You stopped reading because you don't like what they had to say. Even mining groups who are incentivized to provide the rosiest picture are within the ballpark.
Current hash rate is 245.32M TH/s. An AntMiner S19 Pro consumes 29.7 J/TH, so assuming they're all S19s (a big if) we'd be consuming 7226MJ/s or 2007.5kWh/s. That's 64TWh/yr.
So your absolute best case is 1/2 of the Cambridge number. Which is exactly what they list as the "minimum" number.
As soon as we start factoring in things inefficiency and losses along the way - and the fact not everyone has an S19 Pro - we start to get closer and closer to that flagship number.
But let's make no mistake - even the minimum number is a staggering, mind-boggling disaster of unprecedented scale.
> At the end of the day, read this: https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
Lyn is a zealot and a shill, and her arguments on basically any topic are trivially wrong. I would strongly recommend against trusting anything on that blog and instead look for different sources.
If you want to listen to someone interesting who isn't just performing mental cartwheels to defend the indefensible, listen to Boaz Sobrado, Mario Gibney from Ledn, Lily Francus, Josh Cincinnati, etc.
Lyn is just rewarmed long-form talking points from r/Bitcoin presented uncritically. There’s interesting people in the space but Lyn is more of a millennial William DeVane shilling gold on Fox at 2am with a substack.
"What's to say? Lyn is a zealot and will go to any lengths to justify her positions. She's clearly intelligent and completely uninterested in objectivity. She's like if Saylor were intelligent."
You found my criticisms insufficient, so I gave you a long-form version along with a list of folks who actually do have something interesting to say in the space. Then it was too verbose.
I suppose there’s no pleasing some folks huh.
Yes, I literally said that. Glad we are in agreement.
> Lyn is a zealot and a shill, and her arguments on basically any topic are trivially wrong.
Yes, trust the guy on HN who is consistently negative about crypto about who to listen to. Sorry, but when people are so adamantly negative about something, I tend to run towards it because it often has a lot of interesting value. You have chosen the 'Chief Censor 451' role in life.
I didn't tell you who to read, I suggested you dug around and found someone else who isn't a zealot and a shill. There's good authors out there, this isn't one. I follow a number of pro-crypto authors too, ones who I disagree with but respect. They're out there.
Lyn is in my opinion only slightly above Pomp (who I know has retired to spend more time with his fiat) and Saylor (who was promoted to customer).
Early generations of tech might not be the best, but you have to start somewhere and iterate to a better future.
Given that energy use of Bitcoin is literally written into the protocol to decrease over a long period of time, I don't see the big deal of expending energy to get there. Ideally it produces methods of better power distribution, encourages the use of green energy, etc...
> Early generations of tech might not be the best, but you have to start somewhere and iterate to a better future.
Bitcoin is the most obstinate to change on purely ideological grounds. It hasn't materially changed in almost a decade except to move the deck chairs around. This is the time at which one would expect the most change and yet Bitcoin changes the least out of all its peers. This is an intentional decision by both the community and the core team.
Adding green energy simply to waste guessing random numbers instead of decarbonizing the grid just adds to the e-waste Bitcoin is responsible for. Power distribution is a solved problem (only 5% of power is wasted in distribution in the US) - the issue is just NIMBYs refusing to put transmission infrastructure down. Bitcoin does not fix this.
Oh come on, don't be absurd. Bitcoin is not setting oil fields on fire any more than the power usage of the whole internet has. How about games? That's pretty pointless expenditure of electricity... but you aren't screaming at the rooftops over that. This is seriously a case of old man yells at cloud meme.
> Bitcoin is the most obstinate to change on purely ideological grounds.
That's fine. ETH exists. It could mean that ETH wins in the end. Who knows.
> Adding green energy simply to waste guessing random numbers instead of decarbonizing the grid just adds to the e-waste Bitcoin is responsible for.
Blah blah blah... just as absurd as the above statement. Try a different trope, please.
I'm sorry you're trying to defend the indefensible: kilotons of e-waste per year and the energy consumption of a small country to achieve the work of a Raspberry Pi.
97% of all bitcoin mining ASICs will never mine a single block. Ever. Just straight from factory to landfill with a long sojourn warming up the planet.
Everything beyond those facts are mental gymanastics.
The Bitcoin network pays 238,500 BTC annually for its maintenance, plus fees. This is the amount that will be paid regardless of network difficulty, price of bitcoin, mining capacity, cost of electricity, capital cost of mining equipment, etc.
That seems unconvincing. In fact how much energy is required per hash is something that's really quite easy to measure accurately. At any given time there are no more than a few dozen hardware platforms in use (they get priced out rapidly, everyone is running the newest stuff in the BTC world). Just plug them in and measure them.
All that's left from there is to come up with second order corrections about stuff like grid efficiency. But we absolutely know to quite high precision how many joules were spent to produce the coins we observe to have been created.
That's not true. The profitability of a miner is not measured with their hardware generation but with the energy cost needed to operate them. If you have access to very cheap energy, they can still be very profitable. There is a reason the market price of old mining rigs is not 0.
Electrical costs vary by a factor of two or three around the world. Maybe five at the extreme outliers. Modern mining hardware is tens of thousands of times more efficient than the stuff used less than a decade ago. Also due to growth in the market, the rate of production has been increasing rapidly so the total number of old rigs is negligible anyway.[1]
To rather accurate first approximation, all BTC mining is done with hardware less than two years old or so.
[1] Also also, the recent crash has had the effect of depressing mining revenue and accelerating the retirement of the old junk.
what you know is an estimate of total network hashrate. that's it.
but! total network hashrate moves around all the time, so it is really just an estimate. it has gotten better over time, but these machines don't operate perfectly 24/7 and older hardware is still in use. power outages happen too. stuff is just coming on and offline all the time.
you don't know efficiency (watts to hash) of the equipment on a global scale. you can extrapolate, but it is impossible to know for sure.
there are other losses, like stale and invalid shares. also impossible to know. you don't know how much is 'wasted' either... every single power supply on the planet is a snowflake. this would actually increase power usage estimates since it is effectively truly wasted energy.
disclaimer: I've PoW mined since 2014. Even I, with many many megawatts of power, have a hard time calculating exactly how much power we use and that's having access to the raw data!
What you should be able to do is:
a) Open up your electricity bill and look at the total energy consumption for a given period. Admittedly, I'm not familiar with how electricity is invoiced, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't something that was at least coarsely indicating total energy consumption for a billing period. (Or you can skip several middlemen steps and just take the total cost of the electric bill.)
b) Tot up all the bitcoin mining rewards you received in the same time period.
c) Count how many bitcoin blocks were mined in the same time period.
d) Divide b by c, now you know what fraction you are of the total bitcoin mining network.
e) Divide a by d, now you have an estimate of total worldwide energy consumption of bitcoin.
The only reason I can see that might make this hard is if you mine more than just bitcoin, in which case, replace "bitcoin" in the above steps with "sum over all of the cryptocurrencies you mine"--which is closer to what people want to know anyways. Even then, you can use crude weighting metrics to estimate what the consumption of just bitcoin is, which would at least let you know if the estimate is in the right ballpark or not. The exact number doesn't matter; it instead matters if the real number is closer to 14 TWh/yr, 140 TWh/yr or 1400 TWh/yr.
you don't know efficiency (watts to hash) of the equipment on a global scale
In other words, one person might use 1watt to produce 1hash. Someone else might use 2watts -> 1hash.
That would be literally half as efficient and muck up any quantifiable numbers on a global scale.
Never mind all of the other things I mentioned above.
The reason why this is always such a highly debated topic is literally because it is something impossible to quantify.
And, iirc, then they estimated total consumption from well-funded and very active mining pools. I.e. exactly the operators that you would expect to run the most efficient mining equipment. Meaning all you do is being overly optimistic, as in "we claim mining uses less energy than it actually does"
And, FWIW, the kind of methodology that was used to produce the Bitcoin energy consumption is the same kind of methodology that is used to produce statistics like GDP, inflation, employment--basically every macroeconomic indicator. If you're going to complain that you can't quantify Bitcoin's energy consumption, then to be intellectually honest, you need to complain that the true inflation rate or the true size of any country's economy is impossible to quantify as well.
But a factor of two wouldn't change any of the analysis! If the article said "60 TWh" instead, would that be any less horrifying? No, it wouldn't.
2. The arguments youre responding to about BTC being a waste of energy etc. aren't being made in this post. He's just using energy to estimate leak rate, not to assign any moral value to it.
Also, calling papers "silly" doesn't bolster your argument.
What would you prefer me to call it? The pure definition of silly is "having or showing a lack of common sense or judgment; absurd and foolish." Seems pretty accurate to me.
Of course plenty of people here like to fixate on telling people what a good or not good use of energy is. Which is so ironic to me given that here we are using energy to have this debate and I'm sure someone out there thinks it is equally wasteful.
This is a big reason why there is such a huge land grab of new miners coming online right now and a huge increase in power usage. It also solidifies the monetary policy imho. Once emissions stop, it'll become even harder to obtain what BTC is left and as long as it stays desirable for its intrinsic value (imho, that is digital gold... its store of value), people will want it.
Don't forget that while 19m have been emitted, millions of that are locked up forever and will continue to get locked up over time (things like people who die suddenly without leaving access to their private keys). Thus, there is actually a lot less than 21m BTC that'll ever be available.
͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at the halving chart on that website. I usually don't think that past performance indicated future results... but come on... this is just obvious financial cycles. If you haven't already, you'd do well to buy $100 of bitcoin and just sit on it.
No, that's not what the article is about. The article basically says any cryptocurrency that relies on mining cannot be a store of value because mining requires capital outflow which means your bitcoin loses value without continued capital inflow in the form of new demand.
It is very likely miners vote in another consensus. There are ~118 years left before the supply capnis reached. If bitcoin lasts that long, it is highly likely that some major changes occur, consensus seems like the number 1 candidate for change.
The end result of energy usage dropping... if the energy usage drops, the security does also. So price decrease results in less mining, and therefore less capital outflow, which is great, except it results in less security. the only way to get 0 capital outflow (and therefore require 0 capital inflow to keep a steady price) is to have 0 mining, which means no blocks being produced and no security, which again, does not make a good store of value.
Sorry, but you have to make the distinction between mining and inflation. Two different things. Mining is just validating transactions. Today, miners get paid newly minted coin + fees for that service. In the future, they will only get fees. You have to factor that into the long term viability of the coin.
After just watching ETH literally destroy GPU mining, I don't think it'll be that easy for Bitcoin to achieve any sort of changes that affect mining in any way.
Yes, there are 118 years to 21m, but the supply is dwindling... 6.25 now... next 3.125... and the difficulty keeps going up. Did you ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at the link I sent? It has a nice graph of the decline of inflation... we are super close to zero by just 2029 and 2033... even closer.
> The end result of energy usage dropping... if the energy usage drops, the security does also.
Untrue. Difficulty adjusts automatically. The ONLY issue is if a huge amount of hash drops off... and then rejoins... together... all at once... in a way to attack the network. But the economics of doing would negate that pretty quickly.
> the only way to get 0 capital outflow (and therefore require 0 capital inflow to keep a steady price) is to have 0 mining
No... we are going to get to near 0 capital outflow by 2033. We will always need mining to form blocks. The question is what will happen to the fees, and the price. Fees are a function of usage and a minimum set by the miners as a whole. There will always be miners willing to form blocks for almost no fee. If there is little usage, the fees will stay low, but demand of the coin as a store of value, should drive the price up due to the fixed supply and lack of availability.
The hash difficulty adjusting automatically keeps the block time relatively constant. Security goes down the less hash power is on the network, that's an undisputed fact. Hash power is proportional to energy consumption. Lower energy consumption means less hash power means less security. Think of it like this: if 2 CPUs secured bitcoin, it is trivial to attack. How much hash power and energy an attacker has to buy for a successful attack is the security of the network.
You don't have to factor in the distinction between emission (commonly called inflation) and fees when discussing this particular topic, any bitcoin liquidated to pay for energy usage is mathematically identical to price inflation when looking at BTC as a currency. It is sell pressure, it is capital outflow.
Emission of new bitcoin, or inflation as it is commonly called, is not the same as capital outflow. Capital outflow is sell pressure. You cannot get to 0 capital outflow as long as miners must pay for power. Do you understand what I'm saying? This has nothing to do with how many new bitcoins are created.
Please try to understand what I'm telling you. We aren't talking about the usual everybody-has-heard-it-a-million-times bitcoin critiques. I am very, very familiar with how bitcoin works and understand very much all the points you're making. But these things have no bearing on what I or the article are saying.
You're right. Sell pressure (capital outflow) cannot end. That said, with inflation (or emission) becoming less and less over time, there won't be as much to sell.
I'm sorry, but difficulty is also security. Attacks aren't just about hashpower, it is also expense (capital to buy and run enough hash) for the attack. If the hashpower goes down, you're right... there is a window where attacks become possible before the difficulty adjusts (I'd argue ETH PoW per block adjustments were more secure), but that would require the same amount of lost hashpower to also be 'found' and dedicated towards attacking the network at the same time. It isn't like the network was less secure 1 month ago than it is today.
Block difficulty does not determine security in any way. All it determines is average block time, that's it. The security of a network is determined solely by the hash power on the network (and the expense to double it). There's no window while difficulty adjusts, if hash power goes down the security goes down until hash power goes up again. The network was less secure if the hash rate was lower. On September 14 at 12:00 UTC, bitcoin's hash rate was 136 EH/s. Right now it is just under 250 EH/s. Bitcoin is more secure right now than it was on September 14 at 12:00 UTC, and the block difficulty has nothing to do with that whatsoever.
I stopped reading as soon as they quoted that silly inaccurate UoC website that gets quoted over and over again.
Why? Because they even admit, in their own methodology (https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map/methodology), that it is an extrapolation from less than 50% of the total hash. Even worse, is the pools they extrapolate from have been Chinese based. Although, that's changed over time, which invalidates their numbers even more.
Even still, there is no way to know how that power is generated, how much it offsets other power generation, etc... there are just too many variables to simply quote UoC.
At the end of the day, read this: https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/