Why is everyone obsessed with bitcoin electricity consumption? I wonder how much energy is required by the banking system to operate(imagine those thousands of people burning gas in cars to get to their daily work at bank). Humanity spends vast amount of energy on much more useless stuff with just entertainment value(World football cup, all those fans coming from different parts of world in the jets, logistics...)
Also, energy is a resource like any other and it's generation and price is subject to supply/demand. The fact, that is is used on mining bitcoins just indicate, that people value bitcoin technology more than something else they would spend the electricity on.
People care because Bitcoin is, by design, massively wasteful. The banking system's energy use can be curtailed with green tech. Bitcoin's entire ledger is powered by proof of work, which by definition requires computers to grind at maximum power calculating millions of hashes. And the difficulty goes up if more people are mining. And on top of that, the Bitcoin network is extremely slow and several orders of magnitude less efficient than other banking systems in terms of transactions per second.
Everyone is obsessed because we're wasting damn near 1% of the world's energy so nerds can speculate on Dunning-Krugerrands and it's not doing anyone any favours in the long run.
Still does not explain how the current banking industry along with others, such as the entertainment industry is not "massively wasteful" by design. Sure, maybe a small portion of the banking system's energy can be curtailed with green tech, but what about the 24 hour ATM, the light posts at the banks, the AC units in each branch, the massive skyscrapers in which all of the banks corporate offices operate? and the energy required to build all of that infrastructure? As stated already, there are countless number of things that "waste energy", and in some cases "by design". Check out "b.s. jobs" on wikipedia.
a) The entertainment industry is irrelevant to the discussion of Bitcoin vs traditional banking systems. It's a red herring. Cut it out.
b) Bitcoin is using an amount of electricity comparable to the country of Ireland. The banking system might use that much power, but they're doing millions of card transactions a minute - there's actual returns and actual business being done. And literally everything you described is an externality that costs the system money - ATMs exist because they're cheaper than human tellers, the lightposts can use more energy-efficient bulbs, etc etc. None of these are explicitly designed to burn power.
On the other hand, if you add mining power to the pool, it makes it harder to get hashes, using more power. Bitcoin is regressive in its power usages. The traditional system does not actively set out to use more power. While due to inertia it may not make active strides to reduce it, but that's not the point here. It's not by design like Bitcoin is.
The point is, that waste is all upkeep. Something the system tries to minimize, as it bleeds money through it. If ATMs can be made more efficient, the system saves money. In Bitcoin, OTOH, waste is not upkeep but a feature, which the system tries to maximize.
How exactly the system is trying to maximize waste?
In fact, miners did more progress on efficiency in terms of pure hashrate/watt with a million time improvement in past 10 years, than banking industry ever.
It is demand, that is driving the energy usage, not the system on its own. I agree with the person above, that it is basically justified by increasing consumption of the service.
:D how many hours of an ATM running do you think it takes to get to 300kW or 1 single bitcoin transaction?
I’m going to guess that a single ATM might not hit 300kW in a year.
Your sense is scale is way wrong.
Actually most municipalities treat electricity like they treat water, more akin to a public utility. The actual cost isn't necessarily related to supply/demand.
Normally this isn't a big deal as historically the electricity use either was minor (homes) or lead to economic growth (businesses) similarly most businesses would make specific deals if they had heavy use.
Now Bitcoin threw a curve ball by allowing electricity -> money in a system not designed to make the cost of electricity support it.
Yes the fundamental idea of Bitcoin is great but the current external cost to support the "investment market" is quite high.
Except by design, bitcoin miners are incentivized to consume more energy the higher the price goes. If they don't consume as much energy as they possibly can, their mining pool will have less of a chance to get that sweet, sweet block reward (....to convert back into an actual currency in order to, you know, pay their bills and stuff....)
> Also, lightning network will allow for thousand times more transactions with same energy cost.
If the solution to bitcoin's horrific energy consumption is to not use bitcoin.... what is the point of bitcoin?
> The fact, that is is used on mining bitcoins just indicate, that people value bitcoin technology more than something else they would spend the electricity on.
It is valued as a speculative asset and an excellent way to launder ill-gotten money. It's only use is for scams. Bitcoin generates a massive negative externality in that it drives up the costs of electricity for all the people who are doing actual productive things with it.
The whole thing is a abhorrent waste and supporters like yourself should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves for defending it (using some of the most paper-thin arguments, I might add...).
The lightning network IS Bitcoin, just as using HTTP over TCP is using TCP.
> The whole thing is a abhorrent waste and supporters like yourself should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves for defending it.
It's the only way to survive economically in repressive states.
So its got a decentralized, distributed public ledger recording every transaction made? Since when did that happen?
> It's the only way to survive economically in repressive states.
LOL. No. You use USD.... No citizens in economically repressive states are gonna flip to bitcoin. Not when it gets 4 transactions per second tops. Not when you have to purchase your currency from early adopters in order to participate. Not when you can lose your entire savings by simply exposing your computer to the internet.
Sorry man. You fell for a scam.
No, that's not how it works. Participants can go on-chain with their transactions only if needed.
> LOL. No. You use USD.... No citizens in economically repressive states are gonna flip to bitcoin
Repressive states make it difficult to get USD.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/04/03/...
> Not when it gets 4 transactions per second tops.
Again, read up on second-layer scaling.
> Not when you have to purchase your currency from early adopters in order to participate.
Why would that be a problem? Also you can mine it yourself.
> Not when you can lose your entire savings by simply exposing your computer to the internet.
There are may solutions for storing your deposits securely, hardware wallets being one.
> Sorry man. You fell for a scam.
Everybody who tells me that knows very little about Bitcoin
As in "not using the blockchain" otherwise known as "not using bitcoin".
Lightning Network wouldn't even need to exist if Bitcoin was actually good at what it did.
Speaking of, when will I be able to use LN to purchase a cup of coffee from Starbucks?
> Also you can mine it yourself.
Yes. By "mine it yourself" you mean "burn more money on electric and hardware than the value of the bitcoin mined"? Cause last I checked the days of individuals being able to profitably mine bitcoin at home are long gone.
> There are may solutions for storing your deposits securely, hardware wallets being one.
So in addition to buying their Bitcoin from early adopters, these poor repressed people will also need to purchase an expensive (for them) hardware wallet and then learn to use it? What if that hardware wallet gets lost or stolen? What if they forget the key? What if the owner passes on and the children need to access the wealth? How does inheritance work?
> Everybody who tells me that knows very little about Bitcoin
Bitcoin users are an intersection of people who don't understand finance, economics, politics, computer science, monetary policy, legislation, regulation, socioeconomics, math, or seemingly life itself.... It's borderline willful ignorance.
You don't understand Bitcoin
> Cause last I checked the days of individuals being able to profitably mine bitcoin at home are long gone.
You don't understand Bitcoin https://powercompare.co.uk/bitcoin-electricity-cost/
> What if that hardware wallet gets lost or stolen? What if they forget the key?
You don't understand Bitcoin or the concept of backups
There are some people who still support large-scale adoption of PoW coins, though, and you are right that they're generally willfully ignorant of the environmental concerns. The only case I can see for those is something that aims for true trustlessness and anonymity like Monero, since most PoS methods make compromises around that.
EDIT: I stand corrected. Ethereum is still laying the groundwork for a switch from PoW to PoS and hasn't yet transitioned.
The goal is to move entirely to PoS, but things take time.
Does the cost increase in proportion to chain length?
Transactions don't consume energy. This is the biggest misunderstanding floating around here. The transaction rate could halve or double tomorrow without affecting the energy consumption of miners. Furthermore, it's a misleading statement because it implies Bitcoin's utility is equated solely to its transaction rate. The social benefits we extract from Bitcoin are much more than just a raw transaction processing system. For example:
- Some Bitcoin users have become so wealthy that they are donating millions to charities, like the Pineapple Fund (https://pineapplefund.org/).
- The mining industry is pushing so hard for low electricity prices that it is starting to accelerate the research & development of renewables (which are now the cheapest source of energy), helping the industry as a whole move away from fossil fuels.
- A Venezuelan can escape the high inflation rate of his national currency by simply holding bitcoins (whether he withdraws/transacts from his "bitcoin savings" once or ten times a month doesn't really change the utility of the system for him)
None of these points are taken into account if one simply looks at the transaction rate to determine whether Bitcoin's energy use is worth it or not.
Are you serious? Like, that’s a serious argument? Cartel bosses donate money... same thing right?
>Transactions don't consume energy. This is the biggest misunderstanding floating around here.
The misunderstanding is that you think there is a difference between transaction number and miner power. We don’t care. It’s the same thing because what we’re looking at is total power used (massive) and dividing it by a transaction number which is effective output which is transactions.
Bitcoin is a resource waste, you’re defending it in part because “some people have donated to charity. Good luck with that.
No. The "output" of Bitcoin is bigger than that. You focus on a single aspect of the system (processing transaction) and disregard everything else. You fail to look at the big picture, at what the system indirectly creates outside of transactions (helping people escape inflation, and yes redistributing wealth that is donated to charities, etc.) The point is: none of these benefits would exist if Bitcoin/cryptos didn't exist.
Your argument is like saying that "cars are a waste" because one aspect of their operation (engines losing energy as heat) is waste.
What the fuck is the point of bitcoin if the majority of all transactions are off-chain?
LOL. No transitions get denominated in BTC. Cyrpto is way to volatile for that. Anybody sane prices their stuff in USD or some other currency.
Whether bitcoiners admit it or not, the fiat value of their internet tokens are the only thing they care about. What is their BTC worth and when can they go buy their lambo (using fiat, of course...)
Makes me wonder - what is your definition of a transaction?
Traditionally a transaction is something which has been committed to the book or ledger. Transactions cannot exist out in the wild without being on the books. And the ledger creation in bitcoin doesn't happen until a block is mined. Block mining consumes energy. And hence, transactions consume energy too.
Couldn't you say that about anything that ever profited anyone?
> The mining industry is pushing so hard for low electricity prices
Does it have enough money/influence to make a difference here? I don't know, I'm just asking.
> A Venezuelan can escape the high inflation rate of his national currency by simply holding bitcoins
Wouldn't a real-world currency like $ work here too? What does Bitcoin add?
But I think you weren't interested in an answer like that, right? You wanted to criticise bitcoin, fairly or not.
Regarding waste of electricity? Does war count?
Prior to electricity, moving and protecting gold was a major industry.
Ive read about green solutions to this problem. You'd probably still have miners, but it seems the world is moving to offchain for most transactions.
So your solution the ills of Satoshi's Glorious Bitcoin is to.... wait for it.... not use Bitcoin?
What kind of headspace are you bitcoin shysters in where any of this makes sense? I don't understand it.
They have opinions on transactions because transactions fees make the lottery more lucrative is all (there exist evangelism in miners but they are the minority)
Perhaps it's easier to use Joule instead of kWh.
A the cost of a single bitcoin transaction (~300kW) could power a use home for more than a week [1]. How is this even remotely defensible by people who participates in coins and also make posts about climate change? Seems very hypocritical to me, because I’m pretty sure it’s not those “filthy denier types” that are wrapped up in the coin game.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3