'Bitcoin Could Cost Us Our Clean-Energy Future' (grist.org) 468
An anonymous reader shares an article: Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people. But what they might not have accounted for is how much of an energy suck the computer network behind bitcoin could one day become. Simply put, bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What's more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development, and it's getting worse. Digital financial transactions come with a real-world price: The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an exponential demand for computing power. As bitcoin grows, the math problems computers must solve to make more bitcoin (a process called "mining") get more and more difficult -- a wrinkle designed to control the currency's supply. Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day. And miners are constantly installing more and faster computers. Already, the aggregate computing power of the bitcoin network is nearly 100,000 times larger than the world's 500 fastest supercomputers combined. The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge -- an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.
Is there a way to do real work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of computing is done, and few people complain about the energy consumption. It's only when it's computation for the sake of expensive computation that it becomes offensive. Is there any way to do some kind of real work in the process of generating this data, or would that inherently compromise the security of the system (or render it impossible?)
Re:Is there a way to do real work? (Score:4, Interesting)
You can always do your cryptocurrency computation only in the winter, in a northern climate, and use the heat to warm your house.
Re:Is there a way to do real work? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ok to kill puppies and kittens too as long as they make a good coat.
The real problem with what you say is there are better ways to heat your home than electricity. And if you do have to use electricity to do it even a modern heat pump is better than straight electric heating.
Re: Is there a way to do real work? (Score:2)
What are those other methods? Burning fossil fuels? Do we all have to move to geothermal areas for your plan?
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Re: Is there a way to do real work? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Is there a way to do real work? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. If your heat pump works that way, get a better heat pump. A Mitsubishi Hyper-Heat, for example, or one of the Toshiba heat pumps. These use a dual-stage process, which allows the unit to actively pump heat with air temperatures down to -17F. Our heat pump has kept our house toasty through the coldest Vermont winters, and it does not use a resistive element. If the temperature drops below -17, it just shuts off until it rises again; in that case you would need to either make up the heat loss with a resistive element, or just coast through it. If we lived in Minnesota, we'd definitely have a resistive backup, and it would run once or twice a year.
Assisted by resistive. Pump works better to -10F (Score:2)
The heat pump is more efficient than resistive heating down to about -10F (-23C). Many units *also* have an auxiliary resistive element that can kick in around 35F to assist in heating.
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IF you are paying electric and gas bills, just use natural gas for heat and skip the heat pump. Trust me, It's going to be cheaper for 99.99% of you out there.
Natural Gas prices have fallen though the floor the last ~10 years (thank you fracking) and I don't see that changing anytime soon. We literally have Natural Gas coming out our ears in the world right now. We have already developed more production than we as a world can possibly consume over the next 10 years, which was driven by the high prices o
Re:Is there a way to do real work? (Score:5, Insightful)
We heat our entire house with a 12kbtu heat pump. It definitely doesn't suck: it blows. But joking aside, the point is that bitcoin mining is resistive heat. It's about a third as efficient as using a heat pump. So even if you use bitcoin mining to generate heat, you're still wasting energy. And of course, there's summer.
Re:Is there a way to do real work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heat pumps have a sharp fall-off in efficiency outside of their designed temp range. I have a heat pump based HVAC and in the coldest days of winter it is unable to heat the house, because the outside air is the same temp or colder than the evaporator coil temp, leading to liquid freon hitting the compressor. Since that is a BadThing(tm) the heat pump shuts off. Resistive heaters (labeled as supplemental heat on the thermostat) then kick on. At that point mining BTC is no different from an efficiency standpoint.
Now, there are still better ways to heat, in my case I fire up the wood burning stove and use that, but still, heat pumps are not the be all end all in wide swing climates (I have the opposite problem in the hottest summer days, unable to condense the vapor back to a liquid very well).
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Heat pumps suck.
Heat pumps are fine when used in the appropriate places / temperature ranges. When operating in those settings, the GP was correct that they are more efficient than electrical strip heating. I live in Virginia Beach and my 3-stage, 16 SEER unit can keep my house at 72 without the auxiliary (3rd stage) strip heating elements when the outside temperature is down to just below freezing. Of course, the farther North you are, the more disappointed one will be with the Winter heat-pump performance, but even ther
Also in southern climates, in northern summer (Score:2)
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After further consideration, bitcoin is obviously an evil plot by the Big Entropy lobby to accelerate the heat death of the universe.
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Re:Is there a way to do real work? (Score:4, Insightful)
The value of the computation is that it's what secures the immutability of the ledger.
Complaining about it is like saying the Internet wastes electricity because ... fax machines, or something.
Re:Is there a way to do real work? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it does that in an extremely dumb and inefficient way, that's a perfectly valid reason to complain.
Re:Is there a way to do real work? (Score:4, Informative)
That's a valid reason to complain about energy required to perform transactions, but not mining.
For mining, you can be either for or against pissing away horrific amounts of energy to mine BTC, but its efficiency or inefficiency is an artificial design choice that the system must follow.
Re:Is there a way to do real work? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a valid reason to complain about energy required to perform transactions, but not mining.
For mining, you can be either for or against pissing away horrific amounts of energy to mine BTC, but its efficiency or inefficiency is an artificial design choice that the system must follow.
But it's a horrible design choice. Basically, by design, it stays secure only by making the cost of mining too expensive for someone to buy enough miners to game the system and the primary expense is electricity. If someone manages to get around this limitation by say heating a stadium with the excess heat, then either they can game the system or the amount of electricity used goes up as the cost to mine drops.
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That 1 BTC that costs $5,000 to mine is worth $13,000 USD at today's exchange rate. Good luck convincing anyone that that's a stupid investment, especially if they've already dumped the capital into mining gear.
Rube Goldberg is Astonished (Score:5, Interesting)
More and more people are using Rube Goldberg logical arguments to derive some kind of statement that X is Bad.
The argument usually has an excessive number of premises, each premise depending on the previous, and bordering on, if not explicitly, being a non sequitur.
Somewhere, someone probably has created a proof that shows that the likelihood of an argument being correct diminishes with the number of premises it requires.
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Somewhere, someone probably has created a proof that shows that the likelihood of an argument being correct diminishes with the number of premises it requires.
Ockham?
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The problem with Bitcoin is the fact that it growing at a rate far exceeding any sane inflation.
It has gone to stupid level. Because they are so valuable, no one will actually buy anything real with them, unless they will be the pizza guy who bought a Pizza with 20 bit coins a few years ago.
The increasing calculation cost in mining them, is happening faster then the speed computation to figure it out. In general it has became a valuable currency that only an idiot will spend. So we have massive computers
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I'm more than a little skeptical of these power figures, I can't help but wonder if they are mixing up the GPU mining power requirements of other cryptocoins with the ASIC mining poweri
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Bitcoin is creating an anarcho capitalist paradise where you can make $87 million dealing drug and hire hitmen to take out rival drug dealers, all without leaving the house [wikipedia.org]. How is that not 'real work'?
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You're building an international payment platform. That's real work.
There are other international payment platforms that are astronomically more energy-efficient, although they carry the downsides of having marginally higher transaction fees and being much more vulnerable to detection when used for crime.
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Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards... (Score:5, Insightful)
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This true for all currency. It only has value because you believe it does.
Do you think in The Walking Dead the US Dollar is still used? ;-) No. You buy things with force, food, gas, sex, cigarettes, and alcohol.
Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards... (Score:5, Insightful)
My father use to work in an Auto Junk Yard. He Boss use to tell him (thus he would always tell me). "Its all junk!... Unless someone wants it, then it is merchandise!"
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Actually, more like Magic The Gathering [mtgox] cards.
You missed a '.com' there.
No, it won't. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it won't "cost us our clean-energy future." As the article points out itself, the growth rate in the energy cost of bitcoin is unsustainable. Eventually bitcoin transactions are going to become more and more infeasible.
I can't see how anyone expects that Bitcoin will be able to maintain its value if you can't transfer it to other people. And if its value goes down, then so will the demand for energy to keep it running.
Re:No, it won't. (Score:5, Funny)
This is actually going to be interesting should bitcoins ever start to slide a bit more than they did, people notice that they can't get rid of them because the transfer itself already takes insane amounts of times and people (who are already nervous as all hell considering the investment) start to panic.
I'll bring the popcorn.
Any worse than modern web? (Score:2)
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Depending on how many people load a particular browser-bogging page, one page may use more energy overall than any one BTC transaction...hey, that's a good argument for getting companies to slim down their websites! Do it for the environment!
I'd like to see a comparison (Score:2)
Could we get this compared to the amount of power used for computers standing around in offices being idle because the tasks they run don't even use 5% of the CPU's power 99% of the time, and how those offices could lower the power footprint by way more than the bitcoin miners use?
Could we then also see the power footprint of the global light pollution, especially during times like Christmas where everyone feels the urge to put enough light into his garden to divert planes because they think you're the airp
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Yes, we're not talking about much electricity per CPU.
But we're talking about millions of CPUs.
I'll take unintended consequences for $10k, Alex (Score:2)
<eom>
Proof of space (Score:2)
Filecoin [filecoin.io] appears to be taking this route. So if you care about this issue, use something like Filecoin instead of something like Bitcoin.
The same shifting goalposts (Score:5, Insightful)
>Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people.
Bitcoin was a marginally successful experiment in creating a trustless secure distributed public ledger. It was initially used for a few fun purchases, then the crazy cryptoanarchists and libertarians took up the banner and it just started getting weirder. But hey, I'm pretty sure the mining craze drove improvements in gaming video cards, so we did get that out of it before it morphed into an 'investment' pyramid scheme.
However secure the ledger itself may theoretically be... in practical use Bitcoin is about as secure as having a wad of cash hanging out the back pocket of your pants. It's only anonymous until a person can be linked to a ledger entry, and then it's the least anonymous way in the world to transfer wealth.
And Bitcoin was never going to replace money, which quickly became obvious once you looked at the scaling issues. I'm sure the original coder was well aware of that and didn't worry about it because they never expected it to grow beyond a small circle of friends using it for shits and giggles. Or not.
Bitcoin was also never going to replace money because it enforces some basic economic policies on its use that have been proven disastrous by history; the coder was obviously neither an economist nor a historian.
As an investment, Bitcoin's a lottery ticket. If you're lucky and you get in and out at the right times, Bitcoin may still make you some money - but odds are pretty good it won't. Just ask the last round of people who invested in tulips or beanie babies.
STOP supporting valuations based on bullshit. (Score:2)
How many millions of man hours are lost each day to Facebook addiction? How may YouTube data centers running 24/7/365 warehouse nothing but the digital equivalent of cat videos? How many millions have been pissed away every year by the US Mint who still mints pointless pennies at a loss?
Hard to pin the blame on bitcoin when we have so many examples of pointless waste today.
Bitcoin is a malignant development because Greed is a disease. Stop supporting valuations based on hype and bullshit. This applies t
A/C Demonstrates the Value of Pron (Score:2)
Naive extrapolation (Score:2)
Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument.
They created a cash analog and didn't think it would be used as an investment vehicle? Then they are (as I suspected) imbeciles with little understanding of economics and less of people. Kind of like the programmers in the early days of networks that failed to secure their networks because they naively trusted other people's incentives to match their own.
Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people.
It's not a replacement for money because it IS a form of money for all practical purposes. Just because it isn't a fiat currency doesn't change that fac
Bullshit... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit!.
Normally I would try to justify my comment, but I think my statement covers it just fine.
Transaction Fees (Score:3)
With transaction fees over $20, there is no reason to use Bitcoin for anything other than speculation.
Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been utopian no-government proposals in the past.
People always show up, and when enough people have arrived, they need to be governed.
Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government (Score:5, Insightful)
People who want to get rid of government generally imagine themselves as being more successful once that government is gone, and rarely consider what other people just like them will do in order to be the winners in the new system.
You get rid of the current system, it will be quickly replaced with tens of thousands of little vicious despotic governments practicing feudalism, with all the reductions in quality of life that implies.
Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government (Score:5, Funny)
People who want to get rid of government generally imagine themselves as being more successful once that government is gone, and rarely consider what other people just like them will do in order to be the winners in the new system.
And if anyone needs proof of this, just point them to a Home Owners' Association.
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Who said anything about no government? OP only said that a currency free of government control is a good thing.
Yep. 2 year olds know that, have leaders (Score:3, Insightful)
You're absolutely right. If you've ever watched a group of two or three year old kids, one or two kids tend to be leaders/bossy. The others follow the leader(s). The same happens in any business meeting after a few minutes. It's basic human nature. Mammal nature, actually - other mammals do the same.
Even it it weren't human nature, when a bunch of people get together, conflicts happen and rules are needed to resolve and reduce conflicts. Those rules need to be enforced. Rules for large groups are also
Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you summer child. You are so naive.
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A day when no government can create or destroy money is a win for the world.
It is not clear this is true. In the past many countries used currencies based on gold, and that didn't really work out so well. As economies grew, and the supply of gold grew more slowly, the result was deflation, which inhibits growth. It was difficult to stimulated the economy out of recessions.
Once gold was demonetized, it became a store of value rather than a currency. Bitcoin seems headed the same way. People mostly buy bitcoins as speculation, not for use as a currency.
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There's also tulips and land in Florida. that's the direction Bitcoin will be headed.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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How so?
Even in the United States the actual value of the dollar is different across different towns.
Upstate NY 2k a month can pay for a mortgage of a good size house with about an acre of property. In Downstate NY 2k a month would get you a small apartment.
Food, Fuel prices are different.
A world dollar wouldn't really do too much. as 1WD could buy 10kg of rice in one area. while in others it would get you 1kg.
Bitcoin controllable, reality didn't follow design (Score:5, Informative)
If it creates a worldwide non-government controlled currency, it will be worth the struggle. A day when no government can create or destroy money is a win for the world.
Its not really on a path to do so. Yes it was designed to do so but designs often lose to reality. The reality of bitcoin is that we do NOT have decentralized mining.
In 2014 a mining pool reached 50% of the hashrate, IF they made it to 51% and had bad intentions there could have been a successful attack on the blockchain.
Today Chinese mining pools control 70% of all the hashrate, that seems vulnerable to the wishes of a single government.
Bitcoin was designed so that individuals and their computers did the mining. Instead we have mining performed by exotic and expensive ASIC hardware that it under the control of only a few. Even when individuals "own" the hardware they often have it colocated somewhere where there are inexpensive fees and low cost electricity. Their bitcoin mining rig is not really under their control and may be in a different country.
Blockchain is here to stay, bitcoin not so certain (Score:3)
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Bitcoin was designed so that individuals and their computers did the mining. Instead we have mining performed by exotic and expensive ASIC hardware that it under the control of only a few.
If this site is still News For Nerds (and not Echo Chamber For Morons), then there won't be a single person here who didn't see that logical conclusion coming from the very start.
False premise (Score:4, Insightful)
If it creates a worldwide non-government controlled currency, it will be worth the struggle.
You say that as if it is somehow axiomatic. I reject your framing of the argument. If you can provide some airtight argument that government involvement in currency has some fatal flaw then please provide it and collect your Nobel prize. But frankly I don't buy the argument that bitcoin or any analog of it really fixes any problems in any form of government issued currency without creating new and potentially worse ones in the process. If you distrust governments as a philosophical position I can understand that but it doesn't automatically follow that because governments aren't perfect that a solution that doesn't involve them will necessarily be better.
Then of course there is the problem that there is absolutely no way that governments are going to allow a currency that they have no influence over. Even if government leaders honestly and earnestly wanted to not be involved with the currency the first moment there is a dip in the market there will be people screaming for the government to do something about the problem. The governments would HAVE to be involved in regulating currency even if they didn't want to. Not to mention that truly unregulated markets tend to crash and burn hard. There will never be a currency market without government regulation no matter what the mechanics of the currency might be.
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All they have to do is turn off the electricity to it's citizens. All their money is useless.
In the age where everything requires an energy efficiency rating, bitcoin is obsolete.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way.
Citation, please? I can hand someone $1000 without electricity. What numbers are you talking about?
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From your bank account to his bank account? Via the internet. Beyond country borders?
I doubt so.
I like to nitpick, too.
But at some point it is simply much to far out of context.
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I'm sure I can find a way to meet your conditions though for less than 250 kWh...
But, yes, I understand that most of the conditions under which BTC excels are the primary use case. I have no problem with BTC as a hobby, but many people treat it as their current Multi-Level Marketing Project/Scheme.
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I can also hand someone 1 bitcoin without electricity. Put a wallet with exactly 1 bc on a cheap USB stick, presto.
I kinda predict that something like this, along with a quick and easy way to verify that there is actually a bc on the stick, will surface soon.
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To use the BTC, they still have to perform a transaction.
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Unless they, too, hand the stick to the next person. Because, well, how do you "use" a bitcoin? Why, you transfer it to someone. Which is exactly what happens when you pass on the stick.
It's more like handing over cash, and if you want to wire it to someone, you first have to put it into an account. With the difference that this might actually still be faster than putting money into your account and then transferring it...
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You must use the system to transfer the funds, to ensure the person giving you the USB stick didn't just go and spend the BC as well, in addition to "giving" it to you.
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How do you put the bitcoin wallet on the USB stick without using electricity?
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That portion of the deal of course still needs electricity. As does any verification.
Gimme a few hours to work on the idea, I just had it, ok?
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Easiest way for this would probably be some kind of RasPi (or similar) device that allows you to do pretty much what you do now when trying to figure out whether a coin is genuine.
Something like this will eventually come. The details are of course still to be worked out, but eventually I'm quite convinced we'll see cheap sticks (or just for-purpose made roms holding coins) being used. All it takes is a simple way to verify that the stick/rom/whatever is genuine, and that's far from impossible with current t
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You can do the same with Bitcoin: make some of these [gitlab.com], or print off a few paper wallets from here [bitaddress.org]. Load them with value. Hand them off to people, who can either hand them off to other people or redeem them for their stored value.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Depending on the denomination ,the cost of printing a US dollar note is between 5.4 cents and 15.5 cents: https://www.federalreserve.gov... [www.federalreserve.gov] [federalreserve.gov]
Some things to take into consideration:
1: The cost does not scale linearly. $50,000 does not cost 50,000 times as much as $1. With bitcoin, it does scale linearly.
2: Most of the US dollars are never printed, but only exist as numbers in banks. Loro clearing houses haven't operated by sending truckloads of bank notes for a long long time.
3: This is production cost, not environmental cost. In some cases, there may be a correlation, but I do not believe this is one of them.
4: Transaction costs are enormously higher with bitcoin. If I give you $10, the cost is minimal. If I transfer $10 in bitcoin to your wallet, the computational costs are staggering.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
USA Today fluff piece [usatoday.com] indicates that a Visa payment processing center uses 50,000 house-days of power every day, but they use that to process 400 million transactions per day. That works out to
Re: Bullshit (Score:2)
Mining isn't separate from transactions.
There's no way to actually calculate a "per transaction" energy usage, so what they have done here is said "OK, the entire network uses X electricity per day, and on average there are Y transactions per day, therefore each transaction uses X/Y electricity."
Of course the reason the network uses so much electricity is that the vast majority of the machines on the network are competing to try and mine coins. Processing transactions is essentially just a side-business to
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
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Where is the economic calculation that includes the American Empire which is founded on the USD as the world reserve currency, which costs trillions of dollars a year, and including the well-accepted fact that the USG is the world's largest polluter?
This whole "we only look at first-order effects" trend in economic analysis is boring and a waste of everybody's time.
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2) The reason bitcoin mining is necessary is that we need record keeping to prevent fraud in financial transactions.
LOLWUT? Mining and the blockchain do precisely dick to prevent fraud in financial transactions. If anything, it enables more fraud.
4) You need to compare bitcoin energy costs to dollar energy costs, not merely look at bitcoin alone. If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way.
5) Conclusion, if we switch entirely from bitcoin to dollar, we will SAVE money and save energy.
What comparison did you do? It seems that you pulled this information out of your ass. TFA says it takes the same amount of energy to power 9 US homes for a day to complete a BTC transaction. Traditional electronic payments require miniscule amounts of electricity, cash and cheques probably use the most when they're shipped in vehicles.
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They have made the mistake of failing to compare...The reason bitcoin mining is necessary is that we need record keeping to prevent fraud in financial transactions.
And you've made the mistake that those profiting the most from financial fraud want that "problem" corrected. They don't.
...If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way...Conclusion, if we switch entirely from bitcoin to dollar, we will SAVE money and save energy.
Again, you assume those profiting from dollar transactions and energy want the "problem" of more expensive transactions corrected. They don't.
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The energy wasted on computing new bitcoins is growing so large that it's wasting energy that could have been used for more useful purposes.
Imagine if banks worldwide suddenly prohibited exchange between bitcoins and hard cash.
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If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way.
Come again? I don't even understand what the unit of measure you're proposing means, but I can already tell you that if you want to understand the cost of transactions, we don't measure them "per $1,000 equivalent". We measure them per transaction.
According to these researchers, each Bitcoin transaction currently costs the equivalent of 9 days worth of energy for an average US household, with that number growing over time as more resources are added to the system. The average US household consumed 10,766 kW [eia.gov]
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm no, each mined coin might take a large amount of energy, but the transaction costs are pretty much fixed and are nowhere near as onerous.
The mining takes a tremendous amount of energy (.296 Watts per GH/s), and the transaction costs are the opposite of fixed: they grow higher with every transaction, by definition.
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The above link is mind-blowing.
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Yes it makes sense, although I have not done the calculations.
There is a lot of mining going on and relatively few transactions.
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Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day ...
Sorry, we all know that mining is energy intensive, and transactions are not that cheap
But the number above makes no sense at all.
A lot of the numbers in the summary (no, I didn't RTFA) make no sense. 31 terawatt hours per year is slightly less than 85 gigawatt hours per day, but it is apparently increasing at a rate of 450 gigawatt hours per day?
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Greed really is the plague of the new humanity. Once and indispensable personnality trait for survival in the savage, barbarian world we evolved from, it has now become the cancer of civilization.
I agree. We must Solve for Greed. Otherwise, we will perish.
Problem is, it is so deeply entrenched in our genetic make-up that we'll fight it in vain for thousands, if not millions of years to come, if our species lasts that long.
Our species won't last that long. The machines that Greed will ultimately create will ironically put us out of our misery long before then.
Sadly, we probably deserve nothing less.
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Greed and self-interest pretty much has driven everything we've done since crawling out of caves. You are alive right now because of greed. You have a cushy western lifestyle because of greed.
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Greed is what drove Intel to produce the i4004 microprocessor.
The universe has long proven the value of balance. Greed can be sustained for long periods of time as long as it sustains a finite and reasonable limit.
The greed we now have today is ruthless obscene greed. The kind of greed that knows no bounds. The kind of greed that drives billionaires to need to become trillionaires. The kind of greed that ultimately created the massive imbalance of wealth and power in the world today, which cannot be sustained.
We will eventually be consumed by it. Eat the Rich wil
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Exactly. When figuring out the impact of Bitcoin on energy use, don't forget to include all the energy use it displaces, and its potential for load balancing.
In a mature system Bitcoin can actually HELP clean energy by absorbing excess power during peak production. Use it to provide heat at little cost (or even be paid to heat one's home) in polar regions (need to colonize Antarctica, though). Perhaps in the Himalayas too. When there is more wind power than a locale can handle, or more solar power due to
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...or get more efficient? The miners I bought a few years ago draw several times' more power than the miners you can buy today; their power draw is such that it no longer makes sense to run them for their primary purpose. I fired one up for a bit last year just to use it as a space heater; unlike a purpose-built space heater, it somewhat offsets the cost of its operation. :)
Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled (Score:2)
And why exactly can't Bitcoin miners and networks run on clean energy?
There is not a surplus of clean energy to allocate to bitcoin. Note that as Europe shut down nuclear power plants they have had to increase their usage of coal despite their massive investment in renewables. Last year coal exports from the US to Europe doubled.
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Same reason anything else can't, inertia and/or upgrade costs. But it's a gigantic waste of energy either way, and won't be a moot point until we have an excess of renewable electricity generation.
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More than 1/1000th of world electrical consumption being used on a horrifically inefficient and wholly unnecessary digital currency should indeed make us shit ourselves. Thank you for helping to make clear just how severe the problem is.
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So the claimed electricity cost is a tolerable 1.5% of capitalization...
That's assuming that Bitcoin is in addition to created capital, and not just a shift in investments. A charge of 1.5% to move investments is high.
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You call that a non-story? [slashdot.org]
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You made a mistake in your calculations. Bitcoin uses 0.14~0.16% of the world's electricity, as calculated by others in this thread. That is a truly frightening number.
Also it's not that hard to maintain anonymity between a wallet and a person, thousands of black hats do it every day. Ransomware and darknet markets would not be a thing if Bitcoin were not anonymous.
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Since every single fucking transaction is in the blockchain, it's the WORST possible thing you could use to do ANY of the above.
No, everything you mentioned works best with government-created fiat currencies. The serial numbers can only identify the currency itself, n