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Comment by gregwebs | Hacker News Reader

Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be < 1% of energy usage. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

If Bitcoin moved to PoS it would be fundamentally different. It might work for other coins since they aren't as decentralized.

> Instead, proof-of-stake mainly seems less suitable for a decentralized and censorship-resistant global monetary asset, especially when considered along with the issues that I’ll describe in the second half of this article about stablecoins. Proof-of-stake is inherently equity-like rather than money-like, compared to proof-of-work

https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/

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> Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be < 1% of energy usage. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

That author doesn't seem to actually understand the scale of financial transactions in the world. Right now, there are about 300,000 Bitcoin transactions per day. The author defines Bitcoin being "wildly successful" as a 20x increase. Right now there are over 1 billion credit card transactions per day alone right now. If Bitcoin grew by 20x it still would be a drop in the bucket of global transactions but using up a relatively huge percentage of the world's energy compared to it's share of financial transactions. The author also justifies bitcoins energy usage by saying it's similar to Google's. But Google serves billions of people everyday and Bitcoin is used by a very small subset of people.

That is assuming it scales linearly, which is not necessarily true. It would only be true if the value of BTC went up such that more miners were incentivized to join the system. In BTC, there isn't a 1:1 direct correlation between energy spent and transactions processed.

The average US adult does 2.3 financial transactions per day.

The all time high number of bitcoin network transactions in a 24h period is a bit less than 500k.

The busiest day for Bitcoin usage worldwide is roughly equivalent to the population of Modesto, CA.

Blockchain occupies so much of the conversation and generates such incredible amounts of hype very few people truly understand just how insignificant it is in terms of not only the global financial system but also the internet. As you say billions of users and billions of transactions.

It's almost as though people forget these networks are completely public and open - adoption numbers for any chain are a blockchain explorer away.

> The all time high number of bitcoin network transactions in a 24h period is a bit less than 500k

…on chain aka “layer 1”

The L2s and high transaction rate chains don't look much better.

Don't forget about the Lightning Network

It's very difficult to determine transactions, addresses, etc on LN. I've searched far and wide I can't come up with accurate usage.

If you have suggestions for where to look I'd love to check it out!

She does write about this topic as well, it is worth reading the full article. Bitcoin can never be used directly for all the world's financial transactions since it is not capable of that throughput. But those transactions can use things like the Lightning Network that is built on top of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is useful as a final settlement layer, more like how banks use Fedwire today.

Energy usage is only loosely correlated with transaction volume, most of the energy goes towards securing the network.

1% of ALL energy generated just to operate a part of the world economy is a massive amount though...

Bitcoin uses less energy than Gold Mining and the Banking System https://twitter.com/topimp21/status/1542863870552936448

"Bitcoin uses 2-56 times less energy than the fiat system" https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-environmental-de...

It also processes several orders of magnitude less transactions, and does so much slower (and at a higher cost). Please stop posting misleading claims.

What I posted isn't mutually exclusive with the parent comment.

The lightning network on top of Bitcoin scales the number of transactions.

Please stop placing claims where I didn't make any.

Bitcoin also processes over a 10,000 times less transactions than the fiat system

Yeah it also uses less energy per year then the sun... what a comparison...

Gold mining? What does gold mining have to do with the financial system in 2022? It's funny how Bitcoin's "goldbug" roots crop up from time to time in these discussions.

food waste generates 60x more emissions than Bitcoin, yet nobody is freaking out about that, which makes me think people are just riding the ESG bandwagon

There's a lot of shit wrong with this world, we don't need to actively add to it, especially since we know how to do it better.

Food is literally finitely more important though

Even if the 0.1% figure is correct, I find it a lot of energy (and growing) for something found useful by so few. Reducing it to a percentage and saying it's ok because it's within a rounding error is like taking the entire population of New York City (8.38 million), killing them all, and saying it doesn't matter because it's "literally a rounding error of global population (0.1%)".

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