Hacker News Reader

Comment by pred_ | Hacker News Reader

Another problem is that even if the puzzle is legit, you can't claim your prize without wrecking havoc on the environment in the process. At an estimated 850 kWh [0] per transaction, you would need to have a pretty good excuse for performing transactions at all.

[0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

View on HN

Important to mention, is that power consumption is not related to amount of transactions. If bitcoin would allow ten times the amount of transactions tomorrow, the power consumption would not increase.

Power consumption is related to difficulty and the rewards, which is linked to the price of a Bitcoin.

> Power consumption is related to difficulty and the rewards, which is linked to the price of a Bitcoin.

Difficulty is determined by the hash rate of the network. One would expect there to be a link between hash rate and price but that's correlation not causation.

Nonsense, if it costs you $5000 to mine a bitcoin and the price is $1000 then you have no reason to mine it and the hashpower would lower.

From a naïve perspective of only mining for profit that's sort of true.

Lots of people mine for other reasons.

Still probably not related to amount of transactions.

True, since the number of transactions is unrelated to the hashrate of the network.

The actual amount of energy consumed by one bitcoin transaction is actually pretty exactly the amount of money you pay as a fee times the cheapest you can get electricity in the world.

So if you pay $0.2 in fees, you will burn around $0.2 / ($0.1/kWh) = 2kWh of electricity. Note that this is an upper limit since it ignores miner profit (but that will tend towards zero over time).

This is ignoring the block subsidy, but that is independent of the number of transactions will forcibly solve itself over time.

Whether you (or anyone else) perform(s) the transaction or not, the same amount of energy is consumed, so I'm not sure how you got to that kind of reasoning.

Crying about the environment when talking about anything is ludicrous. Do you not poop? Do you not eat? Do you not consume in a modern society? Should we not play games anymore? Should we not watch movies? Find something else to cry about.

Except that the overwhelming majority of mining is done in China and the power is supplied by hydro.

Over half the electricity in China is generated with coal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China).

China's building new coal plants to met increased demand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com