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> And a gas war did begin, as soon as the 9 PM ET sale kicked off. 64,219 ETH was burned over the weekend on transaction fees according to Etherscan—that's over

by danans 5y ago

> And a gas war did begin, as soon as the 9 PM ET sale kicked off. 64,219 ETH was burned over the weekend on transaction fees according to Etherscan—that's over $180 million at today's prices, most of which is now gone forever due to Ethereum’s burn. Probably impossible to know, but I wonder how much actual gas (or other fossil fuel) got burned to power this episode.

tofuahdude 5y ago
Impossible to know because this is not how mining works.
- danans 5y ago
  Please explain how it works with respect to energy consumption then? Perhaps there is no way to isolate and characterize the power consumed for this event exactly, but that doesn't mean that one can't characterize the power consumption of crypto. This is already described in terms of energy used per transaction [1]. So the next question is can we characterize events like these similarly, by i.e. the # of transactions or some other descriptive statistics, and multiply that by the source-weighted energy mix of transactions. That's not to suggest that this event's energy consumption is higher than the regular rate, but interesting nonetheless. 1. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
ChrisClark 5y ago
The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day. Miners don't suddenly spin up hundreds more GPUs when the network gets congested. Creating a block costs the exact same energy whether it's full of high fees, low fees, or completely empty. And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses.
- danans 5y ago
  > The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day How much is that? And what percentage of it went toward powering this event vs the value in $ created by it? > And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses. It's not even 1 order of magnitude less. More like 1/2 of bitcoin's energy consumption. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

by danans 5y ago

tofuahdude 5y ago

Impossible to know because this is not how mining works.

danans 5y ago
Please explain how it works with respect to energy consumption then? Perhaps there is no way to isolate and characterize the power consumed for this event exactly, but that doesn't mean that one can't characterize the power consumption of crypto. This is already described in terms of energy used per transaction [1]. So the next question is can we characterize events like these similarly, by i.e. the # of transactions or some other descriptive statistics, and multiply that by the source-weighted energy mix of transactions. That's not to suggest that this event's energy consumption is higher than the regular rate, but interesting nonetheless. 1. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

ChrisClark 5y ago

The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day. Miners don't suddenly spin up hundreds more GPUs when the network gets congested. Creating a block costs the exact same energy whether it's full of high fees, low fees, or completely empty. And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses.

danans 5y ago
> The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day How much is that? And what percentage of it went toward powering this event vs the value in $ created by it? > And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses. It's not even 1 order of magnitude less. More like 1/2 of bitcoin's energy consumption. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/