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I was shocked the other day on the Ethereum PoS announcement by the energy consumption per transaction metrics. It threw the whole crypto market into a new ligh

I was shocked the other day on the Ethereum PoS announcement by the energy consumption per transaction metrics. It threw the whole crypto market into a new light for me. BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction! That's almost 5000 miles in a Tesla model 3. BTC is using about 2/3 of the power of every data center on the planet! Many, many people have been imprisoned or executed for creating less societal harm and externality than Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto may end up being the most destructive person to have ever lived. People are free to gamble, but could they please not turn the surface of the Earth into a black body radiator while they're at it?

gfodor 5y ago
Maybe take a longer view.
- suprfsat 5y ago
  Right, the surface of the Earth will eventually become a black body radiator _anyway_, so why should it bother anyone if we want to have a little fun first.
  - yetihehe 5y ago
    There is a theory that life exists, because it is effective at spreading out energy as heat more efficently[0]. In such case, bitcoin (or having fun) can be seen as a good purpose for life. Most of activities seen by people as "fun" use up energy and spread it as heat. [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
    - jacobsimon 5y ago
      Super interesting thanks for sharing.
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      This is excellent. We should found a religion based on it. CHURCH OF THE ENTROPY MOST HIGH.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    No my point is that eventually the energy burn per transaction in crypto will likely be near zero.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Downvoting is fine but I'd take a gentleman's bet that in 10 years either crypto has <$1bln market cap or price per transaction is cheaper than credit card systems when incorporating operational costs. Given the entire argument seems lost on readers given the downvotes it's simple: proof of stake and increased use of crypto both drive down energy cost per transaction. The more people use crypto, the cheaper energy use per transaction assuming currency prices stay the same. (This is lost on most commentators, but it's reasonable to expect price stability in the post-speculation phase of crypto adoption.) And proof of stake and side chains stand to drive those costs down by several orders of magnitude.
amelius 5y ago
> BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction! A transaction meaning transferring money from one wallet to another?
- Balantio 5y ago
  i would say but i haven't checked his data. Generally speaking, every 10 minutes! one block is mined which is incentivived with 6 btc or roughlyl the equivilent of over 150.000$. In avg there are 1000-2000 transactions per block.
  - doomroot 5y ago
    We have no idea how many transactions are “in a block”. There are multiple decentralized layers aggregating thousands of transactions down into a single bitcoin block transaction. This doesn’t even begin to touch the sheer magnitude of transactions that exchanges facilitate between their users without touching the blockchain.
    - davewritescode 5y ago
      Yes, but when I exchange bitcoin off chain, I'm giving up a lot of the benefits of using bitcoin in the first place. Lighting in particular solves transaction speed by introducing additional potential security problems that need to be accounted for, particular closed channel type attacks.
    - Balantio 5y ago
      From a default btc perspective, we are very aware of how many transactions are there. Non of my ways of buying/using bitcoins is doing it indirectly. And i do have to assume that this is nothing you can't estimate. After all either those systems are known and used, than you should be able to verify that this is a potential lightning transaction block which contains more or so.
- jonrcooper 5y ago
  Nope - the author is incorrectly using total energy / total transactions to get this number. Which, is understandable. However, if there were 2x the transactions, the total energy would stay very close to the same. So no. There's a lot of energy to secure the network, but the actual energy usage per transaction itself is a small fraction of that misquoted number.
throwkeep 5y ago
Then you'll need to moralize air conditioning and entertainment and everything else too. These use cases aren't the problem, dirty energy is the problem. Fix the source of energy. We need to do that anyway. Bitcoin and the Nakamoto Consensus is a breakthrough that provides a secure, global, uncensorable, decentralized store of value. With defined rules that can't be changed on the whims of a central actor. The energy is used to prevent bad actors from being able to rewrite the blockchain. Per transaction is a misleading metric (plus there are layer 2 solutions). You have to consider the energy used by militaries and banks to secure fiat. When your government fails, as they have in many countries and eventually do in the long span of history, having such a store of value will be, well... invaluable.
- haasted 5y ago
  Your store of value just dropped 40%.
- voidfunc 5y ago
  Man that koolaid must be tasty
- tehlike 5y ago
  Military and banks do more than what PoW blockchain does. I don't buy in the energy argument myself, but trying to justify the way you do sounds a little too kool-aid-y.
  - brilliantbro 5y ago
    Military is worse than POW.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > You have to consider the energy used by militaries and banks to secure fiat. If, ever, it so happens that cryptocurrencies become anything more than a joke from the point of view of the global economy, militaries and banks will be required to secure their operations too.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
Mc_Big_G 5y ago
Awesome, now do the financial industry!
ricardobayes 5y ago
I'm glad people are starting to realize this. I have been bashing bitcoin for this reason for ages only to be ridiculed.
- brilliantbro 5y ago
  Do you take a stance on hyperinflation events throughout history and it's victims? Do you take a stance on security of untested POS coins gambling with people's money? A senior Engineer once told me, "anyone can poke holes in an idea, we will make a change if they have a solution."
Kiro 5y ago
Satoshi is a supervillain who created the most effective weapon of mass destruction the world has ever seen. Unstoppable and fueled by the inherent greed of mankind.
- tim333 5y ago
  But Proofofstakeman shall defeat him!
  - AwaAwa 5y ago
    ProofofSpace man helping HDD prices
- fedreserved 5y ago
  Somehow I think it's a team of supervillains. I can't see any individual giving up the wealth that has accrued to bitcoins "founder"
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
  Are you a fucking idiot?
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  I suspect Satoshi lacks the intent to be a villian here. The creator of the Keurig, a device which produces amazing amounts of waste, talked about the unintended consequences of his invention and how ashamed he is for the damage his invention has done. https://time.com/3731356/keurig-coffee-k-cup/ https://time.com/3731356/keurig-coffee-k-cup/
  - jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
    > unintended consequences I'm sorry but you have to be very short sighted to call single dose coffee in non-recyclable capsules "unintended" waste.
    - neither_color 5y ago
brilliantbro 5y ago
Did you include the energy cost of building the car?
_alex_ 5y ago
The power per tx metric is a dumb metric. Power usage doesnt increase or decrease per tx
- lottin 5y ago
  That doesn't mean it's a dumb metric. Any efficiency metric must measure cost per unit of output and in a crypto-currency that's power per transaction.
  - _alex_ 5y ago
    why not power per dollar transferred? transactions per 10 minute period is relatively constant over time. The thing that increases the energy usage is the price of bitcoin. It's a dumb metric.
    - lottin 5y ago
      > The thing that increases the energy usage is the price of bitcoin. This simply tells us that bitcoin has a dumb cost structure. Apparently its inventors didn't think about that either. But that's not our problem. Our problem is measuring efficiency, and for that we need a measure of efficiency. And a measure of efficiency needs to be chosen in terms of how good it is at measuring efficiency, not in terms of how good it is at hiding that a certain payment system has a dumb cost structure.
      - ric2b 5y ago
        Would you measure a car's efficiency based on how much wiper fluid it uses per mile? The two measures aren't meaningfully linked, so it makes little sense to compute a correlation.
        lottin 5y ago
        No, because wiper fluid contributes nothing to the outcome, which is the car moving from point a to b. The car will move from point a to point b whether it has wiper fluid or not. But it will not move without fuel.
Algent 5y ago
> the most destructive person to have ever lived I'm not sure if we can that easily pin the responsibility on a single person and not on every single one who still continue to go for PoW while knowing how destructive it is.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  There's a reasonable argument that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr was a contender for that title previously.
  - ninju 5y ago
    Inventor of both * Leaded Gasoline * Freon Ouch!
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      And killed by one of his own inventions...
      - duskwuff 5y ago
        Perhaps it was for the best. Humanity might not have survived his next invention.
  - papreclip 5y ago
    I would say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber blows him out of the water >Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I, especially his actions during the Second Battle of Ypres. but more importantly, >Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process. Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018 Anything past 1.6B is overpopulation, and is driving the holocene extinction, global warming, pollution, etc... all of our big problems scale with population, and removing this natural limitation on our food supply has allowed us to blow the suspension out on all of them
bgroat 5y ago
Proof of Work eliminates the need for a centralized authority by identifying the planet all financial intermediaries live on and destroying it
- hanniabu 5y ago
  PoS achieves the same
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
c01n 5y ago
When Satoshi returns she saves the day.
kneel 5y ago
Wait until you learn how much energy the sun puts out
dumbfoundded 5y ago
Just a tangent. Thomas Midgley invented both CFCs and leaded gasoline.
mathiasrw 5y ago
The consumption is a result of the greed to get the reward (fee + per block coins) and is not related to how the blockchain is operating. You can see the carbon footprint from different blockchains on https://coincarboncap.com https://coincarboncap.com
- dougmwne 5y ago
  But the only useful thing BTC does is transfer money/property from one party to another. Take that away and it's nothing at all. The block rewards are just there to operate the network. That the rewards were allowed to get so valuable that they consume the energy equivalent of Norway is a fatal flaw in the design, no?
neither_color 5y ago
> Satoshi Nakamoto may end up being the most destructive person to have ever lived. I was with you up until this part...this kind of over-dramatization might turn others away. I can think of several genocidal dictators worse than Satoshi Nakamoto. If anything Satoshi is an Alfred Nobel type figure, who invented dynamite. We don't attribute all deaths from explosions to Alfred Nobel, and Satoshi is not guilty of what miners and speculators do.
keymone 5y ago
Energy used for PoW per transaction is a dumb metric. Satoshi actually made the most efficient decentralized money that can ever exist and prevented more externalities in the world than potentially any human ever will.
- bb88 5y ago
  > Energy used for PoW per transaction is a dumb metric. Cars monitor energy use through MPG. Datacenters monitor it as well. Why should crypto currencies get a pass? > Satoshi actually made the most efficient decentralized money that can ever exist and prevented more externalities in the world than potentially any human ever will. [CITATION NEEDED]
  - keymone 5y ago
    > Cars monitor energy use through MPG. Datacenters monitor it as well. Why should crypto currencies get a pass? cars spend energy to move. datacenters spend energy to compute things. bitcoin mining doesn't spend energy to process achieve some TPS, it spends energy to achieve certain level of security, so it's security per energy spent that matters, not energy per transaction. if transactions or number of them are not an input to a bitcoin miner -- if miner will spand the same energy whether it's for 1 or 1 trillion transactions -- then energy per transaction metric is zero signal. > [CITATION NEEDED] no, actually, it's an opinion. current financial system and fiat money cause immense externalities: war, corruption, hunger, crime, etc. bitcoin is an incarnation of money where security is expressed in form of energy spent - you no longer need to involve politics or any other human activities to achieve security and so a large incentive for those simply disappears. bitcoin doesn't solve those externalities, but that specific aspect of money is simply no longer contributing.
    - bb88 5y ago
      > if miner will spand the same energy whether it's for 1 or 1 trillion transactions -- then energy per transaction metric is zero signal. So? A running car consumes gas even when it's idle. My parents used to measure MPG at every tank refill, which was a combination of miles, idle, braking, etc. We can certainly take an average of transactions to get a reasonable number for watts/transaction. > no, actually, it's an opinion. ... which was stated as fact.

gfodor 5y ago

Maybe take a longer view.

suprfsat 5y ago
Right, the surface of the Earth will eventually become a black body radiator _anyway_, so why should it bother anyone if we want to have a little fun first.
- yetihehe 5y ago
  There is a theory that life exists, because it is effective at spreading out energy as heat more efficently[0]. In such case, bitcoin (or having fun) can be seen as a good purpose for life. Most of activities seen by people as "fun" use up energy and spread it as heat. [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
  - jacobsimon 5y ago
    Super interesting thanks for sharing.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    This is excellent. We should found a religion based on it. CHURCH OF THE ENTROPY MOST HIGH.
- gfodor 5y ago
  No my point is that eventually the energy burn per transaction in crypto will likely be near zero.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Downvoting is fine but I'd take a gentleman's bet that in 10 years either crypto has <$1bln market cap or price per transaction is cheaper than credit card systems when incorporating operational costs. Given the entire argument seems lost on readers given the downvotes it's simple: proof of stake and increased use of crypto both drive down energy cost per transaction. The more people use crypto, the cheaper energy use per transaction assuming currency prices stay the same. (This is lost on most commentators, but it's reasonable to expect price stability in the post-speculation phase of crypto adoption.) And proof of stake and side chains stand to drive those costs down by several orders of magnitude.

amelius 5y ago

> BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction! A transaction meaning transferring money from one wallet to another?

Balantio 5y ago
i would say but i haven't checked his data. Generally speaking, every 10 minutes! one block is mined which is incentivived with 6 btc or roughlyl the equivilent of over 150.000$. In avg there are 1000-2000 transactions per block.
- doomroot 5y ago
  We have no idea how many transactions are “in a block”. There are multiple decentralized layers aggregating thousands of transactions down into a single bitcoin block transaction. This doesn’t even begin to touch the sheer magnitude of transactions that exchanges facilitate between their users without touching the blockchain.
  - davewritescode 5y ago
    Yes, but when I exchange bitcoin off chain, I'm giving up a lot of the benefits of using bitcoin in the first place. Lighting in particular solves transaction speed by introducing additional potential security problems that need to be accounted for, particular closed channel type attacks.
  - Balantio 5y ago
    From a default btc perspective, we are very aware of how many transactions are there. Non of my ways of buying/using bitcoins is doing it indirectly. And i do have to assume that this is nothing you can't estimate. After all either those systems are known and used, than you should be able to verify that this is a potential lightning transaction block which contains more or so.
jonrcooper 5y ago
Nope - the author is incorrectly using total energy / total transactions to get this number. Which, is understandable. However, if there were 2x the transactions, the total energy would stay very close to the same. So no. There's a lot of energy to secure the network, but the actual energy usage per transaction itself is a small fraction of that misquoted number.

throwkeep 5y ago

Then you'll need to moralize air conditioning and entertainment and everything else too. These use cases aren't the problem, dirty energy is the problem. Fix the source of energy. We need to do that anyway. Bitcoin and the Nakamoto Consensus is a breakthrough that provides a secure, global, uncensorable, decentralized store of value. With defined rules that can't be changed on the whims of a central actor. The energy is used to prevent bad actors from being able to rewrite the blockchain. Per transaction is a misleading metric (plus there are layer 2 solutions). You have to consider the energy used by militaries and banks to secure fiat. When your government fails, as they have in many countries and eventually do in the long span of history, having such a store of value will be, well... invaluable.

haasted 5y ago
Your store of value just dropped 40%.
voidfunc 5y ago
Man that koolaid must be tasty
tehlike 5y ago
Military and banks do more than what PoW blockchain does. I don't buy in the energy argument myself, but trying to justify the way you do sounds a little too kool-aid-y.
- brilliantbro 5y ago
  Military is worse than POW.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> You have to consider the energy used by militaries and banks to secure fiat. If, ever, it so happens that cryptocurrencies become anything more than a joke from the point of view of the global economy, militaries and banks will be required to secure their operations too.
NicoJuicy 5y ago

Mc_Big_G 5y ago

Awesome, now do the financial industry!

ricardobayes 5y ago

I'm glad people are starting to realize this. I have been bashing bitcoin for this reason for ages only to be ridiculed.

brilliantbro 5y ago
Do you take a stance on hyperinflation events throughout history and it's victims? Do you take a stance on security of untested POS coins gambling with people's money? A senior Engineer once told me, "anyone can poke holes in an idea, we will make a change if they have a solution."

Kiro 5y ago

Satoshi is a supervillain who created the most effective weapon of mass destruction the world has ever seen. Unstoppable and fueled by the inherent greed of mankind.

tim333 5y ago
But Proofofstakeman shall defeat him!
- AwaAwa 5y ago
  ProofofSpace man helping HDD prices
fedreserved 5y ago
Somehow I think it's a team of supervillains. I can't see any individual giving up the wealth that has accrued to bitcoins "founder"
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Are you a fucking idiot?
vorpalhex 5y ago
I suspect Satoshi lacks the intent to be a villian here. The creator of the Keurig, a device which produces amazing amounts of waste, talked about the unintended consequences of his invention and how ashamed he is for the damage his invention has done. https://time.com/3731356/keurig-coffee-k-cup/ https://time.com/3731356/keurig-coffee-k-cup/
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
  > unintended consequences I'm sorry but you have to be very short sighted to call single dose coffee in non-recyclable capsules "unintended" waste.
  - neither_color 5y ago

brilliantbro 5y ago

Did you include the energy cost of building the car?

_alex_ 5y ago

The power per tx metric is a dumb metric. Power usage doesnt increase or decrease per tx

lottin 5y ago
That doesn't mean it's a dumb metric. Any efficiency metric must measure cost per unit of output and in a crypto-currency that's power per transaction.
- _alex_ 5y ago
  why not power per dollar transferred? transactions per 10 minute period is relatively constant over time. The thing that increases the energy usage is the price of bitcoin. It's a dumb metric.
  - lottin 5y ago
    > The thing that increases the energy usage is the price of bitcoin. This simply tells us that bitcoin has a dumb cost structure. Apparently its inventors didn't think about that either. But that's not our problem. Our problem is measuring efficiency, and for that we need a measure of efficiency. And a measure of efficiency needs to be chosen in terms of how good it is at measuring efficiency, not in terms of how good it is at hiding that a certain payment system has a dumb cost structure.
    - ric2b 5y ago
      Would you measure a car's efficiency based on how much wiper fluid it uses per mile? The two measures aren't meaningfully linked, so it makes little sense to compute a correlation.
      - lottin 5y ago
        No, because wiper fluid contributes nothing to the outcome, which is the car moving from point a to b. The car will move from point a to point b whether it has wiper fluid or not. But it will not move without fuel.

Algent 5y ago

> the most destructive person to have ever lived I'm not sure if we can that easily pin the responsibility on a single person and not on every single one who still continue to go for PoW while knowing how destructive it is.

sokoloff 5y ago
There's a reasonable argument that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr was a contender for that title previously.
- ninju 5y ago
  Inventor of both * Leaded Gasoline * Freon Ouch!
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    And killed by one of his own inventions...
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      Perhaps it was for the best. Humanity might not have survived his next invention.
- papreclip 5y ago
  I would say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber blows him out of the water >Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I, especially his actions during the Second Battle of Ypres. but more importantly, >Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process. Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018 Anything past 1.6B is overpopulation, and is driving the holocene extinction, global warming, pollution, etc... all of our big problems scale with population, and removing this natural limitation on our food supply has allowed us to blow the suspension out on all of them

bgroat 5y ago

Proof of Work eliminates the need for a centralized authority by identifying the planet all financial intermediaries live on and destroying it

hanniabu 5y ago
PoS achieves the same

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

c01n 5y ago

When Satoshi returns she saves the day.

kneel 5y ago

Wait until you learn how much energy the sun puts out

dumbfoundded 5y ago

Just a tangent. Thomas Midgley invented both CFCs and leaded gasoline.

mathiasrw 5y ago

The consumption is a result of the greed to get the reward (fee + per block coins) and is not related to how the blockchain is operating. You can see the carbon footprint from different blockchains on https://coincarboncap.com https://coincarboncap.com

dougmwne 5y ago
But the only useful thing BTC does is transfer money/property from one party to another. Take that away and it's nothing at all. The block rewards are just there to operate the network. That the rewards were allowed to get so valuable that they consume the energy equivalent of Norway is a fatal flaw in the design, no?

neither_color 5y ago

> Satoshi Nakamoto may end up being the most destructive person to have ever lived. I was with you up until this part...this kind of over-dramatization might turn others away. I can think of several genocidal dictators worse than Satoshi Nakamoto. If anything Satoshi is an Alfred Nobel type figure, who invented dynamite. We don't attribute all deaths from explosions to Alfred Nobel, and Satoshi is not guilty of what miners and speculators do.

keymone 5y ago

Energy used for PoW per transaction is a dumb metric. Satoshi actually made the most efficient decentralized money that can ever exist and prevented more externalities in the world than potentially any human ever will.

bb88 5y ago
> Energy used for PoW per transaction is a dumb metric. Cars monitor energy use through MPG. Datacenters monitor it as well. Why should crypto currencies get a pass? > Satoshi actually made the most efficient decentralized money that can ever exist and prevented more externalities in the world than potentially any human ever will. [CITATION NEEDED]
- keymone 5y ago
  > Cars monitor energy use through MPG. Datacenters monitor it as well. Why should crypto currencies get a pass? cars spend energy to move. datacenters spend energy to compute things. bitcoin mining doesn't spend energy to process achieve some TPS, it spends energy to achieve certain level of security, so it's security per energy spent that matters, not energy per transaction. if transactions or number of them are not an input to a bitcoin miner -- if miner will spand the same energy whether it's for 1 or 1 trillion transactions -- then energy per transaction metric is zero signal. > [CITATION NEEDED] no, actually, it's an opinion. current financial system and fiat money cause immense externalities: war, corruption, hunger, crime, etc. bitcoin is an incarnation of money where security is expressed in form of energy spent - you no longer need to involve politics or any other human activities to achieve security and so a large incentive for those simply disappears. bitcoin doesn't solve those externalities, but that specific aspect of money is simply no longer contributing.
  - bb88 5y ago
    > if miner will spand the same energy whether it's for 1 or 1 trillion transactions -- then energy per transaction metric is zero signal. So? A running car consumes gas even when it's idle. My parents used to measure MPG at every tank refill, which was a combination of miles, idle, braking, etc. We can certainly take an average of transactions to get a reasonable number for watts/transaction. > no, actually, it's an opinion. ... which was stated as fact.