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Comment by africanboy | Hacker News Reader

in your example 100 bitcoin users would let a million of people die of starvation/hypothermia so that they can play blockchain.

scale in general does not excuse, but consumption per capita should.

A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour

If you keep it on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is 876 KW/year.

Which is not very much.

At 120Tw/year with 5 million users BC consumption per capita is an astonishing 24,000kw/year (or 24Mw)

Every bitcoin user consumes 27 times the energy consumed by a (quite powerful) gaming console turned on non stop (which is never the case)

That's why there have been campaigns around the World to replace incandescent bulbs with the energy efficient ones.

Compared to the traditional ones the new light bulbs can save up to the 80% of the energy, compared to a bitcoiner, a non bitcoiner can save ~97% of the energy by simply playing videogames.

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> A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour

You need to take in the manufacturing costs, costs to develop software, costs to run servers too, otherwise you're only measuring marginal energy consumption for a new user.

Marginal energy consumption for a new Bitcoin user is probably small too.

The website linked is actually measuring the amount of energy that BC is using right now to operate.

It's not the total amount of energy used to create the BC network, the software, the HW and everything else.

https://cbeci.org/

> The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) provides a real-time estimate of the total electricity load and consumption of the Bitcoin network. The model is based on a bottom-up approach initially developed by Marc Bevand in 2017 that takes different types of available mining hardware as the starting point.

> The first number refers to the total electrical power consumed by the Bitcoin network and is expressed in gigawatts (GW). This figure is updated every 30 seconds and corresponds to the rate at which Bitcoin uses electricity. The second number refers to the total yearly electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network and is expressed in terawatt-hours (TWh). We annualise Bitcoin’s electricity consumption assuming continuous power usage at the aforementioned rate over the period of one year. We apply a 7-day moving average to the resulting data point in order to make the output value less dependent of short-term hashrate movements, and thus more suitable for comparisons with alternative uses of electricity.

The parts of PS4 and Bitcoin that are expensive are different. It makes zero sense to compare the expensive part of Bitcoin to the cheap part of PS4

Do you think the bitcoin mining rigs materialize themselves out of thin air? Those things get constantly replaced because they get inefficient due to the rising hashrate and advancements in chip efficiency.

The ratio of energy spent running to energy spent producing is orders of magnitude higher for bitcoin rigs than for PS4s.

I disagree the comparison is useful.

that's simply because a PS4 is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than BC and was designed to be like that

BC on the other hand are very expensive in terms of energy consumed, by design

BTC don't make any sense energy wise and in the end don't make any sense to invest in something designed to burn energy in the long run, especially now that we are trying to fix the mistakes of the past

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