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Comment by jeffnappi | Hacker News Reader

DLTs are inefficient by design. The energy consumption is unsustainable with the technology as it stands. For example Bitcoin consumed an estimated 40 million KWh in the past 24 hours - 137KWh per transaction. Enough to power ~1.3M American homes. Many of the alt-coins are even worse.

Source: http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

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This argument certainly has some validity (see also Ensmenger's project to understand the environmental role of computing in general: http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/enviro-compute/dirtyb...).

However, it only goes so far, since other consensus mechanisms could have lower energy requirements. Proof of stake, e.g., (if it ever gets off the ground) could change the game. Similarly, if the economics of proof of work were re-jigged, it isn't impossible that the energy required for mining could be dramatically lowered.

But, as it stands, Bitcoin, in particular, has a shamefully large environmental footprint.

Gold is also inefficient by design. But it's been successfully used as a store of value for thousands of years. It causes miners to expend large amounts of energy to extract gold from dirt. "Inefficient by design" misses the point because proof-of-work is the feature, not an inefficiency.

I've written about the similarity between gold and Bitcoin here: https://runeksvendsen.github.io/blog/posts/2017-06-14-bitcoi...

I wonder what's the energy consumption of an average credit card transaction (including keeping the infrastructure, charge backs etc.)...

From the article:

VISA Network Statistics

VISA's estimated annual electricity consumption (TWh) 0.54

Number of U.S. households that could be powered by VISA 50,000

Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 0.00651

Number of seconds the electricity consumed by 1 VISA transaction could power 1 U.S. household 19

Number of VISA transactions that could be powered with the electricity consumed by 1 Bitcoin transaction 20,983 `

A decentralized network has trade offs associated with it.

The more important point is that VISA is broken by design. Every day hackers steal credit card info and leech millions from the system, which is included in the fee you pay. The only reason it keeps working is because hackers aren't sufficiently sophisticated yet.

The solution, of course, is to store a private key on a hardware device, not have the private key be 16+3 decimal digits and an expiration date.

That is entirely unrelated to a decentralized or centralized design. One could build a centralized CC network where we don't need to transmit credentials to third parties in order to make purchases.

I agree with you, but this is in principle a separate issue. We would like to aim for a system that has both the security of Bitcoin AND the "efficiency" of, in this example, VISA.

That would be great, but what if such a system doesn't exist? Pointing out inefficiencies in Bitcoin isn't very useful when no alternative exists to reach the same level of decentralization.

i think its a fair argument to claim that bleeding edge technology is inefficient during its invention phase.

the very first fusion reactors arent all that efficient, either.

The very latest fusion reactors aren't efficient either, still under unity. Maybe we'll have commercial fusion power in 30 years...

I used present tense for a reason.

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