If there is a more accurate way of calculating it that results in 0.2%, I would love to hear about it.
- Youtube 244 TWh/year
- Gold mining 240 TWh/year
- Bitcoin 200 TWh/year
- Ethereum PoW 112 TWh / year
- Netflix 94 TWh / year
- Gaming 34 TWh / year
- Paypal 0.26 TWh / year
- Ethereum PoS 0.01 TWh / year
Take an inefficient car for instance. There are diminishing returns in its utility after a certain point of energy use. On the other hand, there are no diminishing returns in PoW. The more energy you use, the more money you make.
I guess the more efficient version of the same thing would be the move to using heat pumps.
Not quite sure how this relates to Proof of Work. People don't generally run mining rigs because they want to generate heat. The heat is almost always waste.
I've always wondered if the economics of using CPUs in heaters to do something useful and generate heat would ever work out.
https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/#proof-of-stake-e...
People keep claiming that millions of people rely on it is such a bullshit claim
> with million+ transactions daily
Which is a paltry 11 transactions per second. I think a Raspberry Pi is now capable of the same amazing feat.
> It's using a magnitude less energy now than YouTube or Netflix
And doing orders of magnitudes less while consuming insane amounts of energy.
Had Ethereum tried to move around as much video as Youtube and Netflix are doing, heat death of the universe would happen the next day after the attempt.
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-reversed-a-50-...
Oh.
But hey, at least it's an unregulated, informal, ad-hoc process in Etherium with no justice system or oversight to enforce the rights of the little guy.
and you do know a group of people tried to have the same thing done again a few years ago and it failed right?
Ethereum at this point - with seven years of autonomous operation and no repeats of DAO-like hard forks - has proven to be an immutable and credibly neutral settlement layer.
The 99.999999999% of use cases for Ethereum (or for Blockchains in general) can be easily handled if not by a single Raspberry Pi, but at least by a modern laptop. Because those use cases are currency speculation, buying useless shit, and asset hoarding.
The remaining arguably useful usecases are an exchange of IOUs.
This makes many tools and processes (leveraged financial instruments and automated market makers) available without an intermediate third party that most humans would never know existed, let alone how to use.
They are still in their infancy, the investment in knowledge that is required to use them well remains quite substantial. How many years before a regular person can ditch the bank for their own personal hedge DAO?
I'm afraid you are the one who must be kidding, if you think that internet TV is more important than leveling the financial playing field.
Ah yes. By anyone. Especially those who got in early before the prices skyrocketed and can now enjoy the global financial system of... currency manipulation and hoarding.
> I'm afraid you are the one who must be kidding, if you think that internet TV is more important than leveling the financial playing field.
You must be kidding when you call scams, currency manipulation, hoarding and zero customer protections a "level playing field for a global financial system".
> They are still in their infancy, the investment in knowledge that is required to use them well remains quite substantial.
The only investment in knowledge there was (and there was very little of that) is discovering why existing systems are the way they are and keeping busy reinventing them.
You may have had access to those existing systems (the global financial market) before Ethereum, but many of us did not. Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it against itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two years ago.
I was a 12 year old investor and E-trade told Grandma and Auntie that they would have to sell their Red-Hat stock, back in 2003 or 4, because it had gone down so much in value that it was no longer worth the monthly trade commission to maintain the position open. We bought some stock after IPO, and had bad timing by a few months. If they had known then what we know now, well...
I'd not be here wasting my time talking about re-inventing the global financial system on the internet, believe you me. That was a good investment, bad system and bad timing.
Do you have any idea how exploitative the global financial system is for people who are not "in the know"? It's well over time we reinvent it all. This is awful.
Many you... who?
> Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it against itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two years ago.
That's not "leveling the playing field". It's either "financial education" (because it's something you could always do in "traditional finance"), or "let the suckers come, the more the better" (most of crypto).
> I'd not be here wasting my time talking about re-inventing the global financial system on the internet, believe you me.
Oh, I do believe you. Crypto maximalists never talk about it. They only speak vague trivialities and then disappear.
> Do you have any idea how exploitative the global financial system is for people who are not "in the know"?
Ah yes. Unlike the cryptoscams.
> It's well over time we reinvent it all. This is awful.
Ah yes. Unlike the cryptoscams.
OK. Now we are really splitting hairs, because "education" actually doesn't count as "leveling the playing field." I'm totally done here, you just played yourself.
You go ahead and educate yourself in the traditional exploitative financial system, and I'll continue my education here in the exploitative crypto-financial system. And we shall never talk again. That would be a positive outcome, right?
We're not. I'v directly responding to what you write, and not to hat you think you write.
You started with "leveling the playing field" and continued with "Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it against itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two years ago".
> You go ahead and educate yourself in the traditional exploitative financial system
Ah yes, you continue to use the words you don't fully understand, but since they are emotionally charged, this makes them the right arguments in your mind.
> And we shall never talk again.
As I already said, "Crypto maximalists ... only speak vague trivialities and then disappear."
If you want to engage me in a proper discussion, you can look me up. I've been on the internet using this name since I was 12 years old (and yes educating people, and also getting educated myself.) I'm not going anywhere.
Why don't you explain more about how easily accessible those traditional financial instruments are for normies? I'm interested in that information, can you provide links?
I did try to engage in the discussion. "I'd not be here wasting my time talking", "You go ahead and educate yourself", "we shall never talk again." are hardly a proper response.
> Why don't you explain more about how easily accessible those traditional financial instruments are for normies?
Define "normies" first. Or better still, drop this condescending pejorative.
> I'm interested in that information, can you provide links?
I have no links, as it's a service often provided directly by your bank. Right now I have some money invested in risky assets that in the past two months sank 10% due to the way the world is right now.
There are multiple lists of "best books about investment", so you could start there. You know why? The absolute vast majority of "innovation" and "knowledge" in crypto space falls roughly into:
- scams
- currency speculation which is indistinguishable from Forex trading except that it's running on "smart contracts". Forex trading was huge in some countries (Moldova and Turkey among those I know about) in early-to-mid 2000s. I had friends at university heavily invested in it. It probably still is quite popular (and it's very popular in "defi" which is rarely anything but currency speculation and unsecured loans).
- asset hoarding + speculation. "Buy cheap, hype, hope for the price to go up, sell". Indistinguishable from anything traditional (from stocks to bonds to Ponzi schemes): you buy an asset, wait for the price to go up, sell.
What crypto is busy discovering is why "traditional finance" has all these things in place: KYOC, fraud protection and prevention, reversibility of transactions, deposit insurance, functional courts and laws etc. And is just as busy re-inventing all those, poorly.
Go back and read it. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt now, but you did not. You threw barbs and used the word "scam" as often as you could, and told me I'd be likely disappearing in a few minutes. Then someone showed up to comment on how disappointed they are I didn't really disappear like I promised. Can't win for losing. This is exactly like every crypto discussion on the internet today, it's very frustrating. I hope you know how difficult it is for me to be this patient. (It actually reminds me a whole lot of doing Ruby evangelism in almost the same circles...)
> how easily accessible those traditional financial instruments are
> I have some money invested in risky assets that in the past two months sank 10% due to the way the world is right now
I'm talking about deliverable perpetual futures. If you had seen this coming, you could have done some short-selling to hedge your risks. Price goes up, you deliver and sell for a profit. Price goes down, you still have your asset and can cash out for a profit. Is that a service offered by your bank? Not mine...
But maybe your bank offers it ...maybe only to qualified/accredited investors? How do I get that?
Now perhaps you see what I am getting at? It's not accessible, no matter how many books you read. Go out and get a million dollars today, through some act of God, and you still won't be a qualified investor next week or next year. Or you can wait for SEC approval, and then you can go get them through your broker I guess.
Some people read books, others are not well-served by book learning. I looked for a book that could explain it to me, but ultimately I only learned by getting hosed using these instruments flatly incorrectly until I figured out what I was doing wrong, by using them, and observing the outcomes, then also asking for help. Lovely people answering questions to help others learn. (It was the friends we made along the way!)
Is there some reason the system is the way it is? Yes, I'm sure there is. Does it protect people how it was really intended, or does it actually mean it just remains inaccessible to most people? This is how crypto levels the playing field.
Does that mean you cannot cut yourself when working with the sharp object? No, it definitely is not safe to go alone here. There are a million and one ways to lose all your money, plus a million new ones that weren't possible before. And soon a new technology will come, and everyone who understands the current landscape will know immediately what to do with it, (and everyone who has had their head in the sand will wait for the SEC for guidance, and eventually begrudgingly accept the improvement, maybe, once all the life has been sucked out of it by bureaucrats.)
I did re-read it. That's how I could quote your words.
> You threw barbs and used the word "scam" as often as you could
Because that's what the absolute vast majority of crypto is.
> This is exactly like every crypto discussion on the internet today, it's very frustrating.
Yes. Every crypto discussion on goes like this:
- Crypto claims are refuted or questioned
- Crypto maximalist spouts some grandiose bullshit
- Crypto maximalist gets called out
- Crypto maximalist disappears
I've yet to see you actually address anything I said in my very first comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850112
> I'm talking about deliverable perpetual futures.
It's a nonsensical term (like many other nonsensical terms) that only exists in the crypto space. And only works in the highly volatile market like crypto. This is short-to-medium term currency speculation, and I'm sure there are plenty of services that allow you to do that in "traditional finance". As I'm not interested in currency speculation, I couldn't tell you what they are.
> Now perhaps you see what I am getting at? It's not accessible
You've selected a single service revolving around currency speculation and you call "traditional finance" inaccessible because of that. That... is not what accessibility to financial services means. Or what "levelling the playing field" is.
> Is there some reason the system is the way it is? Yes, I'm sure there is.
You're sure, but at the same time you are completely uninterested to learn why it is that way, and you dismiss anyone telling you why it is the way it is because, let me quote, "it's an awful exploitative global financial system".
> There are a million and one ways to lose all your money, plus a million new ones that weren't possible before.
Indeed. And that makes this "accessible and a level playing field" unlike traditional finance which offers fraud protection, deposit insurance, etc. etc.
> And soon a new technology will come, and everyone who understands the current landscape will know immediately what to do with it
So, the "accessible system" will be accessible to those who understand current landscape, who have already lost money a million ways and cut themselves on sharp corners.
That is neither accessible nor a level playing field.
If you claim that it is "global financial system which can be participated in by anyone", where are the protections for those who "did not have access to existing systems" (I keep quoting you).
I'm a programmer, I earn quite a lot. And I still cannot afford to just go ahead and "lose my money in a million ways" and "cut myself when working with a sharp object". Where's your accessibility, huh?
> and everyone who has had their head in the sand will wait for the SEC for guidance
Ah yes. Instead we can just not wait and lose the money a million and one ways for the sake of.... something.
There's a reason for SEC guidances, but, again, you're entirely unwilling to learn why they exist. Perhaps, you will learn it the hard way.
What is a qualified investor? And why do you have to be one if you want legal access to unregistered securities?
Says the person with such gems as "go educate yourself", "normies" etc.
> you've only quoted from the parts you cherry-picked as you could easily be responsive to them.
Says the person who ignores everything written in every single response and then pretends he's being offended
---
There's a reason you repeated several times you're a big time investor from age 12. That is most likely representative of your actual age.
At this point I've lost all interest in trying to have a conversation with you. Adieu.
The context was "us normies"
I literally just came here today to tell everyone that I learned something, and you ruined it. You raised the bar, it's no longer enough that I learned something, I have to make it accessible for everyone else too, or I am a bad person. Thanks.
That will never happen, since these things, by design, offer none of the guarantees that banks do.
Neither is Ethereum, maybe you'll say, but I didn't come here to argue about that. This is a day to celebrate because the #1 top complaint of all crypto detractors has been addressed by Crypto's second largest collective. Now that is finished we can move onto #2 top complaint, whatever that will be.
I certainly do not imagine, foresee, or desire to live in a world in which people must protect their private keys or forfeit their house to a hacker. But can you really say we aren't headed there now? Is the alternative better, (that you have to trust the bank's security? Are you in the US? Oh god, I have some bad news...)
Acting like scams began in 2008 when Bitcoin was first invented is the ultimate scam. I grew up in NY, we've all been getting scammed our entire lives, by the government too.
> I've had a role to play in removing a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere every week
You're not removing it, you helped create the thing that was putting it there in the first place, and fixed your mistake! It's still there, it's just not getting worse now.
- "Wait until you hear how much Y is more wasteful"
Ok?
Although they built the hell machine in the first place, so maybe better if they would not have ever done anything.
I live in Europe and the measures my county is taking to combat energy shortage are pretty wild like limiting the heating of apartments, indoor swimming pools, reducing street lighting, but nowhere was is stated "banning crypto mining".
Pretty insane how we're just tolerating this massive energy waste just so some people and organizations can have something to speculate on for money.
However in this case with the high cost of electricity in Europe right now, isn't crypto-mining similar to lighting money on fire? I can't imagine it's profitable in many European countries, if any.
Miners sometimes sign long-ish-term contracts for energy.
Nvidia really milked that cash cow.
https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
- Youtube 244 TWh/year
- Gold mining 240 TWh/year
- Bitcoin 200 TWh/year
- Ethereum PoW 112 TWh / year
- Netflix 94 TWh / year
- Gaming 34 TWh / year
- Paypal 0.26 TWh / year
- Ethereum PoS 0.01 TWh / year
The first one was standard pc and the motherboard with gpu looked tiny in it,
I got 3070 recently and it barely fits (with hdd cage still in place), it looks ridiculously big. The card is so big it comes with a special bracket to be mounted below to support its weight.
Those cards are not going down in price any more than they already are.
Also worth mentioning $1,000 in 2000 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $1,719.92 today, it feels like those cards are getting expensive but part of it is cost of inflation.
I’m gonna assume there won’t be some huge shutdown of power plants so this power is still being produced.
The only way production drops is if that takes the price below the point of profitability.
Price is them somewhat affected by this and many other factors.
I was only considering a national grid, at peak consumption hours, where excess power is exported and hence "disappears from view", but of course taking a global view the electricity is just consumed somewhere else.
Still, with the current energy crisis, with prices at all-time highs across at least Europe, I don't know if there is anywhere where power production is not running at close to 100% capacity at peak hours. Right now it is extremely profitable to be a power producer in Europe, and you can sell every kWh you produce thanks to the countries being interconnected.
The regulation capacity you're talking about is on the margin. Certain plants (like most hydro power plants) will adjust their production to keep the frequency stable, but there is certainly no excess production capacity right now.
That's not how it works really. The peak can change - it may literally be influenced by the break time in TV shows and people putting the kettle on at the same time. In the other direction, we may lose capacity due to repairs and unplanned outages. If we ever get close to 100% of production capacity for more than a moment, that's a massive planning issue. Instead we do rolling blackouts.
It’s so wasteful to be using electricity when we could all be playing chess or Yazee instead.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32848104.
I am pointing out with a sarcastic analogy that pre merge and post merge ethereum are not the same thing. Outwardly looking they are both ethereum but the post merge ethereum lacks the triangular incentive structure that pre merge ethereum had.
I am also pointing out the hypocrisy whereby people will happy accelerate climate change for the sake of leisure but get upset when someone else accelerates climate change for the sake of utility.
I am disappointed with your decision to detach this sub thread and any responses that may lead me to challenge my own perspective.
I do however respect that it was done with the intention of an preventing unproductive dialogue.
On a second reading though, it doesn't seem worse than the comment you were replying to, so I'll reattach it.
Btw, your follow-up here is a case of an interesting phenomenon I've noticed many times: people often give a better (i.e. more neutral and explicit) expression of what they originally meant, when explaining it in response to a moderation scolding.
It is as if the original comment presupposed the meaning and just gave us the snark, where the follow-up spells out the actual argument. Usually the actual argument isn't obvious; that is, it's obvious to you (i.e. the original commenter) because you have it in your head already—but it isn't obvious to the rest of us. Since that's the interesting bit, it would be better to include it up front (and then you could drop the snark as well).
I'm not sure if there's any way to actually use this pattern to improve the threads—short of scolding every comment, which would end up becoming background noise soon anyhow—but it's interesting how frequently it shows up.
I guess it could be considered snarky however I was mocking a common perspective (the idea) not the commenter that I was replying to (the person). The GPU shortage during the pandemic pushed a large percentage of the gaming population to despise cryptocurrency. Often they will criticise cryptocurrencies for contributing to climate change without realising the hypocrisy of that position.
If I had to write a rule to discourage comments like mine it would be: "critical replies should quote and address the points of disagreement in their response directly" This would cover indirect criticisms like mine that cause some people to react emotionally. I guess a rule like this might be too strict to enforce though maybe it could only be enforced on the most serious of offenders.
Crypto does nothing. Or you could argue, it 'entertains'. But in a way that is unnecessary (it's a distraction, not entertainment), and in a manner that creates unnecessary energy costs (PoW vs PoS).
For you guys money is a done deal. For a HUGE part of the world, something as basic as money (or even water) is not. Try to be a little bit more empathic.
EDIT:
https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/third_world.htm
>>The term Third World was originally coined in times of the Cold War to distinguish those nations that are neither aligned with the West (NATO) nor with the East, the Communist bloc.
“Third world” was just a grouping of nations that didn’t align themselves with the USA or USSR during the cold war.
Over time labelling a country as “3rd world” become the de facto way of categorising it as a “developing country”.
There are at least a dozen 'very solid' currencies that people anywhere should be able to transact in, notably the USD.
All of which you 'own'.
If there are helpful things they can do, 'digital' currencies, especially USD, (one that is not mess) would be imminently useful.
If you thought the 'petro dollar' was a big thing wait until the 'digital dollar' and entire economies de facto switch to USD.
There are capital controls in place in these countries that make holding foreign currency simultaneously difficult and illegal.
This is why I believe a US CBDC and CBDC wars are highly likely.
A CBDC allows nations to control those nations that use their currency and the increasing it’s use allows the issuing nation to debase the currency to their advantage.
The only problem is distribution of technology but this is only a matter of time.
Your comment is like telling someone poor “just go to work”, or telling people dying of hunger: “you don’t need to die of hunger, you can eat!”.
It might work as a backup option to people who are less lucky. That's the majority of the world. Whether it's a good option depends on a situation.
In any case, it's not for you to judge if it's necessary or not.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanie_Babies
Before you get all worked up about "crypto is better than tulips!", I'm primarily responding to your question by saying that _just because_ people are willing to pay (sometimes exorbitant amounts) for something doesn't imply it has that value.
I prefer to think of value as a function of rarity and utility. I'll skip over rarity but utility can include the possibility of selling something for more than it was purchased at some time in the future.
If someone pays an exorbitant amount for something it has that value to them at the time of purchasing. Whether that value is reflected in the market price or persists over time is something else though. Value is not static. Value is dynamic. You can observe this both personally and in the markets.
I am more and more frustrated with the energy angle of crypto. We live on a technological world that consumes energy, everything has an energy cost. The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant! Why does people complaining about "0.5% of world energy usage" think we're researching fusion energy? So we can stop consuming it?
It's such a populist and uninformed argument that drives me up the wall. We can discuss the pros and cons of PoW and PoS, but using the "it consumes as much as X country" argument is intellectually dishonest and pushes forward a particular agenda. How much energy does porn use? Video games? Advertising? Spam? Space heaters? Surely we could do without them and consume even less energy.
Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal ready to use. [1] Not by how much energy they have saved.
We all hate climate change, let's push for cleaner energy instead of glorifying idiotic energy reduction slogans. If governments were to put a tax on energy generation from fossil fuels, crypto miners will be the first to set up hydro and solar plants to run their GPUs. Because mining makes only sense if you can get cheap energy, otherwise it's unprofitable. But that's a more nuanced and intellectual argument than "Bitcoin warms the planet!" and doesn't fit as nicely on a top-voted comment on a forum.
The issue most people have with Bitcoin is about it's value. It uses tremendous amounts of energy for what most people perceive as little to no tangible return, and the view is that we could use the same energy (and maintain the same "technological advancement" as you put it) for more valuable purposes; things essential to our survival both on an individual level (warmth/cooling, food, shelter) and as a species (accelerating our move to renewables, protected biodiversity, enabling simulations for improvements in medicine and the like).
Your argument seems to be against a fictitious opponent, or one at the extreme end of the normal distribution. Very few if any are campaigning against only reducing energy usage. Most are campaigning for a redistribution of Bitcoins energy consumption, about 0.55% of global production, to accelerate our technological progress.
Minor and probably distant concern. All forms of energy usage have losses, mostly heat. If consumption keeps going up forever, then at some point the accumulated generated heat will become a problem on itself. But let’s solve the more present matters first.
Why? Do you think every additional watt of energy will make us happier? The countries using the most energy per capita are gulf countries like Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE. The population there is 10-20% residents, the rest are quasi-slaves living in awful conditions (hopefully you heard about what they did for the World Cup).
> Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal ready to use.
Again, is the middle-eastern civilization more advanced? Most of them are still monarchies.
We already live in an energy-abundant society. Making more energy will not solve the underlying problems of it.
What did they do? I mean, besides the ridiculous Guardian article claiming unrealistically low death rates among immigrant workers. (discussed on HN earlier at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930117)
> the rest are quasi-slaves living in awful conditions
How would you describe the much worse lives of those people in their countries of origin?
I was born in one of those countries, and personally know people who have made the choice to work in these counties. Do understand that people are not choosing to be quasi slaves because their lives are better as quasi slaves. No, more often it's a choice to create better lives for their families, and sometimes rarely it's a choice by their parents to ship off one out of their seven children to generate income. This quasi slavery is only possible through the insane arbitrage generated by petrodollars, and because we only selectively choose to be morally outraged at human rights violation only when it's done by the villain of the week.
Reminds me of people that were sure the Internet wouldn't go anywhere in the 80s. Technologies don't have to necessarily be useful on day 1 or even 1000 to be eventually successful.
Sun’s mass is 2e30 kg. E=mc^2 gives you max energy. (2e30 * 9e16).
Assume we start with one joule this year. Each year increasing energy output by 5%.
How long will it take till we use-up whole sun?
ln(2e30 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2230 years
How long till we use up whole milky way? (Around 1.15e12 solar masses)
ln(2e30 * 1.15e12 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2799
How long till we use-up whole universe? (10e53 kg)
ln(10e53 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 3348 years
Our potential is not limitless, exponential growth is not sustainable even on universe’s scale. Eventually we will reach hard wall.
2. Crypto heating (mining and poW) is very inefficient use of resource (as in, percentage of planet using crypto vs percent of total energy required for it). Not a smart thing for humanity to do.
3. Energy being limited, makes it shared resource. Crypto heating raises energy prices for others.
You might want to adjust your force sensitivity. The merge doesn't simply GPU mining will stop, simply that the PoS chain is now merged with the PoW chain. You'll still be able to PoW mine with your GPU until they remove PoW fully, which is due to happen sometime around Q3 2022.
Q2: April, May, June
Q3: July, August, September
Q4: October, November, December
Some companies, like Costco, are in their Q1 period right now.
And it reduces the world's energy bill by 0.5%:
https://twitter.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1570305323629527046
I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if a million miners cried out all at once and then were suddenly silenced.