Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be < 1% of energy usage. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

If Bitcoin moved to PoS it would be fundamentally different. It might work for other coins since they aren't as decentralized.

> Instead, proof-of-stake mainly seems less suitable for a decentralized and censorship-resistant global monetary asset, especially when considered along with the issues that I’ll describe in the second half of this article about stablecoins. Proof-of-stake is inherently equity-like rather than money-like, compared to proof-of-work

https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/

> Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be < 1% of energy usage. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

That author doesn't seem to actually understand the scale of financial transactions in the world. Right now, there are about 300,000 Bitcoin transactions per day. The author defines Bitcoin being "wildly successful" as a 20x increase. Right now there are over 1 billion credit card transactions per day alone right now. If Bitcoin grew by 20x it still would be a drop in the bucket of global transactions but using up a relatively huge percentage of the world's energy compared to it's share of financial transactions. The author also justifies bitcoins energy usage by saying it's similar to Google's. But Google serves billions of people everyday and Bitcoin is used by a very small subset of people.

The average US adult does 2.3 financial transactions per day.

The all time high number of bitcoin network transactions in a 24h period is a bit less than 500k.

The busiest day for Bitcoin usage worldwide is roughly equivalent to the population of Modesto, CA.

Blockchain occupies so much of the conversation and generates such incredible amounts of hype very few people truly understand just how insignificant it is in terms of not only the global financial system but also the internet. As you say billions of users and billions of transactions.

It's almost as though people forget these networks are completely public and open - adoption numbers for any chain are a blockchain explorer away.

Don't forget about the Lightning Network

It's very difficult to determine transactions, addresses, etc on LN. I've searched far and wide I can't come up with accurate usage.

If you have suggestions for where to look I'd love to check it out!

> The all time high number of bitcoin network transactions in a 24h period is a bit less than 500k

…on chain aka “layer 1”

The L2s and high transaction rate chains don't look much better.

Energy usage is only loosely correlated with transaction volume, most of the energy goes towards securing the network.

She does write about this topic as well, it is worth reading the full article. Bitcoin can never be used directly for all the world's financial transactions since it is not capable of that throughput. But those transactions can use things like the Lightning Network that is built on top of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is useful as a final settlement layer, more like how banks use Fedwire today.

That is assuming it scales linearly, which is not necessarily true. It would only be true if the value of BTC went up such that more miners were incentivized to join the system. In BTC, there isn't a 1:1 direct correlation between energy spent and transactions processed.

1% of ALL energy generated just to operate a part of the world economy is a massive amount though...

food waste generates 60x more emissions than Bitcoin, yet nobody is freaking out about that, which makes me think people are just riding the ESG bandwagon

There's a lot of shit wrong with this world, we don't need to actively add to it, especially since we know how to do it better.

Food is literally finitely more important though

Bitcoin uses less energy than Gold Mining and the Banking System https://twitter.com/topimp21/status/1542863870552936448

"Bitcoin uses 2-56 times less energy than the fiat system" https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-environmental-de...

Bitcoin also processes over a 10,000 times less transactions than the fiat system

Yeah it also uses less energy per year then the sun... what a comparison...

Gold mining? What does gold mining have to do with the financial system in 2022? It's funny how Bitcoin's "goldbug" roots crop up from time to time in these discussions.

It also processes several orders of magnitude less transactions, and does so much slower (and at a higher cost). Please stop posting misleading claims.

What I posted isn't mutually exclusive with the parent comment.

The lightning network on top of Bitcoin scales the number of transactions.

Please stop placing claims where I didn't make any.

Even if the 0.1% figure is correct, I find it a lot of energy (and growing) for something found useful by so few. Reducing it to a percentage and saying it's ok because it's within a rounding error is like taking the entire population of New York City (8.38 million), killing them all, and saying it doesn't matter because it's "literally a rounding error of global population (0.1%)".

Yes it would need a hard fork - but Bitcoin community is notoriously resistant to change, so it probably would not happen for some years or decades.

It's actually a soft fork to change the consensus method believe it or not, even changing to a new proof of work scheme is completely backwards compatible. It's not a good idea and it's sort of ridiculous, but it is technically doable. If you felt inclined, we could change the transaction format, switch the scripting language to x86 assembly, issue new currencies- all in a soft fork.

How is it backwards compatible? Clients cannot continue to secure the protocol by hash mining after switching the protocol from PoW to PoS. Bitcoin moving to PoS would probably lead to a hard fork and split - two protocols, one where some group want to stay on the PoW fork, and another where some group want to migrate to the new PoS fork.

You define a consensus rule in NewStakeChain that it must include within it a valid block for OldChain that contains no transactions, or otherwise causes damage to the network by making it unusable such as a reorganization proof. Once the OldChain network has been destroyed by the new one, the consensus rule can be relaxed and there no longer needs to be POW completed by anybody.

This specific example works and is economically rational because miners could make a PoW block and get its reward, or they could make the no transaction attack block and get its reward, plus the reward on NewStakeChain for submitting the proof.

That doesn't work as it would still require PoW to "include within it a valid block for OldChain". Any change to proof of work requires a hard fork.

Nobody would be mining OldChain so it's difficulty would be irrelevantly close to zero, you'd just just drop the requirement for POW down to something effectively gone. I said it's contrived as anything, but it's all technically possible if you mess with the incentives and intentionally create really perverse systems. That's the messiest of them though, changing the transaction format, script language, issuing new coins or whatever is pretty clean in comparison.

> Nobody would be mining OldChain so it's difficulty would be irrelevantly close to zero, you'd just just drop the requirement for POW down to something effectively gone.

Why would nobody be mining OldChain? You can't remove the block reward or change the difficulty without a hard fork. PoW miners would still decide which blocks are mined and reap the rewards (block reward and transaction fees). You haven't actually proposed a solution that wouldn't require a hard fork.

You can remove the block reward as a soft fork, the consensus rule for Bitcoin and its derivatives is a maximum. Even if it wasn't, you can soft fork in a rule that the block reward should be spent to somewhere invalid, or paid to a particular person.

That doesn't work, unless 100% of miners accept your rule change forever (aka impossible). It would only take a single miner to keep mining using the old rules and this miner would reap the block reward / transaction fees. An old Bitcoin client would follow the chain created by this miner, wouldn't it?

Yep - users have to actively decide to use a new Bitcoin client. Users who are against PoS would just not upgrade to the new client, or would fork it.

> governments allowing PoW

Is there any precedent for this? Have governments ever ruled on how people can use their computational power?

Ignoring your actual question; do you think it's reasonable that we don't introduce new societal rules as technology progresses?

> Is there any precedent for this? Have governments ever ruled on how people can use their computational power?

Yes, they have. For instance, the DMCA is a USA law which, among other things, forbids people in the USA from using their computational power to circumvent an access control system (for instance, by brute forcing a cryptographic key) which happens to be preventing access to a copyrighted file. An older example is that encryption within France used to be severely restricted (quoting from https://www.theregister.com/1999/01/15/france_to_end_severe_... which is from before the current laws: "Until 1996 anyone wishing to encrypt any document had to first receive an official sanction or risk fines from F6000 to F500,000 ($1000 to $89,300) and a 2-6 month jail term. Right now, apart from a handful of exemptions, any unauthorised use of encryption software is illegal. Encryption software can be used by anyone, but only if it's very easy to break.")

More generally, governments have banned inefficient light bulbs, appliances, and cars. Banning PoW ASICs would be no different. PoW on GPUs would be harder to ban.

> How would Bitcoin ever move over to PoS like this? Would it just be a Bitcoin hard fork?

I believe it would be possible for Bitcoin to migrate to proof of stake with a soft fork, similar to how they migrated to SegWit. A majority of nodes (both non-miner full nodes and miners) would have to upgrade to a version which rejects blocks which do not contain a proof of stake together with the current proof of work; non-upgraded nodes would ignore the proof of stake but would still accept the blocks as valid since the proof of work is valid (this is the key difference between a soft fork and a hard fork; on a hard fork, non-upgraded notes would reject the new chain). And to get rid of the proof of work, the block intervals would have to be tweaked to make the network appear to be running slow (for instance, making every block take one minute longer, either on reality or through clever manipulation of the block timestamps), so that the difficulty adjustment gradually reduces the difficulty, until the (now vestigial) proof of work becomes trivial to compute.

PS: shameless plug, but sharing this since you asked.

The Doge Protocol project will move Bitcoin to proof-of-stake and also will make it quantum resistant.

The goal is to multi-fork Bitcoin+Ethereum+Dogecoin into one blockchain, that uses PoS consensus and is quantum resistant.

0https://dogeprotocol.org/whitepapers/Doge-Protocol-Blockchai...