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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

> According to the University of Cambridge, about 118.75 tWh (terrawatt hours).

I stopped reading as soon as they quoted that silly inaccurate UoC website that gets quoted over and over again.

Why? Because they even admit, in their own methodology (https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map/methodology), that it is an extrapolation from less than 50% of the total hash. Even worse, is the pools they extrapolate from have been Chinese based. Although, that's changed over time, which invalidates their numbers even more.

Even still, there is no way to know how that power is generated, how much it offsets other power generation, etc... there are just too many variables to simply quote UoC.

At the end of the day, read this: https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

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> I stopped reading as soon as they quoted that silly inaccurate UoC website that gets quoted over and over again.

You stopped reading because you don't like what they had to say. Even mining groups who are incentivized to provide the rosiest picture are within the ballpark.

Current hash rate is 245.32M TH/s. An AntMiner S19 Pro consumes 29.7 J/TH, so assuming they're all S19s (a big if) we'd be consuming 7226MJ/s or 2007.5kWh/s. That's 64TWh/yr.

So your absolute best case is 1/2 of the Cambridge number. Which is exactly what they list as the "minimum" number.

As soon as we start factoring in things inefficiency and losses along the way - and the fact not everyone has an S19 Pro - we start to get closer and closer to that flagship number.

But let's make no mistake - even the minimum number is a staggering, mind-boggling disaster of unprecedented scale.

> At the end of the day, read this: https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

Lyn is a zealot and a shill, and her arguments on basically any topic are trivially wrong. I would strongly recommend against trusting anything on that blog and instead look for different sources.

> You stopped reading because you don't like what they had to say.

Yes, I literally said that. Glad we are in agreement.

> Lyn is a zealot and a shill, and her arguments on basically any topic are trivially wrong.

Yes, trust the guy on HN who is consistently negative about crypto about who to listen to. Sorry, but when people are so adamantly negative about something, I tend to run towards it because it often has a lot of interesting value. You have chosen the 'Chief Censor 451' role in life.

> Yes, trust the guy on HN who is consistently negative about crypto about who to listen to. Sorry, but when people are so adamantly negative about something, I tend to run towards it because it often has a lot of interesting value. You have chosen the 'Chief Censor 451' role in life.

I didn't tell you who to read, I suggested you dug around and found someone else who isn't a zealot and a shill. There's good authors out there, this isn't one. I follow a number of pro-crypto authors too, ones who I disagree with but respect. They're out there.

Lyn is in my opinion only slightly above Pomp (who I know has retired to spend more time with his fiat) and Saylor (who was promoted to customer).

Since you haven't provided any "good authors" and only continue with your anti-crypto tirade, then let me guess... Schneier, Diehl and White.

I didn't provide any because I knew you had no interest. But back on topic, what are your thoughts about wasting a minimum of 64TWh/yr?

I don't see it as a waste. I don't feel that technology, in any form, is a waste. The world is a better place with technology and I don't feel that we have to be stuck buying things with gold nuggets. I am more than happy trying to "reinvent finance"... because I see and have personally experienced a lot of issues with existing financial systems.

Early generations of tech might not be the best, but you have to start somewhere and iterate to a better future.

Given that energy use of Bitcoin is literally written into the protocol to decrease over a long period of time, I don't see the big deal of expending energy to get there. Ideally it produces methods of better power distribution, encourages the use of green energy, etc...

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32894814

What about technology that just sets oil fields on fire for no particular purpose? Seems pretty wasteful to me. Technology is never platonic. Concepts aren't a waste but their implementation certainly can be.

> Early generations of tech might not be the best, but you have to start somewhere and iterate to a better future.

Bitcoin is the most obstinate to change on purely ideological grounds. It hasn't materially changed in almost a decade except to move the deck chairs around. This is the time at which one would expect the most change and yet Bitcoin changes the least out of all its peers. This is an intentional decision by both the community and the core team.

Adding green energy simply to waste guessing random numbers instead of decarbonizing the grid just adds to the e-waste Bitcoin is responsible for. Power distribution is a solved problem (only 5% of power is wasted in distribution in the US) - the issue is just NIMBYs refusing to put transmission infrastructure down. Bitcoin does not fix this.

> What about technology that just sets oil fields on fire for no particular purpose?

Oh come on, don't be absurd. Bitcoin is not setting oil fields on fire any more than the power usage of the whole internet has. How about games? That's pretty pointless expenditure of electricity... but you aren't screaming at the rooftops over that. This is seriously a case of old man yells at cloud meme.

> Bitcoin is the most obstinate to change on purely ideological grounds.

That's fine. ETH exists. It could mean that ETH wins in the end. Who knows.

> Adding green energy simply to waste guessing random numbers instead of decarbonizing the grid just adds to the e-waste Bitcoin is responsible for.

Blah blah blah... just as absurd as the above statement. Try a different trope, please.

It’s not a trope it’s facts you dislike and refuse to engage with. You are a miner, you are part of the problem and of course you are looking for anything you can to justify what you do without having to ask if you're the baddies. Such a disclosure would have been helpful in advance and would have saved me some time.

I'm sorry you're trying to defend the indefensible: kilotons of e-waste per year and the energy consumption of a small country to achieve the work of a Raspberry Pi.

97% of all bitcoin mining ASICs will never mine a single block. Ever. Just straight from factory to landfill with a long sojourn warming up the planet.

Everything beyond those facts are mental gymanastics.

I don't mine bitcoin.

Can you elaborate on Lyn Alden? I don’t know enough to comment on her expertise, but I do know that dismissing someone as being trivially wrong on basically any topic is often a sign of not understanding the person’s arguments.

I'd be really surprised if you got a response. Surprise me articbull!

What's to say? Lyn is a zealot and will go to any lengths to justify her positions. She's clearly intelligent and completely uninterested in objectivity. She's like if Saylor wasn't completely vacant and instead of posting "MORTGAGE YOUR HOUSE TO BUY BITCOIN" at the top of the market you get 15 page diatribes about why Bitcoin energy usage doesn't matter because "the Fed" and "censorship" and "hard to confiscate" etc etc. None of which has a single thing to do with energy usage. It’s just pages of gish gallop.

If you want to listen to someone interesting who isn't just performing mental cartwheels to defend the indefensible, listen to Boaz Sobrado, Mario Gibney from Ledn, Lily Francus, Josh Cincinnati, etc.

Lyn is just rewarmed long-form talking points from r/Bitcoin presented uncritically. There’s interesting people in the space but Lyn is more of a millennial William DeVane shilling gold on Fox at 2am with a substack.

Before he edited and went on a rant, he just said this:

"What's to say? Lyn is a zealot and will go to any lengths to justify her positions. She's clearly intelligent and completely uninterested in objectivity. She's like if Saylor were intelligent."

I don't think "he hit enter by accident" is quite the gotcha you seem to think it is.

You found my criticisms insufficient, so I gave you a long-form version along with a list of folks who actually do have something interesting to say in the space. Then it was too verbose.

I suppose there’s no pleasing some folks huh.

Now that we've had a few threads together, I have a whole email box full of you hitting enter "by accident."

Oooh got me again.

I think it might actually be somewhat accurate. There are 6.25*6*24*365 new bitcoins created every year and given to miners. That's over $6B at current prices. So it sort of makes sense miners would spend $6B/year to acquire those $6B of new bitcoins. And that isn't factoring in transaction fees that miners also get, nor that this article was written in June when prices were a lot higher, meaning it would have been much more than $6B/year if I did those calculations then.

And that's the thing -- all the fancy gymnastics the article uses to derive the cost of running the network based on power utilization and power costs is irrelevant.

The Bitcoin network pays 238,500 BTC annually for its maintenance, plus fees. This is the amount that will be paid regardless of network difficulty, price of bitcoin, mining capacity, cost of electricity, capital cost of mining equipment, etc.

> Even still, there is no way to know

That seems unconvincing. In fact how much energy is required per hash is something that's really quite easy to measure accurately. At any given time there are no more than a few dozen hardware platforms in use (they get priced out rapidly, everyone is running the newest stuff in the BTC world). Just plug them in and measure them.

All that's left from there is to come up with second order corrections about stuff like grid efficiency. But we absolutely know to quite high precision how many joules were spent to produce the coins we observe to have been created.

And the only way to hypothesize something different is if there's a ASIC or something that can mine much better than existing equipment (in which case the group that had it would suddenly shoot up in the blocks mined lists) or there's a weakness in the cryptographic protocol somewhere that we don't know about.

I must note that this in fact happened in the past (AsicBoost). Currently, I don't think there is AsicBoost-like secret information, but you can't be sure.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00575

Let’s assume you have AsicBoost 2.0 - what would be the most strategic way to deploy it? I assume it’d look like a hashpower increase to the rest of the world, which may or may not go noticed; but perhaps have them run “normal” and then fling it wide open just before? after? a havening?

I’d guess the optimal strategy is “get that thing turned on as fast as possible and keep as much of the cluster running 24/7 as you possibly can before you get leapfrogged.”

> everyone is running the newest stuff in the BTC world

That's not true. The profitability of a miner is not measured with their hardware generation but with the energy cost needed to operate them. If you have access to very cheap energy, they can still be very profitable. There is a reason the market price of old mining rigs is not 0.

> There is a reason the market price of old mining rigs is not 0.

Electrical costs vary by a factor of two or three around the world. Maybe five at the extreme outliers. Modern mining hardware is tens of thousands of times more efficient than the stuff used less than a decade ago. Also due to growth in the market, the rate of production has been increasing rapidly so the total number of old rigs is negligible anyway.[1]

To rather accurate first approximation, all BTC mining is done with hardware less than two years old or so.

[1] Also also, the recent crash has had the effect of depressing mining revenue and accelerating the retirement of the old junk.

Others have mentioned it, but I'll say it too:

what you know is an estimate of total network hashrate. that's it.

but! total network hashrate moves around all the time, so it is really just an estimate. it has gotten better over time, but these machines don't operate perfectly 24/7 and older hardware is still in use. power outages happen too. stuff is just coming on and offline all the time.

you don't know efficiency (watts to hash) of the equipment on a global scale. you can extrapolate, but it is impossible to know for sure.

there are other losses, like stale and invalid shares. also impossible to know. you don't know how much is 'wasted' either... every single power supply on the planet is a snowflake. this would actually increase power usage estimates since it is effectively truly wasted energy.

disclaimer: I've PoW mined since 2014. Even I, with many many megawatts of power, have a hard time calculating exactly how much power we use and that's having access to the raw data!

If you have access to the raw data, then you should be able to quite easily provide a good estimate for what the article is trying to assess--what's the actual operational cost of bitcoin mining. Estimating the energy consumption is only a vehicle to doing this because those of us who don't have any raw data to do this.

What you should be able to do is:

a) Open up your electricity bill and look at the total energy consumption for a given period. Admittedly, I'm not familiar with how electricity is invoiced, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't something that was at least coarsely indicating total energy consumption for a billing period. (Or you can skip several middlemen steps and just take the total cost of the electric bill.)

b) Tot up all the bitcoin mining rewards you received in the same time period.

c) Count how many bitcoin blocks were mined in the same time period.

d) Divide b by c, now you know what fraction you are of the total bitcoin mining network.

e) Divide a by d, now you have an estimate of total worldwide energy consumption of bitcoin.

The only reason I can see that might make this hard is if you mine more than just bitcoin, in which case, replace "bitcoin" in the above steps with "sum over all of the cryptocurrencies you mine"--which is closer to what people want to know anyways. Even then, you can use crude weighting metrics to estimate what the consumption of just bitcoin is, which would at least let you know if the estimate is in the right ballpark or not. The exact number doesn't matter; it instead matters if the real number is closer to 14 TWh/yr, 140 TWh/yr or 1400 TWh/yr.

I will repeat it again:

you don't know efficiency (watts to hash) of the equipment on a global scale

In other words, one person might use 1watt to produce 1hash. Someone else might use 2watts -> 1hash.

That would be literally half as efficient and muck up any quantifiable numbers on a global scale.

Never mind all of the other things I mentioned above.

The reason why this is always such a highly debated topic is literally because it is something impossible to quantify.

But we really don't care about that factor of 2. It literally doesn't matter, whether Bitcoin wastes half a Luxemburg or a full Luxembourg.

And, iirc, then they estimated total consumption from well-funded and very active mining pools. I.e. exactly the operators that you would expect to run the most efficient mining equipment. Meaning all you do is being overly optimistic, as in "we claim mining uses less energy than it actually does"

Again, though, that's just not true. The hardware is well-understood and easily measured. Sure, there is slop in the measurement (how much of the fleet is using platform A vs. platform B). But those are comparatively small numbers. Sure, like you say, we might have a factor of two lurking in there (seems high, but I'll grant it).

But a factor of two wouldn't change any of the analysis! If the article said "60 TWh" instead, would that be any less horrifying? No, it wouldn't.

We don't know what hardware is on the network and we don't know how all of the power is generated. If it is 60TWh of clean energy that isn't being used for anything else, who cares?

The statistic you're poo-pooing puts error bars that are a factor of 2× in either direction. Tolerating that degree of error bar isn't all that difficult, and if you bothered to continue to read the article, you'd discover that the author themself discusses possible error bars, and deflates the estimated operational cost of bitcoin miners by half anyways.

And, FWIW, the kind of methodology that was used to produce the Bitcoin energy consumption is the same kind of methodology that is used to produce statistics like GDP, inflation, employment--basically every macroeconomic indicator. If you're going to complain that you can't quantify Bitcoin's energy consumption, then to be intellectually honest, you need to complain that the true inflation rate or the true size of any country's economy is impossible to quantify as well.

1. A poor estimate is better than none at all. No matter how uncertain it is, there has to be some range where we can say with 95% confidence, BTC energy consumption falls within this range. We all understand that any estimate will be very uncertain because of the scale and complexity of mining.

2. The arguments youre responding to about BTC being a waste of energy etc. aren't being made in this post. He's just using energy to estimate leak rate, not to assign any moral value to it.

You: "We can't know these things, so any form of estimation is wrong and bad!"

Also, calling papers "silly" doesn't bolster your argument.

Estimation is fine. Basing a HN level of hatred on crypto because of inaccurate data... is... well...

What would you prefer me to call it? The pure definition of silly is "having or showing a lack of common sense or judgment; absurd and foolish." Seems pretty accurate to me.

Well you should've continued reading. It's not about how much energy is used, it's about the fact that energy is used at all. The numbers can be extrapolated from a third of that value and still look bad.

We all know bitcoin uses a lot of energy, there is no debate about that. But, on a global scale of all energy used, it is just a tiny tiny sliver of the pie (see my previous link). Just because something uses energy doesn't mean it is inherently bad. If you want to extrapolate and say that wasting energy on PoW is bad, then you also have to compare that against all of the other wasted energy. If you do, bitcoin doesn't look that bad either.

Of course plenty of people here like to fixate on telling people what a good or not good use of energy is. Which is so ironic to me given that here we are using energy to have this debate and I'm sure someone out there thinks it is equally wasteful.

The article is not about energy usage, it's about capital outflow in the form of energy expenditure. As long as mimers must pay someone to keep running, either capital outflow must match capital inflow, or the price will go down, and consequently mining will decrease and with it security. Either way, not a good store of value.

Ok, so then this is the age old debate of what happens when mining ends? I guess I could have kept reading for some new insight there. Face palm.

The age old debate about what happens when mining ends? When does mining end?

Mining never ends, but the inflationary aspect does [0]. At which point, bitcoin will become unprofitable for most miners and they will shut down. A few who can remain profitable, from the transaction fees alone, will stick around and the end result is that energy usage will drop significantly. Unless, of course, miners vote in another consensus model before then (unlikely).

This is a big reason why there is such a huge land grab of new miners coming online right now and a huge increase in power usage. It also solidifies the monetary policy imho. Once emissions stop, it'll become even harder to obtain what BTC is left and as long as it stays desirable for its intrinsic value (imho, that is digital gold... its store of value), people will want it.

Don't forget that while 19m have been emitted, millions of that are locked up forever and will continue to get locked up over time (things like people who die suddenly without leaving access to their private keys). Thus, there is actually a lot less than 21m BTC that'll ever be available.

͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at the halving chart on that website. I usually don't think that past performance indicated future results... but come on... this is just obvious financial cycles. If you haven't already, you'd do well to buy $100 of bitcoin and just sit on it.

[0] https://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/

OK, you mean when the creation of new bitcoin ends.

No, that's not what the article is about. The article basically says any cryptocurrency that relies on mining cannot be a store of value because mining requires capital outflow which means your bitcoin loses value without continued capital inflow in the form of new demand.

It is very likely miners vote in another consensus. There are ~118 years left before the supply capnis reached. If bitcoin lasts that long, it is highly likely that some major changes occur, consensus seems like the number 1 candidate for change.

The end result of energy usage dropping... if the energy usage drops, the security does also. So price decrease results in less mining, and therefore less capital outflow, which is great, except it results in less security. the only way to get 0 capital outflow (and therefore require 0 capital inflow to keep a steady price) is to have 0 mining, which means no blocks being produced and no security, which again, does not make a good store of value.

> The article basically says any cryptocurrency that relies on mining cannot be a store of value because mining requires capital outflow which means your bitcoin loses value without continued capital inflow in the form of new demand.

Sorry, but you have to make the distinction between mining and inflation. Two different things. Mining is just validating transactions. Today, miners get paid newly minted coin + fees for that service. In the future, they will only get fees. You have to factor that into the long term viability of the coin.

After just watching ETH literally destroy GPU mining, I don't think it'll be that easy for Bitcoin to achieve any sort of changes that affect mining in any way.

Yes, there are 118 years to 21m, but the supply is dwindling... 6.25 now... next 3.125... and the difficulty keeps going up. Did you ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at the link I sent? It has a nice graph of the decline of inflation... we are super close to zero by just 2029 and 2033... even closer.

> The end result of energy usage dropping... if the energy usage drops, the security does also.

Untrue. Difficulty adjusts automatically. The ONLY issue is if a huge amount of hash drops off... and then rejoins... together... all at once... in a way to attack the network. But the economics of doing would negate that pretty quickly.

> the only way to get 0 capital outflow (and therefore require 0 capital inflow to keep a steady price) is to have 0 mining

No... we are going to get to near 0 capital outflow by 2033. We will always need mining to form blocks. The question is what will happen to the fees, and the price. Fees are a function of usage and a minimum set by the miners as a whole. There will always be miners willing to form blocks for almost no fee. If there is little usage, the fees will stay low, but demand of the coin as a store of value, should drive the price up due to the fixed supply and lack of availability.

I don't think you understand this stuff as well as you think you do. That's not intended as a rib, it's important for us to continue learning.

The hash difficulty adjusting automatically keeps the block time relatively constant. Security goes down the less hash power is on the network, that's an undisputed fact. Hash power is proportional to energy consumption. Lower energy consumption means less hash power means less security. Think of it like this: if 2 CPUs secured bitcoin, it is trivial to attack. How much hash power and energy an attacker has to buy for a successful attack is the security of the network.

You don't have to factor in the distinction between emission (commonly called inflation) and fees when discussing this particular topic, any bitcoin liquidated to pay for energy usage is mathematically identical to price inflation when looking at BTC as a currency. It is sell pressure, it is capital outflow.

Emission of new bitcoin, or inflation as it is commonly called, is not the same as capital outflow. Capital outflow is sell pressure. You cannot get to 0 capital outflow as long as miners must pay for power. Do you understand what I'm saying? This has nothing to do with how many new bitcoins are created.

Please try to understand what I'm telling you. We aren't talking about the usual everybody-has-heard-it-a-million-times bitcoin critiques. I am very, very familiar with how bitcoin works and understand very much all the points you're making. But these things have no bearing on what I or the article are saying.

I hear what you're saying and maybe I'm just not explaining myself well enough. You're totally right. Thanks for the clarification. I do understand things the way you're explaining them. I appreciate that you're trying. =)

You're right. Sell pressure (capital outflow) cannot end. That said, with inflation (or emission) becoming less and less over time, there won't be as much to sell.

I'm sorry, but difficulty is also security. Attacks aren't just about hashpower, it is also expense (capital to buy and run enough hash) for the attack. If the hashpower goes down, you're right... there is a window where attacks become possible before the difficulty adjusts (I'd argue ETH PoW per block adjustments were more secure), but that would require the same amount of lost hashpower to also be 'found' and dedicated towards attacking the network at the same time. It isn't like the network was less secure 1 month ago than it is today.

There won't be as much bitcoin to sell, but the capital outflow remains the same if the security remains the same, and that means the price of each bitcoin would have to be much, much higher, but that requires equal capital inflow. If inflow is less, price goes down, miners can't afford it so they drop off the network, security goes down and capital outflow goes down too.

Block difficulty does not determine security in any way. All it determines is average block time, that's it. The security of a network is determined solely by the hash power on the network (and the expense to double it). There's no window while difficulty adjusts, if hash power goes down the security goes down until hash power goes up again. The network was less secure if the hash rate was lower. On September 14 at 12:00 UTC, bitcoin's hash rate was 136 EH/s. Right now it is just under 250 EH/s. Bitcoin is more secure right now than it was on September 14 at 12:00 UTC, and the block difficulty has nothing to do with that whatsoever.

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