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Comment by Rarebox | Hacker News Reader

To verify a single transaction, the network uses 1150kWh of energy which produces 550kg of CO2 [1].

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

This is wrong, the number of transactions has (almost) nothing to do with the energy usage. I wrote almost in brackets because the transaction fees contribute slightly to the total compensation of the miners. So it is mostly the block reward that determines the energy usage (for now)

I can veryfy all Bitcoin transactions ever happened on the network on my laptop in a few days, I'm sure it's less than that, my Apple M1 laptop is quite energy efficient.

Parent said network not just a single machine.

That includes the cost of mining without which your computer would not be able to verify the transaction.

The mining is not needed at all for verifying transactions, it is used to secure the network and to create new block of transactions.

This is just false.

New blocks are created with transactions in them and can’t be verified if they haven’t been mined, because verification works by checking the hash that the miner found.

Transactions that are not yet part of a mined block cannot be verified.

What you wrote is all correct. Just don’t confuse creating the transaction and adding to the network (which is relatively expensive) with verifying (which is cheap, an SHA-256 hash can be computed in 2 days by a human with pen and paper, and for verifying the transaction you need an exponentiation on an elliptic curve, which is still efficient, though slower).

Sure, but a transaction cannot be verified without first being part of a mined block.

So paying the cost of mining is a prerequisite for verification.

You can definitely separate out the costs, but it’s misleading to imply that mining isn’t a requirement and that you also have to pay that cost first.

And a statement like this…

> The mining is not needed at all for verifying transactions, it is used to secure the network and to create new block of transactions.

…isn’t correct - mining is needed for verification. You cannot have verification of new transactions without mining.

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