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> The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bec

> The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB. Proof of stake incentivizes capital directly. Proof of work incentivizes capital via the ability to find prime numbers, which limits you to people who are willing to spend $1000s to millions of dollars to do it efficiently. Limiting the validators like that drives up costs massively. > Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. Having an economic incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead using it for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative. No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited. Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.

majinuub 4y ago
> Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB. Its incredibly fallacious to measure the cost of electricity per transaction on Bitcoin. Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power. You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity. Measuring the cost of electricity per transaction is like measuring the amount of energy bank vaults and the US army use per dollar transaction. Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction. > No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited. > Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat. One, value and usefulness is subjective. Because something is "useless" for someone like you doesn't mean its useless to others. I, and many people around the world, find Bitcoin to be incredibly useful and worth the electricity. Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already. They don't because trapping and transporting the methane would lose them money. Its an industry standard to simply release or burn the methane instead. So Bitcoin IS useful in that respect.
- hwillis 4y ago
  > Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power. It has been steady around 1500 tx/block for years. > You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity. I'm not. That's a completely insane amount of money to pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary. > Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction. They don't have to. All those techniques are equally applicable to POW, but POW doesn't spend $18 million daily on electricity to do it. > Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already. Oil and gas companies sell oil and gas, not electricity. Bitcoin miners are not running methane gas turbines. Electricity companies are.
  - ashwagary 4y ago
    >>It has been steady around 1500 tx/block for years. >>That's a completely insane amount of money to pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary. You cant know exactly how many transactions are processed per bitcoin block. The introduction of the lightning network and other 2nd layers mean any one of the ~1500txs per block could in reality be a batch of a 1,000,000 or more transactions being settled. There could easily be 15,000,000,000,000,000 txs per block, think about what that does to any $/tx calculation. Bitcoin is cheaper than visa because it is designed to process infinite transactions for a fixed security cost.
    - nrb 4y ago
      Bitcoin is cheaper than visa because you have zero consumer protections.
- ryder9 4y ago
  https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
Karunamon 4y ago
Let's add up the carbon footprint of the traditional financial ecosystem, in whole. I think once all the externalities are factored in (including things like minting and handling physical cash and coin), doing it all on a computer makes more sense even if POW is energy intensive. Converting energy into economic value is the opposite of waste. That is what mining does.
- hwillis 4y ago
  > I think once all the externalities are factored in, doing it all on a computer makes more sense even if POW is energy intensive. No, it's not even close. Bitcoin currently uses as much electricity as 31 million US residents. One transaction uses more than two months of average residential usage. > (including things like minting and handling physical cash and coin) Why would you include that? Do you think people won't want to carry money? Do you think bitcoin makes cards, POS processors, and cash obsolete? Do physical wallets not take energy to make and run? Regardless, the amount of energy used to make and use physical money is very small: 1. coins are irrelevant; the most expensive coins are cents, which cost about a cent to make. The total amount of coins made is much smaller than the amount of paper dollars made, so the value of energy used is small compared to the total cash made. 2. The US spends 1 billion annually to mint currency. Bitcoin spends 6.5 billion USD on electricity directly.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    Transactions do not have an energy cost unto themselves, blocks do. If the entire world were to stop sending Bitcoin transactions for one hour, it would make almost no difference in the power consumption of the world's miners. Roughly 7 to 10 empty blocks would be produced. The mining process provides network security all on its own, transactions or no transactions. >Why would you include that? Because I said "all externalities". Bitcoin competes with the traditional financial system, including all the people and infrastructure involved in cash handling. That includes not just minting, but distributing it, collecting it, counting it, securing it, and so forth. And that is a cost borne not just by the United States federal government, but every government with physical currency and every bank on the planet. The idea that doing all this with physical objects is less power consuming than doing it with data is ridiculous. If you want to make an honest apples to apples comparison, you include everything. Mining power usage is the single largest driver of bitcoin energy footprint granted, but it has a lot less other stuff attached.
mrb 4y ago
«Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity.» A common misconception. Only a fraction (about 1% at the moment) of Bitcoin's electricity consumption is derived from transactions, because transaction fees account for only about 1% of miners revenues. The average transaction fee is about $1 at the moment, so a transaction "costs" only $1 in electricity because it provides $1 of extra revenue to miners who can subsequently spend it on opex (electricity).
- MayeulC 4y ago
  I haven't computed it, but you need to take into account the energy it takes to mine a block and the number of transactions in that block. The transaction fee is irrelevant, as the fees being paid were mined in the past and already "paid for" with electicity. In the end, transactions drive the chain forward. You don't need (a lot of?) them to continue mining, but they are the only "useful" part of the blockchain. I have no idea if bitcoin operates at max capacity, but I think it does. If so, I think it's perfectly fair to attach mining energy use to transactions.
  - mrb 4y ago
    «I haven't computed it, but you need to take into account the energy it takes to mine a block» No, because the energy consumption is the same regardless if a block contains zero or a thousand transactions. Therefore it is misleading to attribute mining energy as the "cost" of transactions. And Bitcoin doesn't operate at max capacity: its lightning network is very under-used at the moment. As to the transaction fee, it is relevant: even though it was already "paid for", it is being redistributed to miners again, therefore drives energy consumption further up than if it was not being redistributed.
    - Zaskoda 4y ago
      Also worth considering: Proof of Transfer consensus mechanisms like Stacks allow entire networks to run in paralleled with Bitcoin by piggybacking on Bitcoin's consensus mechanism. That's a whole big pile of transactions happening that go entirely unaccounted for by folks who just count the number of transactions in a block.
brianobush 4y ago
Incorrect assumption: miners use energy regardless of the number of transactions going through.
Feeble 4y ago
The energy is not used to handle the transactions, the energy is used to secure the network. > Instead of being used for something useful Bitcoin uses less energy than YouTube. Wether you think having a decentralized, global monetary system that gives everyone an opportunity to own sound money that the government cannot take away is more or less useful than YouTube is of course something everyone is entitled to have an opinion on. It might be that you are correct, it is too early to tell, but you are no the final judge of what is useful in the world or not, so this quote is just your personal opinion and nothing more.
- upwardbound 4y ago
  > Bitcoin uses less energy than YouTube I believe this is totally wrong - I think Bitcoin uses significantly more than YouTube. Where did you get your numbers? The 2020 Google Environmental Report [1] lists the total energy consumption of all Google/Alphabet data centers as ~12.2 TWh/year in 2019 and growing at about 2 TWh/year. (See page 32.) So in 2022 the approximate usage for all Google/Alphabet properties, not just YouTube, would be about 18.2 TWh. Meanwhile, Statista estimates Bitcoin as consuming about 177 TWh/year [2]. So this means Bitcoin consumes about 10x as much as not just YouTube but all Google/Alphabet data centers combined! There are some urban legends about YouTube using much more energy than it does; some of those urban legends are refuted here: [3] [1] https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2020-environmental-report.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2020-e... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin... [3] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str...
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  Whether Bitcoin uses less energy today than YouTube is immaterial. (As is whether Bitcoin counts as "sound money", which I'll leave to the side.) What's important is the energy use per transaction, the total of which -- if scaled up to match what's handled by traditional banking -- would be absolutely staggering. My lifestyle of keeping my high-end PC running all the time, cranking the AC down to 68, turning all the lights on, and so on, would of course use less energy than YouTube. But if everyone behaved as I do it'd be a bad thing (don't tell Kant).

majinuub 4y ago

> Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB. Its incredibly fallacious to measure the cost of electricity per transaction on Bitcoin. Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power. You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity. Measuring the cost of electricity per transaction is like measuring the amount of energy bank vaults and the US army use per dollar transaction. Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction. > No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited. > Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat. One, value and usefulness is subjective. Because something is "useless" for someone like you doesn't mean its useless to others. I, and many people around the world, find Bitcoin to be incredibly useful and worth the electricity. Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already. They don't because trapping and transporting the methane would lose them money. Its an industry standard to simply release or burn the methane instead. So Bitcoin IS useful in that respect.

hwillis 4y ago
> Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power. It has been steady around 1500 tx/block for years. > You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity. I'm not. That's a completely insane amount of money to pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary. > Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction. They don't have to. All those techniques are equally applicable to POW, but POW doesn't spend $18 million daily on electricity to do it. > Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already. Oil and gas companies sell oil and gas, not electricity. Bitcoin miners are not running methane gas turbines. Electricity companies are.
- ashwagary 4y ago
  >>It has been steady around 1500 tx/block for years. >>That's a completely insane amount of money to pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary. You cant know exactly how many transactions are processed per bitcoin block. The introduction of the lightning network and other 2nd layers mean any one of the ~1500txs per block could in reality be a batch of a 1,000,000 or more transactions being settled. There could easily be 15,000,000,000,000,000 txs per block, think about what that does to any $/tx calculation. Bitcoin is cheaper than visa because it is designed to process infinite transactions for a fixed security cost.
  - nrb 4y ago
    Bitcoin is cheaper than visa because you have zero consumer protections.
ryder9 4y ago
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...

Karunamon 4y ago

Let's add up the carbon footprint of the traditional financial ecosystem, in whole. I think once all the externalities are factored in (including things like minting and handling physical cash and coin), doing it all on a computer makes more sense even if POW is energy intensive. Converting energy into economic value is the opposite of waste. That is what mining does.

hwillis 4y ago
> I think once all the externalities are factored in, doing it all on a computer makes more sense even if POW is energy intensive. No, it's not even close. Bitcoin currently uses as much electricity as 31 million US residents. One transaction uses more than two months of average residential usage. > (including things like minting and handling physical cash and coin) Why would you include that? Do you think people won't want to carry money? Do you think bitcoin makes cards, POS processors, and cash obsolete? Do physical wallets not take energy to make and run? Regardless, the amount of energy used to make and use physical money is very small: 1. coins are irrelevant; the most expensive coins are cents, which cost about a cent to make. The total amount of coins made is much smaller than the amount of paper dollars made, so the value of energy used is small compared to the total cash made. 2. The US spends 1 billion annually to mint currency. Bitcoin spends 6.5 billion USD on electricity directly.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  Transactions do not have an energy cost unto themselves, blocks do. If the entire world were to stop sending Bitcoin transactions for one hour, it would make almost no difference in the power consumption of the world's miners. Roughly 7 to 10 empty blocks would be produced. The mining process provides network security all on its own, transactions or no transactions. >Why would you include that? Because I said "all externalities". Bitcoin competes with the traditional financial system, including all the people and infrastructure involved in cash handling. That includes not just minting, but distributing it, collecting it, counting it, securing it, and so forth. And that is a cost borne not just by the United States federal government, but every government with physical currency and every bank on the planet. The idea that doing all this with physical objects is less power consuming than doing it with data is ridiculous. If you want to make an honest apples to apples comparison, you include everything. Mining power usage is the single largest driver of bitcoin energy footprint granted, but it has a lot less other stuff attached.

mrb 4y ago

«Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity.» A common misconception. Only a fraction (about 1% at the moment) of Bitcoin's electricity consumption is derived from transactions, because transaction fees account for only about 1% of miners revenues. The average transaction fee is about $1 at the moment, so a transaction "costs" only $1 in electricity because it provides $1 of extra revenue to miners who can subsequently spend it on opex (electricity).

MayeulC 4y ago
I haven't computed it, but you need to take into account the energy it takes to mine a block and the number of transactions in that block. The transaction fee is irrelevant, as the fees being paid were mined in the past and already "paid for" with electicity. In the end, transactions drive the chain forward. You don't need (a lot of?) them to continue mining, but they are the only "useful" part of the blockchain. I have no idea if bitcoin operates at max capacity, but I think it does. If so, I think it's perfectly fair to attach mining energy use to transactions.
- mrb 4y ago
  «I haven't computed it, but you need to take into account the energy it takes to mine a block» No, because the energy consumption is the same regardless if a block contains zero or a thousand transactions. Therefore it is misleading to attribute mining energy as the "cost" of transactions. And Bitcoin doesn't operate at max capacity: its lightning network is very under-used at the moment. As to the transaction fee, it is relevant: even though it was already "paid for", it is being redistributed to miners again, therefore drives energy consumption further up than if it was not being redistributed.
  - Zaskoda 4y ago
    Also worth considering: Proof of Transfer consensus mechanisms like Stacks allow entire networks to run in paralleled with Bitcoin by piggybacking on Bitcoin's consensus mechanism. That's a whole big pile of transactions happening that go entirely unaccounted for by folks who just count the number of transactions in a block.

brianobush 4y ago

Incorrect assumption: miners use energy regardless of the number of transactions going through.

Feeble 4y ago

The energy is not used to handle the transactions, the energy is used to secure the network. > Instead of being used for something useful Bitcoin uses less energy than YouTube. Wether you think having a decentralized, global monetary system that gives everyone an opportunity to own sound money that the government cannot take away is more or less useful than YouTube is of course something everyone is entitled to have an opinion on. It might be that you are correct, it is too early to tell, but you are no the final judge of what is useful in the world or not, so this quote is just your personal opinion and nothing more.

upwardbound 4y ago
> Bitcoin uses less energy than YouTube I believe this is totally wrong - I think Bitcoin uses significantly more than YouTube. Where did you get your numbers? The 2020 Google Environmental Report [1] lists the total energy consumption of all Google/Alphabet data centers as ~12.2 TWh/year in 2019 and growing at about 2 TWh/year. (See page 32.) So in 2022 the approximate usage for all Google/Alphabet properties, not just YouTube, would be about 18.2 TWh. Meanwhile, Statista estimates Bitcoin as consuming about 177 TWh/year [2]. So this means Bitcoin consumes about 10x as much as not just YouTube but all Google/Alphabet data centers combined! There are some urban legends about YouTube using much more energy than it does; some of those urban legends are refuted here: [3] [1] https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2020-environmental-report.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2020-e... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin... [3] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str...
mrtranscendence 4y ago
Whether Bitcoin uses less energy today than YouTube is immaterial. (As is whether Bitcoin counts as "sound money", which I'll leave to the side.) What's important is the energy use per transaction, the total of which -- if scaled up to match what's handled by traditional banking -- would be absolutely staggering. My lifestyle of keeping my high-end PC running all the time, cranking the AC down to 68, turning all the lights on, and so on, would of course use less energy than YouTube. But if everyone behaved as I do it'd be a bad thing (don't tell Kant).