Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage:

"First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the military and diplomatic strength of the U.S. government to ensure all of the above are working smoothly.

Any energy comparison must take the above into account – including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar. As those who make this comparison inevitably fail to mention, the dollar’s ubiquity is partly due to a covert arrangement whereby the U.S. provides military support to countries like Saudi Arabia that agree to sell oil exclusively for dollars. It’s worth noting that the grossly oversized U.S. military, whose presence worldwide is necessary to backstop the international dollar system, is the largest single consumer of oil worldwide."

https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...

At that rate and assuming 4tx per second a single Bitcoin transaction consumes 165kWh. A Tesla battery is bit over 50kWh. So let's round that to 3 full charges of Tesla battery.

That's 350km/220 miles of range per charge. In total 1050km or 660 miles of driving.

So basically if you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there with a Tesla rather than send a Bitcoin transaction. Or alternatively 330 miles roundtrip. For each single transaction.

It is hilariously inefficient system. It is literally better to drive a full car and give things physically than use Bitcoin.

A small addenum: Visa apparently uses 146kWh for 100000 transactions. Coming at 1.46wH per transaction. That can drive a Tesla for 9 meters (0.4 seconds of driving at 80km/h) or alternatively keep a nice led lamp lit for an hour. And that includes everything the company does, not just the actual transaction but the upkeep of their offices etc divided by the amount of transactions they perform per year.

EDIT:

Apparently on 2020 it was 741kWh per transaction in practice and/or I made a tiny error in my calculation. Either way it's even better!

https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...

That simply increases the ranges so that it becomes a 3600 mile trip. Or 1800 mile roundtrip.

From what I understand bitcoin currently has a $20+ transaction fee with a transaction time takes 60 minutes+

With these issues in addition to the high power consumption, how will Bitcoin become a usable currency?

Question that came to mind after reading the headline: could this become a future reason for governments to criminalise the trading / use of Bitcoin because of negative environmental effects?

On the surface it seems the value of Bitcoin is directly tied to its energy consumption and thus environmental harm.

I get that Bitcoin itself is decentralised and cannot be banned outright. But could it be neutered in such a way that renders it more and more worth / useless?

If the goal is to educate the public on the scale of power involved, a comparison with a commonly used service would help a lot IMHO. Something like 'Bitcoin consumes 14 times the energy of Google and half (according rough estimates) that of Youtube' would make things easier to grasp before hitting the reader with country comparisons.

FWIW here is my list of 'if a service were a country':

Google Guatemala

Bitcoin Argentina

Youtube South Africa (unreliable data)

[Edit] whoops - no references

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons...

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

There's lots of misdirected anger these last few days towards Bitcoin.

First, the only thing that's energy-intensive about Bitcoin is block production. Making transactions, relaying them, validating them and storing them have negligible energy cost.

Second, nothing about the Bitcoin protocol requires block production to use fossil fuels. Just like with every other energy-intensive industry, the problem isn't the industry. The problem is the fossil fuel use.

Therefore, if you want to get mad about the high energy use of block production leading to environmental pollution, you should direct that anger at the appropriate target: miners who use fossil fuels to mine.

How do we fix this? The same way we fixed it in every other energy-intensive industry: through taxes and regulation. Let's get some laws passed to require miners in your area to use only renewable energy, and to require exchanges to impose a carbon tax on coins whose miners rely on fossil fuels to mine. Properly applied, these laws would make fossil-fuel mining unprofitable, which is exactly what we want.

Bitcoin and PoW aren't going anywhere at this point. So let's make sure it's continued existence doesn't make the world worse. Sound good?

Slightly off topic, but does anyone have any good resources on how alternative consensus protocols work, like proof of stake and proof of importance? I either see really simplistic explanations or ones that assume a lot of domain knowledge. I also recently saw a crypto coin that claims to be energy efficient, and I don’t quite understand how that’s possible without the possibility of a 50.1% attack.

When arguing with a Bitcoin-fanatic, try this line:

"Yeah I agree that cryptocurrencies are interesting, perhaps some day one will replace the USD. It will probably not be Bitcoin, but rather some other cryptocurrency“.

Watch how they recoil!

For they have been found out, they do not actually care for financial freedom, etc., all these noble crypto goals which can also be achieved with a cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin.

All they care about is their speculative investment in Bitcoin in particular, so it won't help them much if another crypto becomes the world standard.

It‘s probably <1% that are true believers and >99% that have missed out on a few bull runs and are now hoping to get rich quickly.

Really, try this line some time and you will come to the same conclusion.

And this is not surprising. Cryptocurrency is designed to be anti-efficient. "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy."

This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.

If this trend continue we may well seal our fate by crunching useless numbers at a global scale for the sake of greed and because we seem incapable of trusting each other.

If this was written in a novel we'd deem it a bit too much on the nose really.

I like the fun-facts on this page: "The amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the USA alone could power the Bitcoin network for 1.8 years" Where is the discussion about the smart home devices using that much energy? This is horrible, thats twice as the Bitcoin network and this is just the USA. I would really like if someone estimate the energy usage (with all trucks and cars and people and companies and buildings and so on) of other things than just whole countries, maybe the "normal" financial system, or plastic bottles or something everyone is using (like idle smart devices).

I think most people missing the main point: Energy is to cheap. Most miners are in China, an they seem to pay nearly nothing for the energy (else they would'nt do it). This would mean they waste Energy on EVERYTHING, not only Bitcoin mining. In Germany I would never even think about mining Bitcoin, since I have to pay 0,35€ per kWh. But if I would buy thousends of miners and waste 5MW of energy, I would have to pay roughtly 0,15€ (maybe even just 0,05€). So wasting energy is profitable, is'nt this strange?

This is a rehash of a previous post of mine regarding electricity consumption:

Back in the days where all our electricity came from fossil fuels, I completely agree that marginal electricity usage was bad for the environment. However I think that thought has persisted with us even though it is no longer true 100% of the time. With renewables sometimes the marginal cost of electricity to our environment is near 0 or even negative (eg, during periods of higher winds and lower demand.)

I predict that in the future as bitcoin mining becomes more and more of an efficiency game that you will see bitcoin mining be kind of a load balancer the grid, effectively turning off during peak demand (or low supply) times and contributing to the base load during regular times.

For example, it may even help the economics of building new wind plants. Eg, currently it may not be profitable to build a new wind plant because base load is too low that the excess power generated would need to be sold off at 0 or even negative prices. However if bitcoin mining could be turned on during these times and off during periods of high demand, there will need to be fewer peaker plants in operation and it would positively affect the economics of opening a new wind plant.

Bitcoin mining only cares about the cost of electricity at a given time, it is not like most other electricity demands that are very time based. With the large variance of electricity generation by renewables, I think bitcoin can in the future help smooth demand according to the real supply/demand curve.

It's kind of like a different implementation of the Tesla utility grid batteries. Instead of deploying power, you force the grid to build more renewable capacity (that the miners are paying for) that you use except in peak periods, where you turn off and effectively provide the grid with more power.

Edit: here is an article of a bitcoin mining company doing just that:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/bitcoin-m... https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2020/05/21/ho...

Bitcoin is so fundamentally deficient that I am absolutely shocked by its continuing popularity. I’ve tried and tried to think of a legitimate purpose for it, but I’m confident that it doesn’t have one.

It is just too slow and inefficient to be used as a currency, and I can’t understand why anybody would use something so volatile as a value storage mechanism similar to gold.

Transactions provide extremely dubious privacy as well, and governments still control it to a large extent via the exchanges, since at the end of the day, you still need to convert it to cash for anything useful.

Its only true use is for wild speculation and greed. It just makes me sick to think of the energy wasted by this when we are on the brink of climate catastrophe.

Why do these discussions so often assume electricity is a finite resource? Are people not able to turn their lights on because of Bitcoin miners?

When Bitcoin miners consume electricity shouldn't that increased demand affect the market price and dis-incentivize mining? What other use of electricity has such a high price elasticity? People don't turn off their ACs in the middle of summer because electricity costs are high -- they value comfort, a lot. But miners, IIUC, shut down their ASICs when they're unprofitable. Bitcoin mining is extremely price sensitive.

If Bitcoin mining is driving up local electricity prices it seems worthy of local regulation. It also seems like an incentive for increased energy production -- and given today's prices would most likely be clean energy production.

The report states Bitcoin's consumption is 39% clean energy. That is considerably higher than the overall portion of global energy consumption from renewables. Does this not mean Bitcoin is a large source of demand for renewable energy? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...

Increased demand increases prices in the short-run and incentivizes production -- decreasing prices, and further increasing usage in the long-run. Right? What am I missing?

A simple "back of the envelope" power use calculation of the possible power use of the bitcoin network, using the total hash rate from https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart ( 151.55 EH/s ) and assuming all Antminer S19 (110 TH/s for 3250 watts)

gives me a total power use of 0.00445 TWH which is very different to the 121 TWH on the cbeci site.. even given the efficiency range of mining gear (like if spread of included hw included stuff 10 x less efficient), cooling systems etc, what am I missing? I dont do these power calculations often so have a left a parameter out?

Bitcoin is Crypto 1.0.

There are better ways to do this. But people remain infatuated with Bitcoin.

Hi HackerNews, I don't typically post but seeing as this involves what I do daily, thought my input might be warranted.

1)Bitcoin mining by nature is a competitive game, people have flocked to cheapest power sources (unused hydro, solar, etc.) where the power costs are super low as that is the only recurring production cost.

2)There are no batteries that are power plant sized..... other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin allows opportunities for unused power to generate instant profit for the producers.

3)Because Bitcoin prices are currently soaring, it has opened up the profitability to mining in many areas with reasonably cheap power as essentially the global hashrate density can not catch up to adoption fast enough. In the long term, more and more efficient equipment will be manufactured and as the hashrate grows exponentially past the pace of mainstream adoption, the power usage again will need to be next to nothing to be competitive as the cost to produce 1 Bitcoin becomes harder and harder with increased competition and lower block rewards. *Please understand that via Moore's law continuance this is inevitable that hashrate will explode past the correlation to BTC prices due to more efficient chip technology increasing exponentially, and block rewards decreasing*

4)In the future, Bitcoin will only be mined in places where electricity is nearly free as the rewards ($/TH) will be shrunk to next to nothing. That is the end goal. We are at an asymmetric point at the moment where the mining is behind adoption. But just as the internet took time to be adopted, so will Bitcoin. But adoption curves must always end, and at the terminal equilibrium the incentives to only use waste energy for mining will be restored.

5)We are witnessing the birth of something A-M-A-Z-I-N-G that will completely change how banking and finance work on this planet forever. Of course there will be some growing pains along the way, but the future envisioned by Bitcoin is one of digital freedom, empowerment, and privacy. At the end of the day, you can't fight this tidal wave, all you can try to do is steer the technology towards your desired outcome.

So it is written, so it shall be.

All Hail Satoshi

I sold out of my position because of the energy consumption but more importantly that bitcoin feels now like it's 100% dependent on greater fools. Like a pyramid scheme, those who buy now must convince others to buy later to increase their wealth. It seems that momentum is the real driver of bitcoin price now not value. The end result is massive inequality especially as institutional investors buy in and the marketing gears begin to wind up. At least with an inflationary currency like USD, there's an incentive to work and put your money to work. Bitcoin feels like it mostly rewards the hoarders.

Quite a few people have noted that this is a lot, but there are caveats (how much does the _whole_ banking system use, how much is cryptofinance worth to society, etc etc).

There's a more important point though: you can have cryptocurrencies without this horrendous waste of energy.

There are functional cryptocurrencies that are _not_ backed by proof-of-work, and don't have the same catastrophic environment impact. Notable candidates include Stellar (backed by Stripe [1], using a consensus protocol with a distributed web of trusted servers) and Cardono (which includes Ethereum-like functionality, using proof-of-stake). They're newer, and they will evolve further, but they're already functional and dramatically more efficient (by many orders of magnitude).

They're not even that niche: Cardono is #4 by market cap & Stellar is #12 [2].

There are interesting arguments for crypto being valuable, but there are very few arguments for Bitcoin or proof-of-work specifically is valuable (and for why the current price isn't a huge bubble). Burning this quantity of power is tragic and totally unnecessary.

[1] https://stripe.com/blog/stellar

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/

As a store of value, bitcoin does not compare to fiat but to other forms of hard money such as gold. During Bretton-woods, the US dollar and other currencies were redeemable for gold and no one was saying that the US dollar was polluting the world because gold mining is polluting.

Comparing the environmental impact of gold and bitcoin is an open question. Gold mining pollutes the world in ways bitcoin never will. It creates ocean waste [1], long-lasting mercury pollution [2] and more.

As renewable become cheaper than fossil fuels, bitcoin will create additional demand for cheap renewable and accelerate the green transition. Because a mine could be moved essentially anywhere, it can be placed exactly where cheap renewable source of energy can be collected, thus maximizing the return on investment for renewable power plants, for example with geothermal in Iceland [3].

[1] https://www.earthworks.org/blog/drawing-the-battle-lines-ove...

[2] https://theconversation.com/gold-rush-mercury-legacy-small-s...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/iceland-bitcoin-mining-gallery/

Remember, the earth is burning.

Crypto is a huge environmental issue.

Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways.

The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so.

Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking rich? I simply can't answer what BTCs and other crypto coins are actually good for. Can someone help me out here?

That sounds very impressive, until you realize that Argentina uses slightly more energy than a single hydroelectric power station like the Itaipu Dam (103 TWh/year).

So comparing Bitcoin to Argentina really is more a testament how little electricity Argentina uses. In people's mind, a "single dam" sounds much, much less impressive than a "whole country".

And as Bitcoins get more scarce and get adopted by more and more banks and companies as reserves, the value of mining rewards is only going to continue rising, until Bitcoin will consume more electricity than the rest of the world combined. (Around the time it is worth $1.2 Million a coin.)

Change my mind.

Bitcoin rewards miners in Bitcoin, which is the ultimate deflationary “store of value”, and has the world mindshare as such. Even if a network arose that was better in every technological way, if it was a “sidechain” to Bitcoin, then BTC would just be locked up as people migrated to that network, so “unstaked” Bitcoins on the original network would become even more scarce, thus mining rewards would go up even more. Bitcoin would be a store of value / collectible just like gold, except its supply would always be shrinking and mining rewards rising.

PS: Consider I am right. How would governments even begin to stop it, if this use of electricity would net the provider more profit than powering a home?

All the people defending BTC because they a vested interest is hilarious. Ahhhh yes lets develop clean energy solutions to mine it before solving all the actual other clean power needs in the world.

Can't wait for the (American/Chinese/Russian) secret 4000 qubit computer to make a mockery of that ledger and all the culty idiots who bought into it.

There's a 0.9+ correlation between Tesla and BTC. If we're not near the end of the bubble, we're definitely not more than a few cycles away.

PC gaming uses more energy than Switzerland, estimated 75 billion kilowatt hours.

https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici...

So on one hand Elon Musk is buying bitcoins which consumes so much energy and on the other hand the same Elon Musk is promoting "green energy" with Teslas...

This comment will probably get buried but I wish someone would make something like coinmarketcap that showed how much energy was being used to secure each cryptocurrency.

If there were solid metrics, it'd help people who want to be more conscientious about where they put their money to actually do that.

Something like "coincarboncap".

A lot of cryptocurrencies don't use even a fraction of the energy bitcoin uses but there's no index to show that, so even if there were incentives for people to invest in energy efficient cryptocurrencies, how would they know which ones to go for?

The closest thing I can think of is whattomine. Maybe they'd be best equipped to build something like this, although I'm not sure if they'd have an interest in it.

Does anyone know how much energy the global gold mining industry uses?

Bitcoin every consumption halves every two years since the mining profit halfs. Thus mining bitcoins becomes less profitable and thus more energy efficient over time.

In the other, if the price increases faster than the mining yield drops, efficiency is decreased.

Unless BTC changes to a "proof of stake" model like the majority of other new cryptocurrencies that are out there, it will see a large chunk of its marketshare replaced.

There's already a big shift from BTC to more technically sophisticated solutions like Ethereum (ETH).

tThe newest protocols like Cardano (ADA) and Polkadot (DOT) are even more efficient in terms of number of transactions that can be securely handled per second.

Bitcoin also suffers from long wait times because you need to wait for the current block to be finalized. The sheer amount of electricity required just to confirm a transaction is not a viable long term solution for e-commerce.

Energy consumption doesn't cause emissions.

Energy production causes emissions.

Reducing consumption (by shaming it, in this case) means less investment in production, because there's less demand. This could slow the green energy transition.

It's worth noting that current bitcoin capitalization ($600B) is also more than Argentina GDP ($445B), so it can be said that bitcoin users constitute a rather significant (bit)nation on this planet.

Does anyone have any figures on what regular banking systems use for accepted/official currencies? I feel like this has blown up so much that it makes sense to compare and contrast.

I think the real value in Bitcoin is its immutability. I don't think there's any piece of information in the world as immutable as the first bitcoin block mined by satoshi.

This property is what powers amazing projects like OpenTimeStamps (https://opentimestamps.org/), this will become an essential tool for notaries all around the world, seriously!, and this has nothing to do with number of transactions, this scales to O(1) (you only need one transaction to prove as many things as there needs to be proved). Previous to bitcoin existence I don't think there was ever a distributed way of proving a piece of information existed previous to X, and even if there was, it was probably centralized or much much MUCH weaker than bitcoin. There's just no replacement, not even a million years as effective as bitcoin is for this, if I'm wrong please tell me! I want to know!

Most people here in favor of bitcoin argue about inflation, I understand the reasoning, and I'm from Venezuela, I pretty sure understand that value, but that's just missing the point, immutability >>> inflation protection.

And if we go to the smart-contracts terrain, that's a whole other world of very diverse and unexplored possibilities of values

A maximum of 178 things on the planet can consume >= to the electricity of Bitcoin.

99.44%/0.56% = ~178 (according to their estimate of 0.56% global use). So for the many comments invoking rhetorical comparisons: Bitcoin mining value per watt can be compared to no more than 178 things on Earth. Are we really saying there are only possibly 178 better uses for global energy than doing double SHA2 for no material value?

Bitcoin is wasteful.

Submitted title was "Bitcoin now uses more electricity than Argentina". Please don't editorialize like that—it's against the site guidelines:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

Cherry-picking a detail, especially a sensational detail, and making that the title, is the main way that people break this guideline, so please don't do that.

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, please do so in the comments. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The part that impressed me:

"The amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the USA alone could power Bitcoin for 1.8 years"

In other words idle devices in US could power all of Saudi and Netherlands. And all it would take to reduce that is some proper thoughfull design.

Other large current related threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096720

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26093099

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26091536

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26090330

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26082324

I do not understand the motivation behind the alarm of BTC mining energy utilization. In terms of pollution there are much easier targets with obvious net negatives for civilization. I'll give you one example, Teflon is a fantastic product but it does not need to coat every piece of cookware. PFOA's are likely in the blood of every American.

What motivations must one have to not see freeing billions of humans from the control of central banks as something good for humanity? Could the energy consumption of bitcoin mining be merely an engineering problem or are we being asked to eschew bitcoin mining (an cryptocurrencies) for the oh-so energy efficient global financial system?

Something smells...

The problem with Bitcoin is that POW is an unbounded competition of who can provide more computational power, ie. energy, to represent a consensus. Comparing the energy usage to Argentina, Island or any other country is therefore just a snapshot of the issue: Miners are incentivized to either increase the efficiency of mining, or invest more energy -- and because the latter option is easier, we see power usage rising and rising, without it having any influence on the performance or functionality. The only imaginable bound is all the energy that Humans can dispose of, but I think that if that is even being considered, the means have been mistaken for the goals.

Yesterday I read "What Bloomberg Gets Wrong About Bitcoin’s Climate Footprint" [0] where the writer tries to make a case that you shouldn't compare Bitcoin to VISA, but more to something like the dollar. While I don't agree with his whole story, for example including the US army in the costs, I thought it was an interesting way of looking at it.

Edit: he also points out that after all Bitcoin has been mined, the electricity use will probably change.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bloomberg-gets-wrong-bitcoin-...

People/companies who invested significantly in BTC will go to extreme measures to defend their investments. Anything negative said about BTC will be faced with various whataboutisms, how it uses renewables, it's a value store and other marketing talk. It's also pathetic that Tesla and Musk are pledging $100M for a CO2 capture solution, whereas in reality Bitcoin is adding 35MT (mega tons) of CO2 per year.

Perhaps not all of it is entirely "wasted" though. I've largely been able to avoid heating this winter as a result of crypto mining.

A computer pumping ~300W into the air 24/7 is remarkably effective for a small apartment

The economy does not account for the environment, that is what is wrong with the current economic system. Bitcoin did not fix that, but it fixes that there is no central bank other than miners.

The only real reason to be upset about this is carbon emissions. If we could properly price those into the price of energy and products the Bitcoin energy consumption would be a non-topic

Bitcoin (as an investment) is a pyramid scheme. It produces no wealth but has become a powerful means of transferring wealth to the upper layers of the pyramid by growing through the base of the pyramid and recruiting the "greater fools" still out there. It was meant as a currency but has become a investment goal and thus a pyramid scheme. Lets get rid of it, not least for the sake of environment.

Bitcoin also enables ransomware.

Bitcoin helps to solve a massive problem (centralization) so I wouldn't say it's not worth it. That said, there are many PoS and DPoS cryptocurrencies to choose from which use almost no electricity and would actually help to decentralize the economy much better than Bitcoin could on its own.

...We can't achieve decentralization by pooling all of the world's money on a single asset. That makes no sense.

this is beyond stupidity. first we waste all that material and brainpower in stupid wars where we destroy what we build, and kill those who remember how. and then comes captchas and passwords which steal so many hours from all the humans alive. and now things like this, it really pisses me off tbh. this should be used to find cures to peoples suffering. like the value should be real.

There's no energy index for the US military industrial complex, the entire US police force--but the primacy of fiat is based on the ability of an authority (for most of the world an authoritarian regime) to protect property through violent cohersion or violent force.

Bitcoin changes that. How much energy is a non-violent property protection commons system worth to humanity?

The pressures for electricity demand has helped drive research and innovation in renewable energies. In some way, the quest for bitcoin has helped renewables get off the ground.

I personally don't mind this extra demand on our electric production, as I believe it will help get us to a renewable energy sources even sooner.

Are the calculations for traditional finance energy consumption accurate? Do they account for all of the physical devices required? Credit card readers, POS systems, banks, offices, credit cards, mailers, etc... It all requires an immense amount of oil and other resources to keep that machine rolling.

Well, we need to build houses with bitcoin miners for heat generation.

(Idea stolen from guy on reddit who actually did this)

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Why don't we care about how dynamic typing contributes to global energy consumption? Runtime overhead for preserving type info in memory (on large quantity of machines) is probably comparable to crypto mining (which is performed on very few machines in comparison).

I had a concept that used crop futures as a virtual currency, deforming a "cloth" with "root growth" to generate randomness. The money would go to finance food production and the currency would accrue an actual dividend once it reaches the market.

This is just ridiculous! I’m hoping for ETH with proof-of-stake to save the face of crypto soon.

Surely the comparison should be against conventional systems used to store and transfer value? Consider a bank, with its datacentre, branches, and people employed to eyeball and verify transactions, maintain the supporting systems and infra, to begin with...

Forgive my ignorance but aren't there a finite number of bitcoins? A casual search says the world has mined 18.5 million out of a total of 21 million, after which, doesn't the mining process stop, along with the current environmental impact?

Ethereum 2.0 solves this via Proof of Stake. They are rolling it out in 2021 and I think the environmentally concerned will then consider the number two coin because of how energy hungry Bitcoin is. PoS also greatly increases transaction speed.

Isn't this only a meaningful statistic when compared to the energy generated by current currency production and maintenance? Considering what the U.S. does to support the dollar, it's probably not even remotely a comparison.

Everyone sleeping on Cardano, but it's creeping. It PoS consensus protocol in action. Tokens and smart contracts coming to mainnet soon.

Keep sleeping and balking at PoW. Stellar and Cardano will reshape the future of fintech transactions.

Am I wrong that resources spent mining Bitcoin aren't that much different from money spent on else? Is the impact of buying $1000 worth of concrete, airline flights, tomatoes, iPhones, etc. etc. significantly different?

I wish people would acknowledge that we are still in the early stages of blockchain technology. When ethereum proof of stake arrives then you will arguably have the security of Bitcoin in a much more efficient blockchain.

Genuine question: how much does this matter if much of it is renewables and cheap hydro? I feel like the negative externalities of using a lot of electricity are very very tied to where that electricity came from

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Bitcoin's value is derived by the fact that an enormous amount of calculations (and therefore energy) are required to fake a transaction. But smart investors know that just because something is hard does not make something a worthwhile endeavor. We should always go after low-hanging fruit first, and cryptocurrency is not that. I gave up on Bitcoin almost 8 years ago and I haven't regretted it. It is not going to fix the world's financial problems and its going to further wreck the planet. As a father, I don't want any further part of it.

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There is no problem, energy is "free", but still, the source of the electricity should always be a concern not just for bitcoin but for everything. Nuclear, solar, wind? good. Hydro, natural gas? less good but ok for now. Carbon, oil? we need to replace those plants asap.

Bitcoin or anything really should be allowed to use however much energy it is economically feasible. The real question is, why is there no better use for that electricity than to compute numbers? How our economies became so stagnant the best return for capital investment is bitcoin?

What’s your opinion on Corda? It has a different view on trust, than other cryptos (and it is not even crypto if we are being pedantic)

Honestly, the only scheme I have seen that seems like a reasonable trade off of trustlessness and energy efficiency is DPoS.

It’s an energy virus and needs to be stopped.

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I would love to see this done on a per country basis. Like x percent of y countries energy goes towards Bitcoin.

Cool. Now show us the Adtech Electricity Consumption Index and see if bitcoin would add up to even 1% of ads.

Anyone who buys and takes part in mining this currency is taking part in the proliferation of climate change and the destruction of the planet. Until you can say all mining is done sustainably and all server production doesn’t not use rare earth materials or cause significant e waste, mining and Bitcoin itself should be regulated. Period.

At some point these transaction costs would effectively make further gains impossible.

Has any government entity attempted to ban Bitcoin yet, and is this even possible?

Yes it's Bitcoin is inefficient, but in exchange we get social scalability.

https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-blockchains-...

This is disgusting. Why is this stupid useless asset allowed to proliferate without regulation?

Why are we not concerned about harvesting this blockchain at the cost of the planet? This is silly. Bitcoin needs to be regulated like other industries. It’s polluting just the same. Regulation now please.

According to this report, Bitcoin mining is fueled by renewables: https://coinshares.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-decem...

How much of that would be wasted otherwise though? You want cheap electricity to mine Bitcoin, so any energy that would otherwise be wasted is ideal. Before Bitcoin, some energy was literally just thrown away. With Bitcoin, it can be put to use for a profit instead.

Time to add another thing to Drake equation: Fb - the fraction of civilizations who didn’t fall prey for proof of work consensus. Others are invisible, cause they are very advanced, but all they do is mining crypto for food. To eat a sandwich you have to prove that it’s yours and a consensus is that it costs few MWh. Small islands of non-crypto trust appear millenia by millenia, but they are slowly marked as communism and disbanded by military consensus. It would be much faster, if military smart contract balance legacy didn’t require a petawatt-hour to sign one resolution with all conditionals, involving century-long testing of its code. Thankfully these groups do not form too often, because when you’re born, there is already a set of smart contracts that your ggggg-parent signed for your kin to obey. Maybe your ggg-children will have a chance with other families, if they manage to meet in the same aeon.

Complaining about Bitcoin now uses more electricity than Lichtenstein

Can we please regulate Bitcoin the way we regulate over heavy consumption and pollution industries? This doesn’t even take into account the production and mining of rare earth materials to power the super computers mining Bitcoin.

Well, how much could you make selling Argentina?

Would there even be a buyer?

How much electricity does the world monetary system use?

Climate change progress is being offset by the rise of harvesting digital currencies and the mining and production of parts that go into computers that power the harvesting and production of the currency.

Is Bitcoin now using more resources than gold mining?

In other words, Tesla just went carbon positive.

Does gold coin use more gold than Argentina?

It's not about today, but tomorrow. Inefficiency is way easier to fix than break paradigms. How much it spends per transaction now isn't that relevant.

Release the free energy patents or btc dies

Is consuming electricity a bad thing?

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos?

As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs. Some are essential, some could be considered trivial. But they are all important for their consumers.

Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system. While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy, for much more trivial reasons.

Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

So where can I buy futures on this?

Bitcoin needs to be exterminated.

Why do they have to mine bitcoins at this point? There are enough in the market just transact and trade with them.

Political clickbait. Many global activities use more electricity than Argentina. Please ban

The sudden barrage of anti-bitcoin news looks slightly suspicious.

I'm here for the bad takes by the hodlers.

proof of work is immoral if you’re an environmentalist. that’s why tesla acquiring BTC was especially egregious

btc considered harmful

a good and rational use of resources, it's not like we are in the middle of a planetary ecological disaster or a possible end-of-civilization climate change crisis. Capitalism at its finest.

Imagine if all real currency was replaced by bitcoin.

How much green house gases would be generated to keep our economic engines going and also who would be genrating this money?

What would the economic outlook of the world look like during covid if it happened in a world where all currency was bitcoin?

Isn't it funny how the attacks on bitcoin have come after the Tesla announcement?

Who is paying for these attacks I wonder?

That's a non-issue.

If we could burn bitcoin apologists we would have infinite energy because you are the densest bunch I've ever met

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

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GPU go Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Criticism a about bitcoin power consumption betrays an understand of even elementary economics. Replace bitcoin with beanie baby, and one could have made a similar argument in the late 90s about beanie babies causing a fabric shortage or fabric being wasted on toys that could instead be used for better purposes. When the beanie baby market crashed, the problem effectively fixed itself, as there was this sudden glut of fabric. Additionally, increased demand for bitcoin production means more power will generated, similar to how increased demand for cloth due to beanie baby production lead to more total cloth being produced overall. It is not like cloth for clothes was diverted to create beanie babies. The increased production of power to mine bitcoins is funded by bitcoin profits, and represents a consensual economic transaction between two parties, not wastefulness.

Of course, then you can talk about externalities such as climate change but I am ignoring this for now and just talking about the criticism of wastefulness.

I’m no expert, but https://nano.org/ seems to solve this quite nicely.

Yet the amount of environmental destruction and pollution done by Argentina to support their massive livestock industry is something Bitcoin will never achieve.

15 years ago we had been leaving computers running in the background to download and share data over P2P networks, nowadays it's to mine cryptocurrencies. How sad.

The mining of Bitcoin uses this amount of electricity.

How much resources does the mining of gold use?

Afaik, 3000 tons of gold are mined per year. Which is worth about $150B. I would expect the mining uses resources of about $150B as well?

By my calculation, the value of bitcoins mined per year is $15B:

900 Bitoins per day = 328500 Bitcoins per Year

328500 * $45000 = $15B

So I would expect that Gold mining uses about 10x as much resources as Bitcoin mining.

Fight the bitcoin climate crisis: https://senatusspqr.medium.com/fight-the-climate-crisis-usen...

This site is called Hacker News, and yet there is a surprising amount of resilience to accept the utility provided by Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, with the same old tirades that keep being repeated ever since Bitcoin was worth less than $1.

The ecosystem has grown and has been finding real world applications. If you are still of the opinion that cryptocurrency is exclusive to buying drugs, laundering money and scamming people, you have a lot of catching up to do.

Please put on your critical thinking hat for a minute.

Using electricity is not the same as contributing to carbon emissions. Bitcoin is mostly mined in areas overflowing with excess green energy, and thus contributes negligibly to carbon emissions.

The idea that all electricity generation is bad and therefore all electricity usage is bad is completely ridiculous. Instead of working so hard to figure out how to hate on some technology you feel like you missed out on, maybe try understanding it for a minute, and realize the massive net benefits it offers to society.

It's hilarious to see the naysayers about Bitcoin say that BTC is not usable. Now it's worth almost 50 grand and all they can come up with is expensive transaction fees which in hindsight, are really not that expensive, and the energy consumption of maintaining the Bitcoin network.

It sure is a lot better than using human lives, usually & most likely forced labor, to mine real Gold. Right? After all, energy is free when you're using solar power to mine your Bitcoins or any other coins. Does the energy really goes to waste when it provides heating? Etc?

It just seems like people are running out of excuses at this point. I wonder what they'll be saying when BTC hits $100,000.

I'm tired of this BS about Bitcoin and pollution. So tired that yesterday I wrote this [0]. Of course you might be in complete disagreement with me, but please read it and let me know what you think. Be kind. I am trying to have a good conversation about it, not to impose my view.

[0]: https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...

If I understand the system correctly, the vast majority of bitcoin energy consumption comes from the mining process, which is not strictly required (at least not anymore, with 18+ million BTC now mined and in circulation). I can spin up the bitcoin software on my home PC to participate in the network, sending and receiving bitcoin, and confirming some transactions, and the power consumed would be low. Much less than running a 4k graphics 3D game.

Because of that, banning bitcoin ownership and trading seems to be overkill or missing the point... Just regulate/limit mining, or even better put a capacity on electricity usage or have tiers where the more you use, the more expensive it is, making mining not worth it after a certain point.

All that said, government regulation will be extremely challenging here as it would require cooperation of nearly every country on Earth, and we've seen how difficult that is.