Bitcoin Uses Far Less Energy Than Banking System and Gold Industry | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Uses Far Less Energy Than Banking System and Gold Industry

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16 pointsdisgrunt9 comments

Even if we accept their estimates -- and of course, given that this coming from a mining company, we wouldn't have the slightest reason not to! --

It is straight up dishonest to attempt to draw a comparison based solely on total network footprint. As the authors of the "whitepaper" are fully aware, what everyone is concerned with is the alarmingly high BTC footprint per transaction. In addition to who exactly benefits from all this insane footprint generation, at the end of the day.

Why is it? It is dishonest to compare per tx anything, also. There is a certain amount of energy used per block, so that blocks are emitted every 10 mins in a way that cannot be faked (proof of work). This trustless time stamp system allows us to arrange transactions so that chronology is respected without a trusted third party. This is technological and economic break through. It is more valuable than you realize. The energy that goes in protects ALL blocks that came before it, and thus all transactions. The security of history of transactions is increasing over time with more energy! Proof of work is good, honest and very difficult to fake. It requires no trust when only trusted models worked before — priceless

also, botcoin has yet to facilitate anything of social value.

But how many billions of transactions are these networks handling? BTC is using vastly more power per transaction. What would be the power usage of BTC if it were scaled up to support an actual useful number of transactions?

Can the banking system really handle more than 5 transactions per second? There so much bureaucracy involved...

I am getting tired of seeing this point being raised time and time again. But I am going to assume that you are just uninformed and try it one more time. There is no meaningful 'cost per transaction' in Bitcoin. There could be 0 transactions per block as well as could be > 100 millions transactions per block (assuming people are using L2 solutions). The cost is used to sustain the whole network.

There could be but arent

That's like saying "There is no meaningful 'miles per tank of gas' for cars. You could spend the whole tank idling or you could go across the Pacific on a single tank (assuming you're being transported on a ferry)."

cough Bitcoin Cash cough

Increasing the blocksize was always Satoshi's plan:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

This means that when the coinbase rewards run out, the fees pay for the mining. Small fees, keeping the network useful, for billions of transactions (bandwidth and storage costs decrease according to Moore's law). With this final state, individual on-chain transactions would not take much energy at all.

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