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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

Tesla contributes to misinformation.

Bitcoin transactions do not, in and of themselves, consume mining energy. A Bitcoin block is validated by miners who use the same amount of energy, regardless if there are 1 or 1000 transactions in the block. Thus if Tesla cares about "energy per transaction", this metric can go down by actually increasing the number of transactions, ie. by continuing to accept Bitcoin as payments.

It's mind-boggling the number of people who can't wrap their head around this. The easiest way to reduce "energy per transaction" is to increase the number of transactions, whether it's on-chain, off-chain, or L2.

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> same amount of energy, regardless if there are 1 or 1000 transactions in the block.

Last I heard, there was a physical limit to the number of transactions in a block (and no intent of increasing that number).

> this metric can go down by actually increasing the number of transactions, ie. continuing to accept Bitcoin as payments.

Are you implying that there are too few transactions to fill blocks right now, so Tesla accepting bitcoin will make blocks fuller?

You also seem to be fully ignoring that the main energy spend is in the mining, not the validation. More transactions (with fixed # of tx/10 min) = higher fees = more mining competition = more energy expenditure.

«Last I heard, there was a physical limit to the number of transactions in a block (and no intent of increasing that number).»

There is no limit when transactions happen in L2 (or off-chain)

«You also seem to be fully ignoring that the main energy spend is in the mining, not the validation»

Mining and validation are one and the same. A block simultaneously mines new coin and validates existing transactions.

> There is no limit when transactions happen in L2

Basically nobody uses L2 transactions.

The amount of actual money that goes through 2nd layer solutions, is very small compared to on chain transactions.

Right now, there are $65 mi available in liquidity on LN, which I wouldn't describe as negligible. I guess the main problem here is regulation: if I spent it, would I be taxed? Volatility is a problem but probably not a big one in half of the world the live with unstable money.

> 65 mi available in liquidity on LN

By 65 million in liquidity, I presume you mean the same ~1000 BTC that has always been on the network, for 2 years now. There has been a slight uptick, in the last 6 months, but the amount of BTC on the network has stayed basically the same.

I don't really consider "People put 1k bitcoin on the network, 2 years ago, and then never removed it" to be a good example of usage.

What matters is usage. How many people are actually using it in actual transactions. Not some nebulous misdirection to a concept of "liquidity".

> there are $65 mi available in liquidity on LN

According to a fairly reliable source [1] it's actually $320 million (on the network + sidechains).

[1] https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/139252761698122957...

In theory that's true if the bitcoin network wasn't so congested. Hasn't every block been saturated for a while now?

A reduction of the value of Bitcoin would be the only thing that would result in less mining, as miners aren't incentivized to burn as much energy when the rewards aren't as valuable.

This is a good point! It's worth noting there is a maximum number of transactions that can fit into one block

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem#Ba...

I'm not sure Tesla / Musk says that. The second tweet he links is "Energy usage trend over past few months is insane https://cbeci.org" estimating annual energy consumption of 148.7 TWh. Not per transaction or anything. And that is an awful lot, more than the electricity consumption of Sweden for example, and up 2x on a year ago.

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