Bitcoins show the same aspects in those who've been charging you 1-4% for the pleasure of doing what bitcoin achieves
Still less than the carbon footprint of the people running our current fiat-based financial infrastructure.
It's the bankers who have jets, mansions and yachts, not the bitcoiners.
Edit to clarify:
Not that riches is somehow "wrong" - it's just that with major value comes major costs, which in practice mean major energy usage.
Why does the currency have anything to do with the wealth of the bankers.
Bitcoin is, as far as i know, a fiat currency too. The value depends on the believe (demand-supply) of the people. You accepting it as means of payment gives it value.
The reason bankers and others have yachts are interests, Investmens, tax avoidance schemes and so on. Nothing Bitcoin solves. The issue is a political one and how we do business and laws.
One is literally supporting the world and the other is used by a few million people as a speculative asset, money laundering scheme or to buy drugs online.
And on top of that you're wrong...
And please explain how my question is ignorant but the stance you're taking isn't?
Bitcoin isn’t using any energy, bitcoin is a marketplace where security of financial asset is represented in terms of energy expenditure.
You may not like how much energy is spent on maintaining security, but it’s not bitcoin that necessitates it, it’s the market.
Bitcoin opened a Pandora’s box by showing the world how it can be done and now if people say they want an attacker to take 1gigawatt to overtake the network then that’s what will be spent to protect against such attack. With or without bitcoin.
> If you made a Bitcoin miner that is two times more efficient - it wouldn’t lead to reduction in energy use, it would lead to increase in difficulty requirement
this is not considered problematic for something meant to replace current army-based currency. It points toward a direction where the economy becomes a zero-sum game.
Security of assets is understood to be best effort and preventive measures are well known to be unreliable (often replaced by inefficient punitive measures).
Bitcoin strives to build a trustless economy and thus its operation has far greater costs (fraud prevention with usual money generally costs proportionally with fraud attempts, while bitcoin is constantly tuned to 100% prevention).
In a more fair comparison we should compare the cost of all the world police + law enforcement + armies to the cost of mining energy + mining hardware and even given conservative estimates of corruption it isn't clear which side would be better under the total cost metric.
We could stop here and consider bitcoin an (almost) infallible trustless economy based on burning commodities compared to our usual fallible economy based on trust and force.
Personally I fell that this comparison suggest that bitcoin _should_ remain like it is today, relatively small with little influence on the world as a whole but readily available to who might need its peculiar service.
Bitcoin
You simply don’t understand what is that energy used for. It’s definitely not for processing transactions.
Your understanding of how it all works is simply flawed.
Energy is required to satisfy difficulty requirement, which has to do with chain security, not with transaction processing.
When people say "transactions cost X amount to process", they mean "in the current state of bitcoin", not in the past when there were very few transaction validators. The more transaction validators (typically called "miners") there are, the higher the cost of validating a transaction, due to Bitcoin's difficulty scaling.
I'm not sure why you separate out chain security from transaction validation and treat them as separate, when the chain security is there to protect against invalid transactions. It's sort of the entire point of it.
there are only so many miners (and so much energy spent) because security of bitcoin is what gives it value. so when people say "transactions cost X amount to process" they are saying something non-sensical, because it's not transactions that cost, it's security of those transactions.
it's important to separate, because there are many kinds of transactions in bitcoin ecosystem with various security characteristics that land anywhere from very low to on-chain settlement with multiple confirmations.
perpetrator in this case being people who want to secure their assets via energy expenditure. if bitcoin disappears - exactly the same amount of energy will be used because the cat is out of the bag - satoshi showed the world how asset security can be expressed as energy expenditure and for as long as there is a demand on the market for that kind of security, energy will be spent.
The statement is essentially "guns are bad, more guns means more death, less guns means less death" which is far from nonsensical independently with how much you agree with it or not.
Bitcoin transaction use energy. The proof is that if no more transaction happened no energy would be spent in bitcoins.
saying that it is the security requirements that waste energy is like saying that bullets are the real culprits not guns: they go hand in hand. Bitcoin without security is no bitcoin at all.
It is technically feasible to have bitcoin with no security just like you can have an army with rifles and no bullets.
In both cases obviously the root cause is people, we still haven't found out neither our lucertoloid overlords nor the simulators to blame, so it is lapalissian: "people are the cause of people's action" but it is not a particularly useful rebuttal to many arguments.
That is not proof that bitcoin uses energy, in fact bitcoin only does about 2k on chain settlements every 10 minutes, and it has been like that for a decade, but energy usage has grown multiple orders of magnitude over that time period. Obviously energy is used for something other than transactions.
many people claim that eventually Bitcoin will be able to be extremely power efficient (with the lightning network and whatnot), I have no idea about how these planned future improvements work. but today transferring Bitcoin (the main action that users of the network are supposed to perform) consumes a lot of energy.
you are clearly more knowledgeable about Bitcoin than me so if your position is that the internal operation called "transaction" nodes perform consumes a negligible amount of energy I have no qualms with it.
but I believe I have overwhelming external evidence that the operation called transaction by the laypeople users of the network to transfer ownership and grow the blockchain in any meaningful way under the dynamic consensus model uses lots of energy by design.
Edit: upon reflection I feel like what you are saying is that the nodes "consume" zero energy, but that I as the Bitcoin use am asking them to burn energy to produce a more secure block that will be better accepted on the blockchain. So the operations themselves consume nothing but rather use the value of energy as ingredient that ends up inside the block as stored value. I you are arguing this I can see how you could say that in good faith, I would still think that is a completely backward opinion
they already work. every on-chain bitcoin settlement can represent trillions of BTC exchanges. same as interbank settlements - done once a day, represent millions or billions of individual transactions. what does that do to your energy / tx metric?
> but today transferring Bitcoin (the main action that users of the network are supposed to perform) consumes a lot of energy.
transferring doesn't, securing it against an attack does.
> operations themselves consume nothing but rather use the value of energy as ingredient that ends up inside the block as stored value
that's exactly right, people that choose transacting on bitcoin chain do so knowing that they pay for certain level of security and you can see it from the correlation between bitcoin price and bitcoin hashrate. it's a system with many feedback loops that self-balances at a level of security that is demanded by the market.
you may think it's backward opinion but i appreciate that you recognize i'm not arguing in bad faith.
Not at all. The efficiency of the network is intentionally degraded such that the rate of Bitcoin transactions remains constant despite the increased energy use. You are assuming that the energy is being spent for some tangible benefit, and drawing conclusions from that assumption. I would say that the energy is being wasted, with the sole result being a receipt showing how much electricity has been thrown away.
I don’t assume, I know what it’s being used for - security against chain overrides/rollbacks.
Logically wrong, but let's follow the reasoning.
Let's assume Bitcoin transactions were indeed not secure (and thus, according to you, costing little energy).
- Would these unsafe-but-cheap transactions still be considered "Bitcoin transactions" in the way that we know them? - Would these unsafe-but-cheap transactions fulfill the requirements that Bitcoin has in place for itself? - Would an unsafe-but-cheap Bitcoin still be a great option in your eyes to replace the worldwide financial system?
If you agree with all these statements and their corollaries, I can follow you in saying "Bitcoin transactions do not cost energy".
You are creating a false dichotomy: security is an integral component of bitcoin transactions, and if security costs, transactions cost as well. You cannot just summon it away and pretend it is unrelated to the nature of Bitcoin transactions itself, when in fact it is one of its largest selling points.
that would be true if only on-chain settlements would count as transactions in BTC ecosystem. there are more ways to exchange BTC with security landing anywhere between very low and on-chain settlement.
thing is, that it's not even transactions that have security, it's blocks. energy is spent to make sure that it's expensive to override/rollback blocks. and it's true that blocks exist to assert ordering of on-chain settlements, but it's not true to claim that there is 1-1 correspondence between on-chain settlements and transactions.
each on-chain settlement can embed trillions of bitcoin transactions (in colloquial sense, exchanges of an asset). what does that do to your "energy per tx" metric?
Currently, the answer is a little over $6: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... That number has been over $50 on occasion.