Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally

digiconomist.net

47 pointsbrianxp128 comments

Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone.

At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us.

I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply.

A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs come into stock. Not all the issues are related to mining, but it certainly is enough of an issue that Nvidia has announced mining specific cards and is throttling mining on their 3060 series. AMD is rumored to be doing similar soon.

Edit: Replaced 'anti-social Ponzi scheme' with 'speculative bubble' to be more accurate.

I say we should ban data centers instead. They're clearly a scam and no one should be allowed to use them because they waste so much power!

And Xbox and other gaming consoles.

And Argentina.

A lot of datacenters provide substantial utility to others. Like the customers of the services that are hosted in those datacenters.

BTC mining makes the miners more wealthy. In service of the BTC network, which has what utility?

There are quite a number of criminal or at least grey market uses for BTC.

But what are the legitimate uses that are not as well or better served by the traditional payment networks?

Operating data centers makes the data center owners more wealthy. All in service of the data center network, which has what utility?

There are quite a number of criminal and grey market uses for data centers.

What are the legitimate uses of data centers that are not served by traditional pen & paper?

Bitcoin's true use case hasn't showed itself yet because it is uniquely suited to help us in case of a select few low probability and extreme scenarios, aka black swan events which we can't predict, but will probably happen.

If those events happen, do you think the infra (electricity generation and telecom interconnection) that it relies upon will still be around?

Yes. I'm talking about financial collapse, not destruction of infra.

Without details, the impact of a financial collapse is unknown. Given how BTC moves in connection with the broader market now, one would expect that the value would crash with the system, especially since BTC has no intrinsic value.

Society know financial collapse. They occur quite regularly every 5-7 years. The outcomes are roughly identical.

I'm pro-blockchain (but not POW) ... and not really as they currently exist. I see a future with UBI, and better taxation of wealthy baked INTO the crypto so that equality is a bit more fair, and everything functions more "automated" so less bureacracy.

However, I've been wondering lately what happens in a future where the grid is destroyed by a sun storm? Say the power grids get knocked off for 21 months (I read this is a very possible scenario with a big sun flare), as well as a lot of satellites.

If we move a lot of the world's monetary systems/value to blockchain, how do we use blockchain with no internet or electricity?

It's less a question of if Bitcoin has utility and more about the proportionality of its utility to resource usage. The problem is that there's always incentives to increase the amount of processing power being thrown at Bitcoin but the utility of Bitcoin is independent of that. You can change the amount of processing power in the network without affecting the rate of transaction processing, rate of minting, or the perceived value of Bitcoin.

> In service of the BTC network, which has what utility?

The safest safe haven asset. A global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms.

> There are quite a number of criminal or at least grey market uses for BTC.

Criminals the world over prefer cash. Should we ban cash?

> But what are the legitimate uses that are not as well or better served by the traditional payment networks?

A programmable, internet-native inflation-proof store of value with transparent fully-auditable supply metrics. Or to quote Elon Musk, “simply a less dumb form of liquidity than cash”.

>BTC is an anti-social Ponzi scheme

speculative bubble =/= ponzi scheme

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203396

To be fair, if Satoshi Nakamoto is still around and has access to 1 million bitcoins, then it's more of a Ponzi scheme.

Even then it's still not really a ponzi scheme unless he promised returns. Just because vitalik buterin is around doesn't mean ethereum is a ponzi scheme.

Yeah, you're right on the definition.

I can list so many dumb uses of energy out of my head that could be beneficial if banned...

VISA alone processes over 60,000 transactions per second [0] and only uses a tiny subset of the world's data centers. Bitcoin processes a whooping 7 transactions per second and consumes as much energy as *all data centers globally*.

I'm curious to hear what dumb use of energy you have in your head that rivals this level of stupidity.

edit: I'll address the "apple to oranges" replies here: you can combine the energy consumed by VISA and whatever other financial service exists that would together match the feature-set of bitcoin (eg. VISA + Bank of America + ...) and you'd still have energy consumption many orders of magnitude lower than the Bitcoin network.

[0] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...

Ripping myself off from another "bitcoin will destroy the world because climate change" thread:

> But visa doesn't provide most of the functions of bitcoin infrastructure. Visa does[n't] need to hold the balance of my account. Visa does[n't] need to or makes available all of my equity worth of assets for me to transfer. Visa does not custody my assets. This is literally apple to oranges (or visa to bitcoin)

So you think those extra functions do account for all data center power consumption added up?

> Visa does[n't] need to hold the balance of my account.

Yes they do?

> Visa does[n't] need to or makes available all of my equity worth of assets for me to transfer.

This is a horrifying bug, right? A thing that no person would ever want, and it's so rare that visa would make you talk to a person and raise your limit first, or they'd get more people involved to make sure you're not being coerced because it's such an abnormal thing to do. Lawyers in some cases, just because you're being so silly. But if you REALLY wanted to make a $1b debit card transaction, you probably totally could, just call the visa billionaire line.

> Visa does not custody my assets.

But a regular bank can, and visa will send to and from there with a debit card.

This conversation never goes anywhere because it's apples and oranges. VISA connects other intermediaries. It isn't actually transferring money, its basically getting two parties to agree to a transfer with a huge pile of terms and fees. It's just not the same thing.

Yes, but it's so easy to bring up as an argument...

I mean, you could just as well say Bitcoin isn't actually transferring money, it's just changing whose private keys are able to move a token around. If you define "money" as something you can pay your rent, taxes, and grocery expenses with, Coinbase and the exchanges are the ones that really settle that into money.

Do you believe that distinction is on the same scale as the distinction I pointed out between comparing VISA and Bitcoin? Nothing is completely black and white, but I believe your distinction is into the pedantic territory whereas the other is fundamental. One can certainly pay for goods and services directly with Bitcoin.

I mean, we're never going to get a 1:1 comparison, but I'll put it this way: Visa's not-quite-really transferring money is a whole lot more useful than Bitcoin's not-quite-really transferring money.

And I'm sure that Visa + banks for settlement are still using a lot less energy than Bitcoin if you normalize it to transaction volume. Even if you only count the settlements as "real" transactions.

Sure, I agree with this.

I'm personally mixed on crypto but strongly dislike the glossing-over of its various fundamental properties by people taking intense absolute positions about what free people should be able to do. That can get me shaking my fist at the internet, though now I mostly realize these opinions are as irrelevant as mine is, and this is good.

Bitcoin definitely has some neat properties. It is interesting having control of your funds being driven purely by your signing keys.

That drew me in with some geeky allure as something quite unique. And the scenarios like "crossing a border with a fortune stored as a memorized passphrase in your head" are cool in a cyberpunk kind of way.

But these days I'm in the "bitcoin is a paperclip maximizer" camp. I don't really want control of my money to be based on crypto keys that I could lose or have stolen with one bad mistake. And proof of work is so wildly expensive for what it does, I can't endorse it.

I follow all of this reasoning and really don't disagree. I would just add that, while I don't want All of my money to be based on crypto, I do like that I could feasibly have Some of it. It seems like a richer or more dynamic future.

The PoW stuff, yeah, there is a reason it exists as you know but it is undeniably insane too. PoS is going to be interesting to see how it goes with Eth.

As a third dimension, I am very optimistic that we're on the order of 1 decade away from a huge change in energy, where solar is dirt cheap. If we see an S curve style shift to that mode of energy production, I think the PoW conversation changes a lot.

The solar part, I'm very unconvinced about.

If solar becomes 100x cheaper than today's energy sources, but bitcoin mining still pays a large reward, bitcoin miners will just use 100x more energy, right? They're in a race with each other, it doesn't make sense to leave any extra hashrate capacity on the table since if you don't use it, somebody else will and they'll get more of the block rewards.

Maybe that's fine, since solar is still zero-emission, but surely there's still some cost to producing that energy (such as the space taken up by the solar panels, the cost to make and replace them, etc). Otherwise it'd be free, not just cheap.

Is VISA an asset that protects against hyperinflation, is it permissionless to participate in, is it censorship resistant, is it pseudonymous?

You're comparing your bicycle to a cargo ship saying "see how much more energy efficient my bicycle is?". Meanwhile your bicycle can't tow 1000 tonnes of freight across the ocean. That's why is moot to compare them.

Bitcoin is no longer censorship resistant. From the US Government alone being able to track and prosecute domestic and international criminals using Bitcoin such as Ross Ulbricht [0] or the BTC-e founder [1], to censoring bitcoin addresses [2] , and there being a trend of the centralized Bitcoin miners complying with such orders [3]; that ship sailed a few years ago. "Users" today transacting on the Bitcoin network are implicitly asking permission from Uncle Sam with every transaction they make, since un-authorized use of Bitcoin has become so easy to prosecute.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/04/world/americas/silk-road-ross...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/29/16060344/btce-bitcoin-exc...

[2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm556

[3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/slippery-slope-as-new-bitcoin...

How is [3] generalizable to all future mining power will require uncle sam permission?

I'm showing evidence for how censorship is happening today in Bitcoin and therefore we cannot claim it to be "censorship resistant". Whether miners co-operate or not with the prosecutors is beside the point. The example of miner co-operation is just to show how easy censorship can be, but from the government's point of view it is just an optimization, not a necessary function.

I don't think you know how mining bitcoin works in theory and practice. I also think you're overestimating (long term) how much users care about what US (I assume from your reference) prosecuters do or not in relation to mining groups that are reachable by US jurisdiction

- People are not prosecuted for using Bitcoin, they are prosecuted for crimes like drug trafficking or money laundering. Even Ross Ulbricht was not necessarily traced because of his Bitcoins.

- Geographic distribution of nodes and mining is important for decentralization.

- I don't live in the United States. I can wash/tumble my coins, proxy through other networks. Transact through Monero. The power is on the side of the users.

cough ad-tech cough

ad-tech runs on a fractional of data centers right? So it's already eclipsed by crypto.

if we're talking about resource usage, we also have to factor in the energy/bandwidth in end-user devices, as well has human labor (bitcoin miners aren't hiring tens/hundreds of thousands of SWEs, for instance).

So... What-about-ism?

Yeah, pretty much expected these comments would appear soon. How come everytime Bitcoin thread is started, 99% of comments are people absolutely clueless about how difficulty is regulated within Bitcoin protocol?

There was no comment about BTC difficulty. It's a comment about the pernicious impact of BTC on the world with practically no benefit to show for it.

Yeah, and the truth is Bitcoin doesn't have negative impact on the world. Miners do.

But Bitcoin can't exist without miners...

This is kind of like the old joke that falling from a great height is perfectly safe, it's only landing that's dangerous.

Almost everything in Bitcoin was intentionally designed around mining.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/810859107894008357/

Personally, I would rather see a reasonable tax on emissions.

Yeah, when it comes to policy, I think you're right. I'd prefer a tax on the externalities than an outright ban.

Or, dirty energy should be banned.

Yes, and that doesn't really address the issue of proof of work blockchains wasting energy. With BTC specifically, the incentives are there to waste as much energy as possible as the difficulty and price goes up. Yes, you try to do more work with a unit of electricity, but the net incentive is to add more and more.

Then what? Do you end up with this problem? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26226470

Fuck all those people using Bitcoin to circumvent oppressive governments. Fuck your freedom. We need the gov to solve all our problems. We need to ban bit coin now!!! Muh climate change https://www.pinterest.com/pin/810859107894008357/

> Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone.

How does one ban a blockchain? Serious question.

Would you only arrest the miners or would you also arrest non-mining full node operators?

How could you tell if regular citizens were transacting with POW coins? Would you subpoena telecom companies for records where customers have visited known sites which transact in POW coins? Or would you go the AT&T route and pipe telecom traffic through a little cabinet that uses deep packet inspection to sniff out POW transactions occurring over RPC?

What about traders? Would you outlaw trading POW coins and make exchange exclude US customers? That could make for some serious arbitrage opportunities for tech savy citizens.

I would genuinely appreciate your answer to any or all of these questions.

I build cryptocurrency software and would gain a lot from additional insight into the threat model I face in the not-so-distant future.

You don't ban the blockchain, you make it illegal to use the coins. Then the network loses value and mining doesn't pay off. If you don't do KYC or AML, you will likely become part of the banned list.

Also you can look for energy consumption. Towns in upstate New York are banning new permits for mining. So it's already happened.

In short, society has certain expectations and if you violate those there will be consequences. Govt and laws are always behind the publics will, so it's coming for cryptos. Which survive is the real speculative bets that will pay off

You regulate exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini, so there are no legitimate ways to trade your proof of work cryptocurrency for USD (or your local gov backed currency).

Then the demand for the crypto currency plummets.

In 2010-2011, I traded BTC for USD in person, with a laptop on wifi. And via PayPal with someone I met on IRC, where there was a bot that kept track of your reputation so the BTC sellers would know if it was safe to sell to you.

At that time the price of 1 BTC was about $1 USD.

I think we'd see something similar, if there was an outright ban.

On the other hand:

* cocaine prices aren't $1/kg, even after governments around the world banned it

* exotic/endangered species are still being traded for top dollars, despite anti-poaching and anti-trafficking regulations

* stolen art is still worth millions

Those things are valued for more than their resale price.

The only reason I would ever want to hold a Bitcoin is that I trust that somebody else will give me something of value for it in the future.

If governments make it very difficult for me to exchange bitcoins for other things, its utility as a "store of value" gets lower. I'd rather store my value in stocks, real estate, gold, or whatever else. The regulation directly interferes with the use case.

On the other hand, all the regulation in the world doesn't interfere with cocaine's use case of getting you high. If governments could make it so that cocaine doesn't get you high, its price would certainly plummet.

Another option is to levy wealth tax in bitcoin holdings. This is definitely less draconian that what you are proposing, but will achieve similar results.

As always, you regulate at the edge: You control that banks do not accept Bitcoin-related money. You regulate exchanges to delist Bitcoin.

Honestly, I'm thinking about buying a brand new Silverado with my crypto just because of how much I hate you whiny climate change bitches.

It’s getting old seeing the same posts with no new data or analysis day after day.

I get that people feel this is important, or perhaps are excited to share something wrong with Bitcoin, but I’d be surprised if 99% of the regular visitors to this site haven’t heard about Bitcoin’s energy use and perhaps heard some counterarguments already several times.

It really does seem like a grudge more than a genuine care. For example, you can often find some of the same accounts parroting cherry picked takes or intentionally misleading comparisons in the comments.

I felt the same way as well, but you know what they say: all publicity is good publicity. If you parrot the same thing over and over, some people may get interested, why other people are so angry....it's because they are nocoiners.

"Everyone who has a problem with bitcoin is a nocoiner" is bullshit and you know it.

I have money invested in cryptocurrencies, and still don't like that it's an incredible waste of energy.

I accept it as a part of the system / algorithm.

People would prefer if Matrix multiplication was O(n^2) algorithm (which would get rid of a lot of waste resources in the datacenters), but people accept that it takes more resources.

What I don’t accept is the amount of lies that people say about Proof of Stake algorithms being an improvement over Bitcoin’s current protocol without any security compromise.

If I see an algorithm that is less costly while giving the same security as Bitcoin, I will evaluate it, but the amount of shaming that I get for paying miners a seignorage to secure my money is what I don’t have to tolerate.

The problem with bitcoin isn't merely that it uses a ton of energy, it's that the amount of energy consumed has practically zero relationship to the utility provided by the network. Yes, Visa uses a lot of energy, it's also a global payment platform servicing hundreds of millions of transactions per day, the amount of energy used correlates with the amount of useful work provided by the network, this is not true of PoW which consumes increasingly more and more energy while facilitating the same rate of transactions. Unlike every other technology in history, when advancements in efficiency are made, bitcoin power consumption actually increases because an increase in efficiency means more miner profit if similar rates of power are consumed, except this also has the side effect of increasing mining difficulty, thus making the entire network more energy hungry overall. Bitcoin is wasteful in a manner that is unique compared to other technology.

>bitcoin power consumption actually increases because an increase in efficiency means more money if similar rates of power are consumed, except this also has the side effect of increasing mining difficulty, thus making the entire network more energy hungry overall

well not really, the amount of bitcoin to be mined is fixed (and actually drops in the long term), so the amount of money that is up for grabs should stay the same unless the price changes. Therefore it's more reasonable to say that the increase is power consumption is fueled by the increase in price, not because of increase in efficiency.

Price is one factor, but ultimately the actual price is secondary to the fact that miners are incentivized to hash as much as possible because more hashes per kWh means more earnings, regardless of the actual price, yet this increase in hashes per kWh doesn't actually provide more utility for the network.

Only if miners paid their costs in BTC which they don't (yet).

There are so many frustrated nocoiners here on HN, it’s crazy. It’s interesting that on a tech site people can be more negative towards new technology, than on youtube for example, where I don’t see so much hate....I just don’t understand why.

They read that Bitcoin uses more electric than Argentina and now they have their panties in a bunch because they believe the talking heads that say climate change will end the world.

I think the answer is because it IS a tech site. Members here understand that Bitcoin is a vastly inefficient and ineffective way to achieve the end goal.

My view is definitely that Bitcoin solves a problem I don't have, in just about the worst way possible (proof of work).

Of course you don't have the problem because your government is currently not oppressing you and nobody is targeting you. But if that were to change I believe you'll start appreciating Bitcoin more.

The idea that some made-up money that only exists on the internet is some kind of weapon against oppressive governments is so out of touch with reality, that it's incomprehensible how somebody can actually believe that.

For me it is the only reality that exists. I have been using Bitcoin for a long time, travelling a lot, and I see a lot of currencies, and none of them feel close to my ideology. I accept them at the same time, and work around the tax laws imposed by my country by getting a loan against my BTC (which I wouldn't need to if I would live in another country).

You wouldn't think that if you were Chinese, Syrian, Lebanonian, and many other states

Of course I would.

This place was flooded with extremely biased nocoiners long before energy consumption was a hot topic.

I truly believe it’s simply that they want it to fail since they missed the boat, and their ego is on the line as a forward thinking, “ahead of the curve” technologist.

It can’t be the biggest development of the last decade, what would that say about them? Therefore, inefficient ponzi that’s only used for drugs!

It wasn't this bad in early 2013 when the price of BTC was $70. Actually pg's comments here persuaded me to buy a lot of Bitcoin (with a few other influential people, like Chamath Palihapatiya and Max Keiser, and the Cyprus bail in). Usually I missed all the good early startup investments, as I'm not an American, so Bitcoin was the first exciting thing that I had the ability to invest in early.

I was on the boat in 2010. I got off it early when I decided the whole thing was a speculative bubble.

I don't really have a lot of regrets about that though. I have more regrets about selling other things too early, like stock positions I once owned.

It's great for you, I love Bitcoin, but there are a lot of other exciting things happening in the world that people should invest in depending on their understanding of the world and their priorities.

I'm also very excited about Moderna's mRNA pipeline for example, building new vaccine for cronic illnesses (vaccines are trivial important application at this point of course), and Tesla's mission of decarbonizing the world and getting rid of air pollution. It's just Bitcoin is what I believe will give me the highest ROI right now to invest later in other important technologies.

Cryptocurrency has indeed been through several speculative bubbles, and we may even be in the midst of one now.

However, I think the speculative bubble valuation of 2010 is well justified now. The thing about speculation is that sometimes the speculators are right. Tesla is almost certainly in a speculative bubble, too, but every day they arguably justify a higher base value.

That said, you seem relatively balanced for a crypto critic, and didn’t miss the boat but rather jumped off, so I’m not sure you’re part of the cohort I’m describing.

Maybe, but even if it is, does it deserve to be banned as the top comment (as of now) suggests?

I certainly don't think so.

Only if you have no savings. Petrodollar not as healthy as it used to be.

There is a lack of interest and understanding of central banking and history of money.

Thus most of the analysis is in the framework of systems efficiency (obviously, we're tech nerds afterall).

Crypto is a breakthrough in distributed computing, but utterly under-performs in efficiency against typical computing solutions. This is because of the trade-offs made in order to create a decentralized, permissionless, censorship resistant network.

It's the ideology behind bitcoin, some people sympathise with it and some people don't. And the monumental waste of energy is a real issue too. This something even the inventors of bitcoin themselves have admitted.

The main issue of this article is electricity. Another point can be made about the origin of hash rates generated during BTC mining operations. In Q2 2020 China (65,08%), Russia (6,90%), Kazakhstan (6,17%) and Iran (3,82%) comprise ~82% of average monthly hashrate.[1] "Decentralized" :)

[1]https://cbeci.org/mining_map

Well, a basic element of Bitcoin is that its energy usage per 10 minutes can be calculated roughly as:

    dollars-per-btc * btc-reward-per-block / kwh-per-dollar

The network is paying out $X every 10 minutes to miners. If miners, in aggregate, are spending more than $X some will stop because it's not profitable. If miners, in aggregate, are spending less than $X, more miners join in because there's still some easy profit to be had. Obviously, there is some friction preventing this from being a perfect match (entry cost of buying new mining hardware) but this is an approximate price target for how much money "makes sense" for the miners to spend in total.

Here on HN people seem to mostly understand that this means:

1. Higher bitcoin valuation leads directly to more spending on mining

2. Cheaper energy just leads to more energy consumed by mining for the same amount of spending

3. The amount spent on mining has no market-driven correlation to the amount "needed" for security

That seems like a pretty bad system from a technology point of view.

I think we should focus on funding more clean renewable energy sources instead of banning things.

Surely that cannot be? If some relatively large set of Bitcoin related energy consumption happens in datacenters. Then how does it consume more than those datacenters?

This only works out if all non-DC bitcoin related power usage (At home mining), is higher than all non-Bitcoin related DC power usage. Are there really that many people mining at home vs. in some sort of DC?

Bitcoin is a good thing. It's a simple financial system with very few rules that can serve as an anti-fragile backbone for much bigger systems on top of it.

Instead of looking for ways to curtail it (because that ALWAYS works, right?) we should be looking for cleaner ways to power it like renewables and nuclear.

Let’s just pretend that all bitcoin mining was done in data centers.

That means that whatever practical good bitcoin provides, we’ve DOUBLED the energy usage of data centers.

Is that good worth having to build that much additional capacity?

What about the problem that bitcoin keeps increasing it’s energy usage?

And finally, is there no more efficient (in energy usage) way of doing the same thing?

You can probably tell that I'm a Taleb fan, but it seems that whatever we have in place for doing the same thing is rotten to the core. What happens when we get hit 2x or 4x as hard as 2008? The way financial systems are structured today is the problem, and decentralization seems to be the only answer. Bitcoin is exactly that.

Bitcoin's future value may end up being no more and no less than helping us preserve a functioning world economy given an unprecedented financial crisis. Is that worth double the energy of data centers? Yes, because without it you will have 0 data centers.

Solutions will have to be implemented to curtail that energy use. Could be better power sources, could be more efficient consensus mechanisms.

and focus on internalizing carbon cost into energy prices, and that will help focus on lightning network for micro-transactions.

blockchain is a good thing. bitcoin is just a early adopter that refuses to go away because people keep pumping it up for one reason or another. there are many better alternatives to bitcoin that solve all the issues people here on HN complain about, but all you will read is people calling others "non-coiners", as if thats the reason anyone is against bitcoin.

Maybe, but being a free system everybody is more than welcome to build something better. I'll be the first in line to hop on.

How much energy do the following consume in total:

- mining metal for coins of fiat currency

- mining gold because people don't trust fiat (digging otherwise useless-in-that-quantity rocks out of the earth, a Proof of... hmm... WORK?)

- running stock exchanges because people don't trust gold either (tungsten has almost the same density)

- smelting the plain metal and gold

- the US military which backs the dollar, and the other armies which compete with it

- manufacturing paper for fiat (lots of water consumption?)

- printing fiat

- transporting fiat

- transporting bank employees

- building shiny glass palaces for banks to signal their status (PoW)

- flying bank managers across the planet to signal status (PoW)

- the office equipment, servers, and employees of banks

- existing fiat currency becoming garbage due to wear, better fakes, and inflation

- the network of hundreds of thousands of ATMs and the COBOL mainframes which back them

Does it matter? Bitcoin will never be a currency based on the implementation (a satoshi is not small enough) and just because something else is bad or worse doesn't make what you do acceptable.

Just to provide some balance, you can add to the bitcoin side:

- Mining metals for GPUs and other devices that run proof of work

- Manufacturing those devices

- Transporting those devices

- Building shiny glass bitcoin cafes.

I'm aware that several of your list items dwarf my items, but it's useful to still remember that producing (and as the article states, using) electronics _also_ has a cost.

And don't forget:

- space exploration

- streaming videos

- grocery stores

- cars

- shipping containers full of fidget spinners

- building and maintaining zoos

- giant casinos in Las Vegas

- hospitals

And all the other things associated with the so-called "green" USD ecosystem.

Are you saying grocery stores, cars, and hospitals only exist because of the "USD ecosystem", and would not exist if Bitcoin were dominant?

Of course not!

I thought we were just listing things paid for in dollars. Like "the US military which backs the dollar, and the other armies which compete with it". The armies of the world ain't going away either. Nor banks. Nor status signaling.

No, it seems to be a serious belief that some enthusiasts have that the USD doesn't have value except for military spending, and therefore there's no need to spend on a military if you have an alternative trust basis for currency.

More likely, I think it's the cognitive dissonance of Bitcoin's insane energy usage causing them to find anything remotely plausible to tot up in fiat's column, especially now that Bitcoin pretty clearly consumes more energy than not merely "all the computers backing VISA" but "all the computers backing all financial transactions for all currencies in the world."

The US Mint appears to use about 250 billion BTUs of energy a year, or about 73 GWh. I can't quickly find numbers for the Bureau of Engraving & Printing, but I suspect it's in the same ballpark.

That puts it at about 0.1% the energy usage of Bitcoin. Now compare how much transaction volume Bitcoin supports versus that of USD cash currency.

Bitcoin is insurance for when the banks go bust.

That scenario is so bad, if it happens, the numbers in your computer will not even be in the top 10 things you're worried about.

I don' think so. Not if you have Bitcoin to pay everyone when other things go bust.

How much electricity should miners waste to get a single bitcoin. Obviously up to the expected price of return. Ergo high BTC prices waste more energy. Bitcoin is designed to be deflationary, so....

The deflationary bit (emission rate halving every 4 years) is also responsible for mining revenues dropping, meaning less money to be spent on electricity.

Transaction costs just go up.

Another anti-Bitcoin article focusing on energy consumption, how original.

HN has discussed this to death.

It’s still a problem. And getting worse.

Good

There's a certain type of person that applies this exact phrase to everything they ideologically oppose.

They're joyless and authoritarian.

Maybe society is tuning in to the problem more. My parents mentioned it.

If they are going to ban ICE vehicles, crypto mining is worth considering for the same fate, especially when energy efficient alternatives exist

The equivalent to banning bitcoin mining would be banning personal vehicles, or banning pickup trucks/SUVs. Banning ICE vehicles would be closer to banning the use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining.

It's about significant contributors to climate change. If BTC contributes disproportionately, then there will be a call to ban its mining. It's already happening (see China and St Lawrence County, where locals were unhappy that BTC miners drove up their electricity bills)

The original element of the article is the perspective it's offering regarding _how much_ energy bitcoin consumes.

You can dismiss it each time it comes up, but the reality of the situation isn't changing.

it may or may not... but it doesn't

Everyone needs a thneed.

Careful... referring to banned authors is dangerous. /s

Bitcoin does not consume energy. Miners do. Before presenting your views on Bitcoin, you should have some knowledge about how the network works, in particular how mining difficulty is regulated. Bitcoin would do just fine if its energy consumption dropped to 2008 levels.

Go on. Suppress the truth. :-D

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

Um, if it was at 2008 levels, wouldn't somebody do a 51% attack?

Then it wouldn't be at 2008 levels anymore. The problem is that miners have so much power today.

So when you said "Bitcoin would do just fine if its energy consumption dropped to 2008 levels.", the phrase "do just fine" means "rapidly grow its energy consumption back to present levels"?

Bitcoin is set up to incentivise exactly the behaviour we're seeing right now, it's built into the structure of bitcoin combined with human psychology.

So yes bitcoin absolutely consumes energy, it goes hand it hand with bitcoin being a popular speculation vehicle.

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