Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than Gold and Silver.
Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than credit cards and the banking system in general.
Yet Bitcoin is frowned upon by environmentalists, as if Bitcoin was a company and they could use political power to shut it down.
Bitcoin is, and always will be, additive on top of the world’s energy consumption. Every Terawatt of energy that goes into Bitcoin is a Terawatt of energy that isn’t being put into the grid to send to homes or industries or other users. No one is choosing to build power plants in the middle of nowhere without a way to send that energy into the grid.
The grid is not perfectly efficient, but it’s still better to transfer that energy through the grid than to keep a coal plant running somewhere else because Bitcoin is (hypothetically) consuming the new renewable energy sources coming online.
The key is to remember that no one is waking up and wondering if they should run their Bitcoin miner or charge their Tesla. Both happen independently, and it’s not hard to see that miners run 24/7 regardless of energy demand fluctuations elsewhere.
This idea of unused, surplus energy that somehow can’t be connected to the grid is a myth perpetuated to whitewash the absolutely massive (country-scale) energy consumption of Bitcoin.
Not to mention, none of us can buy video cards right now because they’re all being consumed to mine other cryptocurrencies. Discussion forums are full of people swapping tips for mining with their GPUs to offset the cost.
There is no angle on this in which we can ignore the 120,000 Gigawatt energy consumption of Bitcoin and the additional energy consumption of all the other crypto currencies popping up in its wake.
Frankly, at this point it’s depressing to see this trope repeated so often on HN, where usually the users would have enough intellectual curiosity and engineering sense to read up on the basics of power transmission and marginal energy costs before repeating such an obviously flawed argument. I’m afraid everyone’s personal financial investment in cryptocurrency is clouding judgment on the topic when all of the facts are right in front of us.
Not really. Electricity is tough to transport over distances and interconnects are expensive and have limited capacity. That's why new hampshire's retail cost for electricity is 17 cents/kWh[1] but quebec only pays 5.8 cent/kWh
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
[2] https://www.energyhub.org/electricity-prices/ (7.3¢/kWh converted to USD)
It is the infrastructure we are going to need anyways to geographically balance varying supply and demand with increasing amounts of (intermittent) renewable energy on the grid.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
Against how much power usage? California has 10GW[1] of north/south transmission capacity against 80GW[2] of installed capacity.
They weren’t building power plants in the middle of nowhere without any plan to get that energy back into the grid, to where it needs to be. There wasn’t an excess of power plants sitting idle with no way to send their power into the grid until Bitcoin came along to consume it.
Mining is, however, negating any potential environmental offset of those plants by consuming the energy before it can be sent to other locations that are still dependent on fossil fuels.
The actual cost of sending power across the grid is relatively low.
The Wikipedia page on power transmission is a good place to get an introduction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission
Specifically:
> The cost of high voltage electricity transmission (as opposed to the costs of electric power distribution) is comparatively low, compared to all other costs arising in a consumer's electricity bill. In the UK, transmission costs are about 0.2 p per kWh compared to a delivered domestic price of around 10 p per kWh.
You're right, although an alternate source shows that the same difference exists for residential to large power (50,000 kW+) customers. Presumably for large power customers the cost of electricity becomes a bigger factor compared to other expenses.
https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/compa...
>> The cost of high voltage electricity transmission (as opposed to the costs of electric power distribution) is comparatively low, compared to all other costs arising in a consumer's electricity bill. In the UK, transmission costs are about 0.2 p per kWh compared to a delivered domestic price of around 10 p per kWh.
There's selection bias going on here. Power is expensive to transmit over long distances, so power authorities opt to build local power plants, so that the expensive long transmission lines aren't built and therefore aren't being factored in.
There can certainly be periods of time where it is excess, it's just hard to believe it's typical for there to be zero dispatchable sources operating on the grids supplying the power.
The mining equipment is also diffusing into the hands of people who don’t pay their own energy bills. I’m part of an IT forum where network admins are constantly sharing stories about employees trying to hide mining equipment in the office to use the free power and cooling for pure profit. Similar situation in school dorms.
The idea of miners turning these things on only during rare times of excess grid capacity is a myth. They’re running 24/7 and they’re consuming energy that would otherwise be sent to the grid to offset fossil fuel consumption elsewhere.
> Bitcoin is mostly mined using excess energy, or "cheap" energy, which improves the efficiency and costs of energy production, making it surprisingly "green".
> Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than Gold and Silver.
As for
> Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than credit cards and the banking system in general.
Bitcoin supports at many orders of magnitude less transactions on the ledger than the banking systems [1] and needs 10 minutes to add a new block to the ledger [2] and ETH about 10-15 seconds[2]. In contrast, according to this [3], in 2019 there were on average 100M visa transactions in the US alone, per day, so around 5 orders of magnitude more transactions in just the States, excluding MasterCard, paypal and every other system.
Now, there are better alternatives, ETH uses proof of stake, there are also papers on proof of space [4]. Personally I'd like to move to something decentralised and away from the banks as much as possible.
[1] https://charts.bitcoin.com/btc/chart/transactions-per-block#...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/block-time-cryptocurren...
[3] https://www.cardrates.com/advice/number-of-credit-card-trans...
AFAIK they have pledged to move to proof of stake for quite some time now, without delivering so far.
For it to scale to that level it requires an L2 solution (eg. Lightning), in which case energy consumption is not going to increase.
Why do we need a separate currency for sending money around anyway?
L2 solutions still transact the same tokens as their L1 counterparts.
Other solutions may potentially be "better" technically, but that doesn't mean they are proven in the long run, and the on-ramp, corporate, etc. infrastructure is not in place for them.
Shame about all of those hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin that have been stolen. Come to think of it, while I haven't crunched the statistics, it wouldn't surprise me if your money were more likely to be stolen if you kept it in Bitcoin than a boring bank account.
But really, I'm interested in these arguments, please let me know where I can learn more. Especially regarding the idea that it uses less energy than the current banking system.
I guess this one is pretty clear, OP was only comparing to gold/silver (I have no idea how it compares in practice).
To be comparable to banking, bitcoin should probably first reach the level where it can provide the same functionality (payment, fractional banking, etc.). (And then prorated as even if it were to provide the functionality, it would have to scale by several orders of magnitude to replace banking)
Do you think that corporations don't require buildings, computing resources, transportation, etc. to exist?
As for the link about gold, read my original comment.
turns out those entire countries in their favorite analogy also use a smaller amount of energy than many industries
the source is more important either way