Electricity needed to mine Bitcoin is more than used by 'entire countries'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
>The more bitcoin that is mined, the harder the algorithms that must be solved to get a bitcoin become. Now that over 18.5m bitcoin have been mined, the average computer can no longer mine bitcoins.
The difficulty has nothing to do with the supply, the difficulty is entirely a function of the amount of hash power on the entire network.
I know people make mistakes, but one thing that bothers me is when people write articles about things they genuinely never took an interest in. You've got no business informing people. Also, an article written about something by an author who does not know about said something screams "agenda". This feels like a hit piece on Tesla (for not being green), and a "don't get excited about bitcoin just yet (pleeease)" article.
> A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube, according to the site.
And it will continue to increase. Common sense may suggest that, consequently, the seigniorage of BTC should naturally dip below zero. But then again who could've predicted its value would ever have exceeded $50K USD?
That's not correct.
The effort put into any block, past and future, is (long-term adjusted) directly connected to the payout, since the effort is algorithmically self-adjusting. It follows, that the effort put into any current block is worth ~$300k, and therefore worth ~$300k of electricity.
If bitcoin is ever going to be valued less again, the necessary resources to sustain bitcoin will shrink accordingly.
Additionally, they automatically shrink, by design, in ~2024, ~2028 and ~2032.
> If bitcoin is ever going to be valued less again, the necessary resources to sustain bitcoin will shrink accordingly.
If I'm interpreting correctly, this will occur because the number of miners will decrease as the reward incentive decreases. Or do you mean something else?
This is 100% incorrect. Energy is spent mining Bitcoin, which has an adjustable difficulty to average mined blocks at rate of ~once per ten minutes. A basic home computer could easily mine all of the blocks if the difficulty was low enough (i.e. there were no other miners).
It's pointless to suggest hypotheticals that aren't even remotely applicable in the real world.
Nevertheless, this thread did raise some questions, particularly about scalability (ie. if each block has a max capacity and blocks are mined every ten minutes, how to account for an ever-increasing amount of transactions per time-period between blocks?). There appear to be some proposed solutions to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem
Yes, we have a system that uses a lot of energy but does so very efficiently. Bitcoin don’t solve any of the problems it alleges to, so all that has been accomplished is the establishment of a worse secondary system that doesn’t do 1/100th of what the existing system does but uses infinitely more power on a per-unit basis.
It’s not as if with Bitcoin you suddenly don’t need a military or financial institutions.
Bitcoin will require banks at scale and an increasing amount of energy for the duration of its existence, or at least until mining is done. The network can’t handle transaction volume so people are forced to settle transactions off network. That’s the job of a bank.
The US is secured by its foreign policy. The foreign policy exists to protect the world’s strongest economy. The dollar’s value is a product of the strong economy. It is not directly secured by the military. Without a military there would be no US, and no economy, only then could you say there would be no dollar. So unless you plan to eliminate the US economy, Bitcoin’s existence doesn’t affect the need for a military, even if it was the world’s standard currency.
If you actually care about the environment, I can’t think of a worse idea than promoting an energy black hole powered by coal and tech garbage.
How did that gold get out of the ground? How did it get to your house? How will you get it to where you want to sell it? How will that buyer transport and secure the gold?
> Bitcoin will require banks at scale and an increasing amount of energy for the duration of its existence, or at least until mining is done. The network can’t handle transaction volume so people are forced to settle transactions off network. That’s the job of a bank.
The lightning network and pegging higher transaction coins to BTC are the answer to transaction volume. It's super early days in crypto, but there are already proposed solutions being developed.
> The US is secured by its foreign policy. The foreign policy exists to protect the world’s strongest economy. The dollar’s value is a product of the strong economy. It is not directly secured by the military. Without a military there would be no US, and no economy, only then could you say there would be no dollar. So unless you plan to eliminate the US economy, Bitcoin’s existence doesn’t affect the need for a military, even if it was the world’s standard currency.
The USD and its associated taxes are used to fund military actions that I have major ethical issues with. It's been that way since this country was created. I would be 100% fine with the US gov going away. In fact as an anarchist, it's the end goal of my philosophy.
> If you actually care about the environment, I can’t think of a worse idea than promoting an energy black hole powered by coal and tech garbage.
I promote clean energy and ethically clean stores of value. Not USD.
These are fixed costs amortized over time. You only mine gold once. You don’t buy gold to sell it for a profit, so transactions tend to be limited. I can guarantee it’s less than 750kwh though.
> The lightning network and pegging higher transaction coins to BTC are the answer to transaction volume. It's super early days in crypto, but there are already proposed solutions being developed.
It is a proposed solution. Lightning Network suggests the use of watchtower nodes which is a fancy word for centralized control. The white paper even says with regards to routing “the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network, or Tier-1 ISPs”.
> In fact as an anarchist, it's the end goal of my philosophy.
Anarchism is antithetical to game theory and is therefore a fundamentally flawed method of social organization. Organizations are always more powerful than individuals, and force their competitors to form organizations of their own. In other words, the king is dead, long live the king. And with all that I’ve said about Bitcoin it should be fairly obvious that it doesn’t solve any of the problems of finance in practice, even in an anarchistic paradise. There’s incentive for miners to organize on blockchains.
> I promote clean energy and ethically clean stores of value.
What is ethical about Bitcoin? It’s a fully auditable, online-only, energy black hole that is predominantly mined in China using coal energy, purchased and held by the 1% of the population who can afford to buy it.
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/environmental-...
* https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/09/ring-environmen...
> Organizations are always more powerful than individuals, and force their competitors to form organizations of their own.
BitTorrent, Bitcoin, OSS, Tor... due to advances in networking and computing, decentralization is finally able to challenge centralization by organizing people at scale through mutually agreed upon protocols. This trend will only continue.
> What is ethical about Bitcoin? It’s a fully auditable, online-only, energy black hole that is predominantly mined in China using coal energy, purchased and held by the 1% of the population who can afford to buy it.
It allows you to store money without any middlemen; it's permission-less. Therefore it empowers the individual over the state. It's much easier for the government to pilfer my bank account than it is for them to torture me in hopes I tell them my seed phrase.
Yes, I'm not denying this. As I said, the cost is mostly fixed and amortized over time. Meanwhile Bitcoin's transactional energy cost is skyrocketing. The energy impact of holding already mined Bitcoin is equivalent to the entire energy consumption of the network, because the network must remain operational to ensure the value remains. This is not true of gold. This is mostly irrelevant anyway, as modern money is not based on a gold standard.
> by organizing people at scale through mutually agreed upon protocols.
You just described organization through democratic law and governance. My point remains on that topic: anarchism can only exist as a transient state of non-equilibrium. In the end, some organization will end up with majority power.
> It allows you to store money without any middlemen; it's permission-less.
Governments still exist, it's not permissionless. You can store cash or gold without any middlemen, but most people don't because it's inconvenient. That's why banks exist and will continue to exist.
> Therefore it empowers the individual over the state.
Nothing screams empowerment like total auditability and transparency for the existing institutions to monitor an analyze. Far more likely that the government audit's your Bitcoin transaction history and throw you in jail for illegal activity than torture you for your money. You know what is legitimately anonymous? Cash.
Bitcoin has become a polluting ponzi scheme in the grand picture. All it did was help some people who said, "why are those people rich? I should be rich. I'm going to use a new currency to become rich."
How much is it compared to maintaining Bitcoin?