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As a Bitcoin miner (https://toom.im https://toom.im), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work th

by toomim 5y ago

As a Bitcoin miner (https://toom.im https://toom.im), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work the way you expect. The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain's energy usage is not proportional to its transactions. I'll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining. I'll say this in a third way: it takes exactly the same amount of energy to mine an empty block as it does a 1GB block of transactions, as it does a 1,000,000,000 PB block. In reality, transactions are all hashed together in a mining pool into a single numeric hash before miners ever see them. It doesn't matter how many transactions are included in the hash. The hashpower just has to find a magic number matching that hash. On the other hand, the #1 factor that increases a blockchain's energy usage is its price per coin. The price of a coin is how much that coin is worth to be mined, which is the incentive for miners to dump energy into mining it. In steady state, miners will dump energy into mining a coin until the cost of energy = the value of the coins coming out. This is why you can see Bitcoin SV at the top of the list -- it's worth the least of the Bitcoins. And it's also misleading to compute the second factor -- transactions per second -- by counting the actual transactions on the blockchain, rather than looking at the transaction capacity. Because blockchains only cost something per transaction once they reach capacity. This is misleading with Bitcoin SV, for instance, because that coin artificially creates bogus transactions on its blockchain in order to make it look popular and demonstrate the vision of large blockchains. Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, can handle a thousands of transactions per second (on testnet) but doesn't clog its live blockchain with them. So, in sum, if you send a transaction on Bitcoin Cash, it will cost 0 kW of electricity, even though it says 31.3 Txs/MWh (which equates to 31.9kW/Tx) in this chart. This is because transactions do not cost anything in electricity. Electricity only goes to preventing double-spends. A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented."

toomim 5y ago
And to be complete, there are other ways that PoW blockchains can compete on energy efficiency: 1) Inflation rate 2) PoW function 3) Transaction cost after blocksize limit reached The inflation rate determines the incentive given to miners. With less incentive, the energy use will go down. This comes at the cost of increasing the ease of a double-spend, but there is already far more than enough difficulty to double-spend at the current mining rates. The PoW function determines the capital cost required to buy the miners themselves. If you increase the capital costs (e.g. with a memory-hard PoW function, or requiring less-efficient GPUs instead of more-efficient ASICs) then miners will be able to spend less of their costs on energy. This is one way in which Eth does well by the above metric, and is a valid way to reduce energy usage in PoW. Of course, transitioning to proof-of-stake (as eth is doing) will eliminate the energy problem entirely. Finally, some blockchains (e.g. BTC, ETH) have reached their capacity of transactions per second, and then users can add a fee to each transaction to incentivize mining pools to include them in a block. These fees do add incentive for miners to dump energy into their blocks. However, they are a much smaller portion of the incentive than you would expect.
GBiT 5y ago
You right. It's written in the FAQ of the page that metric is not really that important. But most of the treads in HN talk about tx/kw anyway... However, if Bitcoin had more transactions, I think a lot less discussion would be right now.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
I agree about the suggestion to look at transaction capacity, however: - Bitcoin is operating at capacity and has shown unwillingness to adjust capacity, so the "kWh/tx" is valid for Bitcoin. - Transaction fees increase the block reward, and as a consequence, the energy that can be used for mining before it becomes unprofitable. This is currently only about 10% of the total reward miners get for mining a block on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, but it is something to consider. The corresponding part of the energy usage would, at a fixed fee, be proportional to transactions.
- xur17 5y ago
  > Bitcoin is operating at capacity and has shown unwillingness to adjust capacity, so the "kWh/tx" is valid for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's layer 1 is operating at capacity - different networks make different tradeoffs. Bitcoin has gone the "less change" and "more decentralization" route by keeping layer 1 small, with the goal of moving transaction volume to layer 2.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    I don't buy it. Bitcoin introduced a number of changes like SegWit that are way more complex than adjusting a constant on layer 1, plus a huge amount of complexity on layer 2 that makes using layer 2 just as complicated as (or more complicated than) using a different cryptocurrency. Whether it leads to "more decentralization" when everyone can run their own (L1) node but a single L1 transaction costs as much as the node hardware is quite debatable IMO. By making L1 transactions unaffordable, it encourages _centralized_ solutions where IOUs are shuffled around entirely off-chain.
    - shawnz 5y ago
      By making L1 transactions cheap, it's basically like giving away cheap, permanent, verifiable storage to anyone which is constantly replicated across the globe. Even if second layer solutions become highly centralized, the risk is significantly mitigated if you just don't keep your savings on them. If popular second layer solutions become untrustworthy then it would be easy to switch to different ones.
baby 5y ago
Indeed, I'd say this Tx/power is the most misleading metric here. Bitcoin is slow (7tx/s) compared to what for example Algorand boasts they will achieve at the end of the year (25000tx/s).
paulgb 5y ago
I’ve gone back and forth on this myself, but I think it is valid to consider the cost of the entire network as a matter of carbon accounting. After all, one of Bitcoin’s selling points is the difficulty of a double-spend. This wouldn’t be the case if Bitcoin mining was not subsidized from the pool of unmined coins.
- meowface 5y ago
  I agree in general, but it makes the analysis more complicated, I think, especially when considering marginal usage/activity from the perspective of an end user/consumer. For example, one could naively believe that there's absolutely no marginal emission from deciding to get on a plane. The plane is emitting basically the same amount whether there's 99 people on board or 99 + 1 (you) on board, and the plane's going to make that particular flight whether or not you get on. However, you're funding the airline industry and increasing demand (and therefore supply) for flights along that route and perhaps also indirectly helping pay for other things the airline is doing, so that could probably be considered a marginal emission contribution. If you ignore transaction fees for a moment, it seems like this logic doesn't quite work for cryptocurrency networks. It seems like a closer analogy would be something like a contrived scenario with an airline that has routes which are absolutely static and predetermined (e.g. a contrived scenario where an airline decides it's going to fly a passenger plane a certain route once per day every day at the exact same time for a year no matter what, even if no one's aboard, and also the tickets are free if assuming no transaction fees). There are still the indirect issues with supporting the network, but it seems like there's less of a marginal emission concern if you're someone who's just making transactions, or arguably even no marginal emission concern. In reality, you are adding some marginal emissions due to transaction fees (direct incentive to mine), and the indirect incentives could maybe be broken down into something marginal as well (no one using the network = no incentive to mine since the currency would probably have no value), but basically it kind of feels like there's less of a direct marginal emission concern as an end user of the network compared to something like getting on a plane, especially if you take transaction fees out of the equation. In that sense, it feels like abstaining is somewhat more of a moral protest rather than a direct economic "vote" or boycott. Am I wrong about any of this? I probably am; this is just a random thought. Maybe the transaction fees are the crux of it (even if the block rewards are much more lucrative), so eliminating them from the equation for the sake of argument makes the whole point moot?
bartimus 5y ago
Or energy use per transaction based on full throughput capacity (full blocks).
codelord 5y ago
On your website that you linked says "We conduct our business in a way that protects ... our planet's climate against warming." Can you elaborate how providing infra to mine Bitcoin is helping the planet against global warming? Aren't you doing the exact opposite? If you are using 100% green energy, that energy can be used for something productive not providing PoW. Note Bitcoin alone currently consumes 0.55% of world's TOTAL electricity production and this is going to get even worse with more adoption. Reference: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  > that energy can be used for something productive A decentralized/borderless/censorship-resistant/virtual currency is one of the most productive things we can use energy for. It might not be as apparent in the US or the developed world, but Bitcoin is a life-saver for many people in countries with crumbling currencies. We waste a lot of energy on things that are far more more useless (like christmas lights for example[1]). We should just put carbon tax on everything with environmental side effects and let the market decides what's a productive use case vs one that isn't. 1: https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-christmas-lights/ https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-...
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - mondoveneziano 5y ago
    You could regulate inefficient christmas lights, but consumers will likely choose more efficient options anyway when they become available to them. How do you enforce carbon taxes on miners under a defunct government in a remote location of the world?
  - codelord 5y ago
    I don't believe mining Bitcoin quite falls into the category of "most productive things we can use energy for". Drug discovery, carbon capture, agriculture, construction, etc. etc. come to mind as slightly more useful. Financial transactions in traditional banking systems which Bitcoin mining is more comparable with consume far far far less energy. Also Bitcoin is designed to adjust PoW difficulty based on network's average mining performance. In other words, the more compute power you provide the less efficient it becomes.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> In steady state, miners will dump energy into mining a coin until the cost of energy = the value of the coins coming out. Exactly, that's why if you're using this list to somehow decide coin X is more "efficient" than coin Y, then it's a foolhardy exercise. For proof of work to actually work, the cost of the electricity has to be proportional to the total market cap of the coin. Otherwise, if the amount of work was low compared to the value of the network, it would be a strong incentive for someone to try to attack it.
- usrusr 5y ago
  "Efficient" could also be read as "I am willing to sacrifice x Wh to the gods of crypto wealth, where do I get the biggest return?" That might even be a tolerable mindset if you happen to live in a cold place and the only tool available to keep you from freezing to death was electricity.
EGreg 5y ago
That's a very dubious way of looking at it. Blockchains all have a bottleneck. All transactions in the world have to go through the miner. And the situation is actually worse than that because we don't know who will solve the useless Proof of Work hashcash function ahead of time, so EVERY potential transaction is gossipped to EVERY potential miner, and then the miners ALL go to town wasting electricity. How great! Anyway, because of this architecture (preventing double-spending by literally aggregating all ambiguities into N potential histories of EVERYTHING, and then having them duke it out with PoW or PoS or any other way), we literally have a cap on how many "TPS" (Transactions Per Second) can go through. Before Bitcoin, no one ever asked how many transactions per second an Internet protocol could support. It would be ridiculous to ask that of HTTP, or FTP or SMTP because there is no central bottleneck: the number of websites, files and emails that can be sent increases with the number of computers on the network. With Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain-based networks, this is not the case. The max number of transactions that fit inside a block is the most throughput you're going to get. The best thing to come out of these blockchains is Microsoft's Sidetree protocol championed by @csuwildcat but that's for identities, not currencies. So basically, you have a payment system which is super-secure and also super-wasteful. It's as if BitTorrent required every computer to seed every movie, and BitTorrent maximalists called everything else that used a Kademlia DHT a ShitTorrent. Except here, it's actually worse because you're not doing Proof of SpaceTime (like FileCoin) but you're requiring a growing number of computers to participate in a lottery proving they burn electricity and get rewarded sometimes. And this amount of computers is growing, just so we can do one operation (transfer money) 10 times a second. At least Ethereum made it into virtual machine capable of executingmore than one operation, thus enabling Turing-complete programming languages like Solidity, and smart contracts. Still, the way it's designed as a "world computer" it's basically a glorified mainframe, and gas is basically paying for time on the mainframe. It is the reason "flash loans" are even possible, they are artifacts of the idea that literally ONE transaction in the entire world can happen at any given time. Nice for atomicity guarantees, I guess, but overall not so great for almost every real world application. Blockchains with global consensus about every transaction in the world are NOT what I would think of when I think "decentralized" in the sense of having no central bottlenecks. Actually @vbuterin wrote a great article years ago about the different senses of the word "decentralized".
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wpietri 5y ago
> A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented." Not for a general audience. The purpose of a currency is to enable transactions. Internally, I get why people involved might fuss about the metric. But from the societal perspective it's reasonable to ask, "What does it cost per unit of value created?"
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Further the purpose of mining is to enable mutations to the chain as quantized into transactions. If you stop permitting mutations energy use drops to zero, ergo energy use per transaction is totally reasonable.
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    That's not how logic works. That would be like saying "you need light to your math homework so we will measure how many math problems you can do per lumen of light". The throughput of transactions is not coupled to the amount of electricity used to mine. They are two elements in the system, that doesn't mean they move proportionally in any way.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      A better analogy would be trying to use a 7-seater dump truck as a school bus, then complaining when the 'haters' analysis is based on "gallons of gasoline per available seat-day." As if the fact the gallons of gasoline per seat-day changes based on external factors (i.e. with the weather or traffic) makes any difference? It legitimately does not matter that (i) not all 7 seats may be populated each day or that (ii) the gas required varies day to day based on externalities. That's why we invented averages and spot measurements. So fine, "kWh per available transaction-second" may be a more apt moniker however that's strictly what I've been talking about. Since 100% of electricity usage is attributable to mutations, this is a completely fair quantization. As blocks have been overwhelmingly full for years, the point on discrepancy is pretty much moot. And further, the point is a dump truck is totally unsuitable for use as a school bus. You are more than welcome to measure Wh of electricity used per math question in regards to the lighting setup. You'll find that number small and irrelevant, however. On the other hand if it requires a few thousand kWh worth of light to do a math question, you're well within your rights to ask (a) why you're doing math questions in what must be a stadium setting and (b) whether there's a more efficient lighting solution. Which are exactly the questions we're asking here. So, respectfully, that's exactly how logic works.
trevelyan 5y ago
Interesting angle -- but it's really not a defense of POW so much an argument for networks like Saito (https://saito.io https://saito.io) that replace mining with routing work and get cost-of-attack from the electricity spent running the servers / routing infrastructure.
BluSyn 5y ago
"Energy used / total value secured" is a better measurement. "Double-spend prevented" isn't calculable. Important to remember that the energy used on mining both secures current and *PAST* transactions, that's the entire point of the blockchain. I think "total value secured" captures this point. I find it frustrating that crypto-currencies are judged by their energy usage, meanwhile traditional fiat currencies are secured by massive banking industries, governments, and militaries. The total energy required to maintain a secure and stable fiat currency is likely orders of magnitude greater than that of Bitcoin today. The problem is one is easier to calculate, so it generates easy headlines from lazy journalists. Fundamentally energy usage isn't a worthy argument for or against a currency. It's the wrong measurement to use. It seems to be the go-to straw-man argument for those who already made up their minds about cryptocurrency before hand. Yes, Proof-of-Stake exists, but notably it does not exist at a reasonable scale yet. If it could work as well as Proof-of-Work then it eventually would displace it. All attempts so far have not lived up to their hype.
- ericjang 5y ago
  Do you have an estimate of energy used / total value secured ? If I am understanding correctly, an upper bound on "total value secured" would just be the total transaction volume moved in a block?
  - clarkmoody 5y ago
    Each block secures the entire chain. The lower bound of the total value secured is market cap of the coin. In the case of Bitcoin, the upper bound is the value of the entire "crypto" ecosystem, including all tokens, companies, jobs, infrastructure, etc.
- throwaway9980 5y ago
  I don’t think you’re going to be able to secure the blockchain without those governments and militaries. Maybe you replace the massive banking industry with a new massive crypto financial industry? “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
quickthrower2 5y ago
Energy used per real world non-speculative use? I imagine Bitcoin would fair terribly and Monero would be the best.
spyder 5y ago
Another technologically interesting very low energy coin is NANO but it has his own challenges because with the feeless transactions the spamming costs almost nothing. But still at one point it confirmed more transactions than BTC + ETH + LTC combined without tx fees and sub-second confirmation time: https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/lxbhh5/nano_confirmed_more_transactions_today_than/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/lxbhh5/nano_c... The spam is becoming a too big problem, but they're trying to mitigate it in the new versions: https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/namwzf/v22_highlevel_prerelease_notes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/namwzf/v22_hi...
monkishrex 5y ago
Thanks for highlighting why scaling is what matters and how BSV is obviously the only chain worth anything. And no, price is meaningless when it's 80% wash traded ponzi money
monkishrex 5y ago
You just wrote an entire thread on why BSV is the ONLY system capable of anything... Lol? That's the point toom -- the more TXs in the block, the more efficient the system. That's why Merkel's, that's why small-world... That's why no CTOR or check points. Because SCALING. BSV is O(1), none of the other "projects" are or even come close to O(1) which is what this site is very elegantly showing
- ValiumMm 5y ago
  THIS, THIS THIS THIS. How does Toom, not understand this. Not only does it scale but then miners get more fee's from more transactions. It baffles me the keyboard gymnastics against BSV, while showing exactly why BSV is the best.
  - rocqua 5y ago
    May I ask how much you have invested in BSV, and whether that investment might be coloring your portrayal of BSV's strengths?
    - ValiumMm 5y ago
      oh totally going to tell some random dude on the internet how much I've invested in any asset lmao. Regardless i have more portfolio in ETH as im riding the trend, however long term, BSV is the ONLY option. actually scales, its cheaper for the end user and the miners capatalise on more transaction fees. its a win win win game.
Weroku 5y ago
Sooo you tell me effectilfy not to worry because bitcoin doesn't consume terrawats of energy as a whole system? We don't need all those miners like you and mining and consuming terrawats of energy? And at the end of the day, when i own bitcoins or take part in bitcoins in any form i have a green thumb and our planet is not additonally getting destroyed through the massive amount of energy consumed into finding the right hash? Did you finnaly convince yourself that just because you consume water energy what you are doing is okay? "We believe that Bitcoin and other CryptoCurrencies will play an important role in the future of finance, technology and governance. We conduct our business in a way that protects the blockchain against plurality attacks, and our planet's climate against warming." Let me ask you a few questions to your statement: Why do you support Bitcoin in particular and name bitcoin and don't use something like etherium which is potentially switching to PoS? The energy you consume (apparently already 2 mega watts) how do you know that this energy couldn't have been used for something which creates direct and longlasting value? Do you make any investments into renewable energy? How do you feel about bitcoin using as a whole system (where you part of) a lot of energy? How do you feel about bitcoin using a lot of dirty energy? What is your take on how bitcoin can help global warming (and i actually mean cooling down the planet not activly heating it)? Do you use your waste heat in any form or do you heat the environment with it? Have you / your company invested in any form of research or change to bitcoin itself to reduce its 'energy consumption for preventing double-spend'? Do you believe in the future of PoW or PoS? If you believe in PoS why do you support currently bitcoin? Biden (after other countries have done this much earlier) is now back on climate change support and targets 0 emissions. How do you think the future with bitcoin and 0 emission will look like? And at the end of the day: Based on your FAQ and the increase of power prices, will you able to consume that much energy for bitcoin in the long run?

by toomim 5y ago

toomim 5y ago

And to be complete, there are other ways that PoW blockchains can compete on energy efficiency: 1) Inflation rate 2) PoW function 3) Transaction cost after blocksize limit reached The inflation rate determines the incentive given to miners. With less incentive, the energy use will go down. This comes at the cost of increasing the ease of a double-spend, but there is already far more than enough difficulty to double-spend at the current mining rates. The PoW function determines the capital cost required to buy the miners themselves. If you increase the capital costs (e.g. with a memory-hard PoW function, or requiring less-efficient GPUs instead of more-efficient ASICs) then miners will be able to spend less of their costs on energy. This is one way in which Eth does well by the above metric, and is a valid way to reduce energy usage in PoW. Of course, transitioning to proof-of-stake (as eth is doing) will eliminate the energy problem entirely. Finally, some blockchains (e.g. BTC, ETH) have reached their capacity of transactions per second, and then users can add a fee to each transaction to incentivize mining pools to include them in a block. These fees do add incentive for miners to dump energy into their blocks. However, they are a much smaller portion of the incentive than you would expect.

GBiT 5y ago

You right. It's written in the FAQ of the page that metric is not really that important. But most of the treads in HN talk about tx/kw anyway... However, if Bitcoin had more transactions, I think a lot less discussion would be right now.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

I agree about the suggestion to look at transaction capacity, however: - Bitcoin is operating at capacity and has shown unwillingness to adjust capacity, so the "kWh/tx" is valid for Bitcoin. - Transaction fees increase the block reward, and as a consequence, the energy that can be used for mining before it becomes unprofitable. This is currently only about 10% of the total reward miners get for mining a block on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, but it is something to consider. The corresponding part of the energy usage would, at a fixed fee, be proportional to transactions.

xur17 5y ago
> Bitcoin is operating at capacity and has shown unwillingness to adjust capacity, so the "kWh/tx" is valid for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's layer 1 is operating at capacity - different networks make different tradeoffs. Bitcoin has gone the "less change" and "more decentralization" route by keeping layer 1 small, with the goal of moving transaction volume to layer 2.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  I don't buy it. Bitcoin introduced a number of changes like SegWit that are way more complex than adjusting a constant on layer 1, plus a huge amount of complexity on layer 2 that makes using layer 2 just as complicated as (or more complicated than) using a different cryptocurrency. Whether it leads to "more decentralization" when everyone can run their own (L1) node but a single L1 transaction costs as much as the node hardware is quite debatable IMO. By making L1 transactions unaffordable, it encourages _centralized_ solutions where IOUs are shuffled around entirely off-chain.
  - shawnz 5y ago
    By making L1 transactions cheap, it's basically like giving away cheap, permanent, verifiable storage to anyone which is constantly replicated across the globe. Even if second layer solutions become highly centralized, the risk is significantly mitigated if you just don't keep your savings on them. If popular second layer solutions become untrustworthy then it would be easy to switch to different ones.

baby 5y ago

Indeed, I'd say this Tx/power is the most misleading metric here. Bitcoin is slow (7tx/s) compared to what for example Algorand boasts they will achieve at the end of the year (25000tx/s).

paulgb 5y ago

I’ve gone back and forth on this myself, but I think it is valid to consider the cost of the entire network as a matter of carbon accounting. After all, one of Bitcoin’s selling points is the difficulty of a double-spend. This wouldn’t be the case if Bitcoin mining was not subsidized from the pool of unmined coins.

meowface 5y ago
I agree in general, but it makes the analysis more complicated, I think, especially when considering marginal usage/activity from the perspective of an end user/consumer. For example, one could naively believe that there's absolutely no marginal emission from deciding to get on a plane. The plane is emitting basically the same amount whether there's 99 people on board or 99 + 1 (you) on board, and the plane's going to make that particular flight whether or not you get on. However, you're funding the airline industry and increasing demand (and therefore supply) for flights along that route and perhaps also indirectly helping pay for other things the airline is doing, so that could probably be considered a marginal emission contribution. If you ignore transaction fees for a moment, it seems like this logic doesn't quite work for cryptocurrency networks. It seems like a closer analogy would be something like a contrived scenario with an airline that has routes which are absolutely static and predetermined (e.g. a contrived scenario where an airline decides it's going to fly a passenger plane a certain route once per day every day at the exact same time for a year no matter what, even if no one's aboard, and also the tickets are free if assuming no transaction fees). There are still the indirect issues with supporting the network, but it seems like there's less of a marginal emission concern if you're someone who's just making transactions, or arguably even no marginal emission concern. In reality, you are adding some marginal emissions due to transaction fees (direct incentive to mine), and the indirect incentives could maybe be broken down into something marginal as well (no one using the network = no incentive to mine since the currency would probably have no value), but basically it kind of feels like there's less of a direct marginal emission concern as an end user of the network compared to something like getting on a plane, especially if you take transaction fees out of the equation. In that sense, it feels like abstaining is somewhat more of a moral protest rather than a direct economic "vote" or boycott. Am I wrong about any of this? I probably am; this is just a random thought. Maybe the transaction fees are the crux of it (even if the block rewards are much more lucrative), so eliminating them from the equation for the sake of argument makes the whole point moot?

bartimus 5y ago

Or energy use per transaction based on full throughput capacity (full blocks).

codelord 5y ago

On your website that you linked says "We conduct our business in a way that protects ... our planet's climate against warming." Can you elaborate how providing infra to mine Bitcoin is helping the planet against global warming? Aren't you doing the exact opposite? If you are using 100% green energy, that energy can be used for something productive not providing PoW. Note Bitcoin alone currently consumes 0.55% of world's TOTAL electricity production and this is going to get even worse with more adoption. Reference: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

rawtxapp 5y ago
> that energy can be used for something productive A decentralized/borderless/censorship-resistant/virtual currency is one of the most productive things we can use energy for. It might not be as apparent in the US or the developed world, but Bitcoin is a life-saver for many people in countries with crumbling currencies. We waste a lot of energy on things that are far more more useless (like christmas lights for example[1]). We should just put carbon tax on everything with environmental side effects and let the market decides what's a productive use case vs one that isn't. 1: https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-christmas-lights/ https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-...
- deleted 5y ago
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- mondoveneziano 5y ago
  You could regulate inefficient christmas lights, but consumers will likely choose more efficient options anyway when they become available to them. How do you enforce carbon taxes on miners under a defunct government in a remote location of the world?
- codelord 5y ago
  I don't believe mining Bitcoin quite falls into the category of "most productive things we can use energy for". Drug discovery, carbon capture, agriculture, construction, etc. etc. come to mind as slightly more useful. Financial transactions in traditional banking systems which Bitcoin mining is more comparable with consume far far far less energy. Also Bitcoin is designed to adjust PoW difficulty based on network's average mining performance. In other words, the more compute power you provide the less efficient it becomes.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

> In steady state, miners will dump energy into mining a coin until the cost of energy = the value of the coins coming out. Exactly, that's why if you're using this list to somehow decide coin X is more "efficient" than coin Y, then it's a foolhardy exercise. For proof of work to actually work, the cost of the electricity has to be proportional to the total market cap of the coin. Otherwise, if the amount of work was low compared to the value of the network, it would be a strong incentive for someone to try to attack it.

usrusr 5y ago
"Efficient" could also be read as "I am willing to sacrifice x Wh to the gods of crypto wealth, where do I get the biggest return?" That might even be a tolerable mindset if you happen to live in a cold place and the only tool available to keep you from freezing to death was electricity.

EGreg 5y ago

That's a very dubious way of looking at it. Blockchains all have a bottleneck. All transactions in the world have to go through the miner. And the situation is actually worse than that because we don't know who will solve the useless Proof of Work hashcash function ahead of time, so EVERY potential transaction is gossipped to EVERY potential miner, and then the miners ALL go to town wasting electricity. How great! Anyway, because of this architecture (preventing double-spending by literally aggregating all ambiguities into N potential histories of EVERYTHING, and then having them duke it out with PoW or PoS or any other way), we literally have a cap on how many "TPS" (Transactions Per Second) can go through. Before Bitcoin, no one ever asked how many transactions per second an Internet protocol could support. It would be ridiculous to ask that of HTTP, or FTP or SMTP because there is no central bottleneck: the number of websites, files and emails that can be sent increases with the number of computers on the network. With Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain-based networks, this is not the case. The max number of transactions that fit inside a block is the most throughput you're going to get. The best thing to come out of these blockchains is Microsoft's Sidetree protocol championed by @csuwildcat but that's for identities, not currencies. So basically, you have a payment system which is super-secure and also super-wasteful. It's as if BitTorrent required every computer to seed every movie, and BitTorrent maximalists called everything else that used a Kademlia DHT a ShitTorrent. Except here, it's actually worse because you're not doing Proof of SpaceTime (like FileCoin) but you're requiring a growing number of computers to participate in a lottery proving they burn electricity and get rewarded sometimes. And this amount of computers is growing, just so we can do one operation (transfer money) 10 times a second. At least Ethereum made it into virtual machine capable of executingmore than one operation, thus enabling Turing-complete programming languages like Solidity, and smart contracts. Still, the way it's designed as a "world computer" it's basically a glorified mainframe, and gas is basically paying for time on the mainframe. It is the reason "flash loans" are even possible, they are artifacts of the idea that literally ONE transaction in the entire world can happen at any given time. Nice for atomicity guarantees, I guess, but overall not so great for almost every real world application. Blockchains with global consensus about every transaction in the world are NOT what I would think of when I think "decentralized" in the sense of having no central bottlenecks. Actually @vbuterin wrote a great article years ago about the different senses of the word "decentralized".

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wpietri 5y ago

> A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented." Not for a general audience. The purpose of a currency is to enable transactions. Internally, I get why people involved might fuss about the metric. But from the societal perspective it's reasonable to ask, "What does it cost per unit of value created?"

arcticbull 5y ago
Further the purpose of mining is to enable mutations to the chain as quantized into transactions. If you stop permitting mutations energy use drops to zero, ergo energy use per transaction is totally reasonable.
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
  That's not how logic works. That would be like saying "you need light to your math homework so we will measure how many math problems you can do per lumen of light". The throughput of transactions is not coupled to the amount of electricity used to mine. They are two elements in the system, that doesn't mean they move proportionally in any way.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    A better analogy would be trying to use a 7-seater dump truck as a school bus, then complaining when the 'haters' analysis is based on "gallons of gasoline per available seat-day." As if the fact the gallons of gasoline per seat-day changes based on external factors (i.e. with the weather or traffic) makes any difference? It legitimately does not matter that (i) not all 7 seats may be populated each day or that (ii) the gas required varies day to day based on externalities. That's why we invented averages and spot measurements. So fine, "kWh per available transaction-second" may be a more apt moniker however that's strictly what I've been talking about. Since 100% of electricity usage is attributable to mutations, this is a completely fair quantization. As blocks have been overwhelmingly full for years, the point on discrepancy is pretty much moot. And further, the point is a dump truck is totally unsuitable for use as a school bus. You are more than welcome to measure Wh of electricity used per math question in regards to the lighting setup. You'll find that number small and irrelevant, however. On the other hand if it requires a few thousand kWh worth of light to do a math question, you're well within your rights to ask (a) why you're doing math questions in what must be a stadium setting and (b) whether there's a more efficient lighting solution. Which are exactly the questions we're asking here. So, respectfully, that's exactly how logic works.

trevelyan 5y ago

Interesting angle -- but it's really not a defense of POW so much an argument for networks like Saito (https://saito.io https://saito.io) that replace mining with routing work and get cost-of-attack from the electricity spent running the servers / routing infrastructure.

BluSyn 5y ago

"Energy used / total value secured" is a better measurement. "Double-spend prevented" isn't calculable. Important to remember that the energy used on mining both secures current and *PAST* transactions, that's the entire point of the blockchain. I think "total value secured" captures this point. I find it frustrating that crypto-currencies are judged by their energy usage, meanwhile traditional fiat currencies are secured by massive banking industries, governments, and militaries. The total energy required to maintain a secure and stable fiat currency is likely orders of magnitude greater than that of Bitcoin today. The problem is one is easier to calculate, so it generates easy headlines from lazy journalists. Fundamentally energy usage isn't a worthy argument for or against a currency. It's the wrong measurement to use. It seems to be the go-to straw-man argument for those who already made up their minds about cryptocurrency before hand. Yes, Proof-of-Stake exists, but notably it does not exist at a reasonable scale yet. If it could work as well as Proof-of-Work then it eventually would displace it. All attempts so far have not lived up to their hype.

ericjang 5y ago
Do you have an estimate of energy used / total value secured ? If I am understanding correctly, an upper bound on "total value secured" would just be the total transaction volume moved in a block?
- clarkmoody 5y ago
  Each block secures the entire chain. The lower bound of the total value secured is market cap of the coin. In the case of Bitcoin, the upper bound is the value of the entire "crypto" ecosystem, including all tokens, companies, jobs, infrastructure, etc.
throwaway9980 5y ago
I don’t think you’re going to be able to secure the blockchain without those governments and militaries. Maybe you replace the massive banking industry with a new massive crypto financial industry? “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

quickthrower2 5y ago

Energy used per real world non-speculative use? I imagine Bitcoin would fair terribly and Monero would be the best.

spyder 5y ago

Another technologically interesting very low energy coin is NANO but it has his own challenges because with the feeless transactions the spamming costs almost nothing. But still at one point it confirmed more transactions than BTC + ETH + LTC combined without tx fees and sub-second confirmation time: https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/lxbhh5/nano_confirmed_more_transactions_today_than/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/lxbhh5/nano_c... The spam is becoming a too big problem, but they're trying to mitigate it in the new versions: https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/namwzf/v22_highlevel_prerelease_notes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/namwzf/v22_hi...

monkishrex 5y ago

Thanks for highlighting why scaling is what matters and how BSV is obviously the only chain worth anything. And no, price is meaningless when it's 80% wash traded ponzi money

monkishrex 5y ago

You just wrote an entire thread on why BSV is the ONLY system capable of anything... Lol? That's the point toom -- the more TXs in the block, the more efficient the system. That's why Merkel's, that's why small-world... That's why no CTOR or check points. Because SCALING. BSV is O(1), none of the other "projects" are or even come close to O(1) which is what this site is very elegantly showing

ValiumMm 5y ago
THIS, THIS THIS THIS. How does Toom, not understand this. Not only does it scale but then miners get more fee's from more transactions. It baffles me the keyboard gymnastics against BSV, while showing exactly why BSV is the best.
- rocqua 5y ago
  May I ask how much you have invested in BSV, and whether that investment might be coloring your portrayal of BSV's strengths?
  - ValiumMm 5y ago
    oh totally going to tell some random dude on the internet how much I've invested in any asset lmao. Regardless i have more portfolio in ETH as im riding the trend, however long term, BSV is the ONLY option. actually scales, its cheaper for the end user and the miners capatalise on more transaction fees. its a win win win game.

Weroku 5y ago

Sooo you tell me effectilfy not to worry because bitcoin doesn't consume terrawats of energy as a whole system? We don't need all those miners like you and mining and consuming terrawats of energy? And at the end of the day, when i own bitcoins or take part in bitcoins in any form i have a green thumb and our planet is not additonally getting destroyed through the massive amount of energy consumed into finding the right hash? Did you finnaly convince yourself that just because you consume water energy what you are doing is okay? "We believe that Bitcoin and other CryptoCurrencies will play an important role in the future of finance, technology and governance. We conduct our business in a way that protects the blockchain against plurality attacks, and our planet's climate against warming." Let me ask you a few questions to your statement: Why do you support Bitcoin in particular and name bitcoin and don't use something like etherium which is potentially switching to PoS? The energy you consume (apparently already 2 mega watts) how do you know that this energy couldn't have been used for something which creates direct and longlasting value? Do you make any investments into renewable energy? How do you feel about bitcoin using as a whole system (where you part of) a lot of energy? How do you feel about bitcoin using a lot of dirty energy? What is your take on how bitcoin can help global warming (and i actually mean cooling down the planet not activly heating it)? Do you use your waste heat in any form or do you heat the environment with it? Have you / your company invested in any form of research or change to bitcoin itself to reduce its 'energy consumption for preventing double-spend'? Do you believe in the future of PoW or PoS? If you believe in PoS why do you support currently bitcoin? Biden (after other countries have done this much earlier) is now back on climate change support and targets 0 emissions. How do you think the future with bitcoin and 0 emission will look like? And at the end of the day: Based on your FAQ and the increase of power prices, will you able to consume that much energy for bitcoin in the long run?