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Comment by yyy888sss | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin uses as much electricity as Chile and a single transaction has the same carbon footprint as ~700k Visa transactions. This may also be underestimated and account for around half of global data centre energy consumption as per a recent study. [1]

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

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The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index gives a much higher estimate (78 TWh vs. 117 TWh), which makes it about the same as the annual electricity usage of United Arab Emirates (pop. 9.9 million).

https://www.cbeci.org/

Tesla should have waited 3 more years until the next halvening.

That doesn't change anything in energy usage, and shows how you fundamentally don't understand how it works.

Reduced mining rewards will indeed reduce the amount of energy spend. Just check the price surges/declines of the past.

The energy usage of Bitcoin is directly related to the revenue available to BTC miners. As mining rewards decline, so does energy expenditure to mine BTC.

BTC miners make significant money from transaction fees which largely offsets future drops. Unfortunately, if rewards drop enough 51% attacks become possible so Bitcoin requires massive energy expenditure to remain viable.

The basic equation the rewards from mining using X hardware over it’s useful lifetime vs the rewards from using that hardware for a 51% attack.

>BTC miners make significant money from transaction fees which largely offsets these drops

Today's block subsidy is currently 6.25 BTC, and the amount with fees is around 7.2 BTC. That's nowhere close to the pre-halvening about of 12.5 BTC.

You’re looking backwards not forwards. Assuming transaction fees of 1BTC / block, the next drop isn’t to 3.125 BTC it’s ~4.125 BTC and the drop after that is to 2.5625 not 1.5625. In roughly 3 drops subsidies will be less than block fees.

Not that 1BTC per transaction is anything close to a constant, maximum rewards over the last 3 years where more than 100x minimum rewards, but it does seem independent of block rewards.

The vast majority of BTC miner revenue - around 90% - comes from block rewards:

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue

With every halving, assuming price remains constant, BTC miner revenue, and with it, energy expenditure, declines, until it's 10% of current energy expenditure.

You're right that this could pose problems for Bitcoin's security, but that's unrelated to the fact that Bitcoin miners' energy expenditure as a share of BTC price will decline.

It’s nowhere near consistent enough to say 10% going forward, as block rewards per day have been anything from 1400 to 10 BTC per day over the last 3 years.

I don’t care about the energy issue. See actual sources of most of bitcoins energy. (Nat gas, thermal, etc that would be otherwise wasted.)

Can you show those actual sources?

It seems really weird to compare the energy consumption to that of a country.

"The total energy usage for the production of cars/yachts/fitness machines/musical instruments/toilets equals that of country X"

What does it even mean? How do you interpret it?

It seems more sensible to compare to total worldwide energy consumption of which Bitcoin takes roughly 0.05%

Countries have millions of people in them, which are doing many things with that energy. It illustrates the waste.

Visa is an alternative technology providing a service that bitcoin is intended to replace (preemptive statement: I am simplifying and very familiar with the crypto true believers various conceptions of what crypto currency "really is", don't waste your time not picking this please), so it is a valid comparison to illustrate the inefficiency

> Countries have millions of people in them, which are doing many things with that energy. It illustrates the waste.

But Bitcoin is something that people are doing with energy in countries. It is 1/2000th of the average person's footprint.

Is doesn't seem reasonable to call, say, people flying around in airplanes doing something with energy while calling Bitcoin "waste".

You would have to show that bitcoin transactions are globally uniformly distributed for that claim to hold well.

The rest of you argument hinges on the idea that the value created by bitcoin on-chain transactions is equivalent to that of airplane usage (the fact that our current air plane usage is wasteful aside), an argument I won't get into without evidence-of-good-faith

I am simply pointing out that the usage of Bitcoin or something else is better assessed as comparison to global consumption. Trying to map energy usage per product/category to energy usage per country is not insightful and misleading, as it suggests the product/category is not part of the country's energy consumption.

I am not at all arguing that Bitcoin is useful, or that its energy consumption isn't excessive.

> (preemptive statement: I am simplifying ... don't waste your time not picking this please)

You admit that it's a strawman to say Bitcoin is meant to replace Visa.. but then why argue that?

Because one of the constantly shifting goal posts that the crypto community used a lot in the past is "payment method without third parties". So it is relevant to compare to Visa, to establish that Bitcoin utterly sucks in that regard, without 2nd, 3rd etc. layer solutions.

There is a lot of accusations of "straw manning" when people calmly point out that except as a gamble and to enable relatively small amount of criminal transactions, Bitcoin has as of now failed to do in anything of the many things its true believers want it to achieve.

I have actually been following the crypto space since the cypherpunk days (by reading archives early on because I'm too young to have been around since the true start) and without regret (okay, a little bit of regret :-) missed out on large gains by selling all my crypto early on. One of the more interesting projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler doesn't get enough hype because it doesn't make claims that make you feel like a badass outlaw, sticking it to the man and potentially avoiding taxes. I still hope it takes off because it would be an actual digital cash, privacy preserving while still allowing for societal important things like taxes to work.

> Bitcoin has as of now failed to do in anything of the many things its true believers want it to achieve.

It's already successful. First of all: simply by enabling new methods of civil disobedience and eliminating future opportunities for government overreach it is already working to strengthen our democracy. Second, people are actually using it today to escape oppressive currency controls in certain places like Argentina. And there is real potential for Bitcoin to act as an inflation hedge that is much more convenient than gold (we have yet to see the long-term price behaviour).

Can not withstand, sorry: Bitcoin is a store of value nowadays. If you want to compare it in an environmental-impact way then compare it e.g. against gold mining.

Bitcoin smoothly moves between store of value and next level of banking whenever fees rise to high to transact or a new tech which is totally gonna make it scale and be affordable for micropayments respectively.

As a store of value it is utterly unusable due to volatility. Like gold, another perennial favorite of a similar crowd.

Beeing a “perennial favorite of a crowd” seems like a good property for a store of value ;)

Depends on the crowd size and philosophy. The only true store of value is a diverse portfolio, anything below that you need to use your own priors and data to decide what kind of risk you take.

You don't have to mine to make a transaction with gold.

bitcoin was just an idea a few years/a decade ago and is now here.

Its existing directly consumes as much energy as a whole fucking country.

I find that a very visible and easy comparision.

If i would invent something and it would consume that much energy just for transactions, i would consider this a gigantic issue.

Considering you're talking worldwide energy consumption, 0.05% is a lot of energy. Just because the number is small doesn't mean it's not large by comparison.

True, but similarly just because the number is big in an absolute sense also doesn't mean it is actually a worthwhile target for reducing emissions. There are plenty of lower-hanging fruit.

It's 0.05% of energy that could be used elsewhere to reduce emissions (since a lot of miners sit on renewable energy). It's a worthwhile target because it#s easy to fix: don't waste energy like that.

edit: additionally a lot of small crap is still a pile or crap at the end of the day, the small little energy wasters (comparatively) still make up a combined total that is wortwhile to take on.

That isn't an easy fix though, unless you can find some other way to replace the unique advantages that Bitcoin is providing to users.

This is like saying "killing combustion engines is an easy fix: Just don't drive!"

The fix is to use alternative consensus mechanisms like PoS. It's not "killing combustion engines is an easy fix: Just don't drive" it's "killing combustion engines is an easy fix: Use more efficient types of engines such as electric or sterling motors".

I can agree with you that PoS is the most promising fix, but even still I don't think it's an easy fix just because the technology exists.

For example electric engines are an easy fix technically, but there are still lots of political and practical barriers that need to be solved before they can achieve widespread adoption.

It will take time for the market to build the same level of trust in PoS systems that they have in PoW systems.

Because you’re comparing the energy consumption of this one thing to the total energy consumption of $x million households along with all the country’s local industry to say that Bitcoin isn’t worth that cost compared to an alternative that requires trusted parties but uses orders of magnitude less energy.

«as much electricity as Chile»

Or about as much as a single large hydroelectric dam.

Fun fact: many miners are located in places with cheap hydro/wind electricity like Sichuan & Yunnan provinces in China. These provinces abandon 100+ TWh/year of hydropower. They literally run water through the dams without powering the turbines. 100 TWh/year is more than what Bitcoin consumes globally.

«single transaction has the same carbon footprint as...»

Misleading. Bitcoin transactions don't consume mining energy. Mining power is completely independent of transaction volume.

>Or about as much as a single large hydroelectric dam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_hydroelectric_...

According to this list, there are two dams in the world which generate that much electricity. And if you take the Cambridge estimate, zero dams.

I know. Hence my claim.

Would you describe a box that weights 600 kg to weight "as much as a single man"?

I said "large" damn, not an average dam. But fair enough—I should have said "around as much as the largest dam".

> Bitcoin transactions don't consume mining energy. Mining power is completely independent of transaction volume.

I'm not familiar with the intricacies of bitcoin, but another comment claimed that the block size is limited (without hardforking) and the number of transactions per block surly is limited by the block size?

Its great that you can find these consumption figures so easily in some cases.

It seems that Google only uses 10.6 terawatt hours.

https://www.google.co/search?q=google+total+power+consumptio...

Add Facebook's 5.1 and you get the amount of power required to kill half of the planet's productivity.

[Edit] typo

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