5 ms·

There's a lot of one-liner talk about externalities in this thread above, but I'd be curious if people would show the stats of energy consumption of the rest of

There's a lot of one-liner talk about externalities in this thread above, but I'd be curious if people would show the stats of energy consumption of the rest of the traditional banking system. I'm not an owner of BTC, but I worked managing datacenter servers in the past, and it's like no one has mentioned a single time that there are arrays upon arrays of servers, 10's of thousands, that run company back-end systems. There are servers to manage the servers to manage the servers (stuff like monitoring, automation management systems, etc.), and it blossoms from there. And these places still use mainframes on top of distributed computing. BTC might be giant waste of resources, but it's curious that the comparisons imply that it's BTC versus no energy usage, instead of BTC versus traditional banks with their giant datacenters all over the country and world. Might be worth at least a mention in the comparison?

varjag 6y ago
Traditional banking runs all the world's actual financial transactions (likely billions settlements at any given moment), something that crypto hasn't even started scratching.
- fastball 6y ago
  Right, but is that not merely because cryptocurrency is a nascent technology? The modern financial system has required an insane amount of capital (energy, resource, human) in order to get where it is. It seems very Luddite to think that the pure-digital system is not more than capable of outpacing (in terms of efficiency and effectiveness) a system that involves massive amounts of human capital, when that (humans > machines) has literally never happened in human history in the long-term.
  - varjag 6y ago
    I'm not sure how say Bitcoin payments are going to outpace in effectiveness what is essentially database queries.
    - fastball 6y ago
      The key improvement with cryptocurrency (and what allows it to be the first truly digital currency / financial system) is the trustless nature. Yes, existing banking is just "database queries", which are of course more efficient than transactions on a blockchain. BUT in order for people to trust those database queries, you need to build a monstrous behemoth of energy/resource/human expenditure to maintain that trust. If I just spin up a PostgreSQL database and tell people "hey, I'll store transactions for you – super energy efficient" obviously nobody will use my system (e: without utilizing supplemental systems for trust). Think about how much human/energy/resource expenditure goes into just making counterfeit-proof paper money – humans designing anti-counterfeiting measures, building money printing machines to make good on those ideas, using plastic/metal threads and such in each and every dollar, humans checking your $100 at the grocery store with a pen / UV light / whatever, people making those pens / UV lights, Secret Service agents investing time and money to find and stop counterfeiters, etc. In cryptocurrency, "counterfeit-proof" comes merely at the expense of more clock cycles. The benefit of which is obvious (to me at least) as the world moves towards 100% renewable energy. Here's a graph to illustrate the point. txns is the cost of an actual transaction. trst is the cost to maintain trust on top of transaction cost. Worth noting that at some point (hopefully), both "txns" rows will be entirely renewably-powered, while the "trst" rows have a good number of processes that are not made more efficient with the onset of renewables. [trad banking] txns: # trst: ############################## [crypto] txns: ########## trst:
      - imtringued 6y ago
        >If I just spin up a PostgreSQL database and tell people "hey, I'll store transactions for you – super energy efficient" obviously nobody will use my system. This happens all the time and there are more of those nobodies than people in the cryptocurrency space.
        fastball 6y ago
        Can you give me an example? The things that spring to mind for me are generally built on the back of (usually more than one) existing financial system, for example settlement layers at the very least (Visa / Mastercard).
  - imtringued 6y ago
    I can't comprehend your comment. You can just create a centralized system that does the same thing as Bitcoin and consume less power. It is that simple. Blockchains don't provide utility beyond executing arbitrary code in a trustless manner. We already know how to execute arbitrary code in a trusted manner so the only substantial difference is the degree of trust which in the vast majority of cases simply doesn't matter.
    - inersha 6y ago
      > You can just create a centralized system that does the same thing as Bitcoin and consume less power. It is that simple. You wouldn't be allowed to do this unfortunately.
- mancerayder 6y ago
  No doubt. But there's some footprint there that should at least be tossed in the conversation about BTC externalities. It might be that BTC is 10X worse, 100X worse, but it's head-scratching that the comparison remains between BTC, with its externalities and so sorth, carbon footprint, and null. BTC might fail miserably (it may already have) but the claim is it can be a store of wealth and a possible transaction system.
imtringued 6y ago
Do these companies invest into more data centers because the value of a stock went up?
- ric2b 6y ago
  Conversely, Bitcoin doesn't need more energy (in any significant quantities) when transaction count goes up.
deegles 6y ago
I’m no expert but I would wager that all of the world’s financial infrastructure consumes less electricity than Argentina[0] and that it’s growth is fairly linear and predictable. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
- ric2b 6y ago
  And you make that assumption based on what?

varjag 6y ago

Traditional banking runs all the world's actual financial transactions (likely billions settlements at any given moment), something that crypto hasn't even started scratching.

fastball 6y ago
Right, but is that not merely because cryptocurrency is a nascent technology? The modern financial system has required an insane amount of capital (energy, resource, human) in order to get where it is. It seems very Luddite to think that the pure-digital system is not more than capable of outpacing (in terms of efficiency and effectiveness) a system that involves massive amounts of human capital, when that (humans > machines) has literally never happened in human history in the long-term.
- varjag 6y ago
  I'm not sure how say Bitcoin payments are going to outpace in effectiveness what is essentially database queries.
  - fastball 6y ago
    The key improvement with cryptocurrency (and what allows it to be the first truly digital currency / financial system) is the trustless nature. Yes, existing banking is just "database queries", which are of course more efficient than transactions on a blockchain. BUT in order for people to trust those database queries, you need to build a monstrous behemoth of energy/resource/human expenditure to maintain that trust. If I just spin up a PostgreSQL database and tell people "hey, I'll store transactions for you – super energy efficient" obviously nobody will use my system (e: without utilizing supplemental systems for trust). Think about how much human/energy/resource expenditure goes into just making counterfeit-proof paper money – humans designing anti-counterfeiting measures, building money printing machines to make good on those ideas, using plastic/metal threads and such in each and every dollar, humans checking your $100 at the grocery store with a pen / UV light / whatever, people making those pens / UV lights, Secret Service agents investing time and money to find and stop counterfeiters, etc. In cryptocurrency, "counterfeit-proof" comes merely at the expense of more clock cycles. The benefit of which is obvious (to me at least) as the world moves towards 100% renewable energy. Here's a graph to illustrate the point. txns is the cost of an actual transaction. trst is the cost to maintain trust on top of transaction cost. Worth noting that at some point (hopefully), both "txns" rows will be entirely renewably-powered, while the "trst" rows have a good number of processes that are not made more efficient with the onset of renewables. [trad banking] txns: # trst: ############################## [crypto] txns: ########## trst:
    - imtringued 6y ago
      >If I just spin up a PostgreSQL database and tell people "hey, I'll store transactions for you – super energy efficient" obviously nobody will use my system. This happens all the time and there are more of those nobodies than people in the cryptocurrency space.
      - fastball 6y ago
        Can you give me an example? The things that spring to mind for me are generally built on the back of (usually more than one) existing financial system, for example settlement layers at the very least (Visa / Mastercard).
- imtringued 6y ago
  I can't comprehend your comment. You can just create a centralized system that does the same thing as Bitcoin and consume less power. It is that simple. Blockchains don't provide utility beyond executing arbitrary code in a trustless manner. We already know how to execute arbitrary code in a trusted manner so the only substantial difference is the degree of trust which in the vast majority of cases simply doesn't matter.
  - inersha 6y ago
    > You can just create a centralized system that does the same thing as Bitcoin and consume less power. It is that simple. You wouldn't be allowed to do this unfortunately.
mancerayder 6y ago
No doubt. But there's some footprint there that should at least be tossed in the conversation about BTC externalities. It might be that BTC is 10X worse, 100X worse, but it's head-scratching that the comparison remains between BTC, with its externalities and so sorth, carbon footprint, and null. BTC might fail miserably (it may already have) but the claim is it can be a store of wealth and a possible transaction system.

imtringued 6y ago

Do these companies invest into more data centers because the value of a stock went up?

ric2b 6y ago
Conversely, Bitcoin doesn't need more energy (in any significant quantities) when transaction count goes up.

deegles 6y ago

I’m no expert but I would wager that all of the world’s financial infrastructure consumes less electricity than Argentina[0] and that it’s growth is fairly linear and predictable. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952

ric2b 6y ago
And you make that assumption based on what?