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Nobody Knows How Much Energy Bitcoin Is Using (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: A new report published in 'Joule' today claims Bitcoin may use up to 0.5% of the world's energy by the end of this year. We often hear about how bad Bitcoin is for the environment -- it already uses the same amount of energy as the country of Ireland -- but these numbers are usually just the /minimum/ amount of energy the network must be using. The actual amount of energy used by the Bitcoin network is likely substantially higher, but getting an accurate reading on that energy level is hard. The only researcher trying to quantify Bitcoin's energy use spoke to Motherboard about opening Bitcoin's 'black box.'
Especially considering web page scripting running stuff in ways as anti-efficient as you can get, relying on millons of copies to keep up with the Joneses.
Still, if it helps drive green generation, well, that's right in line with supply and demand.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So I get it, bitcoin is using massive amounts of energy to power it. But how much energy is used by other currencies? Both in the creation and the destruction of the currency? It costs a lot of money to maintain paper bills and coins. Keep them in circulation, etc... Then there is the processing cost of storing & transport of those physical goods. You need to factor those in to the cost analysis when comparing fiat to bitcoin, and not just say "bitcoin is using power lol!"
Yes, it uses power, but so do fiat currencies, and I'd wager they use about the same amount in their lifecycle as bitcoin does.
Bitcoin is the same push of technology somewhat comparable to the very early car prototype that actually worked, which is MB model 1886, https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Both prototypes are operational. Both are not really good at how energy is consumed. Both have a capacity that is realy low However, both deliver from point A to B. Also, they both served a prototype, a grandaddy for the future models. MB 1886 still runs they way it has been designed 130 years ago and Bitcoin will run they way it is designed 130 years from now.
I seriously doubt that. Guess what requires energy every time it's spent or used?
how much bandwidth does it consume?
You can always toss some solar panels and a powerbank into your cabin in the woods to mine.
I know there are concerted efforts to thermal map grow sites, and bitcoin miners are starting to be of interest.
The power company knows how much electricity you're using, and they can figure out from your billing information if you're doing something "extra"
You raise an interesting point about current money using a lot of energy and resources to maintain; however, I'd be shocked if it were 0.5% of all energy produced (as bitcoin is being quoted as using). I've no doubt bitcoin uses more. A lot more.
Also, bitcoin is used by what, about 1 million people world wide? Whereas cash is used by... 6 or 7 BILLION people.
1 million- using 0.5% of all energy (and only a small fraction of that 1 million are miners using it), is a disproportionate amount of energy. Imagine if the other 7 billion of us started using bitcoin too. The energy usage would go up.
Pure evil for all of your evil buying needs.
Yes, it uses power, but so do fiat currencies
Yes, but fiat currencies have a well-defined useful purpose.
Bitcoin is just a vehicle for rich boys to sucker money out of Stupid People.
Fiat and bitcoin no?
It's not as though fiat via card just takes your word for it that you have sufficient funds.
Cash much less so but still have to power the till draw.
and no more!
When I can buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin and have it still be hot by the time the transaction is processed maybe then you can think about comparing it to fiat cash.
Also large transfers of fiat currency are routinely "wired" and not loaded into sacks with dollar signs printed on the side and piled into a truck.
Electronic banking also takes power, and given how many servers and things in banks throughout the world it's not a trivial amount of power. But even so, the very nature of Bitcoin both in mining and in transactions makes me suspect the difference in energy used per unit compared to traditional electronic banking is huge. It might be multiple orders of magnitude.
As for paper currency is, I'm not sure that is relevant, as that is slowly being phased out in first world countries.
It's not an apples to apples comparison, because bitcoin is not needed in this world or any other world, whereas normal currency is.
Suppose a new fad appears where people are burning big piles of coal stacked in the shape of a giant penis. Say it becomes really popular. Critics then point out that it's a waste of energy and emitter of greenhouse gases. Defenders of penis coal justify this by saying,
"But the CO2 emissions from cars is much bigger than CO2 emission from penis coal. So it's not a problem, cars pollute more than penis coal."
Only if everyone started mining.
I'm not clued up enough to know if the current 1 million miners could handle 7 billion people's worth of transactions but if they could increases in energy usage would be negligible.
How much power is being saved due to heating uses that aren't necessary? Ultimately a computer turns electrons into heat while doing some useful stuff (like playing cat videos) while doing it. The heat is no less for playing the cat video. So a computer is effectively the same as a resistive heater like a space heater is. So if a computer is a space heater which turns its power almost entirely into heat, it must be offsetting heating needs some of the time and increasing cooling needs other times.
bitcoin and its pointless proof of work will not grow exponentially until the whole earth is on fire.
the pointless proof of work system will be replaced with another system that generates artificial scarcity.
Sure, Bitcoin (especially mining) use a lot of energy, but how does it compare to other currency?
- How much energy are used to print/make money and get the raw materia?
- How much energy is used to store money? (Bank and others)
- How much energy is used to do transaction with money?
- What about Wall Street?
etc.
Elok
So lets say about 35 million people use bitcoin. Let's say 7 billion people use hard currency. Extrapolating bitcoin usage to all people on earth would mean that we would devote 0.5%*7,000M/35M=100% of earth's energy usage.
Most fiat currency is virtual. IE it lives inside computers in the government and financial institutions. It's really an incredibly crude blockchain - when you use a credit card your credit card company is telling some other company that they now have some money via a computer network.
So the answer goes beyond making, moving and destroying physical money. Fiat currency depends on giant networks of mainframes and servers running constantly to move this virtual currency around. How much energy does that need?
So what. Why should we care. As long as the power isn't being stolen who cares. Spend your money however you want.
The US Government spends about $1 BILLION per year alone just creating the currency. That's just one government, creating paper money. That doesn't include other governments. That doesn't include all the banks and their server farms, that doesn't include ANYTHING that is required to USE that money... that's just to create the paper money. In one year.
Tell me again how you doubt it?
http://mentalfloss.com/article...
Not just money. How much energy is wasted by people watching funny cat movies, playing games, or any other kind of unproductive entertainment ?
I wouldn't...
http://mentalfloss.com/article...
Ink, paper, people, transporation, etc... that all uses massive amounts of energy. Just the transport of those bills alone probably uses up a considerable amount of energy.
I literally do this all the time. Paying in bitcoin is often faster than cash. If it's taking longer, you're doing it wrong, and either YOU or the person receiving it is retarded.
To be fair, the discussion is how much energy fiat takes vs bitcoin, not how much money it takes.
Unless they are using that burning of penis shaped coal to power cars, the analogy doesn't really work.
BTC, by design, is as expensive to create and operate as possible. It is going to be difficult for anything to be as bad at the same scale of usage.
One way to think about it is that BTC needs to do all the same things in terms of power usage as the current banking network AND large amounts of expensive math on top of it. The power cost for mining is in addition to the power consumed by doing stuff the banking system also does.
Are all the computers used by banks and credit card companies powered by some kind of fantastic free energy generator? Lights, heating and AC at thousands of bank buildings? The cost of a cash transaction is certainly much lower than a bitcoin transaction if you only consider the energy required to create a distribute paper currency, but the banking system as a whole uses a substantial amount of energy and that is the true cost of fiat currency.
A printing press does not use a lot of energy. Hell, even smelting metal for coins doesn't use anywhere near that much energy.
Visa averaged 6kJ each for 111.2 billion transactions in 2017. Compare that to Bitcoin, which at most favorable estimates (only 0.3% of world energy), averaged 3GJ each transaction. That's 500,000 times as expensive. VISA uses less than 0.3% of Bitcoin's nominal usage, and probably 0.1% of Bitcoin's total usage. Yet it processes many orders of magnitude more transactions.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
For 300 bitcoins I'll tell you how much.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm sure Bitcoin seemed like a good idea at the time but the thought of the human race's death being hastened due to a made-up currency for drug dealers and launderers is hard to swallow.
The major difference is that with all those other examples there is no arms race for power usage. The more energy you sink into mining the bigger the payoff you get, and the system can support essentially an infinite amount of energy input. So energy usage will always scale up to match energy cost, while in those other domains energy usage is a cost that only drives down profit.
Better question: How much energy is wasted by blowhard scare-mongers posting constant rage-boner stories about how Bitcoin is destroying the planet with energy consumption?
They're not even able to handle the transactions going on now in any reasonable length of time.
So you're paying huge premiums to have your transaction processed? It requires mining to complete.
In which case I have no counter point.
That a nifty thought experiment from 2008 now uses a measurable and rapidly increasing percentage of global energy output should be cause enough for geekdom to feel ashamed of itself.
That the end result of this energy use is ensuring we can maintain FSM-knows-how-many simultaneous copies of a rapidly-growing 167 GB file for the purposes of maintaining a fraud-rife, impractical-to-use, and highly volatile digital currency should have us cowering in our basements and refusing to ever show our faces in polite society again.
wait
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
And how much energy is wasted by space aliens flying around Alpha Centauri in their rocket ships?
Oh wait, I think you, I, and the GP have maybe lost sight of anything remotely on-topic or relevant to the discussion at hand.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
0.5% of worldwide power generation?
No amount of dollar bills ever cost that much per year.
No, you set your own fee. I pay about a $0.06 premium for using bitcoin per transaction.
Must not be a very mature person.
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But how much energy is used by other currencies?
That's a lot harder to figure out, since every currency note has to be manufactured, and occasionally cleaned, or burned and remanufactured, there are also the processing of raw materials that went into every currency note. Furthermore, all the human labor and equipment involved in counting, processing, and distributing coins and notes. Even with electronic payments; there is a massive amount of 24x7 server and datacenter infrastructure to run JUST the banking functions, and these applications are closed-source, and not necessarily designed to be efficient in terms of the size and power consumption of the centralized infrastructures required to support them.
It's worth pointing out that unlike other currencies... BTC's not manufactured, so there's not a small number of single locations where energy is consumed. If BTC is using 0.5% of the world energy.... it's not the SAME as a country, because all the energy consumption is NOT in one place. BTC uses distributed mining, and the locations of mines are likely to be in places where there is a surplus of energy resulting in the cost being low ---- as pointed out, Bitcoin can help provide a stable base energy demand to justify construction of more renewable energy production capacity that humans need anyways, and when the NORMAL demand picks up, Bitcoin mining will slow down/move elsewhere, because mining becomes less profitable the more demand there is for the energy.
Pointless, really.
I don't NEED a bank to spend money.
If you want to include the BTUs my body expends trading money with some dude, sure
So let's assume the article is write 0.5% of worldwide power generation, and my local electricity charge of $.20/kwh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
Says in 2012, WW energy consumption was 20900 TWh.
so 20900 M kwh.
$4,180,000,000
I think I did that math right.
Your assumption is that the money spent on banks and other institutions would NOT be spent in a BTC regime, and I beg to differ.
The costs of using Bitcoin do not scale linearly, and go up the more transactions that are on the ledger. There is probably 10 orders of magnitude more cash (real or digital) than BTC transactions.
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all
Shows a maximum of 500K confirmed daily transactions in BTC.
Shit, this happens in my city of 50K probably every day,
$1B out of the global GDP OF $84 trillion is only .0011% of overall economic activity. Assuming that energy consumption of most economic activities is roughly proportional to cost, you've only accounted for 1/420th of Bitcoin's energy use.
And don't forget that the US dollar is used for orders of magnitude more total transaction value than Bitcoin. Even if you add in the energy use of the portion of the global banking industry that deals specifically with fiat currencies, here is simply no way that they use anywhere near the amount of energy per unit of value transacted as Bitcoin does.
The same with be true with BTC or other crypto currencies.
The physical cost of that money may go away, but the costs of accounting for it and protecting it digitally will not.
The US government is a bit behind the curve. Most world governments have phased out smaller denomination bills and many have replaced larger bills with more durable materials.
Even so, the vast majority of transactions are purely electronic, and those electronic transactions use an almost negligible fraction of what bitcoin does.
Bitcoin's problem is that it replaces centralized trust with proof of awesomeness, and they chose "how many computers can you use to burn how much electricity to do something completely useless" as their definition of awesomeness.
Guess what requires energy every time it's spent or used?
All those Benjamin's in my fat wallet! AMIRIGHT!?!
I'm not clued up enough to know if the current 1 million miners could handle 7 billion people's worth of transactions but if they could increases in energy usage would be negligible.
The chain has a fixed transaction throughput no matter how people are mining.
If so many people adopt Bitcoin, then they'll need to be fully using a multilayer scaling solution such as Lightning network for all their transactions.
How does bitcoin compare?
Basically, bitcoin's problem is that it replaced gold's natural scarcity with artificial scarcity produced by imposing a high energy cost to generation and transaction. Consequently, its production and transaction costs are roughly two orders of magnitude higher than traditional currencies. Mathematically, it (blockchain) is a brilliant concept. But it's obvious its developers had little practical knowledge of both monetary economics and day-to-day business economics.
There may have been all of 15 minutes right at the beginning that it wasn't cancerous, but after that it was cancer 24/7/365. Just kill it all off and make it go away.
This is short-sighted. Give it another ten years or so and cryptocurrency will be the new "normal currency." In the past, people like you probably talked about how paper currency was not needed when we could just use the "normal currency" of metal coins.
Based upon my experience - it uses a stunning amount of energy to mine an intangible thing. Vastly more than any other way to create any kid of currency. The algorithm is designed to be compute intensive and uses a ton of power. Two computers using a bit over 1000 watts each running for a month mining Litecoin with high end graphics cards caused my electric bill to double. That was years ago when it was much less compute intensive than it is today.
From an ecological standpoint, this approach to currency is a colossal mistake. I cannot believe more people aren't complaining about this type of blockchain technology's impact on the environment.
Greed is the root of all evil.
So I get it, bitcoin is using massive amounts of energy to power it. But how much energy is used by other currencies? Both in the creation and the destruction of the currency? It costs a lot of money to maintain paper bills and coins.
Very little actually, because 1) the vast majority of money in circulation is electronic these days, not printed or minted; 2) electronic money transfers of common currencies are not using some obscure computationally-intensive scheme to survive on the unsecured Internet but they rather use traditional channels which are vastly more efficient at the cost of some amount of necessary centralization to ensure physical safety.
Ezekiel 23:20
writing and reading about Bitcoin...
Guess what requires energy every time it's spent or used?
The millions of credit card terminals in stores all over the world?
They even require energy when they're just waiting to be used. Not to mention the whole network infrastructure to connect them to banks.
Should we talk about how much energy is wasted building and maintaining heavily fortified bank buildings that warehouse large stacks of colorful paper? Or why the US is still minting fucking pennies?
When comparing standard currency to cryptocurrency, traditional proprietors of legal tender have zero room to talk about overhead or waste. At least bitcoin doesn't have to exist as physical tender, and we've done fucking nothing to minimize or eliminate the massive burden of printing and minting cash, regardless of the popularity of electronic transactions. The US Mint spends billions every year just in metals and materials costs.
Sure, Bitcoin (especially mining) use a lot of energy, but how does it compare to other currency?
- How much energy are used to print/make money and get the raw materia?
- How much energy is used to store money? (Bank and others)
- How much energy is used to do transaction with money?
- What about Wall Street?
etc.
On a per transaction level? I tiny fraction of what Bitcoin does and with plenty of room to spare.
Sure and I'm certain we'll blame cryptocurrency for the 1 foot rise in ocean water levels. "2028 mining cryptocurrency has exceeded top CO2 polluter China. China demands that the cryptocurrency menace be stopped."
Cryptominers are scum and the world would be quite better off without them
Crash baby crash. Not all work is equally valuable.
Proof of work on a task is a terrible store of value. It's like running around in circles for an hour in front of somebody who records the "work" in order to prove it was done. Then in exchange for being able to keep the proof, he gives the one who "worked" an hour valued goods and services that also took an hour to produce. Then he proceeds to try and sucker someone else to trade his video for something valuable.
That does not sound reasonable, now does it.
Citation needed. We all wanna know how. Because it seems you are the only one who can get this magical 60 cents per transaction.
Wishful thinking there son.
...Even if you add in the energy use of the portion of the global banking industry that deals specifically with fiat currencies, here is simply no way that they use anywhere near the amount of energy per unit of value transacted as Bitcoin does.
Uh, you had to fracture this down to "amount of energy per unit of value transacted" in order to make it look like traditional currencies is a bargain. Now let's add up all of the extended costs of warehousing physical currency (every bank, bank vault, and ATM we've built and maintain globally), along with the cost to print and mint physical media (the US Mint spends billions on metal and materials costs every year). THEN perhaps we can start actually comparing the real costs between cold hard cash and crypto-cash.
A single decent crypto mining rig running for a year can likely mine at least one bitcoin, currently valued at $8200. Running costs are less than $2K/year, and the currency is made and stored electronically. Now compare that to the costs of minting, printing, distributing, and warehousing $8200 in physical tender.
The US Mint is still making pennies at a loss "per unit". The CFO told them to do what makes sense. Obviously there was some confusion...
6 cents, not 60 cents. Just set your miner fee to whatever you want. It's simple. I'm not the only one... anyone with a half a brain can and does do it. You are an idiot if you use the default fees in your wallet software.
It's simple:
You take the difficulty and current block rate to determine an estimate of the current hashrate (you can also get this info from pools that share).
You could also add 1% or 2% for wasted work (stale shares, for example) and other overhead.
Then you take the best ASIC you can find and get the hash/Watt conversion. Then cut that in half that since much of the network will be powered by older shit.
Then you take your hashrate and divide by your ASIC efficiency and bingo bango, you've got an estimate goin'.
From a Computer Science point of view verifying blockchain is big oh order N factorial and currencies are Big Oh Linear.
How much energy does it take for the FED to mark up a financial asset by pressing a key on computer running a database holding a balance sheet?
From this you can see bit-commodities (note they are NOT currencies) are always going to be more energy intensive this is by design.
The people that have crunched the numbers insist that paper $1s and $5s are cheaper long-run than coins.
I find it hard to believe too, but supposedly a lot of the cost advantage comes in the gimmick of seignorage, where the paper currency is sold at face value to the Fed, making it quite profitable to actually print paper currency. The seignorage profit is less on coins apparently.
I think there's something about people socking away more coins than notes, which adds to the cost of coins.
What seems weird is that so many other currencies have dropped their small denomination notes for coins; you would think they would have similar kinds of costs and would have kept paper, too.
The Bitcoin experiment is: proving a technology that is so phenomenally difficult break, that it has not yet been broken, and has established a direct correlation between energy and security. This is indeed huge - for all of humanity - for it promotes sustainable power. It is, however, understandable, that those that do not want to be bothered, or who are not participating, will be the first to poo-poo the technology.
The US Mint is still making pennies at a loss "per unit". The CFO told them to do what makes sense. Obviously there was some confusion...
Coin production in the US has steadily been dropping for obvious reasons.
The cost of printed money, which accounts for the largest part of cash transactions, is pretty low.
Most 'dollar' based transactions never involve an actual coin or bill.
How to compare I don't know, but its hard to imagine typical currency using nearly as much energy 'per dollar or dollar equivalent".
You would have a point if all transactions were conducted by exchanging truckloads of US penny coins (which should have been abolished 20 years ago, BTW).
But they're not. Most transactions don't even use paper cash.
The US government makes up billions of fresh dollars every day out of nothing simply by writing a few bits to a database. If you think that, like your Bitcoin mining example, it costs the government 25% in overhead to do this, then you're high. It's a small fraction of 1%.
Expensive. I wonder how much of that billion is spent on mucking about with useless pennies.
But still, to put it in perspective: The US money supply is 10,000 billion, making the cost to produce a dollar about $0.001.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has the wonderful property that unless it costs a healthy fraction of the full purchasing power of a BTC to produce a BTC, then the market will break down. So the cost to produce a dollar's worth of BTC should be somewhere between 0.1 and 1.0 BTC, making it at least 100 times more expensive to produce than dollars.
[...]
Also, bitcoin is used by what, about 1 million people world wide? Whereas cash is used by... 6 or 7 BILLION people.
1 million- using 0.5% of all energy (and only a small fraction of that 1 million are miners using it), is a disproportionate amount of energy. [...]
Good point. And it is even worse than that, since the 1 million or so bitcoin users only use it for a small fraction of their day to day transactions.
Unless they are using that burning of penis shaped coal to power cars, the analogy doesn't really work.
It does work, because most Bitcoin is made to be hoarded and traded for currency, not used as currency. Maybe one or two people use penis coal to heat their home or forge the One Cockring, but most waste its energy just like the bitcoin creators.
Bullshit. The energy used by regular bank transactions can be quantified, and it's minuscule in comparison to a BTC transaction. This is because there's hardly any computation required, just a short message from one bank to another - and it's optimized to require the minimum of resources to keep the costs down for each actor involved. Bitcoin on the other hand is *designed* to spend a lot of computing power, and thus electricity, for each transaction. This is why the transaction fees are as high as they are. (thousands of times higher than ACH - roughly corresponding to the amount of energy used)
Even with electronic payments; there is a massive amount of 24x7 server and datacenter infrastructure to run JUST the banking functions, and these applications are closed-source, and not necessarily designed to be efficient in terms of the size and power consumption of the centralized infrastructures required to support them.
Yes but this is changing as well. I know one major leading Credit Card issuer for example plans to have no infrastructure of their own within 2 years - it will all be cloud probably mostly Amazon. They are already well on their way. So that massive data-center infrastructure become shared services. All those compute resources can do something else besides just idling while much of the Western Hemisphere is a asleep.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
funny cat movies brings joy to millions of people and cat lovers go batshit. Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme that lets the people at the top make money off the suckers not at the top. One has value, the other is like bending over and asking someone to "give it to me"
Then again new debt (all fiat currencies) are spent into things which cause environmental damage too.
Every POS system in the world is left running 24/7, and they're old as shit Energy inefficient PCs. Those debit/credit terminals don't charge themselves, either.
You're rather full of shit. There's no way you're getting multiple confs for the lowest miner fee, and certainly not quickly.
You cant sink infinite amount of energy because you can't generate infinite amoun of energy. As you start to sink in more energy the price of energy goes up until it's no longer profitable to mine.
You would have a point if all transactions were conducted by exchanging truckloads of US penny coins (which should have been abolished 20 years ago, BTW).
But they're not. Most transactions don't even use paper cash.
And yet here we are, still minting pennies.
The US government makes up billions of fresh dollars every day out of nothing simply by writing a few bits to a database. If you think that, like your Bitcoin mining example, it costs the government 25% in overhead to do this, then you're high. It's a small fraction of 1%.
It's grossly ignorant to try and dismiss operational costs as a small fraction of 1% when the existence of a centralized government and military (requirements for traditional currency) costs taxpayers trillions every year. You're also assuming that the other 24% of government cost isn't pissed away every day with nothing more than good old fashioned government waste.
Are (any) fiat-currency and (any) cryptocurrency really equivalent, as cryptocurrency fans claim?
For example, US Dollar and Bitcoin are really equals?
Value/validity/authorization of US dollar is provided/guaranteed by US Government (and in-turn whole US Public)!
Also, not to mention, US Dollars in any US Bank is insured by US Government!
What authorization/guarantee/insurance is behind Bitcoin? Nothing!
Sorry but that is the end of discussion then!
Why do you think Satoshi Nakamoto is really hiding his identity, if Bitcoin is really such a great innovation?
He is just someone does not like media/fan attention?
Or, could it be really because Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrencies followed it) are actually Ponzi Schemes?
(So he knew very well that law enforcement would come after him sooner or later?!)
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really good innovation, why they attract so many criminals/criminal activity?
Could it really be because, all cryptocurrencies themselves are scams, and that is why they attract all kinds of criminals/criminal activity?
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really currency, why no company/store can use Bitcoin as currency anymore?
Because the price of Bitcoin proved to be extremely unstable to use as a currency?
Would the result be different, if Bitcoin replaced by any other "cryptocurrency"?
Aren't all work the same way?
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really money; isn't people issuing their own money, illegal already, in all countries?
If so then, why they are still not banned in all countries?
Or, they are not actually virtual currency but virtual investment?
But, if they are actually investment, why we need/want them?
What would happen to world economy, if people invested in virtual investments, instead of real investments?
Or, all so-called cryptocurrencies are actually just a modified (made decentralized and paying variable interest) Ponzi Schemes?
(Price of cryptocurrencies would keep increasing in the long term (by their design), so it is equivalent of paying variable interest to all long term investors.)
As more and more people invest in cryptocurrencies, it will become harder and harder to ban their trading everywhere!
All cryptocurrencies need to be banned globally before it is too late!
It costs 10's of dollars for a bitcoin transaction. At one point it was around $30+ for one transaction.
That's a LOT of electricity. Fiat card, cash, whatever will ALWAYS be cheaper.
The transaction cost of why Bitcoin will die and be replaced with something more efficient (probably Eterium based...but even that has issues becuase of token minting/mining).
Blockchain + proof of work = climate change
The more energy you sink into mining the bigger the payoff you get, and the system can support essentially an infinite amount of energy input.
Not really. You don't dump more energy into mining rigs, each mining rig you buy consumes x-amount of energy, you can't consume an infinite amount of energy w/o an infinite number of mining rigs... Although the cost of mining rigs is now a fraction of the scaling cost relative to the cost of energy it isn't zero.
Also, the amount of coin you can mine in a day is limited to the number of available transactions that day and currently that number is also much lower than infinity...
This is the same as the stock broker problem. As a stock broker, you can only skim money when people trade. There are only so many traders and so many hours that the market is open. Employing more brokers only makes sense if the trade volume is going up. When you are small, it might look like you can make more money that way because you are taking share from other people, but as you become a bigger player, you realize that by scaling up, you are just closer to putting yourself out of business and there is an optimal size (unless you think you are one of the lucky too-big-to-fail companies)...
Are you suggesting that all those banks and credit card companies will go away if we move to bitcoin? That there won't be financial institutions? Really?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Ok I'm on it.
PenisCoalCoin
get em while they're hard
Yo' momma.
But seriously:
- nobody knows how much energy street lamps are using.
- nobody knows how much energy idle PCs, servers and related hardware are using.
- nobody knows how much energy mobile phones are using while people scroll through their Facebook feeds.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Energy costs money. Just convert one to the other in the equation.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
> The more energy you sink into mining the bigger the payoff you get
This is not true and never was true.
What did you base this information on ? Do you understand what Bitcoin's Proof Of Work is and how it works ?
Somehow I doubt that.
We would have just as much government waste and military spending even if all transactions were done with Bitcoin. You can't attribute those costs to the production of currency.
FALSE.
Fiat uses FAR FAR FAR more than Cryptocurrency does.
All the computers, all the buildings, all the staff, their cars, their food, all the entire support systems that go into Fiat Banking and Investment Markets, and of course the completely needless and wasteful "Government".
Cryptocurrency needs only three things to function: Silicon, Electrons, and Packets.
That's it. End of story.
Free yourself from legacy systems.
It's like anything involving the Internet. It's magic and new, and very liberating, until it's not, for some reason that wasn't considered.
One way to think about it is that BTC needs to do all the same things in terms of power usage as the current banking network AND large amounts of expensive math on top of it. The power cost for mining is in addition to the power consumed by doing stuff the banking system also does.
One way to mitigate the waste of bitcoin is to have fewer miners. The bitcoin network needs a reasonable number of distributed and independent miners. More miners don't necessarily make the network any more secure, they just increase the power consumption. Matter of fact one could argue that the unbounded number of miners creates an opportunity for an insecure network. The industrialization and commercialization of bitcoin mining is what brought us near to a hypothetical 51% attack a few years ago.
Perhaps mining should be restricted. Large scale miners prohibited. Software could solve this, sorry, you or your region is providing too much hash rate and excess mining solutions will be discarded.
Energy costs money. Just convert one to the other in the equation.
Sure. No employees or contractors. No buildings and associated services. No materials. Just $1 billion on energy and the coins and notes magically appear and distribute themselves.
I, and many other people have been guilty at times of finding stuff to keep their computer busy doing. It just seems so living and active and relevant when it's doing something.
At times in the past it involved defragging the hard drive and watching the graphical representation of the 'stuff' being moved around.
Or a screensaver. I remember when I first got AfterDark for my Windows (3) PC. Watching the animations became a pursuit all it's own for awhile. Those flying toasters are random, man.
Going even further back, I remember the first timesharing system I had access to, and writing programs in BASIC to calculate stuff like prime numbers, or what was my favorite for a while, a program that counted the number of digits long that the repeating pattern was for reciporicals.
SETI at home is another example.
Recently, bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies have become a popular form of this kind of computer wanking for nerds. It's not really anything new.
That vast majority of dollars only exist as electronic values. Only a small fraction of dollars are printed as physical bills.
The average energy used to produce a dollar is quite low, since typically they are just created when the Federal Reserve increases their balance sheet and loans additional money to banks. The Fed can create a billion dollars for the same energy cost as a thousand dollars.
Some may see this as a bug rather than a feature, but that is a different argument.
It you are going to include other costs of money, you should do it for bit coin too. Include the cost of each computer the portion of each house taken to store that computer. Security for computers if you are storing millions of dollars on it they too should probably be stored in a safe. Cost of disposal of old hardware. Cost of bit coin exchanges. I would not be surprised combined hardware for mining bitcoin far surpassed that of banks, and probably replaced more frequently, since banks don't buy cheap servers where consumers do.
There are 500,000 (/charts/n-transaction) bit coin transactions per day there are 1,900,000,000 (reports/noncash) non-cash transactions. That is 3800 times more, say we linearly scaled up .5% energy use to cover all transactions leaving out things like creating and storage, cooling of the computers the miners would need to run on. That would be 1,900% of the current power used. I don't care what you throw in to the equation managing money doesn't use that much.
BBC = Big Burning Coal?
Corollary question: how much power is being used by YouTube with no one in front of the screen while it autoplays video after video? How much power has Angry Birds used? How much power has Amazon.com used? Facebook? Twitter? How much power has the NSA used? The US Navy? The Air Force? How much power did they expend sending all the Apollo missions after the moon landing? How much power did they spend sending that CAR auto the moon to drive around with?
How much power have just the lights used for advertising of Las Vegas, Nevada shops and casinos used, to say nothing of the power all the slot machines use... how much power if you add all the streetlights in that city? How much power does New York City use?
Just a little bit of perspective. Is Bitcoin a waste of money and electricity? Sure. But so is Disneyland. Speaking of which, how much power does the Mainstreet Electrical Parade use? Probably less than Bitcoin, but also probably less than Las Vegas. Actually, does anyone know how many watts that big lamp atop the Luxor Casino uses? How many times the power consumed by the typical Bitcoin mining rig is the one light atop the Luxor, I wonder.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Nobody Knows How Much Climate change Bitcoin Is Generating
You're welcome
So I get it, bitcoin is using massive amounts of energy to power it. But how much energy is used by other currencies?
Compared to bitcoin, money uses negligible power per user. BTC is using a ton of power and its usage is so small it's not even a rounding error.
You're comparing purchases performed by 7B people (money) to purchases performed by a few thousand. In this case it makes more sense to consider the energy used per person, and BTC is horribly inefficient compared to money.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Oh come on, when all other things are equal...
Just assume the ratio of energy cost to associated cost is the same for both comparison terms, say 2:1 (it doesn't really matter anyway).
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Indeed, the only people who benefit are those who have shares in the power companies.
Why UNIX?
Suppose a new fad appears where people are burning big piles of coal stacked in the shape of a giant penis.
Am I the only one who finds an analogy involving hot coals and penis disturbing?
Unless they are using that burning of penis shaped coal to power cars, the analogy doesn't really work.
I'm pretty sure that the alt-right would be in to penis coal as enthusiastically as they are Buttcoin, so the analogy works pretty well for me.
The US Government spends about $1 BILLION per year alone just creating the currency. That's just one government, creating paper money
That's actually not a lot for something that costs pennies on the dollar and lasts thousands of transactions. In fact, it's very little.
Ezekiel 23:20
You could have fooled me. I use it daily and never have a problem. There was a short window where that wasn't the case and honestly- people just moved to other crypto currencies. Bitcoin is no longer as on top as it once was. Dash is very popular for local transactions now and Bitcoin Cash seems more popular online and off-line as well (more recent change).
"because bitcoin is not needed in this world or any other world, whereas normal currency is."
Keep on deluding yourself. Crypto currencies have value. Have you tried accepting payment via bank wire transfers or credit cards? I had a customer pay around $60 USD ($17 USD for one fee and another $43 for a 2nd fee, which I think is an intermediary bank fee) plus the receiving fee of $15 USD. All for a $120 transaction! Even credit cards are cheaper than this- but with the elimination of traditional currencies if not for crypto currencies prices would jump by 12% in many cases. You have to take into account a 3% cost of credit card fees charged to merchants that increases the price on the goods, a 3% fraud rate that results in credit cards being insecure, and then double that because now you can't pay with traditional cash. While you can get around this if you pay with a wire that isn't always an option. I'm not going to be able to purchase CPUs and other items in small quantiles for my business without a credit card if cash goes away without crypto currencies. Fortunately I'm already lowering my costs of doing business in some cases by as much as 39% as a direct result of accepting crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash and purchasing from suppliers using the crypto currencies. 20% up or down makes little difference to me. I'm still saving 20% or so in the worst case scenario.
The transactional costs are not what you claim. Bitcoins don't get used up like this. Dollars do. It also ignores the cost of electronic transactions in the real world. I had a customer attempt to wire us $120 USD and it cost him $75 USD. Credit cards without physical cash have a transaction cost as high as 12% due to credit card fraud and transactional costs (fees) when one takes into account a business has to both purchase those goods or raw materials on top of accounting for fraud and fees at the point of sale. I'm a business owner so I know just how insanely expensive it is to do business and what the real transaction costs are. We've never had a Bitcoin transaction go south. There is a 0% fraud rate as far as transactions go.
What about electronic games? Come to that, does anyone know how much energy is being consume simply for entertainment?
If you can pay for it, myob.
Employees, contractors, buildings, associated services and materials require energy too.
#DeleteFacebook
Most fiat currency is never realised as physical bank notes.
Most transactions with fiat currencies are just amending numbers in some ledgers held on a computer.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe