you do ultimately push out the less efficient miners.
      • meow112012 6y ago
        If someone has money and power already, they can take a better chance to get more bitcoin. How about the other guys and the other guys ... 10/20 years later?
      • lxgr 6y ago
        The problem is that there is, by definition, economic incentive to spend an amount of electric energy equal to the economic value of transaction confirmation to all protocol participants.
      • rspeele 6y ago
        That's efficient if you define efficiency as hashes computed per watt. That's the metric by which less-efficient miners are driven out. However, this does nothing for the overall energy efficiency of Bitcoin, which could be defined as transactions processed per gigawatt. If energy gets cheaper, that number only gets smaller.
• timwaagh 6y ago
  At some point these transaction costs would effectively make further gains impossible.
• deleted 6y ago
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• macawfish 6y ago
  This comment will probably get buried but I wish someone would make something like coinmarketcap that showed how much energy was being used to secure each cryptocurrency. If there were solid metrics, it'd help people who want to be more conscientious about where they put their money to actually do that. Something like "coincarboncap". A lot of cryptocurrencies don't use even a fraction of the energy bitcoin uses but there's no index to show that, so even if there were incentives for people to invest in energy efficient cryptocurrencies, how would they know which ones to go for? The closest thing I can think of is whattomine. Maybe they'd be best equipped to build something like this, although I'm not sure if they'd have an interest in it.
• pcarolan 6y ago
  I sold out of my position because of the energy consumption but more importantly that bitcoin feels now like it's 100% dependent on greater fools. Like a pyramid scheme, those who buy now must convince others to buy later to increase their wealth. It seems that momentum is the real driver of bitcoin price now not value. The end result is massive inequality especially as institutional investors buy in and the marketing gears begin to wind up. At least with an inflationary currency like USD, there's an incentive to work and put your money to work. Bitcoin feels like it mostly rewards the hoarders.
• meirelles 6y ago
  It's not about today, but tomorrow. Inefficiency is way easier to fix than break paradigms. How much it spends per transaction now isn't that relevant.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    I don't know if you're serious, but you can't make proof of work more efficient, nor can cryptocurrencies realistically get even close to the transaction capacity of current "paradigm" (banks). This won't ever change the paradigm. I fear you may be misinformed about where Bitcoin is headed. I get you, though, I was also in it for the technology (as well as the profit, but I got in back when the "bitcoin faucet" gave away mined bitcoins freely, and I spent like 2 whole bitcoin on socks, there was no investment scheme in the beginning), but it has since become clear that this system can't be more than it currently is: an investment scheme that only works so long as more people put money in. It will take another paradigm shift, as big as Bitcoin was compared to the "paradigm" before 2009, before perhaps someone proposes something that has all the beneficial properties and actually practically works (regardless of energy efficiency).
• janoside 6y ago
  Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the military and diplomatic strength of the U.S. government to ensure all of the above are working smoothly. Any energy comparison must take the above into account – including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar. As those who make this comparison inevitably fail to mention, the dollar’s ubiquity is partly due to a covert arrangement whereby the U.S. provides military support to countries like Saudi Arabia that agree to sell oil exclusively for dollars. It’s worth noting that the grossly oversized U.S. military, whose presence worldwide is necessary to backstop the international dollar system, is the largest single consumer of oil worldwide." https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bitcoins-climate-footprint https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...
  • choward 6y ago
    > including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar This isn't true. Internationally the thing that backs the dollar is the U.S. economy. People know they can spend dollars to get anything they need. Domestically what drives the dollar is that it's the only way you can pay taxes. I suppose you could say that oil is used to defend the U.S. economy but that's a stretch.
    • loveistheanswer 6y ago
      >>including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar >This isn't true. Basic economics and the law of supply and demand says that it is true. >when demand increases and supply remains the same, the higher demand leads to a higher equilibrium price and vice versa. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/033115/how-does-law-supply-and-demand-affect-prices.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/033115/how-does-law...
• axiosgunnar 6y ago
  When arguing with a Bitcoin-fanatic, try this line: "Yeah I agree that cryptocurrencies are interesting, perhaps some day one will replace the USD. It will probably not be Bitcoin, but rather some other cryptocurrency“. Watch how they recoil! For they have been found out, they do not actually care for financial freedom, etc., all these noble crypto goals which can also be achieved with a cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin. All they care about is their speculative investment in Bitcoin in particular, so it won't help them much if another crypto becomes the world standard. It‘s probably <1% that are true believers and >99% that have missed out on a few bull runs and are now hoping to get rich quickly. Really, try this line some time and you will come to the same conclusion.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    > It‘s probably <1% that are true believers Yay, I was the 1%! Until I left in like 2015 when it became clear what a disaster it is and that it won't be able to fulfill its original purpose anyway. I'm very surprised the price is still soaring, shouldn't the best currency win? You seem to be right about the 99% idea, though the remaining 1% is not a true believer (you can't seriously be interested in the tech and miss this little fact) but rather people blinded by the additional promise of getting rich.
    • axiosgunnar 6y ago
      What was it that made it clear it cannot fulfill its original purpose?
  • charcircuit 6y ago
    I am sure most cryptocurrency fanatics understand that volatility is not a good thing for a currency and do not expect bitcoin to be the world standard for payments. Just because you won't end up paying your bills with bitcoin doesn't mean that bitcoin will be worthless.
    • axiosgunnar 6y ago
      Again, let‘s assume you are right, and Bitcoin is in fact 100% useful for doing X! Are you happy? Sure you are, since being useful for X made the price soar! ... Now let‘s pretend it wasn‘t Bitcoin, but some other cryptocoin that actually became the world's standard for X. Are you still excited? If not, you don't actually care about cryptocurrencies in general but want to make a quick buck with Bitcoin in particular. This is the point I am trying to make.
• wruza 6y ago
  Time to add another thing to Drake equation: Fb - the fraction of civilizations who didn’t fall prey for proof of work consensus. Others are invisible, cause they are very advanced, but all they do is mining crypto for food. To eat a sandwich you have to prove that it’s yours and a consensus is that it costs few MWh. Small islands of non-crypto trust appear millenia by millenia, but they are slowly marked as communism and disbanded by military consensus. It would be much faster, if military smart contract balance legacy didn’t require a petawatt-hour to sign one resolution with all conditionals, involving century-long testing of its code. Thankfully these groups do not form too often, because when you’re born, there is already a set of smart contracts that your ggggg-parent signed for your kin to obey. Maybe your ggg-children will have a chance with other families, if they manage to meet in the same aeon.
• andreygrehov 6y ago
  Is consuming electricity a bad thing?
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Since we're destroying the planet by doing it, I guess I'd say so?
• daptaq 6y ago
  The problem with Bitcoin is that POW is an unbounded competition of who can provide more computational power, ie. energy, to represent a consensus. Comparing the energy usage to Argentina, Island or any other country is therefore just a snapshot of the issue: Miners are incentivized to either increase the efficiency of mining, or invest more energy -- and because the latter option is easier, we see power usage rising and rising, without it having any influence on the performance or functionality. The only imaginable bound is all the energy that Humans can dispose of, but I think that if that is even being considered, the means have been mistaken for the goals.
• andred14 6y ago
  Isn't it funny how the attacks on bitcoin have come after the Tesla announcement? Who is paying for these attacks I wonder?
• xnx 6y ago
  Am I wrong that resources spent mining Bitcoin aren't that much different from money spent on else? Is the impact of buying $1000 worth of concrete, airline flights, tomatoes, iPhones, etc. etc. significantly different?
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Yes that's wrong. Bitcoin can be trivially understood to be unnecessary, given the alternative proof-of-stake system, the alternative cash system, the alternative online banking system, the e-cash systems that exist... It's less trivial to say that air travel can be trivially migrated to alternatives. In fact, I think you could make a good argument that some air travel is a net positive for the climate. The trick is knowing which part and whether you can get away with taking people's favorite toys away as a government (lots of people enjoy not traveling 3 weeks for a holiday on the other side of the globe). The only practical use that I can see for Bitcoin is that you don't need a bank yet can make donations. I can donate to sci-hub without signing up for a shady online wallet that operates in Kazakhstan and isn't impacted by sanctions against sci-hub in other countries. But if that's really all there is aside from the investment scheme (you can invest in, say, helium: move the amount of money that people invested in Bitcoin to the helium market and you get the same effect without the power consumption) then we should just find alternative solutions for donating to "good for everyone but unfortunately illegal" services like wikileaks and sci-hub.
• rednerrus 6y ago
  I'm here for the bad takes by the hodlers.
• bjr- 6y ago
  Why do these discussions so often assume electricity is a finite resource? Are people not able to turn their lights on because of Bitcoin miners? When Bitcoin miners consume electricity shouldn't that increased demand affect the market price and dis-incentivize mining? What other use of electricity has such a high price elasticity? People don't turn off their ACs in the middle of summer because electricity costs are high -- they value comfort, a lot. But miners, IIUC, shut down their ASICs when they're unprofitable. Bitcoin mining is extremely price sensitive. If Bitcoin mining is driving up local electricity prices it seems worthy of local regulation. It also seems like an incentive for increased energy production -- and given today's prices would most likely be clean energy production. The report states Bitcoin's consumption is 39% clean energy. That is considerably higher than the overall portion of global energy consumption from renewables. Does this not mean Bitcoin is a large source of demand for renewable energy? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewables https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab... Increased demand increases prices in the short-run and incentivizes production -- decreasing prices, and further increasing usage in the long-run. Right? What am I missing?
• jtanner 6y ago
  Yes it's Bitcoin is inefficient, but in exchange we get social scalability. https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-blockchains-...
• deleted 6y ago
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• pimterry 6y ago
  Quite a few people have noted that this is a lot, but there are caveats (how much does the _whole_ banking system use, how much is cryptofinance worth to society, etc etc). There's a more important point though: you can have cryptocurrencies without this horrendous waste of energy. There are functional cryptocurrencies that are _not_ backed by proof-of-work, and don't have the same catastrophic environment impact. Notable candidates include Stellar (backed by Stripe [1], using a consensus protocol with a distributed web of trusted servers) and Cardono (which includes Ethereum-like functionality, using proof-of-stake). They're newer, and they will evolve further, but they're already functional and dramatically more efficient (by many orders of magnitude). They're not even that niche: Cardono is #4 by market cap & Stellar is #12 [2]. There are interesting arguments for crypto being valuable, but there are very few arguments for Bitcoin or proof-of-work specifically is valuable (and for why the current price isn't a huge bubble). Burning this quantity of power is tragic and totally unnecessary. [1] https://stripe.com/blog/stellar https://stripe.com/blog/stellar [2] https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/
• Mc_Big_G 6y ago
  Are the calculations for traditional finance energy consumption accurate? Do they account for all of the physical devices required? Credit card readers, POS systems, banks, offices, credit cards, mailers, etc... It all requires an immense amount of oil and other resources to keep that machine rolling.
• bcheung 6y ago
  Unless BTC changes to a "proof of stake" model like the majority of other new cryptocurrencies that are out there, it will see a large chunk of its marketshare replaced. There's already a big shift from BTC to more technically sophisticated solutions like Ethereum (ETH). tThe newest protocols like Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT) are even more efficient in terms of number of transactions that can be securely handled per second. Bitcoin also suffers from long wait times because you need to wait for the current block to be finalized. The sheer amount of electricity required just to confirm a transaction is not a viable long term solution for e-commerce.
• sildur 6y ago
  The sudden barrage of anti-bitcoin news looks slightly suspicious.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    Check my account history. You'll see I'm very critical of proof of work schemes and you'll find that it goes back to 2012. You'll probably also find me being enthusiastic about Bitcoin until ~2015 when it became clear what it really is. That more and more people are realizing this, especially as the problem gets bigger and bigger, is only hopeful to me.
    • sildur 6y ago
      I trust you. It's only I'm seeing a surge of anti-bitcoin news since Tesla bought some.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• cryptica 6y ago
  Bitcoin helps to solve a massive problem (centralization) so I wouldn't say it's not worth it. That said, there are many PoS and DPoS cryptocurrencies to choose from which use almost no electricity and would actually help to decentralize the economy much better than Bitcoin could on its own. ...We can't achieve decentralization by pooling all of the world's money on a single asset. That makes no sense.
• nacho2sweet 6y ago
  All the people defending BTC because they a vested interest is hilarious. Ahhhh yes lets develop clean energy solutions to mine it before solving all the actual other clean power needs in the world.
• ninesigns 6y ago
  It's worth noting that current bitcoin capitalization ($600B) is also more than Argentina GDP ($445B), so it can be said that bitcoin users constitute a rather significant (bit)nation on this planet.
• gatvol 6y ago
  Surely the comparison should be against conventional systems used to store and transfer value? Consider a bank, with its datacentre, branches, and people employed to eyeball and verify transactions, maintain the supporting systems and infra, to begin with...
• deleted 6y ago
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• zachrip 6y ago
  btc considered harmful
• acd 6y ago
  The economy does not account for the environment, that is what is wrong with the current economic system. Bitcoin did not fix that, but it fixes that there is no central bank other than miners.
• brokencode 6y ago
  Bitcoin is so fundamentally deficient that I am absolutely shocked by its continuing popularity. I’ve tried and tried to think of a legitimate purpose for it, but I’m confident that it doesn’t have one. It is just too slow and inefficient to be used as a currency, and I can’t understand why anybody would use something so volatile as a value storage mechanism similar to gold. Transactions provide extremely dubious privacy as well, and governments still control it to a large extent via the exchanges, since at the end of the day, you still need to convert it to cash for anything useful. Its only true use is for wild speculation and greed. It just makes me sick to think of the energy wasted by this when we are on the brink of climate catastrophe.
  • tippytippytango 6y ago
    Lots of people are paying for the energy the network uses right now and they thought it was worth it. You might have missed something in your thinking. Maybe go talk to some people that have used the network and ask why they though it was worth it to pay for all this energy.
    • brokencode 6y ago
      I know why, and I said as much in my original post. Bitcoin is purely for speculation at this point. It’s a money making scheme. These people don’t care about energy usage or transaction fees as long as they are getting incredible returns on their investment.
  • anigbrowl 6y ago
    While I largely agree, the existence of volatile instruments (in the abstract) is a Good Thing in that it offers the possibility of rapid gains for people who are willing to accept risk but only have a small pile of capital, sort of like a poker game with no minimum stake (unless you want to treat the transaction fees as such). Where else can you take those sort of risks? Stock fads like $GME are notable for their rarity because large capital holders benefit more from stability than volatility. You could gamble in a casino but people don't like betting against the house, which fills the role of a market maker. Volatile instruments like bitcoin are more like a casino where the dealer is paid a fee per hand but is not a participant in the game.
• mrb 6y ago
  That sounds very impressive, until you realize that Argentina uses slightly more energy than a single hydroelectric power station like the Itaipu Dam (103 TWh/year). So comparing Bitcoin to Argentina really is more a testament how little electricity Argentina uses. In people's mind, a "single dam" sounds much, much less impressive than a "whole country".
• DanielleMolloy 6y ago
  Has any government entity attempted to ban Bitcoin yet, and is this even possible?
• madacol 6y ago
  I think the real value in Bitcoin is its immutability. I don't think there's any piece of information in the world as immutable as the first bitcoin block mined by satoshi. This property is what powers amazing projects like OpenTimeStamps (https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/), this will become an essential tool for notaries all around the world, seriously!, and this has nothing to do with number of transactions, this scales to O(1) (you only need one transaction to prove as many things as there needs to be proved). Previous to bitcoin existence I don't think there was ever a distributed way of proving a piece of information existed previous to X, and even if there was, it was probably centralized or much much MUCH weaker than bitcoin. There's just no replacement, not even a million years as effective as bitcoin is for this, if I'm wrong please tell me! I want to know! Most people here in favor of bitcoin argue about inflation, I understand the reasoning, and I'm from Venezuela, I pretty sure understand that value, but that's just missing the point, immutability >>> inflation protection. And if we go to the smart-contracts terrain, that's a whole other world of very diverse and unexplored possibilities of values
• DSingularity 6y ago
  I wish people would acknowledge that we are still in the early stages of blockchain technology. When ethereum proof of stake arrives then you will arguably have the security of Bitcoin in a much more efficient blockchain.
  • madacol 6y ago
    They don't have the same security, for example, the immutability property is seriously weakened, you cannot verify it anymore, we could argue it becomes federated among the stakers But sure, most other things still seems to work (I'm not expert BTW)
• iwubu99 6y ago
  Release the free energy patents or btc dies
• maxekman 6y ago
  This is just ridiculous! I’m hoping for ETH with proof-of-stake to save the face of crypto soon.
• bennybitcoin 6y ago
  Hi HackerNews, I don't typically post but seeing as this involves what I do daily, thought my input might be warranted. 1)Bitcoin mining by nature is a competitive game, people have flocked to cheapest power sources (unused hydro, solar, etc.) where the power costs are super low as that is the only recurring production cost. 2)There are no batteries that are power plant sized..... other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin allows opportunities for unused power to generate instant profit for the producers. 3)Because Bitcoin prices are currently soaring, it has opened up the profitability to mining in many areas with reasonably cheap power as essentially the global hashrate density can not catch up to adoption fast enough. In the long term, more and more efficient equipment will be manufactured and as the hashrate grows exponentially past the pace of mainstream adoption, the power usage again will need to be next to nothing to be competitive as the cost to produce 1 Bitcoin becomes harder and harder with increased competition and lower block rewards. *Please understand that via Moore's law continuance this is inevitable that hashrate will explode past the correlation to BTC prices due to more efficient chip technology increasing exponentially, and block rewards decreasing* 4)In the future, Bitcoin will only be mined in places where electricity is nearly free as the rewards ($/TH) will be shrunk to next to nothing. That is the end goal. We are at an asymmetric point at the moment where the mining is behind adoption. But just as the internet took time to be adopted, so will Bitcoin. But adoption curves must always end, and at the terminal equilibrium the incentives to only use waste energy for mining will be restored. 5)We are witnessing the birth of something A-M-A-Z-I-N-G that will completely change how banking and finance work on this planet forever. Of course there will be some growing pains along the way, but the future envisioned by Bitcoin is one of digital freedom, empowerment, and privacy. At the end of the day, you can't fight this tidal wave, all you can try to do is steer the technology towards your desired outcome. So it is written, so it shall be. All Hail Satoshi
  • Apofis 6y ago
    So, where do we draw the line? At which percentage of all human electric output do we say, maybe there's something wrong with this picture? 1% total? 5% total? 20% total output? We're at 0.59% now. Of all electricity we generate as a species.
• dang 6y ago
  Submitted title was "Bitcoin now uses more electricity than Argentina". Please don't editorialize like that—it's against the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Cherry-picking a detail, especially a sensational detail, and making that the title, is the main way that people break this guideline, so please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, please do so in the comments. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
• dang 6y ago
  Other large current related threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26093099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26093099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26091536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26091536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26090330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26090330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26082324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26082324
• kvz 6y ago
  Ethereum 2.0 solves this via Proof of Stake. They are rolling it out in 2021 and I think the environmentally concerned will then consider the number two coin because of how energy hungry Bitcoin is. PoS also greatly increases transaction speed.
• jostmey 6y ago
  Bitcoin's value is derived by the fact that an enormous amount of calculations (and therefore energy) are required to fake a transaction. But smart investors know that just because something is hard does not make something a worthwhile endeavor. We should always go after low-hanging fruit first, and cryptocurrency is not that. I gave up on Bitcoin almost 8 years ago and I haven't regretted it. It is not going to fix the world's financial problems and its going to further wreck the planet. As a father, I don't want any further part of it.
• perseusprime11 6y ago
  According to this report, Bitcoin mining is fueled by renewables: https://coinshares.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-december-2019 https://coinshares.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-decem...
• jude- 6y ago
  There's lots of misdirected anger these last few days towards Bitcoin. First, the only thing that's energy-intensive about Bitcoin is block production. Making transactions, relaying them, validating them and storing them have negligible energy cost. Second, nothing about the Bitcoin protocol requires block production to use fossil fuels. Just like with every other energy-intensive industry, the problem isn't the industry. The problem is the fossil fuel use. Therefore, if you want to get mad about the high energy use of block production leading to environmental pollution, you should direct that anger at the appropriate target: miners who use fossil fuels to mine. How do we fix this? The same way we fixed it in every other energy-intensive industry: through taxes and regulation. Let's get some laws passed to require miners in your area to use only renewable energy, and to require exchanges to impose a carbon tax on coins whose miners rely on fossil fuels to mine. Properly applied, these laws would make fossil-fuel mining unprofitable, which is exactly what we want. Bitcoin and PoW aren't going anywhere at this point. So let's make sure it's continued existence doesn't make the world worse. Sound good?
  • AdrianB1 6y ago
    It is impossible to regulate and tax miners; they live in various countries and in some it is impossible to apply such regulations, if some countries will do it then minim will move to other places. When you have an industry, you get a product that you can use. Mining energy consumption is just about how hard to make the mining, not a real limitation like in industry. It is like "let's make car building 3 times more energy consuming". No, there is no misdirected anger, there are good reasons.
    • jude- 6y ago
      > It is impossible to regulate and tax miners; they live in various countries and in some it is impossible to apply such regulations, if some countries will do it then minim will move to other places. Other countries can sanction them until they figure out how to apply such regulations. This isn't unique to PoW; it happens for other such dangerous pollutants as well (like CFC emissions). > When you have an industry, you get a product that you can use. Mining energy consumption is just about how hard to make the mining, not a real limitation like in industry. It is like "let's make car building 3 times more energy consuming". Energy usage and product/market fit are both irrelevant to this discussion. What is important is the pollution PoW creates. If we can get a global handle on that (along with basically every other energy-intense industry), then it hardly matters that the energy is used for PoW. The point is to not pollute. > No, there is no misdirected anger, there are good reasons. You may not think Bitcoin has a right to exist, but it's not up to you, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Love it or hate it, we're going to be living with it for likely a long, long time, so we might as well figure out a way to get a handle on the pollution it could cause.
• frongpik 6y ago
  Cool. Now show us the Adtech Electricity Consumption Index and see if bitcoin would add up to even 1% of ads.
  • lucb1e 6y ago
    One of these can be trivially understood to be unnecessary, given the alternative proof-of-stake system, the alternative cash system, the alternative banking system...
• tomxor 6y ago
  A maximum of 178 things on the planet can consume >= to the electricity of Bitcoin. 99.44%/0.56% = ~178 (according to their estimate of 0.56% global use). So for the many comments invoking rhetorical comparisons: Bitcoin mining value per watt can be compared to no more than 178 things on Earth. Are we really saying there are only possibly 178 better uses for global energy than doing double SHA2 for no material value? Bitcoin is wasteful.
  • andreygrehov 6y ago
    You are comparing centralized entities to a decentralized one. I don't believe it's a fair comparison.
    • tomxor 6y ago
      Being decentralized does not exempt it from value comparison, each node in the network serves the same purpose and is bound by the same rules.
      • andreygrehov 6y ago
        Well, then we should compare Bitcoin to how much energy is being consumed by every apartment/house in the world, which is more closer to how Bitcoin network operates.
        • tomxor 6y ago
          Yes! you can, this is exactly what I am saying. Think about it: 0.56% of electricity _globally_ is consumed by Bitcoin... there are a _max_ of 178 ways to divide up the remaining energy. If you want to designate global housing to be one of the things to compare to, you can do that, now there are <177 things left to compare too (probably quite a bit less). No matter how you go about categorizing things, it's a very short list for the entire planet. Most of them will bring real material value to everyone's lives (electricity in the home), vs Bitcoin which caters to a tiny minority for the purpose of speculating on intrinsic value - most of the world would not notice or care if it disappeared, I'm willing to bet everything above it on the list would be quite noticeable around the world no matter how you go about categorizing things without overlap. Most people in this giant thread are either throwing out rhetorical comparisons like icecream, proposing that bitcoin be treated like one of the many unnecessary pleasures in the world, yet in absolute terms it dwarfs every single one of them in energy use while serving orders of magnitude less people making it's relative value for pleasure or otherwise extremely expensive; Or, they (and other articles) are comparing it to the likes of Visa - in very convincing and well thought out ways, yet missing one critical detail: bitcoin does not actually serve the entire planets transactions, no where even near, that's not even it's purpose any more. I'm essentially saying put it in comparative context without needing to actually compare individual arbitrary things: it's global use of electricity, what is it being used for and by how many, it's not hard to see it being at the extreme end of disproportionate and useless.
• mudlus 6y ago
  There's no energy index for the US military industrial complex, the entire US police force--but the primacy of fiat is based on the ability of an authority (for most of the world an authoritarian regime) to protect property through violent cohersion or violent force. Bitcoin changes that. How much energy is a non-violent property protection commons system worth to humanity?
• amelius 6y ago
  Bitcoin also enables ransomware.
  • doomjunky 6y ago
    Cash also enables ransome.
  • bobcallme 6y ago
    > Bitcoin also enables ransomware. "Ransomware" has been a thing well before Bitcoin. Instead of Bitcoin, they would convince people to buy moneypaks or various gift cards.
    • amelius 6y ago
      Does that work on a large scale (automation), and/or with the large amounts of money like we have seen in recent cases in the news?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• what_the_drew 6y ago
  GPU go Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
• patchtopic 6y ago
  A simple "back of the envelope" power use calculation of the possible power use of the bitcoin network, using the total hash rate from https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart ( 151.55 EH/s ) and assuming all Antminer S19 (110 TH/s for 3250 watts) gives me a total power use of 0.00445 TWH which is very different to the 121 TWH on the cbeci site.. even given the efficiency range of mining gear (like if spread of included hw included stuff 10 x less efficient), cooling systems etc, what am I missing? I dont do these power calculations often so have a left a parameter out?
  • mmoskal 6y ago
    It's TWh per year, so you have to multiply your figure of 0.00445 TW (without H!) by 24*365.25 hours giving you 39TWh/year; I guess if you add cooling and different gear you can get to 120TWh/year. I agree it's kind of strange to measure stuff in TWh/year instead of just TW...
    • patchtopic 6y ago
      thanks! I missed that, yes now it makes sense, and is in the right ballpark.
• gt565k 6y ago
  Everyone sleeping on Cardano, but it's creeping. It PoS consensus protocol in action. Tokens and smart contracts coming to mainnet soon. Keep sleeping and balking at PoW. Stellar and Cardano will reshape the future of fintech transactions.
  • PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    Bitcoin holders don't actually care about proof of work or proof of stake, or even any of the technical details. They only care that their investment goes up in value. That only happens if new entrants to the crypto ecosystem choose Bitcoin over alternatives. Cryptocurrencies are like MLMs for nerds. The earlier you get in at the ground floor, the more valuable your position. You can help the price go up by convincing your friends to invest, who will convince their friends to invest, and so on.
• ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  The part that impressed me: "The amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the USA alone could power Bitcoin for 1.8 years" In other words idle devices in US could power all of Saudi and Netherlands. And all it would take to reduce that is some proper thoughfull design.
• alexmingoia 6y ago
  PC gaming uses more energy than Switzerland, estimated 75 billion kilowatt hours. https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electricity-than-25-power-plants-can-produce/ https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici...
• Animats 6y ago
  Is Bitcoin now using more resources than gold mining?
• 0x008 6y ago
  So where can I buy futures on this?
• diedyesterday 6y ago
  Bitcoin (as an investment) is a pyramid scheme. It produces no wealth but has become a powerful means of transferring wealth to the upper layers of the pyramid by growing through the base of the pyramid and recruiting the "greater fools" still out there. It was meant as a currency but has become a investment goal and thus a pyramid scheme. Lets get rid of it, not least for the sake of environment.