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To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a
by ssss11 6y ago
To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin!
Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind
- smeyer 6y agoYeah, but the rest of us don't have to put up with legions of people excitedly explaining about how idle devices are great and everyone else should idle more devices. Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.
- rcstank 6y agoGP claimed that generating dollars using electricity is bad. Isn't that what the majority of companies are doing? Edit: that's my whole point: mining BTC is generating value by verifying transactions. In turn, the miner gets paid for their work.
- airstrike 6y agoCompanies are generating value, not dollars.
- Closi 6y agoNo, companies do not create new money. They create goods and services in order to generate value/profit.
- jld 6y agoBanks are companies and their service is to create new money.
- Closi 6y agoBanks that are for-profit companies add to the money supply (via loans) but don't 'create new money' in the same sense as mining Bitcoin. Mining bitcoin is most similar to a central bank printing/issuing money (except it's issued to the person that can waste the most electricity or show proof of stake rather than being issued selectively by the central government). Banks can add to the money supply by lending out money which has been saved in them by others, but there is nothing unique to fiat currencies about this, and the same can be done with Bitcoin or other crypto. I suspect you wouldn't say that 'banks can create new bitcoins without mining', but that's the same thing as saying 'banks can create new money without printing it'.
- sudosysgen 6y agoCompanies generate dollars by first generating things that some people find useful. Just generating dollars by themselves should be done with the smallest possible amount of electricity.
- shawnz 6y agoBitcoin's energy usage is proportional to its market value so you might say it always uses the smallest possible amount of energy (given the current valuation). We have yet to see if alternative systems like proof-of-stake can gain the same trust and replace proof-of-work while actually consuming less energy in practice. I'm hopeful though.
- sudosysgen 6y agoCreating currency by itself does not create any value.
- shawnz 6y agoRight, the creation of Bitcoins only redistributes the value. The value mining provides is actually in outcompeting potential attackers who might want to change the consensus of the network.
- bluescrn 6y agoOr they generate dollars by trading and speculating but not actually creating anything. How much power is used worldwide by stock trading, HFT, etc?
- sudosysgen 6y agoI agree that this is an issue, but I don't think that's anywhere near what Bitcoin uses.
- cortesoft 6y agoNo, creating new dollars is just updating a database at the fed, basically. There are no companies that generate dollars. That would be counterfeiting.
- jki275 6y agoThe fed certainly generates new dollars.
- Matticus_Rex 6y ago> There are no companies that generate dollars Other than banks. Banks generate new dollars through fractional reserve lending, though they also destroy them.
- AaronFriel 6y agoBitcoin consumers more power than entire nations' economies while generating so little value that I suspect my home town in Iowa would exceed the transaction rate on a daily basis. A moderately busy food district in a major city would exceed that every day. (I'm thinking roughly 100,000 people getting lunch or dinner in 1 hour ought to generate 13 to 27 times as many transactions/second as the entire Bitcoin network supports.) Sure, there's bitcoin cash, lightning network stuff - but uhh, where's the beef? I mean, seriously, where are the users using Bitcoin at volume? It seems like Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme for people mining (or HODLing) Bitcoin, not a store of value, not a mechanism of currency.
- lallysingh 6y agoThey're moving money out of their countries past currency export controls.
- shawnz 6y agoTransaction rate is not the only possible way to judge the value a monetary system. Also: Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all (but it would have other trade-offs not related to energy usage, which has made it hard to establish a consensus on the issue).
- vkou 6y agoTransaction rate is the only possible way to judge the value of a monetary system. A system where you essentially can't transact is economically dead. The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it, not in how wealthy a dragon sitting on a pile of gold can get. It can be a speculative system, but that's far less useful than being a monetary system. Bitcoin is a terrible currency in the same way that houses, or diamond rings are a terrible currency. Settling transactions in them is slow and incredibly expensive.
- shawnz 6y agoNot true. For example a monetary system might be valuable because it supports high transaction volumes even at a low rate, or because it has high costs to attack. > The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it Bitcoin isn't an economy. It is just a small part of the overall economy
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoIt's unclear how much value is being created by Bitcoin vs how much is being captured/transferred from elsewhere. Plenty of reasonable people likely think that Bitcoin doesn't create any value.
- grifball 6y agoHaha, but actually, you might have to put up with that soon. There's recent research on a blockchain technology called: "proof of space" which would require systems with large storage to idle for long periods of time I believe. EDIT: proof of storage -> proof of space
- kevingadd 6y agoHey, at least that way all those empty apartments and houses being held as investments will get filled up with proof of space mining nodes
- btczeus 6y agoIt's called Proof of Capacity, and it's been running since 2015: https://www.burst-coin.org/ https://www.burst-coin.org/
- bluescrn 6y agoWe need a way to prove the work was done using renewable energy
- Natfan 6y agoSure, you could get large Bitcoin miners to get certified with some authority, so that they can put a stamp on their website that tracks all of the transactions that were made with renewable energy. However, people can, and will, lie and cheat for profit. In this case it's in the form of PR and playing nice with the Government, possibly for tax reasons. We've seen this same story play out in the car industry[0], and that has far fewer (albeit far larger) players that need to be properly regulated. So, from a technical perspective, how would you achieve this goal? Could one mathematically and cryptographically prove that the work was done using renewable energy? I don't know, that's something for someone much smarter than me to figure out. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
- grifball 6y agoIt sounds impossible, but I've read the abstract of this article which claims to provide a cryptographic proof of a physical object (nuclear warhead): https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8618 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8618 I'm not sure if this is possible to extrapolate to prove an energy generation process... But, it's exciting that a physical material can be cryptographically proven over a network (if I'm reading this abstract correctly).
- kfrzcode 6y agoBitcoin consumes electricity and creates a store of value, fungible, and with easy global transaction methods. Your dangling iPods and Alarms Clock, however, are just hunks of junk, sitting around, highly illiquid.
- jazzabeanie 6y agoCertainly not on a per gram basis...
- tomxor 6y ago> It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US I'd bet that _all_ idle "devices" in in the US are providing far more utility by being ready and available to do ... anything (you did say all), than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority. Sorry but I'm fed up of these stupid comparisons, if bitcoin uses 0.56% of the worlds electricity, there are a maximum of 178 ways to divide up the rest... it's simply not on that scale of usefulness, _and_ it is not comparable to fucking visa because it doesn't serve the worlds transactions, no one buys coffee with bitcoin. It's also not comparable to the USD for the same reason. Everything you compare it to will be of more material value to the world and almost always consume less energy, even if it's icecream. </rant>
- Consultant32452 6y agoI know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies that are manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of wealth from the poor to the wealthy. Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are our best chance at the moment.
- tomxor 6y ago> I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.
- solosoyokaze 6y agoBitcoin continues to grow at an enormous rate. It hasn't failed at anything. Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold. We are actually on our way to getting off fiat.
- christophilus 6y agoStreetlights/ night time lights which (besides often consuming fossil fuels) have the additional feature of ruining the night sky for stargazers, insects, nocturnal animals, etc.
- cosmodisk 6y agoIt's not sensationalist at all. Just because idle devices in the US consume the same amount, it doesn't become less important. It's still absurd amount of energy that could be used for much much better purposes. Another good example, albeit on much greater scale is Youtube, which already uses 1% of the world's electricity output.
- hulahoof 6y agoA good idea in theory that hasn't seem to have taken off in any major way is designing a PoW that is mobile device optimised so that the consensus can be driven by idle phones that are charging etc., Major problem being how can you ensure that the miners are indeed an idle device instead of a dedicated server farm. I have a feeling PoS such as in ADA or ETH 2.0 will likely emerge as the front runner in the next decade (by usage, BTC will likely hold top spot in total market cap for a while to come)
- Voloskaya 6y agoAh yes the good old "but something worse already exists therefore it is ok" argument. Always very effective.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoGP didn’t conclude “therefore it is ok”.
- cortic 6y agomore like; "but the amount of electricity is so insignificant to us that we use more doing absolutely nothing"
- trident5000 6y agoMore like theres hundreds of things in the world that use more energy than BTC like gaming, gold mining, existing banking infrastructure, social media servers, etc - and the comparison is stupid in the first place. People just want to virtue signal because they dont like other people getting ahead of them and they didnt invest. Thats the crux of the outrage just like people get into stock investment wars.
- fendy3002 6y agoRate of growth. For bitcoin to be useful as currency, it needs to be used by many more people, while idle devices may not grow much more. However idle devices power consumption also needs to be addressed.
- amznthrwaway 6y agoCandidly, all you’re doing is reinforcing that its a massive problem. PoW coins are a bad design and we should switch to PoS or other responsible and efficient designs.
- Griffinsauce 6y agoThis kind of whataboutist counterargument is so tired and asinine. Multiple things can be bad. Bad things do not cancel each other out. If someone is murdered in one city, that doesn't suddenly become less bad when someone else is murdered in another.
- playingchanges 6y agoHow about empty cruise ships running off generators. Or all the oven lights left on accidentally across the world every night lol. I wonder how much electricity California will be consuming when we stop selling gas cars and go all electric...