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One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses As Much Energy As Your House In a Week (vice.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader SlaveToTheGrind quotes Motherboard:
Bitcoin's incredible price run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency. An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.
This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
Yes. Proof of Stake requires almost no electricity at all, as the blockchain is determined by who puts up the largest stakes. The reason Proof of Stake isn't popular is because it's a "rich get richer, poor may as well not play" system, just like capitalism.
The energy spent *MINING* a bitcoin is not at all close to the energy spent *TRANSACTING* a bitcoin. Why is this even a metric?
Thank you! Terrible bad title and terrible summary to go along with the bad math. This is so misleading that this junk should just be removed. It reads like government propaganda.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
Would be 3-5 weeks for other western countries who actually insulate their houses, use modern appliances and lighting.
Yes.
Bitcoin has two contradictory goals. On the one hand it needs everyone to have the same information. The network couldn't work if I think I have 10 coins and you think I have 5. The way this classically works is you just have an authority keep track of it, the bank. You can simply ask the bank how much money you or anyone else has in the account.
But bitcoin doesn't want a central authority so how can it keep track of who owns what and whose paid who? It uses a consensus based on whatever group has the most computing power. And they're rewarded for this work with a few new bitcoins and that reward is called 'mining'.
So 'mining' is simply the act of gathering up all the transactions the network wants to do and 'signing' it with your massive computer power and pushing it out to the world. You can't have transactions with out mining.
However bitcoin scales directly to the mining power on the network, so if everyone just closed up right and only you were left you could run all the transactions on a general purpose CPU if needed. So there is no reason it has to be wasteful, but the way it works is the greater the reward for mining the more it encourages people to waste electricity.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
No, the reason PoS isn't popular is because it's provably insecure.
Contrary to a PoW-chain absent a +51% cartel, it’s mathematically proven that it is impossible to determine the “true” transaction history in a PoS blockchain without an additional source of trust. If a source of trust is always needed, a potential pandora’s box of attack and centralization scenarios is opened. This is a seed of truth behind the joke that Ethereum plans to use “proof of Vitalik”.
(follow the links for the actual paper)
https://medium.com/@tuurdemees...
it's in my head