Running Bitcoin uses a small city’s worth of electricity

Re:Running Bitcoin uses a small city’s worth of electricity by kllrnohj on Monday October 02, 2017 @04:17PM (#15387539)

Market cap is a bad metric. A better one would be transactions.

According to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption bitcoin is on track to consume 19 TWh this year. That puts it at .1% of the global power consumption already

NASDAQ does 10 million trades a day, roughly. So if bitcoin scales to just handle NASDAQ alone it would consume ~850 TWh/year, which is 3.5% of the total world's electricity generation (to say nothing of Visa's 150 million transactions a day)

The reason bitcoin isn't currently an enormous threat is because it's basically barely used by comparison. 300,000 trades/day is a tiny number in the world of financial transactions.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Running Bitcoin uses a small city’s worth of electricity by clarkmoody on Monday October 02, 2017 @06:17PM (#15388435)

But that is not how Bitcoin will scale. Rather, transactions will go off-chain.

Edit: mining effort is dominated by difficulty anyway, not throughput.

[ Parent | on HN ]