Perhaps it's more reasonable to compare the energy footprint of cryptocurrency with that of our traditional fiat currencies. Including all computing power used by banks to settle their transactions.
I've been unable to find any rigorous research on this, but even the pieces defending bitcoin claim that the banking system consumes maybe 5 or 10 times as much energy as the bitcoin network, while neglecting to mention that the traditional banking system handle hundreds of thousands of times more transactions per second than bitcoin (especially funny since the estimates include stuff like the AC costs of bank branches - obvious sophistry).
There are so many new things we can do with crypto that it's going to take decades for people to discover them.
However calling my bank and having cash recalled from fraudulent (or even just bankrupt) merchants, that's happened. Who do I call at Bitcoin?
The benefit of BTC is that when your bank mismanages their assets a la 2008, resulting in a bank run, you know your assets are safe instead of having to rely on the Fed to bail out your bank. Your money is in your control, not in the control of someone else.
If you don't want that, it's easy -- just don't buy bitcoin. But don't discredit it by comparing it to a credit card which it is not trying to be. The strawman is disingenuous and shows how little you understand the topic.
The point is when we're looking at comparative energy use, you can't just point at the whole banking system and compare it to Bitcoin, as if it's an apples to apples comparison, because the banking system provides an embarassment of services that Bitcoin does not.
> The strawman is disingenuous and shows how little you understand the topic.
There's no strawman here and if anything this shows how little you understood the thread you're replying to.
(Edit: fixed a copy/paste screwup)
Sorry, this does not make BTC a bank.
As they continue to add more features, we will see what BTC will become and how it may be useful. But comparing it to a bank is silly.
I agree, Bitcoin is not a bank, that makes comparing its energy footprint to the banking system totally pointless.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...
this is true. bitcoin should be compared with everything required to run or "back" USD. which is a lot more energy use than most states on this planet
I don't think that's true. Most companies providing services on top of bitcoin control the private keys, so they could do the same thing. You give up absolute control of your money to get access to a service, except now creating the money is terrible for the environment and consumes as much power as a small European nation.
You say that now, but it's the kind of innovation that will require some time to develop use-cases. I use it as an example of where crypto is just a lot more powerful than traditional banking. There's the ability to scale without "permission". Think a 12 year old opening an "account".
> However calling my bank and having cash recalled from fraudulent (or even just bankrupt) merchants, that's happened. Who do I call at Bitcoin?
Escrow accounts and merchant layers are in development. There's a lot of interesting DeFi (decentralized finance) services being developed on Ethereum.
Right, so that means that Bitcoin is not providing many of the services the financial system provides now, so comparing its energy footprint to the existing financial system is pointless.
That's the point I was making. You can't say "Bitcoin uses X electricity and Finance uses Y, which is bigger, and so is worse" when Bitcoin doesn't provide the same services or service the same size of audience as existing financial systems do.
But I'm glad we agree the comparison with the existing system is a silly one.
what about sending money to someone far away? ever tried? or just living in a bubble using a single fiat to buy coffee
your limited use argument is tiresome. you can not send money to anyone you want with fiat. most can not send money to you. you are not free
my grandgranparent sent money back home to Italy from the US in 1912...
my grandgrandmother had no electricity, no running water, could not read, but could use that money.
now do the same with bitcoins.
anyway this sentence
> you can not send money to anyone you want with fiat
is not true.
I don't know what bubble you live in, but the opposite is true: you can't send bitcoins to anyone you want.
> I don't know what bubble you live in, but the opposite is true: you can't send bitcoins to anyone you want.
the opposite to "you can not send money to anyone you want with fiat" is "you can send money to anyone you want with fiat". which is false. hence initial statement is true. there is no bubble here.
friendly advice. read more.
thanks, I am a software engineer with 30 years of working experience, still find bitcoins the most obtuse way to send money, first of all because bitcoins are not money, secondly because 100% of those I would send money to don't know anything about bitcoins (why would they care?) and last but not least because it's easier and cheaper to convert money to gold and ship the gold (assuming I don't want to send real money)
buying prepaid credit is also an option, it works everywhere bitcoins work and it's free, immediate and it's money, directly spendable on goods and services
hell, even shipping banknotes in an envelope is better than sending bitcoins!
bitcoins are useless for this use case to anyone who really wants to send money to someone they care about
> "you can send money to anyone you want with fiat". which is false.
it's not.
I can send fiat money to anyone I want (emphasis on I)
but to prove me wrong you can send a couple bitcoins to my mom and I'll show you she doesn't know what to do with them.
if you're interested in proving me wrong, I can give you her wallet address.
in the end ask yourself this: why North Korea is disconnected from internet, but allows bitcoins?
are bitcoins really pro people and against oppressive regimes?
p.s. as much as I don't care about burn accounts, yours is actually really suspicious...
If you need to do this, you can do it through the group at your bank called treasury services (or something like that). They have APIs for financial services customers and CFOs who need to do this sort of thing.
Anyone can do this now with HD wallets.
That’s moving the goalpost.
There isn’t any barrier to programmatic banking. The use case is too narrow for it to be a widely-advertised service.
> There isn’t any barrier to programmatic banking.
There absolutely is, there's no open API for this.
There is a difference between not being able to and not knowing how to. You can. There are no-minimum balance API banking interfaces. There just isn’t a common enough use case for them to be heavily advertised.
We can move the goalpost again to an open API, but that’s another thing once more.
Yes, easily.
It would take a phone call, since I haven’t set up the rails to do this. But “I need ten thousand sequentially numbered checking accounts with wire privileges” is a perfectly fine (if odd for an individual customer) request. (Almost any process requiring that many accounts is being done wrong.)
Granted, I have a private banker. But there are services who provide this to e.g. fintech companies setting up and destroying single-use accounts on the fly.
OP meant legal things.
Datacenters use about 205 TWh/year.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow...
Bitcoin uses about 75 TWh/year.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
And that's with everyone on the planet using normal money every day and just about no one using Bitcoin.
Some Bitcoin-related stuff is running in datacenters, no doubt, but it's a rounding error compared to the rest.
try sending money to someone in north korea. how many hours does that take?
> actually interested in them as currency
it is still a currency.
North Korea leader has an army of hackers trained to steal bitcoins and uses them to launder money...
probably not the best example
Thats the best defense for Btc you have?
>it is still a currency.
The only people consistently using BTC as currency are drug dealers or drug buyers.
it is the most obvious use case that is superior to everything currently in use.
> The only people consistently using BTC as currency are drug dealers or drug buyers.
no. but even if true, does that make it less of a currency?
First of all, countries secure energy because people want energy. Even in a world where we use Bitcoin, people are still going to want HVAC, cars, cell phones, and all the other things that we use/buy that consume energy and damage the environment. The idea that a country will magically stop wanting oil because it's using Bitcoin is just laughable.
Second, Bitcoin uses a ton of energy by design. It's literally built to create a competition between miners for hashing power in order to prevent 51% attacks. This structure is why increased hashing efficiency hasn't reduced Bitcoin's energy usage, it only results in spending the same amount of electricity on new hardware rather than old. A country that runs on Bitcoin will need a bit more energy as a fiat country, because maintaining sufficient hashing power will suddenly become a strategic problem. Up until today the risk of a 51% attack on Bitcoin is a private concern; only the miners and those involved in Bitcoin are concerned about it. But if a country used BTC as its main currency, suddenly that is a strategic problem. Does anyone honestly think that the USA wouldn't use its military to secure oil in order to hedge off a 51% attack on its entire financial system? Honestly, it would be dereliction of duty to not do that, given that scenario.
I don't really care about the USA, and I want to be in control of my own money. Maybe from your perspective of being able to control the citizens of a country, USD is better. But from my perspective of protecting my own interests, BTC is a compelling solution.
The funny thing is that we know that neither fiat currency nor oil is necessary for empire building or warmongering, because both fiat currencies and large scale oil consumption came out after the greatest period of imperialism and colony building that humanity has ever seen. The idea that replacing something that’s been around for ~50 years will solve a Millenia long problem of humanity’s is just funny.
Is it? Communicating over distance was a problem we've had for millenia (or much longer) and it's now solved. Technology is amazing and we hit an inflection point last century. We're essentially already living in a post-humanity world, and crypto is the currency to match.
There's a reason why I say that bitcoin fans participate in magical thinking, and this is a prime example. So the argument goes that because we've solved communication, bitcoin is supposed to solve war ... how again? There's not even a fig leaf of an argument here, only a blunt assertion that because we've solved other problems, therefore your preferred technology will solve other issues.
Maybe one day we'll solve war. But the burden of proof is on you to argue that your specific thing will solve that issue. And you're not even really trying.
> We're essentially already living in a post-humanity world, and crypto is the currency to match.
Lol, what? This is the intro to a cyberpunk novel, not an actual argument with testable claims. What the heck does "post-humanity" even freaking mean? As an actual human being living in this society, I'd argue that any claims that I'm "post" are objectively wrong.
This is always the issue with any sort of enthusiast; your enthusiasm does not scale. Just because you're really excited about a thing doesn't mean that anyone else will be; you have to actually find things that other people want and connect your interest to them persuasively (blunt assertions don't really work). "We're already living in a post-humanity world, and crypto is the currency to match" is the kind of thing that'll get you plaudits on crypto sub-forums, and worried looks from everyone else who has no <explicative deleted> idea what you're going on about.
If anything, limited supplies of anything, including bitcoin, are a likely to spark wars, not end them.
If you truly wish to help stop wars, join a peace-loving organization, attend marches, lobby politicians. You'll find all of the real work on this are in leftist organizations, which fight against the real foundations of war, such as inequality, ideas of exceptionalism, corporate greed and others. Fiat currency is well down on the list of the world's problems.
Quite the contrary. You'll find that many currencies were created specifically to support an army or war.
If the US government wanted to go to war, was lacking money for this, and for some reason didn't want to seize the entire bitcoin network (which it could pretty easily do, make no mistake), it could simply issue its own cryptocoin, just like in 1652. And people will buy it, because they know the US is good for it, for the same reason that dollars don't particularly devalue even if you print another hundred billion of them today.
It's important to understand that you can't fight social problems with technical solutions. The disgusting amounts of power that big states have make it impossible to oppose them with fun projects like bitcoin. If you are truly serious about combatting US imperialism, try reading some Noam Chomsky - that is a man that has spent his life fighting against these things, but also understanding the levers of power.
Financial games are in the end games; they may seem important because it is where the rich spend their time, but if push comes to shove and the system is threatened, the game is quickly stopped and any necessary controls is asserted. Just look at what happened with the GME stock (and we haven't even seen the end of that). Make no mistake, if BTC ever becomes a real threat to any monetary system, you will see much worse than that.
This can only be combatted in the arena of politics and democratic control, by changing the rules, not playing the game.
2. Fiat is not a social problem but a technological one that crypto is well poised to take on.
3. BTC is well on its way to passing gold in aggregate value. It's safe to say, it's no longer a "toy".
4. I'm left of Chomsky but in general, a big fan.
2. I don't understand how fiat is a technological problem. Fiat was a solution to the problem of a fixed supply (gold-pegged) currency. Crypto is generally a step back.
3. The value of bitcoin is irrelevant to its impact on global financial systems. It can handle 7 transactions per second, while consuming more power than the Czech Republic. That people are willing to bet good money on it for now is does not mean that is should be taken seriously as an alternative to anything in the financial system.
4. Interesting, I honestly expected from your arguments that you were more in the area of a more-socially-conscious-than-average Rand Paul fan, glad to hear I was wrong.
2. Fiat is a technological solution, as is Bitcoin. Really though, the dichotomy between "social" and "tech" solutions is false. Technology and society are one and the same.
3. BTC has moved billions of dollars into crypto. That crypto can be pegged in smart contracts on more appropriate tech stacks (like ETH) to enable currency use-cases with alt coins. It's early days here, but very exciting.
4. There's not many leftist libertarians but it is an actual philosophy. Individual liberty + social and humanitarian thinking + acknowledgement of the role racism and exploitation has had in today's power structures. I believe in radical decentralization and leveraging technology and automation to make life better for all.
2. I was wrong in my explanation, you're right that fiat is a (social/financial) technology and in principle crypto could be an alternative. What I was thinking of initially is that the problems of the finance system are social, not technological: the incentives in the current system (the rich keeping their richness at the expense of everyone else) are a social problem, which can't be fixed with technology. As long as the rich stay rich and powerful, they will control crypto just as well as they controlled gold and fiat before it.
3. ETH can do, what, 24 TPS? Right now there is no coin that can realistically compete with the global banking system, especially on the last mile. And I don't think PoW or PoSpace will ever get there. And PoStake doesn't seem like it has any real advantages over a trusted distributed DB, to be honest.
4. Those are quite noble goals. Probably a major difference of belief between us is that I don't believe any change towards decentralization can come from (computer) technology, I believe it must be a social movement with democratic power that moves things first and foremost - any kind of purely technological solution will easily be co-opted by the rich and powerful. In this way, crypto should look at what happened with the Internet itself, as Google and Facebook and others slowly absorbed it.
Arguably currency is a consequence of wars, as are markets[0]. Markets and currency (fiat & hard specie) are usually the consequence of states needing to raise armies, equip and pay for armies, and do something with the tribute collected from vanquished foes. Small scale agriculture can work on either physical barter or interpersonal debt systems, it's only when you need to equip and train men to fight full time that you need actual coinage and markets to produce arms for them and do something with whatever they seized abroad.
Assuming that one accepts this, this is actually a pretty big problem for the "bitcoin will stop wars" crowd, as arguably currencies are a consequence of wars and not vice-versa. If one wants to stop wars, one has to tackle the root causes, not the side-effects.
Furthermore, it's also clear that it's possible to organize and fund wars on the back of several different types of currency. We've seen wars funded with hard specie (early Roman Republic/empire), diluted hard specie (late Roman Empire), wheat backed coin (Sumaria), lead (Sparta), paper notes backed by land (French directory), gold backed paper (America pre-1971), fiat (everyone nowadays), and probably more still. There's really no clear reason why one couldn't use a cryptocurrency to organize and fund a war.
Heck, if they actually worked it would probably make modern wars a bit easier. Modern conflict often involves the funding of proxy groups with a variety of openness and plausible deniability. This usually requires the actual transit of physical money, which is dangerous and expensive. The ability to just digitally wire a bunch of currency to your proxies without the need to fly pallets of money and gold to your proxy fighters would simplify things significantly for current world powers. The ultra-private currencies would be a pretty good way to send money to terrorist and rebel groups you don't want to be seen visible funding too.
0 - For more on this see David Graeber's Debt, the First 5000 Years.
To the extent that inequality, competition, and unfairness create tension, that tension doesn't go away just because there's a different set of people at the top.
Come on. Of all of the cryptocurrency-utopia claims that exist, this is surely the least believable.