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Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

mlthoughts2018

It is so shameful for people to characterize resource use as “waste” like this. Not surprised to see more sanctimonious nonsense from Stephen Diehl, the same guy who thinks all us programmers not using functional languages are neanderthals still in “the bloodletting and leeches” era of software engineering.

This really is beyond the pale. Stephen sounds like a total crackpot here.

How much “waste” does Pixar’s renderfarm generate when creating artistic cinema that people want?

How much “waste” does Sony’s Playstation Network generate distributing games people want?

How much “waste” does the sum total of plastic surgery create?

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> This really is beyond the pale.

Beyond the pale? Beyond the pale to discuss Bitcoin energy usage. Some bitcoin people never cease to amaze me.

On top of that, the answer for all of the above is effectively zero compared to Bitcoin.

https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...

And I think that's part of the issue - a number of people aren't appreciating exactly how incredibly wasteful Bitcoin mining is.

I was curious about the actual number; how much energy does Bitcoin use?

> the bitcoin network in 2020 consumes 120 gigawatts (GW) per second.

GW / s. (/year, I suppose, since it's just 2020. But FFS. Edit: no, GW / s / year is GW, but that's still not… really? right? I mean, maybe it's an average of the energy consumption rate over the year, and so on average, in 2020, it was consuming 120GW?)

Uhh no. Stephen is not discussing BTC energy usage. This is sanctimonious, moralistic grandstanding that presupposes “Bitcoin bad” as a moral absolute straw man to set up a nasty, useless screed railing against it.

If there was some legit discussion in it, that would be fine. There utterly is none.

I can't find a single factual statement in Stephen's tweet thread I disagree with. Your use of subjective pejoratives rather than specifics seems to imply that you are the same position.

Your response is deeply unreasonable. Here’s a quote from Stephen’s thread,

> “ Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost.”

That is nothing but complete grandstanding decoupled from reality. It deserves to be criticized with pejorative language because Stephen’s comments are so wildly extreme, inflammatory, and totally disconnected from facts or reality. It meets the literal definition of a rambling screed and needs to be called out as such.

I don’t really think those are fair comparisons. For one, the PlayStation network provides entertainment. I know from a hard economic perspective that might not be “valuable”, but it is. People need entertainment. And I’m sure the PS network is more energy efficient than everyone driving half an hour to a movie theatre, or something.

By comparison Bitcoin provides nothing other than itself. It’s price is almost entirely powered by speculation at this point. To put it another way: if the PS network disappears tomorrow it will have still entertained millions. If Bitcoin crashes tomorrow, it leaves nothing.

Saying that BTC provides nothing other than itself is too reductionist -- indeed the Playstation Network also provides nothing other than itself, the ability for users to play online games with each other. If bitcoin crashes tomorrow, it will still have enabled censorship resistant, peer to peer value transfer for millions. People use it to pay for games, buy things, sell things, donate and preserve the value of money earned in depreciating fiat.

I would argue that BTC has provided significantly more value to its millions of users in its 12 year history than Playstation Network; What is PSN really -- a matchmaking service, and social contact platform. What is a global, peer to peer, censorship resistant, non-government fiat backed economic system worth?

> People use it to pay for games, buy things, sell things, donate and preserve the value of money earned in depreciating fiat.

This is where the argument about energy usage per transaction comes in, namely that Bitcoin is terribly, terribly inefficient at providing this value. From the OP:

> A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment.

Comparing Bitcoin to a credit card payment isn't really a fair comparison. (Since if people really like the credit card model so much you can build credit card like things on top of the Bitcoin network) A more apt comparison would be to an international wire transfer which costs $15-$40 and takes a few days to complete.

... but doesn’t consume anywhere near the levels of power that Bitcoin does.

You would have to equalize for speed and transfer fees (because people consume a quite a bit of energy doing things faster and obtaining money) and then somehow come up with some way to calculate all the necessary energy for a wire transfer.

Bitcoin could still provide all that value without wasting all that energy. The mining process provides no real value.

I agree. How much waste do fiat currencies generate protecting their themselves with standing armies (or the alliances with a country that has one)? Far more than the amount of energy used to secure bitcoin currency against other nation states using proof of work.

Iregardless of what ones opinion on maintaining standing armies might be usually it creates significant added value (unlike mining bitcoin) for the economy. All those people in the military or working in industries producing for the military have to be paid etc.

All traditional currencies are backed by military might and the constant threat of war.

If a cryptocurrency could decrease such centralization of power and consequent waste of human lives, money and energy it would be excellent.

However, bitcoin has no mechanism to democratize banking - on the contrary, the more wealth you have the more mining you can afford doing.

This makes the whole conversation fall into whataboutism.

Pixar and PSN provide actual value to some people, while mining bitcoin is completely superfluous (not saying that bitcoin itself is necessarily useless but that the same result can be reached without wasting as much energy needlessly)

That is a radical claim to make with no evidence and huge evidence to the contrary.

Which claim? That there might be less wasteful ways to process crypto currency transactions? I’d love to hear the evidence..

You claim Pixar adds value while Bitcoin does not. That’s a mammoth claim in need of extremely amazing evidence to take seriously.

No, I said that the value created by bitcoin is not directly related to how much energy is used. Technically the same outcome could be reached with much less wasted energy.

If you can provide the same proof of work features using less energy, you can demonstrably make a lot of money. Can you show me the evidence of that and the specifics of how to get the same block validation consensus security with less energy consumption?

A 2019 thread on Hacker News has the Pixar Renderfarm core count at around 60K. That is...microscopic...in terms of data center scale and energy usage.

So you've built a tiny tower of straw men, attempting to use them to draw a false equivalence between the energy to maintain and expand the bitcoin system.

I suspect bitcoin adherents may also enjoy (along with mining) continuously spraying chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. Big Bad Society does frown on that activity! Increasingly, Big Bad Society does not like the externalities from things like BTC.

Diehl is wrong about speculation being the only use of bitcoin. Investing in crime is the other.

I think the point is that Bitcoin uses an insane amount of energy for what it accomplishes, if one considers only the financial transaction aspect (and not all of the other benefits that Bitcoin might provide - depending on your position on Bitcoin, that may or may not be fair to do).

If someone invented a car that consumed 10,000x as much energy per mile, using that car would generally be considered a waste of resources, or at least a wasteful use of resources.

To continue the abstract car analogy, what if this car that used 10,000x the energy per mile also had some magic properties -- like that anyone could build the car themselves from the blueprints, it could magically teleport anywhere on earth and nobody could tell you where you could drive it (traffic signs are ignored).

"Would that be worth something to you, eh?" -- Scotty

i highly doubt any of those 3 examples use enough energy to be meaningfully measured as a percentage of the total global energy consumption

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