Realtime Bitcoin
realtimebitcoin.info
realtimebitcoin.info
Still, that's fascinating.
http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/
Tl;dr: "the electricity consumption of the network at 3250 PH/s adds up to 470-540 MW".
I don't think Visa uses up as much energy as a small country for processing 7 transactions per second at full speed.
(Eg even with bitcoins, you'd still have essentially the same stock market. You might be trading coloured coins on the blockchain, but people would still need to work to raise capital etc.)
I guess where we disagree is in how much of a proportion effort in finance is spent on producing that kind of trust vs other activities (like eg capital allocation, or hunting for arbitrage activities etc).
This "waste" is actually a kind of security all its own.
Scarcity is a good attribute for a currency. Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns. Which is what was used during the 2007 crisis. People do not realize how much worse the 2007 crisis would have been without the measures taken by the Federal Reserve.
IMO, the attractiveness of bitcoin is about being a secure decentralized payment system everything else is fluff. Such a system takes some energy to work what a surprise...
Do you guys think that all the financial institutions combined use less energy than bitcoin ? Bitcoin is probably using a lot less energy...
It's not. One immediate limit is ground space.
I shared your concern until recently. But then I learned more about fractional reserve banking: with suitable (lack of) regulations banks can and will create just the right amount of extra bank money to satisfy extra demands from the general population for holding extra money.
Historically, just conditions have held in eg the free banking episodes in Scotland, Canada, France, Australia. (I think in the Song dynasty in China, too.)
https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-... has a bit of background on history. And George Selgin has a bunch of paper really delving into the automatic adjustments that profit seeking banks will produce on their own accord.
But free banking is much closer to the way major currencies actually operate today (which also involves money supply determined primarily by banks' willingness to extend credit and fluctuating from day to day) than the concept behind Bitcoin or indeed the gold standard (supplies of a particular currency should be limited by [proof of] specific type of work and only able to grow, and very slowly)
> Australia. Operating with few restrictions, Australian banks were large, widely branched, and competitive, and they practiced mutual par acceptance, making the system resemble Scotland’s. The Australian episode is of special interest for suffering the worst financial crisis known under a free-banking system. After a decade-long real estate boom came to an end in 1891, some building societies and land banks failed, after which 13 of 26 trading banks suspended payments in early 1893. George Selgin (1992a) finds that the banks’ reserve ratios do not indicate any overexpansion of bank liabilities during the boom, though some banks clearly made bad loans. The boom was rather financed by British capital inflows, which suddenly stopped after the Baring crisis of 1890. Kevin Dowd (1992) adds that the banks were not undercapitalized. He argues that “misguided government intervention” in the first failed institutions “needlessly undermined public confidence” in other banks, while other interventions boosted the number of suspensions (all but one of the suspended banks soon reopened) by providing favorable reorganization terms for banks in suspension. (For a different view, see Turner and Hickson (2002).
I don't understand your second paragraph. You can have free banking in a gold standard or in a fiat regime. The historic free banking episodes regularly cited were in a gold standard setting. (But perhaps the confusion comes from 'Internet-Austrians' common insistence on 100% reserve banking as a mandatory feature of what they'd call a gold standard?)
(Bitcoin in its current parameters is more or less trying to imitate a gold standard.)
Internet Austrians and Bitcoiners believe that what is used as money should be a commodity with highly constrained supply, hence full reserve requirements for the former and a unified ledger and no credit-creation mechanism for the latter. Free bankers (and some altcoiners, and the economic mainstream) believe that what is used as money should be a promise from a financial institution with a flexible supply based on credit creation (disagreeing with each other on whether it's best backstopped by convertibility to a [quasi]commodity or central bank reserves under stricter regulations)
Free banking fanatics' arguments that Australian free banking practices were fundamentally sound and systematic collapse happened only because the government saved some of the worst ones should be taken with the same pinch of salt as anarchists' claims that people are fundamentally non-violent with crime occuring mainly as a reaction to police brutality.
As an aside:
Reading about how free banking can automatically can adjust the amount of bank money created over eg a fixed amount of gold to keep nominal GDP stable even in the face of eg increased demands for holding money from the general population, made me much more sympathetic to bitcoin's fixed supply than I'd been before. Since some kind of inflation, price level or nGDP targeting seemed like a good idea for a currency regime, and I could only assume that bitcoin was bound to fail before.
Of course, the mechanism George Selgin describes don't necessarily have to work that way. But at least it's something that looks plausible.
Ie even if bitcoin was purely running on renewable energy, it would still crowd out other users of renewable energy, and those might fall back to coal.
In really Bitcoin's power consumption is ~500 MW as of 3 months ago, which is less than the amount of electricity spent on decorative Christmas lights in the US: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/
Also, Christmas lights can use a lot of power. Your example reminds me of those electric heater ads that say their product uses as much power as a coffee maker.
More popularity will lead to higher bitcoin prices, and that will indirectly to more power consumption for hashing until no-arbitrage equilibrium is restored.
It is still increasing at a rate that would make most startups jealous when they look at their own growth rate: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=2year...
"If it ever becomes popular for more than crime and tax evasion, that's as lot of Christmas lights."
It's already more popular than that. Bitcoin is no longer driven principally by "sin" activities: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2808762 And see the nice growth in various areas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin#Growth
Care to share any of the details on the tech? Are you using each of the exchange's individual APIs to calculate the weighted average? Did you use any library or framework to help with websockets, or to look at the blockchain?
The meaning of "Estimated Money Sent" was a little confusing to me, even after reading the definition on the About page.
What do the scrolling numbers in the background mean? I imagine there aren't enough of them to be all of the realtime transactions happening on the blockchain. Also, I'm sure you know, but they overlap when showing as 600x120 in iframe mode.
Allowing users to embed the widget in an iframe is nice and a good way to spread the word about your site. Maybe unbury that from the About page and link directly to an 'Embed this' page from the main page, and (as silly as it sounds) use something like clipboardjs to make copying the snippet to the clipboard easier.
We could at least burn coal to compute something useful.
I'm not dismissing bitcoin altogether as it brought a great deal of interesting concepts, in fact I even mined a very small quantity once uppon a time. But right now the whole hashing random number madness is mostly a waste of energy.
I don't think we should afford 1.7GW (apparently 500MW according to a comment bellow) of power as long as we're still burning fossil fuel somewhere on earth.
Just because the method to defend against unmodified database entries in the Bitcoin blockchain is very evident and the evidence of ecological cost to our current financial system is largely silent doesn't mean one can ignore those costs.
We have a network growing exponentially relying on the fact that we're hashing random numbers. Academic research aside, it sounds very useless.
That has nothing to do with the way banks are doing their maths or maintaining their infrastructure. Again, I'm also very grateful of bitcoin demonstrating we can exchange value without a 3rd party, but it looks like nowadays we could do better.
Now in regard of the destruction of ecological areas, mining gold etc... I simply agree with you.
One alternative idea is 'proof of stake'.
And then it always seemed to me, also, that some kind of strategic partial centralisation could help make cryptocurrencies much more efficient..
Honestly, if you are going "big leagues" in cryptocurrency, I don't think having a central authority is bad as long as procedures are in place to contest flawed histories. Peercoin does its PoS through the developers signing key locking history - as long as people trust the devs, they trust the blockchain. If someone can prove the Peercoin blockchain is manipulated, the chain and project can be forked and someone else can be given confidence by whatever measure the community wants to use.
If trust in devs is sufficient, why bother with a blockchain? Just store the history in Git.
Yes, and you could implement that specialisation on top of bitcoin. Just imagine eg one of the bitcoin exchanges that hold your balance for you allowing you to send money to other account holders (even at other exchanges) without that ever hitting the blockchain.
The control to keep that kind of company honest is that people will occasionally demand their balances be paid out in bitcoin.
If you have a better idea, we're all ears.
And, of course, one can express a desire to want to fix one problem without being obligated to express the desire to fix problems many orders of magnitude larger ("You don't want our town to cut down the trees in the park? Why don't you care about the destruction of the rainforests?"). You don't even know that the person you're talking to doesn't want to fix those problems.
The bitcoin design sat in a blind spot, perhaps deservedly though.
However, history has parallels: digging up gold out of the ground is enormously wasteful just to use it as a currency. Paper mostly does the job just as well. But just like bitcoin, the very expense can buy you certain security features. 'Gold' is the original proof of work?
History however also shows solutions: for commodity money, fractional reserve banking was one. For example, at its heyday the Scottish free banking system had a gold-reserve ratio of about 2% and was virtually crisis free. So the expense of digging up gold was all else being equal reduced by 98% compared to using gold directly for all trades.
Now, I wonder how widespread fractional reserve banking would work for bitcoin. At the moment, bitcoin exchanges holding your money in escrow come closest to the kind of institutions that could start this kind of banking for bitcoin.
I also don't know how fractional reserve banking would impact the price of bitcoin and the incentives for mining. As a bigger proportion of transactions would be off the bitcoin chain, eg mediated by trusted third-parties, mining incentives would perhaps go down?
That is a fallacy. The traditional banking system uses much more electrical power to keep running than Bitcoin does.
(Similar to historic free banking episodes in eg Scotland or Canada.)
http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/
So far no one has been able to come up with a useful PoW that leaves the properties of Bitcoin intact (notably decentralization, and trustlessness.) That is why it has to be based on abstract puzzles like hashing data. Some thoughts as to how implementing a useful PoW might be done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8963209
Also, Bitcoin miners use only a fraction of the electricity used by a thing that is literally useless on a technical level: Christmas decorative lights (6.63 TWh/yr in the US, probably 20+ TWh/yr in the world). This helps put things in perspective. If Xmas lights use 4x more electricity, you should be 4x more mad at Xmas lights.
These other cryptocurrencies are only less energy intensive because they are mined by less computer power. However Eth may introduce POS which will reduce computer power required.
I have a miniscule amount of BTC (currently 'worth' £20), I just bought it out of novelty really, never found that much of a use for it outside of buying gift vouchers.
Where is all this money going? People just trading the currency between each other? Retail?
Also, one word posts will almost always get downvotes unless you're answering a question that can reasonably be answered with only one word.