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You seem to have a good grasp of creating high level models. I always see people referring to the energy consumption of bitcoin as though it’s strictly additiv

You seem to have a good grasp of creating high level models. I always see people referring to the energy consumption of bitcoin as though it’s strictly additive. What I’d be interested to know is how it compares relative to energy costs for transacting with and securing fiat currencies. Second, what people tend to ignore is that innovation doesn’t come in a vacuum - there are second, and third degree improvements triggered from it. In a world where bitcoin is $1million, it means the world has agreed on the benefits, and we will see innovations to address the tradeoffs that come from this. For example, we could see significant investment into renewable energy as a means to support the energy consumption of bitcoin. Third, and this isn’t directed at you, just a general statement based on arguments I see on HN - cryptocurrency itself does not have high energy consumption. Proof-of-work mining does. There are methods to support cryptocurrency that do not result in high energy consumption (Proof of Stake, DAGs). It’s wrong to generalize energy consumption issues to all cryptocurrencies.

graeme 6y ago
> What I’d be interested to know is how it compares relative to energy costs for transacting with and securing fiat currencies. Very hard to compare. One thing I’m unsure of for bitcoin: do costs go up if there are more transactions or does mining difficulty adjust so that costs don’t rise no matter how many transactions bitcoin does? I realize this is a major gap in my understanding. The finance and currency system does much that bitcoin doesn’t currently do. So comparing as a whole isn’t adequate unless bitcoin network costs don’t scale up with numbers of transactions because mining gets easier. Actually how do miners make money once there are no more coins to mine? > In a world where bitcoin is $1million, it means the world has agreed on the benefits, and we will see innovations to address the tradeoffs that come from this. For example, we could see significant investment into renewable energy as a means to support the energy consumption of bitcoin. That actually doesn’t follow. All that follows is that the world has decided to move $170 billion in capital into bitcoin per year. The world is presently set to move about $20 billion of capital into bitcoin per year, and there’s no real consensus above usefulness. The world could be putting $170 billion in because there is value, or it could be a massive waste of resources. The world has certainly misallocated resources before. And yeah I was restricting my own comments to bitcoin. Ethereum et al I know much less about.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Actually how do miners make money once there are no more coins to mine? With BTC (and I would assume most other cryptocurrencies), by transaction fees.
  - graeme 6y ago
    Wait is my whole calculation wrong then? I thought miners only got paid for receiving bitcoins. They also get additional payments in fractions of a bitcoin for transactions and this is in addition to the costs I wrote above?
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > They also get additional payments in fractions of a bitcoin for transactions and this is in addition to the costs I wrote above? Yeah, the basic design of bitcoin is for the block rewards to dominate early on with no/low transaction fees, but transaction fees to gradually take over as the main reward for miners maintaining the network.
      - graeme 6y ago
        Ah interesting. Any estimates of how transaction costs scale? Currently iirc it is 100 million transactions per year at $20-$30 each, so adds about 10-15% to network upkeep costs at that transaction volume.
    - rantwasp 6y ago
      miners are getting payed for every transaction. if you don’t include transactions fees your transaction will spend a lot of time in limbo and may actually never be mined. the way it works, let’s say you have A bitcoins and you want to pay someone B bitcoins. you create a transaction that say: I want to move A to B and A-B-fee the miners see it and see the fee. it gets included (ie mined) in a block. actual example 50BTC -> 20BTC + 29BTC when the miner mines it, it will send the tx fee to its own wallet also, most miners sort transactions by the most profitable to less profitable and mine only the most profitable ones
Cullinet 6y ago
good question about baseline infrastructure energy cost > >I always see people referring to the energy consumption of bitcoin as though it’s strictly additive. What I’d be interested to know is how it compares relative to energy costs for transacting with and securing fiat currencies. the base load of the combined major central banks, transfer networks and custodial institutions is undoubtedly considerable not least I'm thinking how much still runs on Itanium and OPENVMS. Just ten years ago I would have wagered the majority is on Itanium running vms or nonstop or the Honeywell legacies virtualized by Unisys. now a significant UK clearing bank ( at clear.bank) has run on Azure with white label customers who would have brought plenty of attention in the event of any problems, I'm no longer sure at all that I have any real idea what infrastructure is on. re the energy costs of the network and that growth, I'm baffled - surely bitcoin should have moved to a custody model of settlement in view of the energy and other costs and risks of on chain transactions by now?

graeme 6y ago

> What I’d be interested to know is how it compares relative to energy costs for transacting with and securing fiat currencies. Very hard to compare. One thing I’m unsure of for bitcoin: do costs go up if there are more transactions or does mining difficulty adjust so that costs don’t rise no matter how many transactions bitcoin does? I realize this is a major gap in my understanding. The finance and currency system does much that bitcoin doesn’t currently do. So comparing as a whole isn’t adequate unless bitcoin network costs don’t scale up with numbers of transactions because mining gets easier. Actually how do miners make money once there are no more coins to mine? > In a world where bitcoin is $1million, it means the world has agreed on the benefits, and we will see innovations to address the tradeoffs that come from this. For example, we could see significant investment into renewable energy as a means to support the energy consumption of bitcoin. That actually doesn’t follow. All that follows is that the world has decided to move $170 billion in capital into bitcoin per year. The world is presently set to move about $20 billion of capital into bitcoin per year, and there’s no real consensus above usefulness. The world could be putting $170 billion in because there is value, or it could be a massive waste of resources. The world has certainly misallocated resources before. And yeah I was restricting my own comments to bitcoin. Ethereum et al I know much less about.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Actually how do miners make money once there are no more coins to mine? With BTC (and I would assume most other cryptocurrencies), by transaction fees.
- graeme 6y ago
  Wait is my whole calculation wrong then? I thought miners only got paid for receiving bitcoins. They also get additional payments in fractions of a bitcoin for transactions and this is in addition to the costs I wrote above?
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > They also get additional payments in fractions of a bitcoin for transactions and this is in addition to the costs I wrote above? Yeah, the basic design of bitcoin is for the block rewards to dominate early on with no/low transaction fees, but transaction fees to gradually take over as the main reward for miners maintaining the network.
    - graeme 6y ago
      Ah interesting. Any estimates of how transaction costs scale? Currently iirc it is 100 million transactions per year at $20-$30 each, so adds about 10-15% to network upkeep costs at that transaction volume.
  - rantwasp 6y ago
    miners are getting payed for every transaction. if you don’t include transactions fees your transaction will spend a lot of time in limbo and may actually never be mined. the way it works, let’s say you have A bitcoins and you want to pay someone B bitcoins. you create a transaction that say: I want to move A to B and A-B-fee the miners see it and see the fee. it gets included (ie mined) in a block. actual example 50BTC -> 20BTC + 29BTC when the miner mines it, it will send the tx fee to its own wallet also, most miners sort transactions by the most profitable to less profitable and mine only the most profitable ones

Cullinet 6y ago

good question about baseline infrastructure energy cost > >I always see people referring to the energy consumption of bitcoin as though it’s strictly additive. What I’d be interested to know is how it compares relative to energy costs for transacting with and securing fiat currencies. the base load of the combined major central banks, transfer networks and custodial institutions is undoubtedly considerable not least I'm thinking how much still runs on Itanium and OPENVMS. Just ten years ago I would have wagered the majority is on Itanium running vms or nonstop or the Honeywell legacies virtualized by Unisys. now a significant UK clearing bank ( at clear.bank) has run on Azure with white label customers who would have brought plenty of attention in the event of any problems, I'm no longer sure at all that I have any real idea what infrastructure is on. re the energy costs of the network and that growth, I'm baffled - surely bitcoin should have moved to a custody model of settlement in view of the energy and other costs and risks of on chain transactions by now?