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> Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatev

by paulgb 5y ago

> Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatever the energy use is, it's provably less than Bitcoin by any metric like transaction volume or market cap, by the simple fact that if you were to scale up Bitcoin's energy use for comparison to the world financial system, it would use magnitudes more energy than humans produce.

drcross 5y ago
The key to your misunderstand here is that the proof of work hashing is decoupled from transaction volume or market cap.
- paulgb 5y ago
  It's not. If the market cap goes up, it's because the price of bitcoin goes up. If the price of bitcoin goes up, the mining reward goes up. If the mining reward goes up, the block reward that incentivizes mining goes up. The mining market is in equilibrium when miners expenses approach the block reward, so mining uses more energy as the market cap goes up.
cogman10 5y ago
The numbers I have seen usually comes from something like this https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 However, it's a terribly bad faith argument. Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because if you had a true apples to apples comparison, you'd end up with kwh of power usage. That's because a ledger is computationally cheap to maintain over a trust network. We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis. And how do we know it's garbage? Because if banks stopped doing their own ledgers and instead did everything through bitcoin, would their power usage drop? Absolutely not. They'd still have branches, ATMs, and data centers running their websites. In fact, some banks do manage BTC. Do those banks have lower power footprints compared to like banks without BTC? Absolutely not.
- drcross 5y ago
  >We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis. You weren't able to send value from one part of the world to another in minutes without an intermediary for a tiny fraction of the transaction amount in the 70's and you still can't do it today without crypto.
  - 8note 5y ago
    You can't per se do it with crypto today either. You go through two intermediaries with crypto. One to turn your chinese currency into crypto, then another to turn the crypto into us currency.
    - drcross 5y ago
      You're assuming fiat onramps are part of the process and dont realise that in the future fiat doesn't exist. How could it?

by paulgb 5y ago

drcross 5y ago

The key to your misunderstand here is that the proof of work hashing is decoupled from transaction volume or market cap.

paulgb 5y ago
It's not. If the market cap goes up, it's because the price of bitcoin goes up. If the price of bitcoin goes up, the mining reward goes up. If the mining reward goes up, the block reward that incentivizes mining goes up. The mining market is in equilibrium when miners expenses approach the block reward, so mining uses more energy as the market cap goes up.

cogman10 5y ago

The numbers I have seen usually comes from something like this https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 However, it's a terribly bad faith argument. Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because if you had a true apples to apples comparison, you'd end up with kwh of power usage. That's because a ledger is computationally cheap to maintain over a trust network. We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis. And how do we know it's garbage? Because if banks stopped doing their own ledgers and instead did everything through bitcoin, would their power usage drop? Absolutely not. They'd still have branches, ATMs, and data centers running their websites. In fact, some banks do manage BTC. Do those banks have lower power footprints compared to like banks without BTC? Absolutely not.

drcross 5y ago
>We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis. You weren't able to send value from one part of the world to another in minutes without an intermediary for a tiny fraction of the transaction amount in the 70's and you still can't do it today without crypto.
- 8note 5y ago
  You can't per se do it with crypto today either. You go through two intermediaries with crypto. One to turn your chinese currency into crypto, then another to turn the crypto into us currency.
  - drcross 5y ago
    You're assuming fiat onramps are part of the process and dont realise that in the future fiat doesn't exist. How could it?