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Comment by 627467 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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