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graeme

If Statistia is to be believed, Facebook consumes 22x less energy than Bitcoin. 5 vs 110 Terawatt hours.

And Bitcoin is hardly used for any transactions, and its energy usage will increase linearly with BTC price.

(If someone has a direct source that would be great. Statista is not good)

Update: seems the FB figure is correct, for 2019: https://sustainability.fb.com/report-pages/renewable-energy/

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I'm aghast that Facebook burns that much power to run what is basically a giant BBS. I guess mining all of our personal data must take up an outrageous number of computer cycles.

However, in Facebook's defense it's per-user per-transaction energy costs are going to be much lower than Bitcoin.

> I'm aghast that Facebook burns that much power to run what is basically a giant BBS. I guess mining all of our personal data must take up an outrageous number of computer cycles.

Did Ye Olde BBS support 1:millions broadcasting, and real-time viewing of high-definition video? Uploading and viewing thousands of high-quality photos?

Calling Facebook 'basically a giant BBS' is a lot like saying 'Oh, I could build Twitter in a weekend'.

It depends on what is counted there. It might be the total operations of the company. Offices, AC for offices and whatnot.

Especially when talking about CO2 emissions absolutely everything is included, including plane trips and whatnot.

Seems a bit disingenuous to compare that to just the kWh consumed by the ASICs that mine Bitcoin.

It definitely is. Either that, or it's incredibly short-sighted.

That comparison ignores the actual value add of Facebook and the fact that people are using it. Most BTC trades happen off blockchain and are powered by the servers of the market places and nobody really knows how much energy they use.

If Facebook has a value add, then so do columbian drug lords

That's true. But in a way it just emphasizes how much energy Bitcoin wastes, so it's fine-ish.

FB is a top video streaming platform. Also they run WhatsApp, which I think is the largest global telephony system.

Why does the energy moves with the price? Is it because of increased number of transactions?

No, it's because competition between miners necessarily drives the hash rate and thus energy usage to scale up with the value of mining rewards and transaction fees.

But if there aren't more transaction (as number of transactions), what happens when the hash rate increases? They hash incomplete blocks of transactions? Or does the same block gets confirmed by a greater number of miners?

The second answer, although there is only one "winner" of each block's competition, so it's only one miner/mining pool which ends up confirming a transaction. It's controlled by a hardness parameter that's readjusted automatically in a regular fashion.

Miners tend to increase their hashrate because that's how they compete for block rewards. However, the electrical energy a miner spends on finding blocks should not be more than the value of the block rewards, otherwise they would operate at a loss. This provides a ceiling for the energy expenditure.

Therefore, if the price of Bitcoin doubles, miners can afford to burn twice as much electricity. (Roughly. This is a simplification of course.)

Why is proof of waste needed at all? What do you achieve by proving that you have wasted a certain amount of electricity?

If one didn't need to prove they'd done something difficult, then cryptocurrency didn't be a workable idea.

Why do they have to prove that they'd done something difficult? That's what I'm trying to understand.

Because the chain of transactions with the most accumulated waste is chosen as the "correct" chain. In order to double-spend, you have to cause a different chain to be the "correct" chain, so you'll have to waste even more energy than has been wasted by everybody else, over whatever span of time you're trying to roll back. Thus the more waste, the more secure the chain.

Proof of stake is a newer way of coming to consensus on one correct chain. It took people a while to figure out how to do it securely and efficiently.

Okay, so the chain of transactions that is regarded as correct is the one that has been more expensive to create. Instead of wasting energy, the same result could be achieved by wasting other stuff, such as bitcoins themselves, for instance?

Sure. In fact, that's almost how Ethereum's proof-of-stake works, except it has a protocol that comes to consensus without wasting anything as long as people follow the rules, and only destroys stake when someone provably breaks the rules.

If this is true, PoW is simply a stupid version of PoS and should be abandoned immediately.

But maybe Bitcoin is of 1000x(+) more value for humanity in the long run?

Whatever humanity is left after the climate crisis bitcoin is significantly contributing to.

Bitcoin uses far less energy than the gold or banking industry, uses more and more renewable energy every day and has some significant game theory going on regarding renewable usage and research.

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