5 ms·

I checked your numbers against [0]. Road distance NY -> SF = 2900 miles [1]. Model S mileage is 290Wh/mi [2]. That is 840kW for Tesla against 657kW for a single

by roter 6y ago

I checked your numbers against [0]. Road distance NY -> SF = 2900 miles [1]. Model S mileage is 290Wh/mi [2]. That is 840kW for Tesla against 657kW for a single transaction. This is all order-of-magnitude stuff but... wow. [0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [1] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=road%20distance%20san%20francisco%20to%20new%20york https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=road%20distance%20san%... [2] https://www.zeviecars.com/browse-cars/tesla-model-s https://www.zeviecars.com/browse-cars/tesla-model-s

mlyle 6y ago
kWhr, not kW. It's also 1/2 to 3/4th the electricity used in a month by a typical US household.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  kWh, if we're going to be pedantic, which I approve of. :) It bugs me that even quality newspapers frequently mistake power (watt (W)) for energy (joules (J) or watt-hour (Wh, often with the usual metric prefixes)).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
arcticbull 6y ago
Yeah the distance thing was ball parked, based on the last time I ran the numbers. To your point, I accidentally omitted to say “round trip from SF to NY” - I also used the great circle distance (2586mi) and ballparked a phone at 200g, roughly the weight of an iPhone. Thank you for going through the numbers and adding the sources. I was on my phone and meant to circle back.
autocorr 6y ago
Can someone explain how transactions are not insanely cost prohibitive for Bitcoin with power consumption figures like those? Those numbers would suggest something like >20 USD. Is it because most transactions in practice actually happen internally on exchanges that avoid putting every individual transaction on the blockchain? I have limited knowledge of Bitcoin so maybe not quite "explain like I'm five"... but close. :)
- tuankiet65 6y ago
  The whole point of Bitcoin mining is to produce a block, which contains a bunch of transactions. The Bitcoin network dictates that each block's SHA256 hash starts with a certain number of zeroes, so the only way to achieve this is to brute force the block data until you find the "winning" block which hashes to a number of zeroes. Once someone finds a winning block, they're rewarded with a number of Bitcoin. This subsidies the cost that goes into mining that block. However the reward halves after every 210k blocks, so as the reward goes down, miners will prefer to only include transactions with high fee. Eventually the true cost of mining will reflect in the transaction fee. And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goes down tenfold.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    > And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goes down tenfold. Oh, it could be somewhat improved. Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks. (And, this assumes that the increase in bitcoin price doesn't cause more mining).
Solvitieg 6y ago
Bitcoin's energy consumption has been stable for nearly four years. Perhaps this is the cost of running a secure system.

by roter 6y ago

mlyle 6y ago

kWhr, not kW. It's also 1/2 to 3/4th the electricity used in a month by a typical US household.

Freak_NL 6y ago
kWh, if we're going to be pedantic, which I approve of. :) It bugs me that even quality newspapers frequently mistake power (watt (W)) for energy (joules (J) or watt-hour (Wh, often with the usual metric prefixes)).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

arcticbull 6y ago

Yeah the distance thing was ball parked, based on the last time I ran the numbers. To your point, I accidentally omitted to say “round trip from SF to NY” - I also used the great circle distance (2586mi) and ballparked a phone at 200g, roughly the weight of an iPhone. Thank you for going through the numbers and adding the sources. I was on my phone and meant to circle back.

autocorr 6y ago

Can someone explain how transactions are not insanely cost prohibitive for Bitcoin with power consumption figures like those? Those numbers would suggest something like >20 USD. Is it because most transactions in practice actually happen internally on exchanges that avoid putting every individual transaction on the blockchain? I have limited knowledge of Bitcoin so maybe not quite "explain like I'm five"... but close. :)

tuankiet65 6y ago
The whole point of Bitcoin mining is to produce a block, which contains a bunch of transactions. The Bitcoin network dictates that each block's SHA256 hash starts with a certain number of zeroes, so the only way to achieve this is to brute force the block data until you find the "winning" block which hashes to a number of zeroes. Once someone finds a winning block, they're rewarded with a number of Bitcoin. This subsidies the cost that goes into mining that block. However the reward halves after every 210k blocks, so as the reward goes down, miners will prefer to only include transactions with high fee. Eventually the true cost of mining will reflect in the transaction fee. And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goes down tenfold.
- mlyle 6y ago
  > And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goes down tenfold. Oh, it could be somewhat improved. Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks. (And, this assumes that the increase in bitcoin price doesn't cause more mining).

Solvitieg 6y ago

Bitcoin's energy consumption has been stable for nearly four years. Perhaps this is the cost of running a secure system.