Slashdot Mirror

How much electricity is required for banks to manage your FIAT money?

I'm guessing you didn't click through to this article with graphs related to that very question.
If one believes those graphs, and i see no reason not to,
here are the number of US Households which could be powered by the current energy consumption of various transaction networks:

bitcoin: 4.2 million
ethereum: 1 million
visa: 0.017 million

so visa is 1/200th as energy-consumptive than bitcoin. that's two orders of magnitude plus a factor of two.

that same page reports that a single bitcoin transaction, just one, consumes enough energy to power a US household for 15 days.

yeah, i think banning should be considered.

What could we have done with 40 tWh of energy?!
It takes 15,000 kWh produce one ton of aluminum. That was 2.6 Gigatons of aluminum we could have had. We got stupid hash codes instead. This is 460,000 times the yearly world production of aluminum.

We wasted the energy of 460,000 times (not tons fricken times) the yearly world production of aluminum last year on Bitcoin and Ethereum!

Bitcoin energy use:
https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

Ethereum energy use
https://digiconomist.net/ether...

Aluminum produced / year
http://www.world-aluminium.org...

Energy to produce aluminum:
https://agmetalminer.com/2015/...

What could we have done with 40 tWh of energy?!
It takes 15,000 kWh produce one ton of aluminum. That was 2.6 Gigatons of aluminum we could have had. We got stupid hash codes instead. This is 460,000 times the yearly world production of aluminum.

We wasted the energy of 460,000 times (not tons fricken times) the yearly world production of aluminum last year on Bitcoin and Ethereum!

Bitcoin energy use:
https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

Ethereum energy use
https://digiconomist.net/ether...

Aluminum produced / year
http://www.world-aluminium.org...

Energy to produce aluminum:
https://agmetalminer.com/2015/...

The best part (for the environment) is that the overall energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is dropping significantly. According to this estimation the power consumed by the aggregated network has dropped from 73.12 TWh per year (around 8.3 GW on average) one month ago, to 45.54 TWh per year (around 5.2 GW on average) today.

Note that solar panel market installed 98.9 GW last year. With an optimistic efficiency of 50% (nigths, clouds), this means that one month ago we were dedicating one in each 6 new panels installed last year, worldwide, to power Bitcoin. Today, it is "only" one in 9.5.

And yes, those panels are the "clean energy" we are installing to save the world. Bitcoin saves nothing, please save (pun intended) the "but this is the cost for lack of trust/decentralized/...". This is good, and should keep dropping, considering the environmental impact.

Public blockchains that rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) should be outlawed. They encourage mining, which is basically wasting energy in HUGE amounts (in the case of cryptocurrencies, to generate virtual coins out of thin air). They are such an inefficient way of implementing the technology, in terms of energy consumption, that they should never be considered as a viable option. If you are considering blockchain-based technology, please think of the planet for a moment when architecting your solution.

Remember the Energy Star program? Well, that program should be extended to forbid certain technlogies. Such as Bitcoin.

For more info, see the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index. Bitcoin is wasting more energy than many countries in the world. At least, now we have GPUs back to normal prices.

Bitcoin mining is estimated toconsume around 34 TWh of power. Sort this list by TWh consumption and you'll find that BTC mining consumes more power than 75% of all the nations on the face of the Earth. More power than places like Denmark, Ireland, Serbia, Myanmar. It's not sustainable - and I'm surprised so many strong climate-change proponents are accepting of this clear waste of energy (note that most of those countries are poor, and get a majority of their power from coal and other fossil fuels).

From what I've read, GPUs are for wimps, and real cryptocurrency miners use ASICs

https://shop.bitmain.com/antmi...

(Of course, that could just be hype, though the look at a real Crypto Farm suggests that whole buildings of ASICs are used, rather than a few GPUs)

...and with 112 kg CO2 per transaction, (more than that by my math) the whole thing starts to look like a giant fucking mess.

No, slightly more than 1/10,000th, but way less than 1/1000th of world electrical consumption. And again, the article cited no sources and just asserted it as bare fact, with no reference as to how the number was arrived.

Are you disputing the 0.14% number? If not, check your math. 0.14x1000=140. It's well over a 1/1000th, it's about 1/714th to be more precise. Here is how the energy consumption was calculated:

https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

And if you're looking at horrifically inefficient and unnecessary uses of electricity, start with Slashdot. Then tackle gaming. Survive trying to kill those and you can think about restricting what people do with their resources.

Now here some numbers are being pulled out of thin air, and it's you who's doing it. But we can make educated guesses. So why would you guess a relatively lightweight site like Slashdot might use more energy than a system that pegs data centers full of GPUs and ASICs 24/7/365?

Gaming worldwide could indeed approach the total energy usage of the BitCoin network. But I don't think it's as bad because it's less wasteful. It's not crunching on insanely difficult math problems just for the sake of running a digital currency whose only notable advantage over much more efficient payment systems is an ability to jump through legal loopholes. Most of that energy goes directly into making games look good for people's enjoyment.

No, slightly more than 1/10,000th, but way less than 1/1000th of world electrical consumption. And again, the article cited no sources and just asserted it as bare fact, with no reference as to how the number was arrived.

Are you disputing the 0.14% number? If not, check your math. 0.14x1000=140. It's well over a 1/1000th, it's about 1/714th to be more precise. Here is how the energy consumption was calculated:

https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

And if you're looking at horrifically inefficient and unnecessary uses of electricity, start with Slashdot. Then tackle gaming. Survive trying to kill those and you can think about restricting what people do with their resources.

Now here some numbers are being pulled out of thin air, and it's you who's doing it. But we can make educated guesses. So why would you guess a relatively lightweight site like Slashdot might use more energy than a system that pegs data centers full of GPUs and ASICs 24/7/365?

Gaming worldwide could indeed approach the total energy usage of the BitCoin network. But I don't think it's as bad because it's less wasteful. It's not crunching on insanely difficult math problems just for the sake of running a digital currency whose only notable advantage over much more efficient payment systems is an ability to jump through legal loopholes. Most of that energy goes directly into making games look good for people's enjoyment.

If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar.

Um, NO.

Currency has no need to be "efficient". Bitcoin transactions have far less overhead than conventional currency transactions.

Not true. https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

The above link is mind-blowing.

Cause Bitcoins also waste HUGE AMOUNTS of electricity with every single transaction.

Currently it's at 271 KWh or about 9.15 "U.S. households powered for 1 day".
PER transaction.

So... every three transactions, one would waste as much electricity as one would need to run a home for a month.
It's like having to set the store on fire every time you get a loaf of bread.

Basically... using Bitcoins is the moral equivalent of dealing meth to kindergartners. Or maybe heroin.
Mining Bitcoin is the moral equivalent of producing drugs and cutting them with rat poison.
THEN dealing them to kindergartners. Preferably in poor, underprivileged neighborhoods.
GREED - fucking up future generations - TODAY*

____
* slogan is currently under the right of first refusal consideration by the US Republican Party

I did some googling as well, and found this page, where its current estimate is a shocking 245 kWh per transaction. Most days my house averages about 25 to 26 kWh per day, so each transaction could power my house for almost 10 days! Using a very rough estimate of $0.10 per kWh, each transaction costs about $25. While I consider bitcoin to be an interesting experiment, this data is enough for me to say it should *not* be adopted widely until they can develop a much less power-hungry way to run the network.

According to https://digiconomist.net/bitco... it's now 228kWh per transaction and somewhere north of a megawatt to generate that $530/month gross profit. Should keep the pipes from freezing!

Of course not all of that energy is turned into heat, some goes into the blockchain entropy /s

Real money also doesn't use 170kW/h of electricity for every transaction.

(current power usage of the Bitcoin network is 0.08% of the worlds production)

https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

Gold doesn't take a large amount of computation time (and energy) for a transaction to take place.

According to one estimate, Bitcoin takes an estimated 15 TWh per year to keep functioning; it takes ~41,000 MWh per day, and it works out to 178 kWh for each transaction.

At the cost of electricity from my local utility, that works out to an energy cost of $15.67 per transaction.

More conservative estimates put the cost up to 94 kWh/transaction - which is "only" $8.27 per transaction.

I realize there's nuance to the story; that "mining" is where the energy "actually" goes... but since "proof of work" for a transaction requires mining, and the difficulty of finding a nonce is increased as more miners try to strike gold... we can't really separate the cost of transactions from the cost of mining BTC.

In contrast, once gold is out of the ground & refined, transactions are relatively cheap (gold is heavy, and gold certificates greatly mitigate that problem.) The transaction cost for gold has only decreased over time. Even in the world of fiat currencies like the US Dollar, the cost per transaction is a fraction of a penny.

More traditional ways of ensuring security in financial transactions are currently thousands of times less energy intensive/expensive than BTC; as it becomes more difficult to mine coins, I don't see BTC transaction costs dropping.