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Comment by nnfy | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is happy to sentationalize the amount of energy that the bitcoin network uses, but no one ever mentions how much energy use is acceptable.

Nor does anyone seem to attempt a thorough cost/benefit analysis. How much energy from financial infrastructure could bitcoin free up?

Edit: vague comparisons like these really bug me, because while they make problems seem large by comparing them to A WHOLE COUNTRY, they actually offer little in the way of information. Most of us know nothing about Ecuador's energy use in comparison to any other country or industry, except perhaps that it is relatively small. But I guess it gets you the clicks...

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Ecuador is about 66th percentile by economy size, with a GDP of about $100bil.

So Ecuador is producing $100bil in value, which is similar to the total volume of transactions on the Bitcoin network.

So using less energy, Ecuador produces more economic value than Bitcoin can even move.

That sounds like Bitcoin is wildly inefficient, in that it can't transmit stored value for less than that value costs to generate in power:

It would be more efficient to use the power to create more wealth than transmit it with Bitcoin!

But you're ignoring the fact that bitcoin is about more than simply moving money. There is value in security and decentralization.

Further, GDP ignores consumption, it is gross product, not net product. Further indication to me that comparing bitcoin to power consumption of a small country is inappropriate. Apples to oranges.

Edit: after reading a couple articles on wikipedia, I'm confused. Gross implies product before subtraction of consumption (I.E. revenue), while wikipedia claims that GDP factors in so called intermediate consumption, which would make it more like a net value (I.e. profit). Do we have any economists browsing? Genuinely curious.

with you on that one... a better comparison would be to see how bitcoin stacks up against the power dedicated to porn... or spam

Porn and spam don't have an incentive structure to redistribute wealth weighted towards the earliest adopters - they're otherwise not really comparable unless you narrow in on one point, such as energy use.

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