However this article claims 29.05 TWh/year, basing it on Digiconomist which is the work of an amateur and known to overestimate by ~2×: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/
BM1387 has worse performance than 0.10J/GH @ the wall in practice. Bitmain has released 3 BM1387 based miners (S9, T9, R4). Only two are intended for industrial use and should seriously be considered (home mining is dead):
* The S9 is advertised as pulling 0.098 J/GH +10% at the wall on a 93% efficient PSU. [1]
* The T9 is advertised as pulling 0.126 J/GH + 7% at the wall on a 93% efficient PSU. [2]
However, measured performance in the field tends to be a better indicator. BlockOperations tested the T-9 and S-9 with wattmeters and discovered that the Batch 16 12TH S-9 burns 1329W at the wall and the 11.5TH T-9 burns 1352W, for an efficiency of 0.111 J/GH and 0.117 J/GH respectively at a fairly cool (60F) room temperature [3]. If the room is hotter (most mines are) the fans spin harder and the efficiency gets a tiny bit worse.
Only the earliest batches of S9s that had fixed frequencies achieved 0.10 J/GH, but they had serious issues with reliability and stability so bitmain switched to variable frequency, which helped the reliability and stability but hurt the efficiency.
Another thing you might want to factor in is that the actual hashrate of the bitcoin network is higher than the network difficulty indicates. Remember, roughly 2% of generated blocks are orphaned and never counted, so you should adjust your estimate upwards somewhat to account for that missing hashrate.
[1] https://shop.bitmain.com/specifications.htm?name=antminer_s9...
[2] https://shop.bitmain.com/antminer_t9_asic_bitcoin_miner.htm?...
[3] https://blockoperations.com/power-comparison-antminer-t9-ant...
15 TWh/year
= 15000 GWh/year
= 41 GWh/day
= 1.7 Gwh/hour
= 1.7 GW
Of course, that doesn’t rule out that your claim is true, but it does make me wonder whether it does.
I would guess kWh is used because it makes it easier for customers to verify that they aren’t scammed, given that appliances are tagged with Watts. I guess appliances are tagged with Watts and not Joule/s because it is easier to use a single unit than two.
I did try to find out when it was defined but failed, so thanks for digging that fact up!
That is for books and must cover mentions of both Watt’s and Joule’s name and of the unit (and, likely, way more of the names. The units typically are abbreviated), so I don’t think that proves or disproves much about wide use of the units.
The difference before 1860 probably is there because James Prescott Joule was less than a year old when James Watt died in 1819 (at the age of 83)
Edit: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=kJ%2CkWh%2Ccal... seems to support the claim that “Joule” came up relatively late.
https://www.top500.org/list/2017/11/?page=1
Given bitcoin's current throughput that's about 1 exaFLOP equivalent per bitcoin transaction.
There is no wealth being created here, merely a lot of wealth being rapidly redistributed with a great proportion of that literally turned into heat.
This will not end well.
A block adds an extra confirmation to all transactions in the chain, not just those in the given block. The goal is to make the entire chain as difficult to alter as possible, and each added block increases that difficulty.
1.7GW lacks a time frame, 15TWh/year is more useful in that context, even if you can just short it down to 1.7GW.
or 1.71ish gigawatts -- https://www.google.com/search?q=15+terawatt+hours+per+year+t...
I'm pretty impressed google handled that conversion. I mathed it out independently but not even wolframalpha got it.
$ units -v "15 TWh/year" "GW"
15 TWh/year = 1.7111933 GW
15 TWh/year = (1 / 0.58438752) GWLuckily trends show that this will happen soon, but other challenges posed in Africa is political stability (e.g. government decides BitCoin mining is illegal or imposes unreasonable taxes due to lack of understanding), lack of competency, and other types of infrastructure.
The only countries I can see that are suitable are South Africa and Namibia.
I think this is the biggest problem with cryptocurrencies. Reversible and traceable transactions are a feature of real money, not a bug.
No, I just forgot cash existed for a second.
That depends. Having a paper trail of your money in local tax office sometimes means you would be shot in a head and buried in a nearest forest.
When armed insurgency happens (and yes, they do happen) all you see in the news is "Country A" occupied parts of "Country B", but on the ground you would have armed people going full-DAESH on local tax offices to see whom to demand ransom from and that would be law-obeying people with paper trail for their earnings.
Looking at the big picture, this is even worse: the way you don’t have Daesh is by having a strong society which has the resources to fight them off. A society with rampant corruption and black market activity is exactly how you create the conditions for them to thrive!
For example I can accept my earned money on account in Ukraine, pay taxes here, but can't send it back to an investment account somewhere EU. This just can't be done.
Even more sillier - some time ago it was illegal to merely have an account in foreign bank without obtaining personal license from central bank here.
So yes, there are cheaper ways and there are simpler things and there was people who were sent to GULAG for doing "illegal money transactions".
Currently the best real life "use case" of Bitcoin is digital gold, a form of electronic store of value.
Does it achieve any of those words in practice?
“Censorship resistant” - Regulatory authorities are seemingly having as much impact on bitcoin as any other financial instrument.
“Decentralized” - It is not particularly decentralized. The fact that multiple nodes maintain the same log provides very little decentralization of much of anything. Here’s folks representing 90% of the hashing power of bitcoin on a stage: https://mobile.twitter.com/lopp/status/673398201307664384?la... That’s about the same number of people on the board of governors for the US federal reserve, to be fair. But to be fairer, the US dollar is one of 200 or so nation state backed currencies in the world and the federal reserve can’t invalidate transactions that have already occurred using their currency.
“Payment system” - It is not doing very well at that at all. Almost every competing payment system offers more predictable and consumer friendly behavior.
Bitcoin can though. 51% of users could just outright fork and annul whatever transaction they want, no?
In addition, we’ve learned over and over again that non-reversibility is not necessarily even a desirable property to have in a payment system, which is why so many non-cash payment systems have built those in.
Holding and/or transporting large amounts of cash is extremely fraught, especially across borders. US legal authorities regularly seize cash without due process and without meaningful judicial recourse. Most US banknotes are contaminated with cocaine, so it's prima facie laughable that a narcotic-detection-dog alert on a pile of money is seen as sufficient evidence that the money was obtained via the drug trade (thus allowing its seizure) -- yet this is a very common tactic.
The ability to transact in cash is meaningless if governments (and entities authorised by governments, look up "sewer service" or "gutter service") can seize cash without even a pretence of due process.
A Brazilian man used Bitcoin to evade a judge's extortion attempt: https://coinvedi.com/brazilian-man-uses-bitcoin-to-evade-jud...
Bitcoin would have helped Cyprus citizens avoid banks confiscating their savings: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-10/new-laws-allow-gove...
Businesses use Bitcoin to avoid fraud, like this $100,000 charged backs twice: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/5r9nqi/credit_...
Bitcoin helps people continue to do business online, eg. when alternative PayPal exited an entire country: http://www.wsj.com/articles/paypal-to-exit-turkey-after-regu...
Bitcoin helps people have ultimate control on their money, unlike cash when for example a bank blocks a woman from accessing her account: http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/151623037-story
Bitcoin helps people escape abuse from the DEA using civil forfeiture, eg. when they stole $16,000 from a young black man: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/07/dea-asset-forfeitur...
More recently, Bitcoin becomes a safe haven when the military executes a coup: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/20/bitcoin-has...
And hundreds and thousands of other examples...
In your list of examples Bitcoin is the hero that saves individuals from the oppression of a government or regulation, but sometimes it's the bad individuals (e.g. tax evasion) against a government and suddenly it's not so bad if there are ways to seize assets and close their accounts.
You need to get your transactions accepted to the ledger and you need to pay for that to happen as well (I guess whether the mining network is a third party is debatable).
Not mentioning that people will most likely use some sort of intermediary for their digital wallet to begin with.
He was ordered to remove a video from his channel where he practices slander and libel (both crimes in Brazil) against a congresswoman, he refused, the judge ordered the fine, he traded all his money to bitcoin to avoid the execution of the fine.
I wouldn't call it a extortion attempt, if you see his videos you'll see that he openly mocks the justice and expose details of the case that was occurring under "secret of justice", where the parts can't talk about it until it is finished.
You can disagree with the decision, but it wasn't extortion, he practiced slander and libel, was ordered to remove a video, refused, was fined for that.
By moving the fiat money into bitcoin he moved them out of the judgde's control. That in itself proves the usefulness of the coin.
But even then, this isn't the point.
The guy lives in Brazil, so USA laws are completely irrelevant, don't know why you brought up this point, but anyway, he commited a crime, defied a court order and hid his assets, besides that, he boasted that on following videos, in one of them he claimed that slander should be legal, his opinion, perfectly valid, I don't agree, but he did that just because HE knows that he commited slander.
The guy is a piece of work, defending him like he is a noble fighting the big and evil hand of the government is a joke that only ancaps don't laugh at.
Anyway, bitcoin is a libertarian/ancap tool and strategy created to minimize the power of the state, and most of us libertarians believe there are inalienable rights that cannot be superseded by state laws, and this includes freedom of expression. If you are against libertarianism than you should be really afraid of bitcoin, because it was made as a tool to subjugate the state, to evade tax and fuck up with commies. And it's working.
I don't really know why a lot of people act like freedom of expression means that you can say anything without consequences, if there's not a state to enforce law, a lot of stuff that would qualify as freedom of expression would be solved by violence.
He evade taxes, but still enjoy the benefits of the state this is a clear hypocrisy that I see in a lot of the admirers of Ayn Rand.
Also, ancaps that believe that property is a natural right that would exist without a state to protect it are completely delusional.
Provides one of the world’s greatest supplies of irritating quasi-libertarian euphoria, as well, of course.
8.584 TWh/year
8.584 / 109613 = 0.00008 = 0.008%
(109613 TWh is the annual world consumption number you used)
P.S.: I think this is a high estimate, because companies like BitFury have access to much more energy efficient asics which they're keeping secret. We should at least re-calculate this using the new DragonMint miner numbers instead of S9.
And you’re a professional bitcoin power consumption analyst then?
The kid who edits Digiconomist is a fresh finance grad with no tech background and who has zero mining experience.