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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

>How much energy does watching porn consume?

I guess if you got stats on how much porn they watch in Argentina you would be well on your way to answering this question. Same for the rest.

I think the more interesting thing is: as bitcoin becomes more difficult to mine energy needs go up, but countries are working hard to bring their energy usage down. Can bitcoin be overtaken on the downward journey by a country, or will it always be bitcoin overtaking countries on its upward swing. Is there some country decreasing its usage as bitcoin increases its, and the two pass each other like ships in the night.

What is the next country most likely to be surpassed by bitcoin?

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Stats not even needed.

If the enegry used in Argentina <= energy used in bitcoin transactions.

and, if people living in Argentina are doing any of the things listed (watching porn, etc).

Then the energy used to watch all the porn in Argentina must still be included as part of the Energy use of Argentina; thus less than the use of bitcoin. (I guess this would have to assume the porn is also hosted in Argentina; but I would imagine at least 1 porn unit is hosted and viewed internally to Argentina).

obviously, but you still don't know how much greater the bitcoin amount is the porn amount.

Also how much bitcoin is mined in Argentina, obviously less than 50% of the world's bitcoin - but how much less!?!

If those damned Argentinians would just mine bitcoin exclusively, we could all get on with our lives.

We also need to talk to South Africa about Youtube.

> as bitcoin becomes more difficult to mine energy needs go up

Difficulty adjusts up and down as needed to maintain an average of 1 block every 10 minutes, it doesn't just tend to infinity.

It's mostly correlated to the block reward, miners won't spend more money on energy than they get back from mining blocks.

I may be confused here. But the regulation mechanism to get to 1block/min is to ask miners to do more computations, right? Making the problem harder in this context does have the effect of more power consumed. A block is an answer to the riddle who's parameters are being regulated. So the block rate is not important, number of computations is. And that is directly linked with power consumption.

It's 1 block every 10 minutes.

The difficulty adjustment goes both ways, if blocks start taking longer than 10 minutes to be mined (for example if some large miner stops mining for some reason) the difficulty goes down, which likely means less energy is used.

You're correct that the actual adjustment is on the number of computations, so the correlation to energy use isn't direct, different machines can be more or less efficient at making those calculations.

So basically the more popular bitcoin is, more inefficient it is. Great.

Not necessarily, depends on the ratio between users and value of the block reward.

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