Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
cbeci.org
cbeci.org
I know of zero people who used to like Bitcoin but are turned off by energy consumption. Bitcoin has the potential to make huge portions of the finance industry obsolete: how much energy does the finance industry as a whole use? How do we make a valid comparison? Does anyone have an amount of power consumption reduction that they think would make Bitcoin use justified for the functionality it provides?
The only time I see people arguing against Bitcoin based on power consumption, it seems like the speaker already had a distaste for Bitcoin and latched onto the power consumption argument because it's easy to state and you don't have to understand the technology or economics to use the argument. There is no call to action or suggestion, it's just "See? Bitcoin is bad." I see it as just a method to mollify the insecurities and regret from not recognizing that Bitcoin was going to be valuable back when they first heard about it.
If you saw a website that showed the power consumption of all internet services, would you find that to be a compelling reason to change the way you interact with the internet?
Energy usage itself is not a bad thing, it’s the energy source that can be environmentally problematic.
Currently 39% of mining power is driven by renewables [1]. It’s not much but a good start.
The simplest solution to speed this up would be to create a law requiring that all mining must come from renewable sources (or at least tax those that don’t). It would drive innovation, jobs, and make locations with renewable sources competitive places to live.
[1] https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternati...
My issue is just how incredibly wasteful and inefficient PoW is. It's resource requirements completely disproportionate to the the underlying problem/solution space.
It offends my sensibilities and aesthetic appreciation of elegance in design. It is like contemplating a trillion record bubble sort.
Hard to see the interesting projects in such a crowded field of crapcoins.
There have been many step changes in efficiency. On a per-hash basis (and security of the network is directly proportional to number/difficulty of hashes) I'd estimate the efficiency of bitcoin mining has increased a million- or even billion-fold in the last decade.
Miners are making their decisions based on the price, which is set by the market: the amorphous sentiment of a crowd of millions of strangers. The price of bitcoin is directly proportional to the rational amount of energy miners should expend mining it.
There is no "make it more efficient": it's already being pushed to be extremely efficient all the time. That you believe bitcoin is not efficient enough is irrelevant and probably unfounded. The market likes it, and you're yelling at the market about efficiency, but the market already decided what the rational amount of electricity to expend securing the network and settling transactions based on the current price.
The only reason you think it's using "too much" energy is because you don't understand the security value of chained hashing.
Even without a call to action, changing overall sentiment can influence action in the future.
> Does anyone have an amount of power consumption reduction that they think would make Bitcoin use justified for the functionality it provides?
Close to 100%, given PoS coins exist. Especially once ETH and other larger communities migrate.
You then compare it to the power use of all internet services. This is another comparison that proponents of BTC often make. However the use of internet has tangible everyday benefits. What is the tangible benefit of BTC today that can outweigh it's power consumption?
If you don’t understand why this is valuable now, you don’t need such a thing. One day you might...
Most economists don't believe in unregulated markets anymore. Somehow this message hasn't found its way downstream.
Everybody can understand crypto's role for illegal transactions and tax evasion. Not everyone sees a value there. And really, this is not down to Bitcoin in particular.
The irony with this argument is that Coinbase, Binance and other exchanges are all part of the "finance industry". The elusive "finance industry" will always consume more energy, by definition.
Crypto is cool in a theoretical sense but ugly in practical sense.
I mined a bit of BTC in 2011 and LTC in 2013 but when my colleagues started buying ASICs in 2017 boom I could not in good faith join them because of energy concerns. (incidentally buying ASICs is a losing proposition unless you get early access)
The problem is that if BTC goes to say 500k the incentives for power (ab)use get even more perverse.
POW is just like Adtech and HFT. Some Adtech and some HFT might be okay but at some point it becomes an arms race no one can win.
I don't like Bitcoin, precisely because it's just a deflationary currency. The fact that deflationary pressure drives energy consumption higher is just a nice bonus on the list of reasons why Bitcoin shouldn't exist.
Would be interested to hear this across all tech really, e.g what's the environmental impact of say videogames I mean they're running machines at full pelt too for hours a day for millions of people.
It's woefully inefficient, and worse the incentive structure doesn't intrinsically actually align with what's needed to keep the network safe from double-spend attacks. At the moment the income from block rewards from mining (combined with bitcoin's price) is entirely what's driving the energy usage of bitcoin, while what's actually needed is enough proof of work done that a double-spend attack is unprofitable. There's no intrinsic reason these two values are linked: at the moment the energy usage is extremely high, probably far higher than what is needed to secure the network against an attack, but when block rewards decrease in the future, the energy miners are incensivised to spend to get the block rewards will inevitably sink below the level needed to protect the network. The only saviour would be if transaction fees can cover this, but even now with transaction fees being almost irrelevant (<10%) of the miner's incentive, the transaction fees are untenably high for any use as a currency. They would need to rise to $140 or so to break even. This makes the idea of bitcoin as a cheap 'store of value' extremely questionable in the long run, since it is a store of value which requires a constant maintenance by the expendature of energy, which only grows as the value stored in it increases (while an adversary only needs to expend the necesary energy once to pull off an attack). The only way bitcoin could sustain a healthy level of proof of work would be to continuously provide enough value as a transaction medium to justify the cost, and with the current bitcoin that isn't going to work, while at the same time it has basically become fossilised with extreme resistance to any change to the protocol which would provide this.
I think there's a lot of potential value in cryptocurrenies as a concept, and if etherium manages to successfully transition to proof of stake I think it could be in a position to provide that at a reasonable cost, but bitcoin is not it and the position it occupies both crowds out better ideas in the cryptocurrency space as well as being net negative value to humanity as a whole (though it certainly is making some individuals and organisations rich).
Though there is also another factor which limits mining: the availability of hardware. This cost is not negligible in mining profits, and in fact is one of the reasons the idea of miners using excess green power is a myth: mining hardware generally needs to be run close 100% of the time to make a profit.
That's what I meant when I wrote, mining may be limited by another resource limit. I dread a future, where technological progression is halted or slowed, because people need to dig into landfills searching for rare elements bound to overproduced electronics.
Look at all the compute thrown at heat generation instead of solving protein folding problems for all of humanity. What could be done with terawatts of electrical energy?
I think prolonging the usage of Bitcoin isn't stupid, but downright offensive. Your freedom ends, where my future begins.
I think there is definitely a future for crypto, but surely there isn't for Bitcoin.
I'm still not really up-to-date on Lightning Network and its potential. But even without that, I think that Bitcoin will remain dominant in the cryptocurrency space due to network effects. It has the best name recognition, the most secure PoW blockchain, and the highest capitalization. Ethereum will likely stay quite relevant, but between its migration to the less-secure PoS system, and its constant inflation rate without any cap (vs. Bitcoin's decreasing one with the 21 million cap), I think that Bitcoin will continue to be prized as a store of value.
That doesn't matter really. It's just energy "wasted" with artificial challenges. The only purpose of digging for hashes is to blow energy... Bitcoin apologists ignore the fact that there are alternatives.
There is just no future in that. No energy source is carbon neutral, much less resource-neutral.
Western life is too wasteful, we all need to cut back. Bitcoin doesn't fit humanity's future.
ex. https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-flaring-i... find a similar source that you recognize and choose to respect
same is happening at hydro and wind plants. no energy that would have been sent to another purpose is being used for mining on these sites
everything else is a much smaller mining operation
for anyone passing by: make sure to post a reason when you disagree. A lot of people have spent a long time not considering the source of energy, and validating their existing negative thoughts on bitcoin, and this hurts their world view.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-09/tesla-s-b...
No wasting of energy is environmentally sustainable. We exhausted earth's capacity for hydroelectric dams and their "free" energy of the past will be gone, when they operate for their intended purpose of powering new settlements. And do you think bitcoin will thrive when it's all mined with iceland's geothermal monopoly?
Nuclear, solar and wind are resource intense "not carbon-based" / "sustainable" technologies, but blowing away their production in unnecessary heat generation is not environmentally sustainable.
1 TW would be 71,000 upcoming SGRE 14MW(!) offshore wind turbines running at max capacity (which of course is completely unrealistic). If you line them up, that would be a wind park of about 16,000 km length, or about twice the distance between Europe and the US. Apart from all the material wasted, maintenance efforts and lives lost, I am sure earth's capacity for wind energy is limited too, as obviously winds don't produce free energy either and over exploitation may, or may not be catastrophic for earth's local climates. E.g. there are ideas to kill American hurricanes with offshore windparks, afaik.
And really, the question is never, if your could operate bitcoin with "sustainable" energy production, but what else you could invest the energy in instead. Bitcoin has nothing to offer which justifies its energy demand, as there are (possible) alternatives which cost us less.
Bitcoin has no future, if humanity has one.
In some places that energy is burned off into the atmosphere instead, in other places plants are just operating underneath the capacity they already built.
Putting that towards bitcoin mining is by far the biggest impact, as in it is either positive impact (reducing burning) or no impact, and the heat concern and the hardware creation concern are comparatively much smaller. Much of the potential e-waste actually winds up at these sites and continue to be used because the power cost is so low.
The heat is often transferred to something else that needs heat. Ive seen proposals for use in fish farms near the site, which were already generating their own heat with an inefficient means.
I’m telling you the answer. Not arguing for anything at all. The answer is acknowledging that fracking wont stop here are ways to reduce its impact. The answer is that hardware production wont stop, here are how it is being used as a sustainability solution greater than its heat and future e-waste reality. You aren't going to get your reality, and the existing reality is providing an economic practicality that nobody like you has ever come up with, its simple as that.
I am following bitcoin for 11 years now. The hype seems to have vanished, it's still not useful much apart from speculation and pump and dump... But now, we also really, really need to think about climate change and wasting energy no matter the source, doesn't appear sensible to me.
I think this bubble may go still a lot higher, but I am skeptical, if it will ever recover after the next crash. This is important, because it has implications for those buying in high(-ish). I think this crash could be very different. Different psychology, different positions exiting.
If we could put miniature 1 GW power plants in every home that were 100% renewable and didn't pollute, we would.
If the Iranian government was competent, it wouldn't matter whether or not BTC exists or how valuable it was -- it wouldn't be trying to mine it in the first place. Governments shouldn't be so fragile that the mere existence of Bitcoin poses such an existential risk to the wellbeing of the people.
Anyway, BTC is a bad fit for a modern world in which non-crypto energy needs already outstrip renewable supplies. Maybe we can talk once just feeding and housing the poor and hungry is solved sustainably.
Regardless of how we both feel about BTC, it's here to stay, so we might as well figure out a way for it to continue to exist without actively harming people.