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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?
It is ironic that in a era where most people are talking about:
* Energy efficiency
* Energy independence
* Emissions reduction
* Green power production
we are racing to consume [waste] tons of energy to produce "currency" which doesn't actually produce any goods or services. Imagine consuming megawatts of energy just to produce currency that could then be used to later buy things like, perhaps, more megawatts of energy. Seems insane.
There's proof of space proposal from the bit-torrent guy. https://www.coindesk.com/proof...
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.
Because we know that with Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work system, it's the poor that can afford racks full of ASIC miners, right?
I pay my power bill using bitcoins. I noticed that I have to build out exponentially more bitcoin mining infrastructure every month, but I thought that was normal. I guess I should have realized something was amiss when we built the 60-acre data center. Anyhoo, the 3,600-acre data center will be sufficient, I am confident.
Because Bitcoin isn't ANYTHING like that.
Oh wait.
Exactly! BitCoin is the most ridiculous, sketchy snake oil that has ever been peddled. Now we find that it is extremely wasteful of energy as well. The day bubble bursts and everyone's money has evaporated into the cloud can't come too soon.
You mean just-like-Trotsky-ites ... pimping the pauper with the words THEFT-AGENDA substituted for the word RICH.
Or just like the fascists selling a middle class tax cut on the tired old theory that when we give the lion's share of that tax cut to the big corps and the 1% that it will all trickle down to the middle class, eventually. Yes, Trump's economic adviser, Gary Cohn, used the phrase trickle down in an interview just a couple of days ago.
When the rich run the system, Trump's promises notwithstanding, they rig the system to make themselves even richer, so, yes, you could call it a theft agenda.
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
Contrary to a PoW-chain absent a +51% cartel
In 2014 a single mining pool reached 50%.
https://www.coindesk.com/51-at...
As bitcoin mining in increasingly centralized on expensive specialized ASIC hardware, as individual/small miners increasingly host remotely (where they don't have physical control of ASICs) where electricity is inexpensive, bitcoin insecurity is increasing.
Bitcoin was designed with the assumption of distributed mining. With many small players contributing to the blockchain, as in the early days when CPU and GPU mining was practical. That assumption of bitcoin's design has turned out to be false, bitcoin is vulnerable.
That 215 kWh per transaction number is out of date, since the power consumption is growing so rapidly. Last I saw, late this week, it was over 250 kWh per transaction. This is a ridiculous amount of electricity to consume per transaction. Sure, bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but the power consumption problem needs to get fixed. At some rough cost of $0.10 per kWh, that's creating a cost of $25 per transaction. Insane.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Now we find that it is extremely wasteful of energy as well.
“Now”? As if we didn’t know about this, all along?
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