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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

by 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?

uxcolumbo 6y ago
Can you share some sources where I can read up on this? I checked the bitcoin docs - but couldn't find much about energy use (or I'm just not very good at searching ;) )
- db48x 6y ago
  Mining a block requires a lot of calculations, calculations are done on computers, computers use electricity, and producing electricity necessarily produces pollution. Ergo, bitcoin is bad. Of course, the estimates of how much energy is used are always a bit suspect. I've seen articles like this that just don't quote any sources at all, and I've seen a number of them that all ultimately refer the same reddit comment from a decade ago where someone made an estimate of the per-hash electricity cost. They then scale that up to the current hash rate and use that as an authoritative figure. Of course, nobody adds up all the electricity used heating and cooling all the bank branches in the world, or the cost of the looping animations on the screens of all the ATMs in the world, or the food eaten by all of the bank tellers in the world. Single-book accounting can make anything look bad. But aside from that, the real story here is that the proof of work implementation allows the bitcoin system to spend money on something that makes certain kinds of attacks difficult or impossible. Other banking systems have to protect against those same attacks, but they do it by using trust between humans, exhaustive reporting and accounting requirements, and so on. As a result, those attacks are easier than in the bitcoin system, especially when international banks are involved. That big scandal in Germany where Wirecard told it's auditors that it had €1.9B in a bank in the Philippines comes to mind. It turns out that they forged the documents in an attempt to cover up their failing business. Forging a bitcoin transaction like that is impossible.
- jude- 6y ago
  I've written code to sign and validate Bitcoin transactions (see my profile). Believe me, they're cheap -- loading this site and rendering it in your browser probably takes an order of magnitude more watts. It's really not that different -- both in principle and execution -- than signing and verifying a SSL certificate.
maliker 6y ago
I've been wondering about this. Once all the easy to get blocks have been mined, the energy consumption of the network will drop to negligible amounts? Is there a source out there that explains this and when it will likely happen?
- kinghajj 6y ago
  No, mining will continue as usual even after the block reward drops to 0. At that point, miners will only receive transaction fees, and not transaction fees + the block reward as they do currently.
  - maliker 6y ago
    Does that negate the original poster's point that "Making transactions, relaying them, validating them and storing them have negligible energy cost."?
    - kinghajj 6y ago
      The original poster was being pedantic in distinguishing between "Making transactions, relaying them, validating them" and "block production" (mining). So they are technically correct, but I'd agree that they're being disingenuous. Sure, "making a transaction" is cheap, as well as nodes "validating" transactions in produced blocks. But without mining to make those blocks to be validated, nothing would progress on the Bitcoin blockchain.
      - jude- 6y ago
        No need to talk about me like I'm not here ;) The energy spent on block production is something that, in theory, _could_ be regulated so as to reduce or cap the pollution it may create. We already do this with other industries, like banning CFCs from refrigerants. Why not do the same with mining? But before we can have a serious conversation about this, the folks on this site need to understand that the problem is _using fossil fuels to mine blocks_. It makes no sense to talk about how much electricity a Bitcoin transaction consumes, as if that meant anything. Loading and rendering HN takes more electricity, and no one complains about that.

by jude- 6y ago

uxcolumbo 6y ago

Can you share some sources where I can read up on this? I checked the bitcoin docs - but couldn't find much about energy use (or I'm just not very good at searching ;) )

db48x 6y ago
Mining a block requires a lot of calculations, calculations are done on computers, computers use electricity, and producing electricity necessarily produces pollution. Ergo, bitcoin is bad. Of course, the estimates of how much energy is used are always a bit suspect. I've seen articles like this that just don't quote any sources at all, and I've seen a number of them that all ultimately refer the same reddit comment from a decade ago where someone made an estimate of the per-hash electricity cost. They then scale that up to the current hash rate and use that as an authoritative figure. Of course, nobody adds up all the electricity used heating and cooling all the bank branches in the world, or the cost of the looping animations on the screens of all the ATMs in the world, or the food eaten by all of the bank tellers in the world. Single-book accounting can make anything look bad. But aside from that, the real story here is that the proof of work implementation allows the bitcoin system to spend money on something that makes certain kinds of attacks difficult or impossible. Other banking systems have to protect against those same attacks, but they do it by using trust between humans, exhaustive reporting and accounting requirements, and so on. As a result, those attacks are easier than in the bitcoin system, especially when international banks are involved. That big scandal in Germany where Wirecard told it's auditors that it had €1.9B in a bank in the Philippines comes to mind. It turns out that they forged the documents in an attempt to cover up their failing business. Forging a bitcoin transaction like that is impossible.
jude- 6y ago
I've written code to sign and validate Bitcoin transactions (see my profile). Believe me, they're cheap -- loading this site and rendering it in your browser probably takes an order of magnitude more watts. It's really not that different -- both in principle and execution -- than signing and verifying a SSL certificate.

maliker 6y ago

I've been wondering about this. Once all the easy to get blocks have been mined, the energy consumption of the network will drop to negligible amounts? Is there a source out there that explains this and when it will likely happen?

kinghajj 6y ago
No, mining will continue as usual even after the block reward drops to 0. At that point, miners will only receive transaction fees, and not transaction fees + the block reward as they do currently.
- maliker 6y ago
  Does that negate the original poster's point that "Making transactions, relaying them, validating them and storing them have negligible energy cost."?
  - kinghajj 6y ago
    The original poster was being pedantic in distinguishing between "Making transactions, relaying them, validating them" and "block production" (mining). So they are technically correct, but I'd agree that they're being disingenuous. Sure, "making a transaction" is cheap, as well as nodes "validating" transactions in produced blocks. But without mining to make those blocks to be validated, nothing would progress on the Bitcoin blockchain.
    - jude- 6y ago
      No need to talk about me like I'm not here ;) The energy spent on block production is something that, in theory, _could_ be regulated so as to reduce or cap the pollution it may create. We already do this with other industries, like banning CFCs from refrigerants. Why not do the same with mining? But before we can have a serious conversation about this, the folks on this site need to understand that the problem is _using fossil fuels to mine blocks_. It makes no sense to talk about how much electricity a Bitcoin transaction consumes, as if that meant anything. Loading and rendering HN takes more electricity, and no one complains about that.