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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I was shocked the other day on the Ethereum PoS announcement by the energy consumption per transaction metrics. It threw the whole crypto market into a new light for me. BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction! That's almost 5000 miles in a Tesla model 3. BTC is using about 2/3 of the power of every data center on the planet! Many, many people have been imprisoned or executed for creating less societal harm and externality than Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto may end up being the most destructive person to have ever lived.

People are free to gamble, but could they please not turn the surface of the Earth into a black body radiator while they're at it?

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Satoshi is a supervillain who created the most effective weapon of mass destruction the world has ever seen. Unstoppable and fueled by the inherent greed of mankind.

But Proofofstakeman shall defeat him!

ProofofSpace man helping HDD prices

I suspect Satoshi lacks the intent to be a villian here.

The creator of the Keurig, a device which produces amazing amounts of waste, talked about the unintended consequences of his invention and how ashamed he is for the damage his invention has done.

https://time.com/3731356/keurig-coffee-k-cup/

> unintended consequences

I'm sorry but you have to be very short sighted to call single dose coffee in non-recyclable capsules "unintended" waste.

The Nobel Prize is named after the guy who invented dynamite so I'm not judging a single inventor for not being able to conjure up the infinite number of ways his invention could be misused.

Nobel created the prize pool to atone for his deficit of imagination (or at least, to improve his posthumous image) upon reading scathing obituaries of himself mistakenly published when his brother died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel#Nobel_Prize

If Satoshi does something like this with his cold wallets, or Mr. Keurig does the same with his k-cup loot, then we'll think about it.

He meant for the machines to be used in situations where one-off servings are common, like small offices or for people who rarely have more than a cup.

Though making them unrecyclable is a bit of a question. Obviously it wasn't the intent but it seems a very obvious overlook. I believe (but may be wrong) that the Nespresso, a competitor, has compostable pods.

> the most destructive person to have ever lived

I'm not sure if we can that easily pin the responsibility on a single person and not on every single one who still continue to go for PoW while knowing how destructive it is.

There's a reasonable argument that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr was a contender for that title previously.

Inventor of both * Leaded Gasoline * Freon

Ouch!

And killed by one of his own inventions...

Perhaps it was for the best. Humanity might not have survived his next invention.

I would say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber blows him out of the water

>Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I, especially his actions during the Second Battle of Ypres.

but more importantly,

>Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process. Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018

Anything past 1.6B is overpopulation, and is driving the holocene extinction, global warming, pollution, etc... all of our big problems scale with population, and removing this natural limitation on our food supply has allowed us to blow the suspension out on all of them

What is a “natural limitation” of food? Should we get rid of mechanized farming, genetically enhanced plant varieties, modern logistics, and everything else that makes the modern world so spectacular and quality of life so high for billions of people as well?

The solutions for the future will be ones that improve technology to allow more to be produced more efficiently. We should look to the future, not “return to monke”.

I'm glad people are starting to realize this. I have been bashing bitcoin for this reason for ages only to be ridiculed.

Proof of Work eliminates the need for a centralized authority by identifying the planet all financial intermediaries live on and destroying it

PoS achieves the same

The consumption is a result of the greed to get the reward (fee + per block coins) and is not related to how the blockchain is operating.

You can see the carbon footprint from different blockchains on https://coincarboncap.com

But the only useful thing BTC does is transfer money/property from one party to another. Take that away and it's nothing at all. The block rewards are just there to operate the network. That the rewards were allowed to get so valuable that they consume the energy equivalent of Norway is a fatal flaw in the design, no?

> BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction!

A transaction meaning transferring money from one wallet to another?

i would say but i haven't checked his data.

Generally speaking, every 10 minutes! one block is mined which is incentivived with 6 btc or roughlyl the equivilent of over 150.000$.

In avg there are 1000-2000 transactions per block.

We have no idea how many transactions are “in a block”. There are multiple decentralized layers aggregating thousands of transactions down into a single bitcoin block transaction. This doesn’t even begin to touch the sheer magnitude of transactions that exchanges facilitate between their users without touching the blockchain.

Yes, but when I exchange bitcoin off chain, I'm giving up a lot of the benefits of using bitcoin in the first place.

Lighting in particular solves transaction speed by introducing additional potential security problems that need to be accounted for, particular closed channel type attacks.

From a default btc perspective, we are very aware of how many transactions are there.

Non of my ways of buying/using bitcoins is doing it indirectly.

And i do have to assume that this is nothing you can't estimate. After all either those systems are known and used, than you should be able to verify that this is a potential lightning transaction block which contains more or so.

Nope - the author is incorrectly using total energy / total transactions to get this number. Which, is understandable. However, if there were 2x the transactions, the total energy would stay very close to the same. So no.

There's a lot of energy to secure the network, but the actual energy usage per transaction itself is a small fraction of that misquoted number.

Unfortunately the network can’t handle more transactions.

Decentralised, fast, cheap: pick two.

Bitcoin picked centralized, slow, and expensive. Most mining is done in giant warehouses, and the whole point is that more computing power results in zero faster processing.

It remains to be seen if there are good ways to do distributed currency, but there are certainly less bad ways.

Sure, they could have made better choices, but the decentralisation is really a fundamental problem that can't be designed away.

If you want it decentralised it's going to be significantly slower and more expensive than centralised networks.

More computationally intensive, yes- but computationally intensive may mean "running on smartphones in the background for .1% reduction in battery time" or "a medium-sized country".

Increased cost is certainly not so straightforward. If you're sufficiently distributed, using already-existing hardware, with spare compute on extremely efficient devices, it could conceivably cost less. Even if a centralized server farm would be doing an order of magnitude less math, smaller processors use an order of magnitude less power to do that math.

Bitcoin proper has a central ledger- every miner needs to hear about your transaction to verify it. Lightning is a clumsy way of reducing how many actors need to be notified of your transaction. Better currencies include stuff like that as first class. It's all in the name of getting closer to a constant-number verification scheme that is closer to competitive with the O(1) of registering a transaction with a bank.

Centralized credit/debit cards exist so that a big wealthy firm can say yes, this person has enough money for this transaction and I will guarantee the transaction by paying for it even if they can't. What I would really like to see is distributed, automatic guarantees: when you buy something at a coffee shop, people running validators on wifi will pick it up and use their staked currency as insurance (hedged by the system) that they know accounts who trust this particular account, and the transaction is valid. More people staking and trusting this account means more trust by the larger system, which then only has to validate aggregated transactions. Anyone announcing themselves at a validator plugs in at a given level of aggregation, all of which have different staking/network/latency/storage requirements. Unlike off-chain transactions (eg lightning), the system is guaranteed at every level.

Any given transaction will still be validated dozens or hundreds of times. En bloc it will probably use tens or hundreds of times more energy than the server farms powering VISA. I'll be honest, I'm okay with that. I really like the idea of having a bank account that isn't tied to a company.

My country handles 5 billion electronic transactions a year (thanks to COVID cash practically died last year). Fast and cheap although to be fair not decentralised. To this day I have no idea what cryptocurrency was supposed to solved.

But it's worth clarifying that the number is correct — Bitcoin is currently using 1 Mwh per transaction.

Except there is no connection between megawatts and transactions.

Because blocksize is fixed and blocks are consistently full, it's possible to estimate the next block's energy usage per transaction. All blocks are currently full as miners have an incentive to collect all transactions available, ordered by their attached transaction fee.

If you mean that the same amount of power would be used whether the blocks are full or empty, you are technically correct but in practice it's not relevant until blocks are consistently not full.

Does BTC makes sense if there would be no transactions?

If transactions are critical for everyone, wouldn't that mean that keeping bitcoin mining alive is a fundamental part of transactions?

We could argue that fiat keeps databases running (if we ignore physical money) and bitcoin is keeping blocks mining active.

I don't think it is wrong to say megatwatts per transactions. We could ignore this completly and say 'the baseload of just keeping btc running is x megawatts per hour' and that would just ring the same bells.

I'm pondering if we could also say something like "btc itself as a cryptosystem motivates actors to consume megawatts per hour due to the interest in btc and the current fiat<>btc exchange value"?

That is not correct.

Two glaring gaps in that concept...

First, energy use is not tied to transactions. An empty block uses the same amount as a full block.

And second, the transaction count we’re discussing is the count of settled base layer transactions. This doesn’t include the majority of transactions of value: those that occur off chain or through second layer transactions. An infinite amount of off chain and L2 transactions only need a single on chain transaction to settle.

Energy per transaction is not a very useful metric since each validated block helps secure previous blocks as well.

Put another way - each validated block helps secure every single transaction that came before it.

I'm not going to argue that the energy consumption is worth it (I don't think it's sustainable myself). I'm only pointing out that energy per transaction is a bad metric if you want to have an honest debate. It's much more complicated than that.

You are correct, but for the wrong reason. Bitcoin's energy consumption[1] does not track with the number of transactions[2]; energy consumption has significantly increased while the number of transactions has not. What the energy consumption does track is the price[3]: mining creates coins, so higher price means more mining. The current ~4% inflation rate will not significantly decrease incentives for decades.

In a sane world, the energy use and price would be tied to the actual usefulness of the currency. They are not. In roughly 100 years the energy use will be set by transaction fees and the number of transactions, but currently it's only proportional to speculative will.

When transaction fees incentivize mining, the incentive to mine will certainly be much lower. Arguably more secure, too- the block reward creates a separate incentive for large players to dominate mining, which lowers the diversity of miners. It's not at all clear that the absolute energy consumption will be lower than it currently is.

[1]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [2]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_transactions_per_day [3]: https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin

Isn't the network already saturated with transactions though? To the point where it was needed to implement something like Lightning Network to compensate for that?

It was never needed. What was needed was to increase the max block size.

Instead, new people took it over and kept the throughput to the rate of a 56k modem. Now for the cost of a single transaction you can pay for enough hard drive space to hold the entire chain and enough bandwidth for a billion transactions.

This is like building a sidewalk instead of a freeway then saying you need to build a network of gondolas over it that just plunks groups of people down at different places on the sidewalk to move people.

Ah, yes, I'm very aware of that fact, my use of "needed" here was in the sense it was needed after all the ones making money from transaction fees took over and decided to not increase the block size.

But there can't really be 2x the transactions (or, at the very least there cannot be 100x the transactions). Transactions/block varies but there is a fundamental limit on how many bits can fit into a block.

Transactions are the thing that matters. Simply securing the network achieves nothing if people cannot move money. That's why people measure the network with transactions/joule.

Total energy / total transactions is a completely appropriate metric to use. If you could meaninufylly scale the number of bitcoin transactions and could amortize the high fixed costs of running the blockchain I'd agree with you but as it stands right now, you can't.

Yes, I'm aware there's off chain solutions such as lighting but it's unclear to me whether those solutions are viable long term.

> Satoshi Nakamoto may end up being the most destructive person to have ever lived.

I was with you up until this part...this kind of over-dramatization might turn others away. I can think of several genocidal dictators worse than Satoshi Nakamoto. If anything Satoshi is an Alfred Nobel type figure, who invented dynamite. We don't attribute all deaths from explosions to Alfred Nobel, and Satoshi is not guilty of what miners and speculators do.

When Satoshi returns she saves the day.

Just a tangent. Thomas Midgley invented both CFCs and leaded gasoline.

The power per tx metric is a dumb metric. Power usage doesnt increase or decrease per tx

That doesn't mean it's a dumb metric. Any efficiency metric must measure cost per unit of output and in a crypto-currency that's power per transaction.

why not power per dollar transferred? transactions per 10 minute period is relatively constant over time. The thing that increases the energy usage is the price of bitcoin.

It's a dumb metric.

> The thing that increases the energy usage is the price of bitcoin.

This simply tells us that bitcoin has a dumb cost structure. Apparently its inventors didn't think about that either. But that's not our problem. Our problem is measuring efficiency, and for that we need a measure of efficiency. And a measure of efficiency needs to be chosen in terms of how good it is at measuring efficiency, not in terms of how good it is at hiding that a certain payment system has a dumb cost structure.

Would you measure a car's efficiency based on how much wiper fluid it uses per mile? The two measures aren't meaningfully linked, so it makes little sense to compute a correlation.

No, because wiper fluid contributes nothing to the outcome, which is the car moving from point a to b. The car will move from point a to point b whether it has wiper fluid or not. But it will not move without fuel.

Ok, so what about how many rotations the radiator fan does per mile?

The car will overheat and won't reach point B if the fan isn't running, so does it make sense to compare the efficiency of different cars based on how many rpm's their radiator fans do?

No, because the general idea behind efficiency has to do with the costs that are incurred to achieve a particular outcome. For example, a method is said to be more efficient than another if it achieves the same outcome at a lower cost. The outcome in the case of cars is movement because that's the purpose they're built for, so a measure of car efficiency has to reflect how costly is to move the car some unit of distance. The RPMs the radiators fans do per mile don't tell us anything about how costly it is to move the car, therefore, no, it's clearly not a good efficiency measure.

It's reasonable to evaluate the usefulness of a system by weighing the resources it consumes against the valuable output it produces. In Bitcoin's case the valuable output is around 10 financial transactions per second, and the resource it consumes is enough energy to power the Netherlands.

The output also includes security/decentralization.

I can handle a lot of transactions on my personal laptop, but how safe would they be?

Wait until you learn how much energy the sun puts out

Energy used for PoW per transaction is a dumb metric.

Satoshi actually made the most efficient decentralized money that can ever exist and prevented more externalities in the world than potentially any human ever will.

> Energy used for PoW per transaction is a dumb metric.

Cars monitor energy use through MPG. Datacenters monitor it as well. Why should crypto currencies get a pass?

> Satoshi actually made the most efficient decentralized money that can ever exist and prevented more externalities in the world than potentially any human ever will.

[CITATION NEEDED]

> Cars monitor energy use through MPG. Datacenters monitor it as well. Why should crypto currencies get a pass?

cars spend energy to move. datacenters spend energy to compute things. bitcoin mining doesn't spend energy to process achieve some TPS, it spends energy to achieve certain level of security, so it's security per energy spent that matters, not energy per transaction.

if transactions or number of them are not an input to a bitcoin miner -- if miner will spand the same energy whether it's for 1 or 1 trillion transactions -- then energy per transaction metric is zero signal.

> [CITATION NEEDED]

no, actually, it's an opinion. current financial system and fiat money cause immense externalities: war, corruption, hunger, crime, etc. bitcoin is an incarnation of money where security is expressed in form of energy spent - you no longer need to involve politics or any other human activities to achieve security and so a large incentive for those simply disappears. bitcoin doesn't solve those externalities, but that specific aspect of money is simply no longer contributing.

> if miner will spand the same energy whether it's for 1 or 1 trillion transactions -- then energy per transaction metric is zero signal.

So? A running car consumes gas even when it's idle. My parents used to measure MPG at every tank refill, which was a combination of miles, idle, braking, etc.

We can certainly take an average of transactions to get a reasonable number for watts/transaction.

> no, actually, it's an opinion.

... which was stated as fact.

> A running car consumes gas even when it's idle.

Bad extrapolation of analogy, but still - how convenient that you decided to focus on the lower bound. How about the high bound? Can a car go trillions of miles per gallon? Because Bitcoin block can contain trillions of transactions every 10 minutes.

> We can certainly take an average of transactions to get a reasonable number for watts/transaction.

You can, it’s just not useful.

> You can, it’s just not useful.

Yes, yes it is. Stating an opinion as if it's fact, again?

Awesome, now do the financial industry!

Maybe take a longer view.

Right, the surface of the Earth will eventually become a black body radiator _anyway_, so why should it bother anyone if we want to have a little fun first.

There is a theory that life exists, because it is effective at spreading out energy as heat more efficently[0]. In such case, bitcoin (or having fun) can be seen as a good purpose for life. Most of activities seen by people as "fun" use up energy and spread it as heat.

[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

Super interesting thanks for sharing.

This is excellent. We should found a religion based on it. CHURCH OF THE ENTROPY MOST HIGH.

No my point is that eventually the energy burn per transaction in crypto will likely be near zero.

Downvoting is fine but I'd take a gentleman's bet that in 10 years either crypto has <$1bln market cap or price per transaction is cheaper than credit card systems when incorporating operational costs.

Given the entire argument seems lost on readers given the downvotes it's simple: proof of stake and increased use of crypto both drive down energy cost per transaction. The more people use crypto, the cheaper energy use per transaction assuming currency prices stay the same. (This is lost on most commentators, but it's reasonable to expect price stability in the post-speculation phase of crypto adoption.) And proof of stake and side chains stand to drive those costs down by several orders of magnitude.

Then you'll need to moralize air conditioning and entertainment and everything else too. These use cases aren't the problem, dirty energy is the problem. Fix the source of energy. We need to do that anyway.

Bitcoin and the Nakamoto Consensus is a breakthrough that provides a secure, global, uncensorable, decentralized store of value. With defined rules that can't be changed on the whims of a central actor. The energy is used to prevent bad actors from being able to rewrite the blockchain. Per transaction is a misleading metric (plus there are layer 2 solutions). You have to consider the energy used by militaries and banks to secure fiat.

When your government fails, as they have in many countries and eventually do in the long span of history, having such a store of value will be, well... invaluable.

Your store of value just dropped 40%.

Man that koolaid must be tasty

Military and banks do more than what PoW blockchain does.

I don't buy in the energy argument myself, but trying to justify the way you do sounds a little too kool-aid-y.

> You have to consider the energy used by militaries and banks to secure fiat.

If, ever, it so happens that cryptocurrencies become anything more than a joke from the point of view of the global economy, militaries and banks will be required to secure their operations too.

> Bitcoin and the Nakamoto Consensus is a breakthrough that provides a secure, global, uncensorable, decentralized store of value.

Most people don't seem to realize that a store of value is stable.

Today ( just as in 2017 till the pandemic) has proven that BTC/crypto is not stable.

It has more similarities with a MLM scheme ( not really backed by anything ( eg. Stable coins - tether), unregulated, limited withdrawals of your money on the exchange).

I don't believe anyone actually thinks BTC is safer while it's influenced by memes instead of actual market conditions. Well, except if the reason is greed and personal liability ofc.

Ps. The only reason to have some crypto coins is for diversifying your portfolio. If you consider the risks carefully, as with everything else.

It's a new technology. Volatility is to be expected. Zooming out, any purchase of Bitcoin prior to a few months ago is still in the green. Even if you bought the peak in 2017.

If you zoom out on USD, it's not exactly stable either. It has greatly decreased in value due to inflation over the years. Or worse, if you zoom out on bolivars and other currencies. Anyone in country with hyperinflation, or at risk of it, very much appreciates a permissionless global store of value.

Inflation is a technique created for stable countries with stable markets. Fiat is based on market conditions, not on hypes and memes like BTC. BTC isn't really a hedge against inflation either, since the lack of underlying value.

Hyperinflation means that that market is in trouble, you can already hedge with USD/gold in most cases, which is actually backed by something. Losing a couple of % over years is a tested strategy and a requirement for healthy economies. Most people that talk about BTC and hyperinflation don't understand basic economy and are just looking for an excuse for BTC to rise because of... Greed.

Additionally, BTC was new in 2009 and I cashed out 2017 and never looked back. It's not new anymore and hasn't been for a long time, a lot of accountants even got courses about the blockchain in Belgium 5 years ago.

Everything of 2016-2017 repeats. Then it was adopted by steam, woocommerce, square, Amazon, ... and they all removed it again or never finalized the integration, because of not enough usage. That's 5 years ago and everyone was talking about it and it was in every possible media in every country. That is: Newspaper, tv, going out, Reddit, here, ads, ... I even had a site with some popular articles on it ( how to recover your bitcoin password was by far the most popular one fyi)

Today it's just Tesla and they also removed payment.

Ps. Countries going to do digital currencies are not going to base it on a existing one. So that's unrelated to the topic of currently tradeable crypto.

Ps2. A bit of regret not thinking about it in March last year. But that's just the greed talking.

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