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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Comparing the energy used for Visa transactions to Bitcoin is a false comparison. Bitcoin not only handles transactions, but more importantly, it maintains current wealth and the entire history of every transaction that took place, including the rules that manage it.

You should compare the energy bitcoin uses to all energy used by traditional banks, their corporate headquarters, the government regulators responsible for managing the system, lawyers / judges / institutions managing conflicts, mobile apps and servers powering it, etc.

Bitcoin is doing all of these things without formal institutions, employees, governance, and official regulation.

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> Bitcoin is doing all of these things without formal institutions, employees, governance, and official regulation.

All at a whopping pace of 4 transactions per second... Which means that if the entire population of Denver used Bitcoin, they'd only get to make a single transaction once every 2 days.

I don't care what you say or what you compare it to, Bitcoin is very inefficient at what it does. And worse, its energy consumption is not a function of its transaction volume, but of its price in fiat. The higher the price, the more energy miners will throw at it as they attempt to win the next block reward.

And it is this way by design. Take all that inefficiency away and you give up all that makes Bitcoin what it is....

source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(population+of+denver)...

> And worse, its energy consumption is not a function of its transaction volume, but of its price in fiat.

It's also a function of time, dropping in half every ~4 years. (Rounding transaction fees to zero)

Which isn't to argue against proof of stake, just to clarify the current situation.

The best way to think about it is like gold. The gold standard didn't mean that everyone was doing day to day trading in gold. While you could carry around physical gold (and coins did contain precious metals), gold-backed notes were a big part of the equation.

If Bitcoin became a major currency, you'd have banks that pay you interest for your deposits and then issue you notes (not necessarily physical). They would pay for your interest and make their profit by lending out a portion of deposits.

So essentially Bitcoin is so terrible as an actual currency / method of transferring money that we'll need to create another crypto on top of it that fixes all of the original issues of Bitcoin. All the while Bitcoin will still be using > 15% of all energy consumed in the world. Oh and we still have to trust Banks to make the underlying transactions on the Bitcoin when we use this new currency but Bitcoin is too slow to keep up with the needed transaction rate.

This is a disaster. And like most technologists, everyone enamored with the technology is completely blind or in denial of the actual societal interaction - which will be abysmam.

Bitcoin will be society's first grey goo. It's just a waiting game until people are ready to admit it.

Not true. Bitcoin has many companies built around it, and numerous lawsuits and criminal actions have arisen from fraud in the Bitcoin community.

lolwat?

GP means that you can't subtract the energy cost of lawyers, courts, or whatever fraud detection/resolution mechanism as GGP suggests, because in order for Bitcoin to really replace current transaction systems it will have to handle conflict resolution too.

That's fair, but if you were to say, American Express and count its entire energy usage across all sections of the company and its entire business, it'd still surely use orders of magnitude less than BTC while processing orders of magnitude more transactions.

Yeah, but you don't get to pick just AE if you're doing a fair comparison, as Bitcoin serves pretty close to every cryptocurrency user on the planet. It's reasonable to compare it to the sum power usage of every financial institution willing to handle US dollars somewhere in their infrastructure.

No it's not reasonable. Bitcoin is moving a tiny fraction of the value of what just Visa by itself is processing (nearing $10 trillion in total annual volume; 141 billion transactions; 65,000 transaction messages per second). They also store a record of every transaction they process, along with vast troves of connected information.

You don't get to pick just the bitcoin exchanges as well. If bitcoin ever became a standard, you would by your logic have to include every financial institution that pops up to service bitcoin, custody bitcoin, swipe bitcoin at a store - and include all their headquarters etc etc. That whole layer you include for fiat will also exist for bitcoin, only, now we have the much larger energy expenditure to maintain bitcoin vs fiat.

American Express is a full-stack institution with its own processing network, own bank, own card issuance, own customer service, etc. It also serves a ton more people than Bitcoin does. If the comparison is unfair, it's in Bitcoin's favor as Amex does significantly more.

And the physical coin manufacturing plant?

I can write anything i want into the bitcoin chain for $1 and all the computing power in the world wouldnt be able to undo it after a few days.

Even quantum computing can't touch it (though can trivially work out my private keys).

Many people throughout history can and have been censored, don't see that changing soon.

The bitcoin blockchain is a modern technological wonder without anyone really appreciating the power at their disposal.

Using it only for transactions now is like hiring a tank so you can go get money out from an atm. Predict eventually use cases will come into their own.

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