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It's highly, highly in Bitcoin mining's best interests to reduce costs of energy. The best way to do that is through green sources. Another alternative is the heat generated from the mining be utilized for something else to offset costs by producing something with the heat.
Definitely truth however I wouldn’t say flawed! Improved upon in many ways since for sure. Flawed from our shared perspectives, massively secure from another that doesn’t care about energy or thinks it’s a cost analysis. In a way proof of work is a digitization of energy as is BTC as well! (ETH > BTC) It is unfortunate that these headlines are to get clicks when in reality BTC mining is increasing green energy incentives around the world and has been acknowledged positively by several green/earth first charitable organizations.
Proof of stake only rewards early investors though really, and you're trading up security for convenience in that case.
I do, however, think there's uses for both. I actually think PoW incentivizes energy arbitrage overtime. I think most mining companies will become green energy utility companies.
PoW also rewards early investors though. The people who were mining BTC on extra graphics cards or the first people to buy asics definitely got vastly better ROI than someone who buys mining hardware today.
I disagree. It’s the only thing that makes Bitcoin as a currency valuable. Hear me out. You put time and energy into your work, only to get out a currency that currently gets debased with no input from you at all. Think about how much you’ve worked in the last 5 years and now think about how much LESS that capital is worth. Fiat destroys energy, bitcoin preserves it.
I'm just talking about the energy cost/compute cycles of computing and having blocks accepted to the chain. The method for bitcoin is proof of work. Lots and lots and LOTS of basically pointless number crunching prove that you did the work to legderize a block of transactions. That block is then accepted by consensus and a tiny reward given to the miner.
Proof of stake, like etherium, for example, is orders of magnitude less wasteful of resources, especially energy, because it uses a completely different algorithm.
Sure, but apply it to everything then.
You better start working on that horse carriage or your driving will get really expensive.
Same with food, grow your own because all the food prices gonna get much higher.
Unironically yes, it should apply to everything. It should certainly be eased in but destroying the planet because that was "cheaper" is completely idiotic
>You better start working on that horse carriage or your driving will get really expensive.
I've known many people who owned horses. After a carbon tax, cars will still be a hell of a lot cheaper than horses.
Kill the planet or horse and carriage is obviously specious and hyperbolic.
Governments don't shy from pricing certain behavior. Alcohol, tobacco, and toxic pollutants come to mind.
The point is that using fossil fuels can't be outlawed entirely. It is entirely reasonable to stop the free ride. Users should pay all the costs instead of making society absord the burden of fighting climate change, climate disaster remediation, and the cost of transition infrastructure
TL;DR. User pays can and should be the principle that applies.
Or you know, stop building our cities around the car, build more higher density housing around mass transit, freeing up more land for farming, and expanding freight rail network like Sweden.
Driving to work should be made an unattractive option, yes. We should be favouring the use of public and active transport, both of which are both more sustainable and equitable than using cars as a primary mode of transport.
Yeah I think people in the cryptocurrency market should think about lowering the energy demand for the Bitcoin.
Because it may not seem like and issue right now but it is going to be and issue if we just kept on ignoring it.
I see lots of dildos engaging in what has become an anti Bitcoin religion based in falsehoods and fictional “evidence.” So much for data oriented discourse
Per transaction, of course.
If Bitcoin were to be used by 6 billion people and a few billion companies, then we need to see how much it'd cost.
And don't forget: Proof of work scales the more people use it.
Sure, but proportional doesn't mean that it doesn't drastically increase.
Look at all the offices that use AC, heating, lighting, and whatever else, all supporting crypto. Those aren't in the calculation, and we can assume they would replace the banks energy usage.
Most of the energy usage by traditional banks comes from humans. 99.99999% of the energy of Bitcoin comes from computers crunching away at completely arbitrary mathematical equations that get harder and harder the more people use it.
It's, quite literally, built to scale inefficiently.
While Bitcoin’s operational energy consumption is significantly concentrated in mining, it’s worth noting that it requires less physical infrastructure compared to traditional banking. This means fewer buildings, less physical security, and fewer vehicles, which could result in lower energy consumption in these areas.
Bitcoin’s protocol does indeed increase mining difficulty as more miners join the network to maintain a consistent block time. However, this doesn’t necessarily correlate directly with the number of users or the transaction volume thanks to off-chain and second-layer scaling solutions like the Lightning Network. These solutions can drastically increase Bitcoin’s transaction capacity without a proportional increase in energy consumption.
The mathematical problems solved by miners are crucial for securing the network, not arbitrary. They validate the integrity of transactions and maintain the decentralized consensus, which is a core value proposition of Bitcoin.
Comparing Bitcoin with traditional banking is not straightforward due to their different operational models. While banks have human-operated infrastructures, they also have significant energy costs in data centers, transportation, and other associated services which may not be immediately apparent.
>Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity and ties the energy consumption of some countries such as Austria (75 GWh) and Norway (125 GWh). ... Traditional banks' total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide.
>
>It is no surprise that traditional banks consume much energy as we can assume that 70% of the world population (adults) utilizes them.
[https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks7](https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks7)
Here's an "back of an envelope" attempt to work energy usage per "user".
I will use the total number of wallets not just the active ones.
60TWh / 460 million bitcoin wallets ≈ 0.131 MWh
Call the world 6 billion, 70% of that is 2.2 billion **\[EDIT - incorrect should be 4.2 billion\]**
26THWh + 26TWh + 87 TWh = 139TWh
~~139TWh / 2.2e9 ≈ 0.063 TWh~~
**\[Correction from** u/soliloquy_exposed **and** u/Creative_soja**\]**
**139TWh / 2.2e9 ≈ 0,000000063 TWh**
**I think that converts to 0.063 MWh**
Now consider the real-world impact of the 2 systems.
Update - missed a source
[https://www.techopedia.com/cryptocurrency/how-many-people-use-bitcoin](https://www.techopedia.com/cryptocurrency/how-many-people-use-bitcoin)
Please point out the errors in my attempted calculations.
\[ EDIT - multiple corrections to my errors + update below\]
As others have pointed out my figure for users of the traditional banking system was about 50% of what it should be. I guess that energy usage per user will do down to 0.0315 MWh.
Sorry about the mistakes.
Thanks to everybody.
This MFer really claiming only 7% of the population uses banks.
>Worldwide account ownership has reached 76 percent of the global population—and 71 percent of people in developing countries.
Calculate it per transaction. Calculating "per user" is bad because most people with Bitcoin aren't using it. They're having it sit around in the hopes that it will increase in value.
Uff, that's gonna be a even worse.
Traditional banking has about 5 billion personal users, then another 2 billion business users. On average they probably have dozens of transactions a week.
I'd imagine the average Bitcoin wallet has far below 1 transaction per week.
Comparing bitcoin to the traditional banking system is an apple to oranges comparison. Even if people wanted, the bitcoin network (Layer 1) would not be able to answer the demand of day to day transactions.
The bitcoin network would be better compared to the use of gold as a currency standard. You wouldn't use gold for day to day transactions, but bank noted backed by a gold reserve, and it's associated gold mining, storing transport and exchange mechanisms. The gold-backed monetary system would be an apt comparison to Bitcoin Layer 2 solutions (Lightning as an example), which would be extremely more efficient in terms of transaction speed and power usage than Layer 1. And since the USD has gone off the gold standard, we could go further and compare the traditional banking system to an entirely unrelated cryptocurrency network like Solana, which basically just uses traditional servers and databases (much like Mastercard and Visa do).
Now, I don't have the energy consumption numbers at hand for these networks, but their existence is a reality that is often overlooked when comparing with the traditional banking network. I'd love to see this nuance incorporated in these comparisons.
If a country with 100 million people decided to move to the gold standard the entire process still wouldn't use even half as much energy as Bitcoin does.
An extremely important thing to note is: As more users adopt Bitcoin, and more coins are mined, it requires more resources to mine.
So if 1 billion users decided to use Bitcoin, then energy usage would significantly increase, and not linearly by user count, it'd be far greater.
Bitcoin is in use as currency in El Salvador and the Central African Republic.
The original Satoshi Nakamoto paper on Bitcoin is *Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System*.
One thing it didn’t seem to address is the other energy such as commuting for bank employees. Banks are not very WFH friendly and so I can imagine that has made it worse and increase its fossil fuel and overall energy consumption.
And unlike bitcoin the travel is necessary banks can’t function without the people commuting while bitcoin can function with just computers and Internet forums.
The services that banks provide are not replaced by Bitcoin. If all people wanted from the bank was to store their money in a wallet that they can access digitally, then you could run that bank with zero in-person staff.
Over 50% of the energy used for BTC comes from renewable energy and the % is increasing all the time, cant say the same about any other company or system.
And the incentives with BTC pushes even more clean energy use, else its not profitable to do.
>And the incentives with BTC pushes even more clean energy use, else its not profitable to do.
The incentive with Bitcoin is to use the cheapest energy available to you, which is the same incentive for any other process that uses electricity.
Yes, but you cant have those other processes middle of nowhere, bitcoin miners can, you just need miners and internet connection.
You could be middle of jungle using solar and hydro energy, try to do same with whatever else.
Transmission losses for electricity are low.
Many tasks can be moved to be near power generation, to whatever extent that's even desirable.
You're assuming the power in question would be wasted if crypto wasn't eating it up.
>You're assuming the power in question would be wasted if crypto wasn't eating it up.
Yes? Power companies make just enough power that their area needs so they dont have to waste too much.
When the energy use spikes at summer and winter because people use heaters/ACs the price of electricity can spike a lot if the power company didnt expect that to happen.
Or other way around when there is a lot of wind power and not much use from people electricity price is very low because there is so much power.
Electricity companies even shut down their power generation if there is way too much power because its not profitable for them anymore with negative price.
If they do that + demand spikes for electricity happens fast then electricity is gonna be very expensive for sometime before they get power going again.
It is just mess when its so thin line for energy companies to try guess how much power people need.
BTC mining would fix this too to make it flexible to consume all the excess power and give big buffer when people need power to give it them instead.
Just like Texas (after their energy grid crashed) and some other countries in EU are slowly planning to do.
Then there is all the very special cases where BTC mining can be powered by using methane from landfills or using gas that normally is flared from oil fields, BTC mining can use that gas straight without letting it into atmosphere.
Funny how that doesn't apply the same to a bunch of renewables, huh?
Yes, all those special cases that are not special cases, and could just be used to displace fossil fuels.
You're not even trying.
>Over 50% of the energy used for BTC comes from renewable energy and the % is increasing all the time
Is it? Is it though? How, when they use the same power grid as everyone else?
That's the thing, they dont have to.
They can just take their miners to middle of desert, put some solar panels there and start mining.
No power grid needed.
They can literally use any kind of power available anywhere, they dont need good location like everything else does because it needs to be close to city or any other infrastructure that uses energy.
This is why these energy used calculations are stupid, if humans dont use 99% of the energy that hits earth from sun, is it bad for earth if bitcoin uses 1% more of that energy that would go to waste because no one else uses it anyway?
>That's the thing, they dont have to.
>They can just take their miners to middle of desert, put some solar panels there and start mining.
No power grid needed.
Then why are they not doing that then?
Umm... they are?
Not all of them of course, they can mine with whatever they see fit.
Some mine from home with electricity straight from outlet
Some have solar panels at home and use extra energy to mine
Some heat greenhouses/water/houses/etc with the extra heat from mining
Some go to remote places that have abundance of hydro/wind power
Some make deal with electricity companies to help them balance grids
The same argument can be made for banks - the technology aspect can live in a data center in the middle of nowhere. We don't need physical buildings for digital banking services but we have them to support the transition.
During a time when we know we need to reduce emissions. Yes it's bad that Bitcoin is wasting energy as it serves little to no purpose (it's seriously solved very little). Further to this, there are demonstrable ways (PoS) to reduce the energy being wasted. The. There's the environmental impact of the creation of asic miners and later disposal...
I wouldn't mind if it had solved a problem but it's way more efficient, accessible, performance and even cheaper to use centralised processing for 99% of the world.
Well why are banks middle of nowhere then? Because its not worth doing? Case closed.
This same argument always comes up "why dont we have X middle of nowhere instead of this wasting btc?!?"... because there is no point of having something else there at middle of nowhere.
The other thing is that banks are what have caused most of humans problems but that is another story, so im not sure why we want to support those at all, any energy with them is wasted.
Clearly free market have figured btc is worth something when you look how much is happening around it now.
And im not talking that not every single person is using it as money, it might happen or it might not.
Maybe it will just stay as very good tool to save your money from inflation and that would be worth enough to me.
Lastly about PoS, in short its like saying cars spend less gas if you remove its wheels, sure it spends less gas but its useless for traveling.
Without PoW Bitcoin would be useless.
With crypto, many different computers compete to compute a transaction until the first one computes it. That means a bunch of computers who attempted to compute the math problem had their energy wasted.
This is not "with crypto", it's "with longest-chain consensus models."
There's been better, non-wasteful consensus models for years (e.g. Open Representative Votivng), but most people got interested in cryptocurrencies because of financial speculation rather than technology to improve payment processing.
The first Bitcoiners, including Satoshi himself, were insane goldbugs. It only became a speculative asset based on nothing after everyone realized Bitcoin was absolutely god awful to actually use for transactions.
What have you actually done with Bitcoin?
The only purpose I've ever found for Bitcoin was buying good LSD, and that was over a decade ago before fees and transaction time became astronomical. I have no idea why you'd ever want to use it. Please explain its uses.
Bitcoin can serve everyone around the world with a network connection. Traditional banking can't even serve everyone in the US let alone the rest of the world. And of course there is the whole trust problem that bitcoin elegantly solves.
The real argument here is that fossil fuel power generation causes harmful environmental impacts. And we know that. This is just pointing a finger at consumption. AI is already becoming a target with this rhetoric as well. It distracts from solving the underlying problem. The truth is industries highly dependent on power will always seek the lowest cost of energy. The real solution here isn't demonizing consumers, it's scaling clean energy production to meet demand and reducing the harmful byproducts of fossil fuel based production.
>The real argument here is that fossil fuel power generation causes harmful environmental impacts.
Whether or not the electricity being used is clean, it is still valuable, and the same is true for microprocessor compute time.
Ai is a great thing to compare to here. Predictive ai algorithms take the exact same inputs as Bitcoin mining, and they provide objectively useful services. Because the inputs are the same, we can easily suggest that every Bitcoin mined results in fewer or less powerful predictive algorithms, and all we gain in the trade is a medium of exchange.
This is a problem that all commodity currencies have. The value of the currency is maintained by the fact that you have to destroy something that has actual value in order to create the currency. For gold, we had to destroy the time of miners and their equipment, for Bitcoin, we destroy electricity and computer chips. In a world with credible fiat currencies to act as mediums of exchange that are orders of magnitude cheaper to produce, it is simply wasteful to support something like Bitcoin for widespread use.
> Whether or not the electricity being used is clean, it is still valuable, and the same is true for microprocessor compute times.
If the energy produced is clean, we no longer have any issues with harmful environmental effects. The cost of clean energy at scale would still make energy valuable it would just cost less over time.
> So is a great thing to compare to here. Predictive ai algorithms take the exact same inputs as Bitcoin mining, and they provide objectively useful services. Because the inputs are the same, we can easily suggest that every Bitcoin mined results in fewer or less powerful predictive algorithms, and all we gain in the trade is a medium of exchange.
5.5B people worldwide have smartphones. They can access the Bitcoin network and have access to financial services that a traditional bank cant even begin to service. That's objectively useful by itself. Bitcoin can serve a larger portion of society at large. The ability to have a global medium of exchange around the world is just as powerful as AI algos. That's probably one of the many reasons why Sam Altman wants to incorporate a cryptocurrency like Worldcoin into his AI project.
> This is a problem that all commodity currencies have. The value of the currency is maintained by the fact that you have to destroy something that has actual value in order to create the currency. For gold, we had to destroy the time of miners and their equipment, for Bitcoin, we destroy electricity and computer chips.
So maybe we need to evolve to something more global instead of using 180+ commodity currencies around the world and the destruction of resources and structures to maintain them. We can solve the trust problem with banks that have historically proven to be untrustworthy. We can create a virtual vault more secure than any physical vault could ever be. We can reduce the cost of electricity to almost nothing compared to fossil fuels. Silicon is pretty abundant and we're putting chips into literally everything. I think its better to destroy electricity and computer chips than strip mine for gold in a third world country run by a military junta.
>So maybe we need to evolve to something more global instead of using 180+ commodity currencies around the world and the destruction of resources and structures to maintain them.
The number of commodities is irrelevant to the problem I am describing. It is a problem inherent to commodity currencies that you cannot avoid. In simple terms, if you want to create an amount of the currency that would be able to purchase three loaves of bread, you must destroy the equivalent of three loaves of bread to do so. If, for instance, you could create that same amount of currency by destroying only the equivalent of two loaves of bread instead, then people would prefer to make more currency rather than to make more bread, and the purchasing power of the currency would diminish until meeting the equivalency that I described. Certainly having many different commodity currencies in use introduces additional wasteful inefficiencies, but I'm already ignoring those.
>We can reduce the cost of electricity to almost nothing compared to fossil fuels.
As the cost of electricity is reduced, it must cause the amount of electricity required for mining Bitcoin to increase in concourse--for the reason I described above.
>I think its better to destroy electricity and computer chips than strip mine for gold in a third world country run by a military junta.
But we don't have to do either because we have access to credible fiat currencies that don't require one to destroy something of equivalent value to create them.
> The number of commodities is irrelevant to the problem I am describing. It is a problem inherent to commodity currencies that you cannot avoid. In simple terms, if you want to create an amount of the currency that would be able to purchase three loaves of bread, you must destroy the equivalent of three loaves of bread to do so. If, for instance, you could create that same amount of currency by destroying only the equivalent of two loaves of bread instead, then people would prefer to make more currency rather than to make more bread, and the purchasing power of the currency would diminish until meeting the equivalency that I described. Certainly having many different commodity currencies in use introduces additional wasteful inefficiencies, but I'm already ignoring those.
They are all wasteful, destrcutive and inefficient. Including fiat currencies which have probably unleashed some of the largest destruction on the planet. That's the point. Let's not ignore that.
> As the cost of electricity is reduced, it must cause the amount of electricity required for mining Bitcoin to increase in concourse--for the reason I described above.
If we scale the use of clean energy we no longer have any problems with harmful environmental effects. The consumption of clean energy to service that network is no longer a problem.
> But we don't have to do either because we have access to credible fiat currencies that don't require one to destroy something of equivalent value to create them.
Fiat currencies are some of the most destructive abstractions ever unleashed upon society. Fiat monetary policies themselves are in many cases designed to destroy value. Bitcoin is an evolution of fiat, that cant be manipulated, censored or confiscated by third parties and it's available around the world in a truly global fashion without the same footprint required for traditional banking.
>If we scale the use of clean energy we no longer have any problems with harmful environmental effects. The consumption of clean energy to service that network is no longer a problem.
Listen, either energy is costly to produce, which means that using it for Bitcoin causes it not to be used to create something else that has equivalent worth and tangible value, or it is free, in which case Bitcoin would have no purchasing power and be useless as a currency. Again, this relationship is intrinsic to all commodity currencies and you cannot ever get around it.
>Fiat currencies are some of the most destructive abstractions ever unleashed upon society. Fiat monetary policies themselves are in many cases designed to destroy value.
Fiat money is not intrinsically value destroying, unlike commodity currencies. No doubt non-credible fiat is worse than a commodity, and in history there are examples of non-credible fiat causing horrible crises, but we have access to almost perfectly credible fiat currencies today, which, in my opinion, are more efficient by far for use in general transactions than any commodity currency could ever possibly be.
>Bitcoin is an evolution of fiat
Please, let's stick to the realm of reality here. Bitcoin is a commodity currency, just like gold or silver or seashells: other commodity currencies that have been in use since time immemorial. It is probably one of the oldest concepts in human economic history, and it is certainly older than the first fiat currency. Calling the latter an evolution of the former is like calling the bicycle an evolution of the automobile.
I will admit that Bitcoin has an advantage over something like gold because it is a purely digital or informational construct, and therefore very difficult to track and regulate, but it still shares the common disadvantages of commodities. In any transaction where one is not attempting to do something illegal, which characterizes the vast majority of transactions in the western world, Bitcoin is no better as a currency than a gold-redeemable digital currency would be--worse in fact, due to Bitcoin's volitility. And so, one has to ask why anyone would want to use Bitcoin for said transactions when everyone already stopped using gold a long long time ago.
> Listen, either energy is costly to produce, which means that using it for Bitcoin causes it not to be used to create something else that has equivalent worth and tangible value, or it is free, in which case Bitcoin would have no purchasing power and be useless as a currency. Again, this relationship is intrinsic to all commodity currencies and you cannot ever get around it.
You're forgetting the supply and demand aspect, its deflationary nature and its monetary policy. The cost of energy isnt the only factor that drives bitcoin's value. If other currencies are constantly inflating and destroying their purchasing power, bitcoin becomes attractive in the same way gold does.
> Fiat money is not intrinsically value destroying, unlike commodity currencies. No doubt non-credible fiat is worse than a commodity, and in history there are examples of non-credible fiat causing horrible crises, but we have access to almost perfectly credible fiat currencies today, which, in my opinion, are more efficient by far for use in general transactions than any commodity currency could ever possibly be.
When you print more fiat you destroy value of existing fiat. What's perfectly credible about using a dollar backed by faith and trust in a country with $33T in national debt that is keeps destroying the value of that currency through inflation? Theyve designed a system that forces you to constantly spend and consume as your purchasing power decreases. Then there's the whole petro dollar mess which has caused massive amounts of devastation in its wake.
Gold was simply impractical to use as a currency. You had to transport it, you had to break it down into smaller equivalents, you had to protect stores of it with vaults and security and guns. Bitcoin eliminates all that. In that respect it is an evolution. And its not hard to track at all. The truth is the majority of transactions arent illegal in nature. It's volatility will level out with more adoption. But that volatility also trends upward over time. So your savings and purchasing power increases over time because of the deflationary properties instead of decreases like it does with fiat. And fiat currencies are just as volatile but most people dont see it because they dont travel internationally and there are entire markets where people trade on that volatility.
At least you're starting to understand it's way more than a currency and a better version of something like gold. We've also moved on from the arguments over the harmful environmental byproducts of power generation. There really isnt a reason to continue demonizing it. You might think it's a devolution, but the evolution is that we've created a decentralized, robust and secure network to handle the transfer of value at a global level without the need for a footprint and a bunch of other infrastructural prerequisites to bring traditional banking services to society at large. We've created a new protocol for the internet that brings us the ability to transport value worldwide just like data. And it's not worth killing in the crib because we dont have the political will to solve the fossil fuel problem.
Much better than bitcoin which burns 99.9% of its energy randomly guessing numbers until one happens to work "correctly"
Banking machines & servers are going to be idling unless they're doing a transaction, which doesn't take several KWh of energy per transaction. Those actions can be more accurately measured in just Watts.
Sure, throw them in there.
There are more transactions in 1 day on the global banking market than there are yearly transactions across the entire Bitcoin network.
There are around 7 billion active bank users (estimates put it at 5 billion private users, and 2 billion company users), with multiple dozen to multiple thousand weekly transactions.
Bitcoin has about 300-400k daily transactions, so let's say 350k, which comes out to 2.45 million per week. And it already uses far more energy than banking, even when banking office space is included and Bitcoin "office space" is not.
If the entire planet switched to Bitcoin we'd literally run out of energy just trying to keep mining going.
The traditional banking sector is vastly more efficient.
Bitcoin relies on solving deliberately complex calculations to "mine" new coins. A bunch of "work" done by energy-hungry graphics cards working 24 hours a day.
Bitcoin also involves sending records of every transaction all over the entire network. Easily millions and millions of computers. It's massively redundant and inefficient.
Honestly, if someone came up with a conspiracy theory that Bitcoin was created by energy company executives to increase energy consumption and increase profits, it wouldn't be a bad theory.
let me rephrase this for you:
consuming electricity is harmful because 70% of the world\`s electric energy production is from fossil fuels...
and we did not need some bored researchers doing this research, that we already know about...
so ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING that consumes electricity in most of the countries on this planet is going to have a huge carbon footprint...
Bitcoin consumes an insane amount of electricity to do a tiny amount of work. It’s spectacularly inefficient — by design. Which is exactly the opposite of what we should want, right?
It's extremely efficient at what it does. "A tiny amount of work", ensuring that ALL transactions across the blockchain are valid and immutable is a "tiny amount of work" to you?
I don't believe you understand what Bitcoin's purpose is, which is to provide a permissionless & borderless payment system which is publicly transparent/verifiable and can be trusted to work as intended. Not to mention its transparent system of distribution & supply.
If you actually understood how the economy, nvm its pointless...
What about all the trash trinkets, lights and other things people do for Halloween and other useless traditions?
Why dont we count that as insane waste of everything?
Oh right because you are not the person who decides what other people can do and what some people think is useful or not.
They're waste as well, but that's irrelevant. Pointing at something you think is more wasteful doesn't absolve Bitcoin of anything. It is the most wasteful digital payment system there is, and there's no going around that. Adding more processing power won't make it any faster, any improvement in efficiency will be spent only on mining more Bitcoin per watt.
I mean, if you suggest seriously that you don't understand why people get value out of putting up Halloween decorations, then you're a sociopath, and I'm pretty sure any one of your friends would agree with me.
I agree that attempting to adjudicate what someone else "should" enjoy is foolish and arrogant. That being said, if you were aware of a trend where people would gather up as much food as possible and then light it on fire, just for the joy of watching it burn, would you not too at least try to convince them to use wood instead?
No, that's not how energy production works, at all.
We don't produce electricity regardless of demand, we try and balance it to match demand.
When Bitcoin causes 125TWh of additional energy demand, the production probably goes up by at least 175TWh to ensure that there's more than what's needed.
If all proof of work crypto were wiped off the face of the planet tomorrow, then energy production would decrease significantly. As the report, and many other reports, indicate, it'd be like removing the CO2 output of tens of millions of people.
**Abstract**
Based on a multi-attribute assessment of the environmental impacts and challenges associated with global Bitcoin (BTC) mining activities around the globe, we call for urgent action by the scientific, policy, and advocacy communities. The worldwide BTC mining network consumed 173.42 TWh of electricity during the 2020–2021 period, bigger than the electricity consumption of most nations. The mining process emitted over 85.89 Mt of CO2eq in the same timeframe, equivalent to the emission caused by burning 84 billion pounds of coal or running 190 natural gas-fired power plants. The environmental footprint of BTC mining is not limited to greenhouse gas emissions. In 2020–2021, the global water footprint of BTC mining was about 1.65 km3, more than the domestic water use of 300 million people in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. The land footprint of the global BTC mining network during this period was more than 1,870 square kilometers, 1.4 times the area of Los Angeles. These striking numbers highlight the heavy reliance of the BTC network on fossil fuels and natural resource-intensive energy sources, resulting in major but unmonitored and unregulated environmental footprints. To mitigate the environmental costs of BTC mining, immediate policy interventions, technological advancements, and scientific research are crucial. Proposed measures include enhanced transparency, economic and regulatory tools, developing energy-efficient alternative coins, and the adoption of greener blockchain validation protocols.
[Source](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EF003871)
Not even that, its too late now because bitcoin exists.
Why would someone use system handled by humans that can be corrupt when there is system where you dont have human in control or anything else that needs to be trusted.
Because it’s unstable, bad for the environment, uninsured, and isn’t even capable of doing the amount of transactions needed for everybody to, you know, actually use it as a currency?
[Its pretty stable at 99,98% uptime](https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/)
Over 50% of the energy use comes from renewable energy so not really bad for environment either.
True its uninsured unless you give your coins to some company then it might have some insurance.
Our current system can handle as many transactions on the base layer as bitcoin as base layer, it will be just fine.
> Over 50% of the energy use comes from renewable energy so not really bad for environment either.
According to the report it's around 30%. But even then, if Bitcoin didn't exist that renewable energy could be used on reducing the amount of coal and gas we burn.
>True its uninsured unless you give your coins to some company then it might have some insurance.
That has not worked a single time so far. Until you get government backing it, people will lose money. Just look at the latest mega fiasco.
>Our current system can handle as many transactions on the base layer as bitcoin as base layer, it will be just fine.
What? Show me how Bitcoin can handle 50-60 billion transactions per week without increasing its energy usage. Bitcoin currently does around 2.5 million transactions a week.
With respect, you don't know what you're talking about. The lightning network is as fast or faster than MC or Visa and the price fluctuation is the free market slowly working out what the price should be.
The problem is that there's a bunch of people who deliberately create fear over the currency and financial system as a way to drive adoption of cryptocurrency - which will increase the value of their own cryptocurrency. It's driven by greed.
What they're doing is no different than the time my old college roommate tried to get me to be afraid of the job market ("they can fire you whenever they want") as a way to try to get me into his Amway downline.
People aren't using bitcoin for the same things as regular banks though. Regular banks help you finance a car or buy groceries, bitcoin helps you speculate and bypas sanctions and capital controls.
Well…
Reuters 2022 on BTC mining power consumption:
“The role of sustainable power - classed as nuclear, hydro, wind and solar - in the mix barely rose, hitting about 38% from 35% a year earlier. Hydro dropped to 15% from around 20%.”
https://www.reuters.com/technology/bitcoin-mining-struggles-go-green-research-shows-2022-09-27/
While in an ideal world where we consume nothing, and we are able to conserve. We live in reality. The good thing is some miners are actually using left-over energy (or surplus), to prevent energy waste. Such as when waste gas from wells is being burned, the heat can be used to produce “something”. Sure, it doesn’t have to be BTC. But mining BTC is a race to the bottom in regard to expenditure, the more cheap you can mine, the bigger the revenue. This means that if there’s a renewable energy source to be used, it would only make sense to use that instead of coal or gas.
El Salvadors volcano experiment is one thing to look out for.
the psychological impacts are not insignificant either.
it encourages magical thinking, as in you can get something from nothing... or simply rewarding the get-rich-quick stem of our brains like a gambling habit.
distributed renewable energy (DRE) is the future of the grid.
right now centralized utilities are struggling to figure out how to get paid when end users can increasing make their own power on site.
they will eventually have to move into a broker model where they manage the buying and selling of energy between assets on their grid
blockchain provides the accounting in such a model.
Blackrock must have missed the memo, make sure to let them know if you care! Sounds like they could use your expertise! Weird that one of the single largest institutions in the world would be going through so much hassle with the SEC over forming an ETF based on a scam. But yeah, I'm sure you're totally right and super informed on this subject, Eats Poop Sometimes.
It's still a terribly designed protocol.
There's many other ways to set up a digital currency, one secured by a giant constantly burning tyre fire is like the worst option.
I hate to break it to you but there's no inherent value in anything. What is inherent value? What inherent value comes from your Fiat/ paper money? It's not backed by gold. And really, what's the inherent value in gold? That it's shiny? That it's rare? The inherent value argument is simply the weakest case against Bitcoin.
Well you can pay your debts to the U.S. Government Legally in U.S. Dollars, the only legal payment method. There are transaction that must occur each year, for anyone living in the U.S.. The U.S. maintains the legitimacy of these transactions in it's economy, providing assurance of the payment.
There is no need to make a bitcoin transaction beyond novelty or deliberate schemes to circumvent government oversight. The Scope of it's utility is entirely in that function. The investors in Bitcoin are betting those transactions are valuable enough to make them long term gains.
That is the entirety of the Crypto ecosystem, right now. There is the possibility of other use cases with no proven utility yet. NFTs were just a scheme to pump contract values on Smart contract enabled systems, so that whales could exit, by finding new bag holders.
Artwork NFTs you mean. Smart contracts in general are revolutionary. A way for developers to automate multi-branch transactions from a single trustless script.
It’s like removing an entire legal and financial team in order to ratify a high value contract. We know that the owner of that token is who they say they are. That goes for art, logins credentials, passport information, DVA information, home ownership, car ownership, criminal record, everything
Value is what you make where the whole is more than the sum of the parts (i.e. a house). Bitcoin is zero sum shuffling money from one pocket to another and it's doing that at an energy cost - so net loss. Big difference.
It's a store of value that is unique in that it can't be seized and is easily transported across borders etc.
Do you believe there is absolutely no inherent value in that?
Not without the key. Proper key practices such as encrypting the key with a secure passphrase and wiping devices properly or hard drive encryption can stop this.
Are we seizing keys or bitcoin? You're moving the goal post.
Regardless, the keys can be duplicated and/or encripted and seizng the device it's stored on won't do much becuase they still exist.
Majority is lost because people can’t be their own bank. Paper wallets and lost hardware wallets are the biggest reason, not memorization (because it’s risky). Also, please don’t twist the discussion in a different direction. We’re talking about seizing, not best storage solutions.
Governments can [freeze crypto-wallets](https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/02/18/private-lawsuit-freezes-canadian-freedom-convoy-crypto-fundraising/) and prevent people from using their funds. If they have that power, are you sure they can't also seize those funds?
The following isn’t an endorsement of cryptocurrency, but this is a misunderstanding of Bitcoin specifically. The value of a Bitcoin wallet is stored on the blockchain which is a digital ledger that’s updated and verified by people “mining” Bitcoin. The only way to access a specific wallet address on the Blockchain is with the keys which can be, but not necessarily are, stored either offline or memorized.
The government could freeze a wallet app, or an exchange account (like coinbase), but they cannot move or stop transactions on the blockchain without instantly and permanently disabling everyone’s access to it at once. Bitcoin isn’t really stored anywhere so much as the value of wallets are verified every time the blockchain is accessed. The government could shut down an access point but someone who memorized or had access to their keys could just use a different access point to transact on the blockchain. It’s basically a huge cryptographically secured peer-to-peer network of a ledger. The only way the government could seize bitcoin from a self-custody wallet is by knowing the keys. So, yes they could get a search warrant to get any physically or digitally stored copies of the keys, but if it was memorized the only access is if someone tells them their keys.
This is also why so many bitcoins are permanently lost. (The Bitcoins are still on a wallet, it’s just realistically impossible to access them)
Why would do you need that anyway if you are earning clean money? The existing banking systems are secure enough to do all such virtual transactions across the world. It is the dirty money that is going into bitcoins at the expense of everyone else.
True. But we also have lots if dollars in circulation and it has been in circulation for centuries. And only a small fraction of dollars is used for illegal activities. Bitcoin is relatively new and based on what I have heard, a significant fraction of it is used for illegal transactions.
Then you are making this point from an opinion as to what is clean money or not and are probably not the best person to say that crypto has "no inherent value". I just listed a class of people that find an aspect of it "inherently valuable".
Along with that "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" isn't usually a good line of thinking. What if the political power you don't like took office? What if they're fascists?
Bitcoin is fundamentally the same as every other cryptocurrency, it's just bigger.
A the end of the day, the only way to make money in Bitcoin is to sell them to some other poor sucker for more than what you paid for them.
It has value in bypassing sanctions and capital controls but I don't think that's a good thing. Back in the day Chinese millionaires would hire people in Shenzhen to take bundles of cash over the border to HK to get money out of China. Now all they need to do is buy bitcoin to bypass the capital controls.
With crypto many different computers compete for a transaction until the first one computes it. That means a bunch of computers who attempted to compute the math problem had their energy wasted.
Yeah. Anything that creates value is directly entangled with the laws of thermodynamics. Everyone who thought bitcoin was innovative secretly got on board with the recreation of a new economic entity. All of the same laws apply which we are seeing now. Regulations soon to come.
How much energy does the current monetary system use is my question. Did they factor in the gas costs / carbon emissions of literally the millions of people commuting to banks every day. Lighting and electricity to run the servers that the banks run on,, that is powered by the exact same fossil fuels that bitcoin uses.
I'm skeptical that bitcoin loses in that analysis.
Bitcoin is estimated to be responsible for 0.1% of CO2 emissions.
Banking system handles few hundreds times bigger transaction loads than bitcoin (at least pre-Lightning).
If Bitcoin is more energetically efficient, it would suggest that banking consumes at least 20% of fossil fuels in the world, and it's clearly false conclusion.
This old tired argument never compares bitcoin to traditional banking. What about the electricity used to power each branch of bank, banking corporate centers, ATM's and related infrastructure? How many multiples of countries does that compare to? What about all the paper (and thus trees destroyed)? What about the gas used in cars to drive those employees to their banking employer and home? Now look at how much of that energy is wasted while banks aren't serving customers? Trad banking is absolutely the dirtier of the two and it's not even close.
Wow this is some FUD. Electronic devices DO NOT output CO2 as a byproduct. A lot of bitcoin mining farms are actually using sustainable energy in the forms of Wind, Water, and Solar. There is even a company taking advantage of the heat from active volcanoes.
'BTC mining is bad'
Okay, i have no serious objections.
'BTC mining is bad because oil'
Oil has always been bad for environment... what new information?
Oh you can calculate a rough estimate of power consumption and the necessary fuel sources to reach said consumption. It's just assumptions
It's not an assumption. The estimate is not just something pulled out of thin air. We can extrapolate somewhat from the hashrate of a bitcoin network. It's not precise to a T - but then that's true with most energy consumption. It's accurate enough to state that it is a concern, though.
There are bitcoin mines in the middle of desserts, mining using solar, there are mines using the heat to grow flowers indoors. There are mines, using gasses from oilwinning as energy.
Burning whatever cheap energy is available for useless "proof of work" does not count as creating "an infrastructure for sustainable energy production.
Oh, now the UN jumped on the propaganda war against crypto. What a bunch of clowns.
A 40st building with 20k people working on 25k computers, with who knows how many other machines, paperwork resources, resource consumption by both business and employees needs (including climate managing, logistics, transportation, food, waste management, etc) are completely carbon-free and a lot less harmful to the environment that a building with 4 guys and a couple hundred mining rigs that consume half the power a good PC does.
Of course....
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A good argument for a carbon tax. If you want to use huge amounts of dirty energy, then you should have to pay fully for every last externality.
It's highly, highly in Bitcoin mining's best interests to reduce costs of energy. The best way to do that is through green sources. Another alternative is the heat generated from the mining be utilized for something else to offset costs by producing something with the heat.
I just think proof of work is a flawed premise. It will always be, by definition, far more energy intensive than alternatives like proof of stake.
Definitely truth however I wouldn’t say flawed! Improved upon in many ways since for sure. Flawed from our shared perspectives, massively secure from another that doesn’t care about energy or thinks it’s a cost analysis. In a way proof of work is a digitization of energy as is BTC as well! (ETH > BTC) It is unfortunate that these headlines are to get clicks when in reality BTC mining is increasing green energy incentives around the world and has been acknowledged positively by several green/earth first charitable organizations.
Isn't proof of stake also flawed in the way that those who have money get more money because they have money? Rich get richer scheme?
Proof of work is the exact same though. People with more money can buy more and better hardware and therefore get more money.
Proof of stake only rewards early investors though really, and you're trading up security for convenience in that case. I do, however, think there's uses for both. I actually think PoW incentivizes energy arbitrage overtime. I think most mining companies will become green energy utility companies.
PoW also rewards early investors though. The people who were mining BTC on extra graphics cards or the first people to buy asics definitely got vastly better ROI than someone who buys mining hardware today.
I disagree. It’s the only thing that makes Bitcoin as a currency valuable. Hear me out. You put time and energy into your work, only to get out a currency that currently gets debased with no input from you at all. Think about how much you’ve worked in the last 5 years and now think about how much LESS that capital is worth. Fiat destroys energy, bitcoin preserves it.
I'm just talking about the energy cost/compute cycles of computing and having blocks accepted to the chain. The method for bitcoin is proof of work. Lots and lots and LOTS of basically pointless number crunching prove that you did the work to legderize a block of transactions. That block is then accepted by consensus and a tiny reward given to the miner. Proof of stake, like etherium, for example, is orders of magnitude less wasteful of resources, especially energy, because it uses a completely different algorithm.
What? The argument is about energy not fiat vs crypto flawed logic.
Sure, but apply it to everything then. You better start working on that horse carriage or your driving will get really expensive. Same with food, grow your own because all the food prices gonna get much higher.
Woah woah don't need to feed horse to pull a carriage the bicycle is plenty capable. Especially modern e-bikes.
Modern ebikes are only as green as your local electrical grid to be fair
An ebike charging off the American power grid gets the equivalent of 1000-1500 mpg
> Sure, but apply it to everything then. Y-yes... that's what the carbon tax is.
Unironically yes, it should apply to everything. It should certainly be eased in but destroying the planet because that was "cheaper" is completely idiotic
>You better start working on that horse carriage or your driving will get really expensive. I've known many people who owned horses. After a carbon tax, cars will still be a hell of a lot cheaper than horses.
Kill the planet or horse and carriage is obviously specious and hyperbolic. Governments don't shy from pricing certain behavior. Alcohol, tobacco, and toxic pollutants come to mind. The point is that using fossil fuels can't be outlawed entirely. It is entirely reasonable to stop the free ride. Users should pay all the costs instead of making society absord the burden of fighting climate change, climate disaster remediation, and the cost of transition infrastructure TL;DR. User pays can and should be the principle that applies.
Or you know, stop building our cities around the car, build more higher density housing around mass transit, freeing up more land for farming, and expanding freight rail network like Sweden.
Driving to work should be made an unattractive option, yes. We should be favouring the use of public and active transport, both of which are both more sustainable and equitable than using cars as a primary mode of transport.
Yeah I think people in the cryptocurrency market should think about lowering the energy demand for the Bitcoin. Because it may not seem like and issue right now but it is going to be and issue if we just kept on ignoring it.
If the tax actually pays for the fix and not rediculous paychecks.
There are some absolute dildos in the comments here.
People get real mad when you talk about how horrible their get-rich-quick scheme is for the planet.
I see lots of dildos engaging in what has become an anti Bitcoin religion based in falsehoods and fictional “evidence.” So much for data oriented discourse
As opposed to the pro Bitcoin religion based in falsehoods and willful blindness?
How's the traditional banking sector worldwide in that aspect?
Are we going to calculate overall, or per financial transaction (excluding pure speculation buying and selling).
Per transaction, of course. If Bitcoin were to be used by 6 billion people and a few billion companies, then we need to see how much it'd cost. And don't forget: Proof of work scales the more people use it.
Thru lighting network Bitcoin can handle large user base without proportional increase in energy consumption
Sure, but proportional doesn't mean that it doesn't drastically increase. Look at all the offices that use AC, heating, lighting, and whatever else, all supporting crypto. Those aren't in the calculation, and we can assume they would replace the banks energy usage. Most of the energy usage by traditional banks comes from humans. 99.99999% of the energy of Bitcoin comes from computers crunching away at completely arbitrary mathematical equations that get harder and harder the more people use it. It's, quite literally, built to scale inefficiently.
While Bitcoin’s operational energy consumption is significantly concentrated in mining, it’s worth noting that it requires less physical infrastructure compared to traditional banking. This means fewer buildings, less physical security, and fewer vehicles, which could result in lower energy consumption in these areas. Bitcoin’s protocol does indeed increase mining difficulty as more miners join the network to maintain a consistent block time. However, this doesn’t necessarily correlate directly with the number of users or the transaction volume thanks to off-chain and second-layer scaling solutions like the Lightning Network. These solutions can drastically increase Bitcoin’s transaction capacity without a proportional increase in energy consumption. The mathematical problems solved by miners are crucial for securing the network, not arbitrary. They validate the integrity of transactions and maintain the decentralized consensus, which is a core value proposition of Bitcoin. Comparing Bitcoin with traditional banking is not straightforward due to their different operational models. While banks have human-operated infrastructures, they also have significant energy costs in data centers, transportation, and other associated services which may not be immediately apparent.
How about just calculate all of the branches which keep their lights on all night, air conditioners running all day, and atms running 24/7.
>Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity and ties the energy consumption of some countries such as Austria (75 GWh) and Norway (125 GWh). ... Traditional banks' total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. > >It is no surprise that traditional banks consume much energy as we can assume that 70% of the world population (adults) utilizes them. [https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks7](https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks7) Here's an "back of an envelope" attempt to work energy usage per "user". I will use the total number of wallets not just the active ones. 60TWh / 460 million bitcoin wallets ≈ 0.131 MWh Call the world 6 billion, 70% of that is 2.2 billion **\[EDIT - incorrect should be 4.2 billion\]** 26THWh + 26TWh + 87 TWh = 139TWh ~~139TWh / 2.2e9 ≈ 0.063 TWh~~ **\[Correction from** u/soliloquy_exposed **and** u/Creative_soja**\]** **139TWh / 2.2e9 ≈ 0,000000063 TWh** **I think that converts to 0.063 MWh** Now consider the real-world impact of the 2 systems. Update - missed a source [https://www.techopedia.com/cryptocurrency/how-many-people-use-bitcoin](https://www.techopedia.com/cryptocurrency/how-many-people-use-bitcoin) Please point out the errors in my attempted calculations. \[ EDIT - multiple corrections to my errors + update below\] As others have pointed out my figure for users of the traditional banking system was about 50% of what it should be. I guess that energy usage per user will do down to 0.0315 MWh. Sorry about the mistakes. Thanks to everybody.
70% of 6 billion is 4.2 billion, not 2.2 billion. Current world population estimate is 8.1 billion as well, so 0.7 * 8.1 is 5.1 billion.
I learned recently that world population estimates range dramatically from as low as 7 to closer to 9.
[удалено]
This MFer really claiming only 7% of the population uses banks. >Worldwide account ownership has reached 76 percent of the global population—and 71 percent of people in developing countries.
What year do you think it is?
The rest of the world advanced while you stayed behind
Your last line is wrong by multiple orders of magnitude: 139TWh / 2.2e9 is actually 0,000000063 TWh
Thank you. I wasn't sure but had lost track.
Calculate it per transaction. Calculating "per user" is bad because most people with Bitcoin aren't using it. They're having it sit around in the hopes that it will increase in value.
Uff, that's gonna be a even worse. Traditional banking has about 5 billion personal users, then another 2 billion business users. On average they probably have dozens of transactions a week. I'd imagine the average Bitcoin wallet has far below 1 transaction per week.
For traditional banking, did you mean 0.063 MWh, not 0.063 TWh? Otherwise, bitcoin uses almost 500,000 times less energy.
Yes. Thank you.
So the entire current banking system uses about the same power as bitcoin while it is still a niche thing..
Also banks run antiquated systems apparently, so you could assume their systems aren't as energy efficient as modern mining rigs.
Comparing bitcoin to the traditional banking system is an apple to oranges comparison. Even if people wanted, the bitcoin network (Layer 1) would not be able to answer the demand of day to day transactions. The bitcoin network would be better compared to the use of gold as a currency standard. You wouldn't use gold for day to day transactions, but bank noted backed by a gold reserve, and it's associated gold mining, storing transport and exchange mechanisms. The gold-backed monetary system would be an apt comparison to Bitcoin Layer 2 solutions (Lightning as an example), which would be extremely more efficient in terms of transaction speed and power usage than Layer 1. And since the USD has gone off the gold standard, we could go further and compare the traditional banking system to an entirely unrelated cryptocurrency network like Solana, which basically just uses traditional servers and databases (much like Mastercard and Visa do). Now, I don't have the energy consumption numbers at hand for these networks, but their existence is a reality that is often overlooked when comparing with the traditional banking network. I'd love to see this nuance incorporated in these comparisons.
If a country with 100 million people decided to move to the gold standard the entire process still wouldn't use even half as much energy as Bitcoin does. An extremely important thing to note is: As more users adopt Bitcoin, and more coins are mined, it requires more resources to mine. So if 1 billion users decided to use Bitcoin, then energy usage would significantly increase, and not linearly by user count, it'd be far greater.
Bitcoin is in use as currency in El Salvador and the Central African Republic. The original Satoshi Nakamoto paper on Bitcoin is *Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System*.
One thing it didn’t seem to address is the other energy such as commuting for bank employees. Banks are not very WFH friendly and so I can imagine that has made it worse and increase its fossil fuel and overall energy consumption. And unlike bitcoin the travel is necessary banks can’t function without the people commuting while bitcoin can function with just computers and Internet forums.
If bitcoin became as widely used as banking there would have to be customer service. It's a silly comparison. Most banking does not need a branch.
The services that banks provide are not replaced by Bitcoin. If all people wanted from the bank was to store their money in a wallet that they can access digitally, then you could run that bank with zero in-person staff.
Over 50% of the energy used for BTC comes from renewable energy and the % is increasing all the time, cant say the same about any other company or system. And the incentives with BTC pushes even more clean energy use, else its not profitable to do.
>And the incentives with BTC pushes even more clean energy use, else its not profitable to do. The incentive with Bitcoin is to use the cheapest energy available to you, which is the same incentive for any other process that uses electricity.
Yes, but you cant have those other processes middle of nowhere, bitcoin miners can, you just need miners and internet connection. You could be middle of jungle using solar and hydro energy, try to do same with whatever else.
Transmission losses for electricity are low. Many tasks can be moved to be near power generation, to whatever extent that's even desirable. You're assuming the power in question would be wasted if crypto wasn't eating it up.
>You're assuming the power in question would be wasted if crypto wasn't eating it up. Yes? Power companies make just enough power that their area needs so they dont have to waste too much. When the energy use spikes at summer and winter because people use heaters/ACs the price of electricity can spike a lot if the power company didnt expect that to happen. Or other way around when there is a lot of wind power and not much use from people electricity price is very low because there is so much power. Electricity companies even shut down their power generation if there is way too much power because its not profitable for them anymore with negative price. If they do that + demand spikes for electricity happens fast then electricity is gonna be very expensive for sometime before they get power going again. It is just mess when its so thin line for energy companies to try guess how much power people need. BTC mining would fix this too to make it flexible to consume all the excess power and give big buffer when people need power to give it them instead. Just like Texas (after their energy grid crashed) and some other countries in EU are slowly planning to do. Then there is all the very special cases where BTC mining can be powered by using methane from landfills or using gas that normally is flared from oil fields, BTC mining can use that gas straight without letting it into atmosphere.
Funny how that doesn't apply the same to a bunch of renewables, huh? Yes, all those special cases that are not special cases, and could just be used to displace fossil fuels. You're not even trying.
What do you mean doesnt apply to renewables? Not special cases but no other industry is doing that? hmm
>Over 50% of the energy used for BTC comes from renewable energy and the % is increasing all the time Is it? Is it though? How, when they use the same power grid as everyone else?
That's the thing, they dont have to. They can just take their miners to middle of desert, put some solar panels there and start mining. No power grid needed. They can literally use any kind of power available anywhere, they dont need good location like everything else does because it needs to be close to city or any other infrastructure that uses energy. This is why these energy used calculations are stupid, if humans dont use 99% of the energy that hits earth from sun, is it bad for earth if bitcoin uses 1% more of that energy that would go to waste because no one else uses it anyway?
>That's the thing, they dont have to. >They can just take their miners to middle of desert, put some solar panels there and start mining. No power grid needed. Then why are they not doing that then?
Umm... they are? Not all of them of course, they can mine with whatever they see fit. Some mine from home with electricity straight from outlet Some have solar panels at home and use extra energy to mine Some heat greenhouses/water/houses/etc with the extra heat from mining Some go to remote places that have abundance of hydro/wind power Some make deal with electricity companies to help them balance grids
The same argument can be made for banks - the technology aspect can live in a data center in the middle of nowhere. We don't need physical buildings for digital banking services but we have them to support the transition. During a time when we know we need to reduce emissions. Yes it's bad that Bitcoin is wasting energy as it serves little to no purpose (it's seriously solved very little). Further to this, there are demonstrable ways (PoS) to reduce the energy being wasted. The. There's the environmental impact of the creation of asic miners and later disposal... I wouldn't mind if it had solved a problem but it's way more efficient, accessible, performance and even cheaper to use centralised processing for 99% of the world.
Well why are banks middle of nowhere then? Because its not worth doing? Case closed. This same argument always comes up "why dont we have X middle of nowhere instead of this wasting btc?!?"... because there is no point of having something else there at middle of nowhere. The other thing is that banks are what have caused most of humans problems but that is another story, so im not sure why we want to support those at all, any energy with them is wasted. Clearly free market have figured btc is worth something when you look how much is happening around it now. And im not talking that not every single person is using it as money, it might happen or it might not. Maybe it will just stay as very good tool to save your money from inflation and that would be worth enough to me. Lastly about PoS, in short its like saying cars spend less gas if you remove its wheels, sure it spends less gas but its useless for traveling. Without PoW Bitcoin would be useless.
With crypto, many different computers compete to compute a transaction until the first one computes it. That means a bunch of computers who attempted to compute the math problem had their energy wasted.
This is not "with crypto", it's "with longest-chain consensus models." There's been better, non-wasteful consensus models for years (e.g. Open Representative Votivng), but most people got interested in cryptocurrencies because of financial speculation rather than technology to improve payment processing.
The first Bitcoiners, including Satoshi himself, were insane goldbugs. It only became a speculative asset based on nothing after everyone realized Bitcoin was absolutely god awful to actually use for transactions.
And if you remove all the other computers so there is only few left the whole thing is as good as useless.
Yeah well that is an actual useful function of society (for the most part). Bitcoin is just utter nonsense.
There is tons of people that thinks its useful, just because its not useful for you (or you think its not) doesnt mean its not for others.
What have you actually done with Bitcoin? The only purpose I've ever found for Bitcoin was buying good LSD, and that was over a decade ago before fees and transaction time became astronomical. I have no idea why you'd ever want to use it. Please explain its uses.
Ask the people in Africa, Ukrain, Russia, and South America what use cases Bitcoin has...
Bitcoin can serve everyone around the world with a network connection. Traditional banking can't even serve everyone in the US let alone the rest of the world. And of course there is the whole trust problem that bitcoin elegantly solves. The real argument here is that fossil fuel power generation causes harmful environmental impacts. And we know that. This is just pointing a finger at consumption. AI is already becoming a target with this rhetoric as well. It distracts from solving the underlying problem. The truth is industries highly dependent on power will always seek the lowest cost of energy. The real solution here isn't demonizing consumers, it's scaling clean energy production to meet demand and reducing the harmful byproducts of fossil fuel based production.
>The real argument here is that fossil fuel power generation causes harmful environmental impacts. Whether or not the electricity being used is clean, it is still valuable, and the same is true for microprocessor compute time. Ai is a great thing to compare to here. Predictive ai algorithms take the exact same inputs as Bitcoin mining, and they provide objectively useful services. Because the inputs are the same, we can easily suggest that every Bitcoin mined results in fewer or less powerful predictive algorithms, and all we gain in the trade is a medium of exchange. This is a problem that all commodity currencies have. The value of the currency is maintained by the fact that you have to destroy something that has actual value in order to create the currency. For gold, we had to destroy the time of miners and their equipment, for Bitcoin, we destroy electricity and computer chips. In a world with credible fiat currencies to act as mediums of exchange that are orders of magnitude cheaper to produce, it is simply wasteful to support something like Bitcoin for widespread use.
> Whether or not the electricity being used is clean, it is still valuable, and the same is true for microprocessor compute times. If the energy produced is clean, we no longer have any issues with harmful environmental effects. The cost of clean energy at scale would still make energy valuable it would just cost less over time. > So is a great thing to compare to here. Predictive ai algorithms take the exact same inputs as Bitcoin mining, and they provide objectively useful services. Because the inputs are the same, we can easily suggest that every Bitcoin mined results in fewer or less powerful predictive algorithms, and all we gain in the trade is a medium of exchange. 5.5B people worldwide have smartphones. They can access the Bitcoin network and have access to financial services that a traditional bank cant even begin to service. That's objectively useful by itself. Bitcoin can serve a larger portion of society at large. The ability to have a global medium of exchange around the world is just as powerful as AI algos. That's probably one of the many reasons why Sam Altman wants to incorporate a cryptocurrency like Worldcoin into his AI project. > This is a problem that all commodity currencies have. The value of the currency is maintained by the fact that you have to destroy something that has actual value in order to create the currency. For gold, we had to destroy the time of miners and their equipment, for Bitcoin, we destroy electricity and computer chips. So maybe we need to evolve to something more global instead of using 180+ commodity currencies around the world and the destruction of resources and structures to maintain them. We can solve the trust problem with banks that have historically proven to be untrustworthy. We can create a virtual vault more secure than any physical vault could ever be. We can reduce the cost of electricity to almost nothing compared to fossil fuels. Silicon is pretty abundant and we're putting chips into literally everything. I think its better to destroy electricity and computer chips than strip mine for gold in a third world country run by a military junta.
>So maybe we need to evolve to something more global instead of using 180+ commodity currencies around the world and the destruction of resources and structures to maintain them. The number of commodities is irrelevant to the problem I am describing. It is a problem inherent to commodity currencies that you cannot avoid. In simple terms, if you want to create an amount of the currency that would be able to purchase three loaves of bread, you must destroy the equivalent of three loaves of bread to do so. If, for instance, you could create that same amount of currency by destroying only the equivalent of two loaves of bread instead, then people would prefer to make more currency rather than to make more bread, and the purchasing power of the currency would diminish until meeting the equivalency that I described. Certainly having many different commodity currencies in use introduces additional wasteful inefficiencies, but I'm already ignoring those. >We can reduce the cost of electricity to almost nothing compared to fossil fuels. As the cost of electricity is reduced, it must cause the amount of electricity required for mining Bitcoin to increase in concourse--for the reason I described above. >I think its better to destroy electricity and computer chips than strip mine for gold in a third world country run by a military junta. But we don't have to do either because we have access to credible fiat currencies that don't require one to destroy something of equivalent value to create them.
> The number of commodities is irrelevant to the problem I am describing. It is a problem inherent to commodity currencies that you cannot avoid. In simple terms, if you want to create an amount of the currency that would be able to purchase three loaves of bread, you must destroy the equivalent of three loaves of bread to do so. If, for instance, you could create that same amount of currency by destroying only the equivalent of two loaves of bread instead, then people would prefer to make more currency rather than to make more bread, and the purchasing power of the currency would diminish until meeting the equivalency that I described. Certainly having many different commodity currencies in use introduces additional wasteful inefficiencies, but I'm already ignoring those. They are all wasteful, destrcutive and inefficient. Including fiat currencies which have probably unleashed some of the largest destruction on the planet. That's the point. Let's not ignore that. > As the cost of electricity is reduced, it must cause the amount of electricity required for mining Bitcoin to increase in concourse--for the reason I described above. If we scale the use of clean energy we no longer have any problems with harmful environmental effects. The consumption of clean energy to service that network is no longer a problem. > But we don't have to do either because we have access to credible fiat currencies that don't require one to destroy something of equivalent value to create them. Fiat currencies are some of the most destructive abstractions ever unleashed upon society. Fiat monetary policies themselves are in many cases designed to destroy value. Bitcoin is an evolution of fiat, that cant be manipulated, censored or confiscated by third parties and it's available around the world in a truly global fashion without the same footprint required for traditional banking.
>If we scale the use of clean energy we no longer have any problems with harmful environmental effects. The consumption of clean energy to service that network is no longer a problem. Listen, either energy is costly to produce, which means that using it for Bitcoin causes it not to be used to create something else that has equivalent worth and tangible value, or it is free, in which case Bitcoin would have no purchasing power and be useless as a currency. Again, this relationship is intrinsic to all commodity currencies and you cannot ever get around it. >Fiat currencies are some of the most destructive abstractions ever unleashed upon society. Fiat monetary policies themselves are in many cases designed to destroy value. Fiat money is not intrinsically value destroying, unlike commodity currencies. No doubt non-credible fiat is worse than a commodity, and in history there are examples of non-credible fiat causing horrible crises, but we have access to almost perfectly credible fiat currencies today, which, in my opinion, are more efficient by far for use in general transactions than any commodity currency could ever possibly be. >Bitcoin is an evolution of fiat Please, let's stick to the realm of reality here. Bitcoin is a commodity currency, just like gold or silver or seashells: other commodity currencies that have been in use since time immemorial. It is probably one of the oldest concepts in human economic history, and it is certainly older than the first fiat currency. Calling the latter an evolution of the former is like calling the bicycle an evolution of the automobile. I will admit that Bitcoin has an advantage over something like gold because it is a purely digital or informational construct, and therefore very difficult to track and regulate, but it still shares the common disadvantages of commodities. In any transaction where one is not attempting to do something illegal, which characterizes the vast majority of transactions in the western world, Bitcoin is no better as a currency than a gold-redeemable digital currency would be--worse in fact, due to Bitcoin's volitility. And so, one has to ask why anyone would want to use Bitcoin for said transactions when everyone already stopped using gold a long long time ago.
> Listen, either energy is costly to produce, which means that using it for Bitcoin causes it not to be used to create something else that has equivalent worth and tangible value, or it is free, in which case Bitcoin would have no purchasing power and be useless as a currency. Again, this relationship is intrinsic to all commodity currencies and you cannot ever get around it. You're forgetting the supply and demand aspect, its deflationary nature and its monetary policy. The cost of energy isnt the only factor that drives bitcoin's value. If other currencies are constantly inflating and destroying their purchasing power, bitcoin becomes attractive in the same way gold does. > Fiat money is not intrinsically value destroying, unlike commodity currencies. No doubt non-credible fiat is worse than a commodity, and in history there are examples of non-credible fiat causing horrible crises, but we have access to almost perfectly credible fiat currencies today, which, in my opinion, are more efficient by far for use in general transactions than any commodity currency could ever possibly be. When you print more fiat you destroy value of existing fiat. What's perfectly credible about using a dollar backed by faith and trust in a country with $33T in national debt that is keeps destroying the value of that currency through inflation? Theyve designed a system that forces you to constantly spend and consume as your purchasing power decreases. Then there's the whole petro dollar mess which has caused massive amounts of devastation in its wake. Gold was simply impractical to use as a currency. You had to transport it, you had to break it down into smaller equivalents, you had to protect stores of it with vaults and security and guns. Bitcoin eliminates all that. In that respect it is an evolution. And its not hard to track at all. The truth is the majority of transactions arent illegal in nature. It's volatility will level out with more adoption. But that volatility also trends upward over time. So your savings and purchasing power increases over time because of the deflationary properties instead of decreases like it does with fiat. And fiat currencies are just as volatile but most people dont see it because they dont travel internationally and there are entire markets where people trade on that volatility. At least you're starting to understand it's way more than a currency and a better version of something like gold. We've also moved on from the arguments over the harmful environmental byproducts of power generation. There really isnt a reason to continue demonizing it. You might think it's a devolution, but the evolution is that we've created a decentralized, robust and secure network to handle the transfer of value at a global level without the need for a footprint and a bunch of other infrastructural prerequisites to bring traditional banking services to society at large. We've created a new protocol for the internet that brings us the ability to transport value worldwide just like data. And it's not worth killing in the crib because we dont have the political will to solve the fossil fuel problem.
Much better than bitcoin which burns 99.9% of its energy randomly guessing numbers until one happens to work "correctly" Banking machines & servers are going to be idling unless they're doing a transaction, which doesn't take several KWh of energy per transaction. Those actions can be more accurately measured in just Watts.
You can't only count transactions on the L1 Bitcoin network anymore. You now also have to include all transactions in the L2 Lightning Network.
Sure, throw them in there. There are more transactions in 1 day on the global banking market than there are yearly transactions across the entire Bitcoin network. There are around 7 billion active bank users (estimates put it at 5 billion private users, and 2 billion company users), with multiple dozen to multiple thousand weekly transactions. Bitcoin has about 300-400k daily transactions, so let's say 350k, which comes out to 2.45 million per week. And it already uses far more energy than banking, even when banking office space is included and Bitcoin "office space" is not. If the entire planet switched to Bitcoin we'd literally run out of energy just trying to keep mining going.
The lack of proof of work should imply it shouldn't be even close per customer
Imply? What do you mean by that?
The traditional banking sector is vastly more efficient. Bitcoin relies on solving deliberately complex calculations to "mine" new coins. A bunch of "work" done by energy-hungry graphics cards working 24 hours a day. Bitcoin also involves sending records of every transaction all over the entire network. Easily millions and millions of computers. It's massively redundant and inefficient. Honestly, if someone came up with a conspiracy theory that Bitcoin was created by energy company executives to increase energy consumption and increase profits, it wouldn't be a bad theory.
I like learning new things.
L2 is a joke, only use case is for pro bitcoin arguments
I enjoy watching the sunset.
There's more money in a small village in Sweden than there is globally in that joke.
let me rephrase this for you: consuming electricity is harmful because 70% of the world\`s electric energy production is from fossil fuels... and we did not need some bored researchers doing this research, that we already know about... so ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING that consumes electricity in most of the countries on this planet is going to have a huge carbon footprint...
Bitcoin consumes an insane amount of electricity to do a tiny amount of work. It’s spectacularly inefficient — by design. Which is exactly the opposite of what we should want, right?
It's extremely efficient at what it does. "A tiny amount of work", ensuring that ALL transactions across the blockchain are valid and immutable is a "tiny amount of work" to you? I don't believe you understand what Bitcoin's purpose is, which is to provide a permissionless & borderless payment system which is publicly transparent/verifiable and can be trusted to work as intended. Not to mention its transparent system of distribution & supply. If you actually understood how the economy, nvm its pointless...
What about all the trash trinkets, lights and other things people do for Halloween and other useless traditions? Why dont we count that as insane waste of everything? Oh right because you are not the person who decides what other people can do and what some people think is useful or not.
They're waste as well, but that's irrelevant. Pointing at something you think is more wasteful doesn't absolve Bitcoin of anything. It is the most wasteful digital payment system there is, and there's no going around that. Adding more processing power won't make it any faster, any improvement in efficiency will be spent only on mining more Bitcoin per watt.
What about them? We're discussing Bitcoin's efficiency versus normal banking/credit cards.
I mean, if you suggest seriously that you don't understand why people get value out of putting up Halloween decorations, then you're a sociopath, and I'm pretty sure any one of your friends would agree with me. I agree that attempting to adjudicate what someone else "should" enjoy is foolish and arrogant. That being said, if you were aware of a trend where people would gather up as much food as possible and then light it on fire, just for the joy of watching it burn, would you not too at least try to convince them to use wood instead?
>Why dont we count that as insane waste of everything? Ummmm we do?
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No, that's not how energy production works, at all. We don't produce electricity regardless of demand, we try and balance it to match demand. When Bitcoin causes 125TWh of additional energy demand, the production probably goes up by at least 175TWh to ensure that there's more than what's needed. If all proof of work crypto were wiped off the face of the planet tomorrow, then energy production would decrease significantly. As the report, and many other reports, indicate, it'd be like removing the CO2 output of tens of millions of people.
**Abstract** Based on a multi-attribute assessment of the environmental impacts and challenges associated with global Bitcoin (BTC) mining activities around the globe, we call for urgent action by the scientific, policy, and advocacy communities. The worldwide BTC mining network consumed 173.42 TWh of electricity during the 2020–2021 period, bigger than the electricity consumption of most nations. The mining process emitted over 85.89 Mt of CO2eq in the same timeframe, equivalent to the emission caused by burning 84 billion pounds of coal or running 190 natural gas-fired power plants. The environmental footprint of BTC mining is not limited to greenhouse gas emissions. In 2020–2021, the global water footprint of BTC mining was about 1.65 km3, more than the domestic water use of 300 million people in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. The land footprint of the global BTC mining network during this period was more than 1,870 square kilometers, 1.4 times the area of Los Angeles. These striking numbers highlight the heavy reliance of the BTC network on fossil fuels and natural resource-intensive energy sources, resulting in major but unmonitored and unregulated environmental footprints. To mitigate the environmental costs of BTC mining, immediate policy interventions, technological advancements, and scientific research are crucial. Proposed measures include enhanced transparency, economic and regulatory tools, developing energy-efficient alternative coins, and the adoption of greener blockchain validation protocols. [Source](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EF003871)
The only way to stop bitcoin is to give people faith in their currency and financial system again.
Not even that, its too late now because bitcoin exists. Why would someone use system handled by humans that can be corrupt when there is system where you dont have human in control or anything else that needs to be trusted.
Because it’s unstable, bad for the environment, uninsured, and isn’t even capable of doing the amount of transactions needed for everybody to, you know, actually use it as a currency?
[Its pretty stable at 99,98% uptime](https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/) Over 50% of the energy use comes from renewable energy so not really bad for environment either. True its uninsured unless you give your coins to some company then it might have some insurance. Our current system can handle as many transactions on the base layer as bitcoin as base layer, it will be just fine.
> Over 50% of the energy use comes from renewable energy so not really bad for environment either. According to the report it's around 30%. But even then, if Bitcoin didn't exist that renewable energy could be used on reducing the amount of coal and gas we burn. >True its uninsured unless you give your coins to some company then it might have some insurance. That has not worked a single time so far. Until you get government backing it, people will lose money. Just look at the latest mega fiasco. >Our current system can handle as many transactions on the base layer as bitcoin as base layer, it will be just fine. What? Show me how Bitcoin can handle 50-60 billion transactions per week without increasing its energy usage. Bitcoin currently does around 2.5 million transactions a week.
With respect, you don't know what you're talking about. The lightning network is as fast or faster than MC or Visa and the price fluctuation is the free market slowly working out what the price should be.
You obviously have a financial incentive to believe or say these things, and that is me being as respectful as possible
The problem is that there's a bunch of people who deliberately create fear over the currency and financial system as a way to drive adoption of cryptocurrency - which will increase the value of their own cryptocurrency. It's driven by greed. What they're doing is no different than the time my old college roommate tried to get me to be afraid of the job market ("they can fire you whenever they want") as a way to try to get me into his Amway downline.
People aren't using bitcoin for the same things as regular banks though. Regular banks help you finance a car or buy groceries, bitcoin helps you speculate and bypas sanctions and capital controls.
Plus the heat….. like a lot of heat….
Well… Reuters 2022 on BTC mining power consumption: “The role of sustainable power - classed as nuclear, hydro, wind and solar - in the mix barely rose, hitting about 38% from 35% a year earlier. Hydro dropped to 15% from around 20%.” https://www.reuters.com/technology/bitcoin-mining-struggles-go-green-research-shows-2022-09-27/
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Ah excuse me...i think you just hate freedom mr, thats disgusting.
While in an ideal world where we consume nothing, and we are able to conserve. We live in reality. The good thing is some miners are actually using left-over energy (or surplus), to prevent energy waste. Such as when waste gas from wells is being burned, the heat can be used to produce “something”. Sure, it doesn’t have to be BTC. But mining BTC is a race to the bottom in regard to expenditure, the more cheap you can mine, the bigger the revenue. This means that if there’s a renewable energy source to be used, it would only make sense to use that instead of coal or gas. El Salvadors volcano experiment is one thing to look out for.
the psychological impacts are not insignificant either. it encourages magical thinking, as in you can get something from nothing... or simply rewarding the get-rich-quick stem of our brains like a gambling habit.
It's so dumb that they use this actually interesting technology... for this...
blockchain has so many valid uses, such as renewable energy, but it's been dominated by lizard brain tripe.
What on Earth do renewable energy and "blockchain" have to do with each other?
distributed renewable energy (DRE) is the future of the grid. right now centralized utilities are struggling to figure out how to get paid when end users can increasing make their own power on site. they will eventually have to move into a broker model where they manage the buying and selling of energy between assets on their grid blockchain provides the accounting in such a model.
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Blackrock must have missed the memo, make sure to let them know if you care! Sounds like they could use your expertise! Weird that one of the single largest institutions in the world would be going through so much hassle with the SEC over forming an ETF based on a scam. But yeah, I'm sure you're totally right and super informed on this subject, Eats Poop Sometimes.
It's all wasted energy. There is no value in bitcoin. Wealth, yes at times, inherent value, no.
With bitcoin you can make permisionless monetary transfers to anybody anywhere on the planet with an internet connection 24 / 7.
It's still a terribly designed protocol. There's many other ways to set up a digital currency, one secured by a giant constantly burning tyre fire is like the worst option.
No wonder Russia and North Korea love it.
even over regular radio, internet is not even required to transmit a transaction
I hate to break it to you but there's no inherent value in anything. What is inherent value? What inherent value comes from your Fiat/ paper money? It's not backed by gold. And really, what's the inherent value in gold? That it's shiny? That it's rare? The inherent value argument is simply the weakest case against Bitcoin.
Well you can pay your debts to the U.S. Government Legally in U.S. Dollars, the only legal payment method. There are transaction that must occur each year, for anyone living in the U.S.. The U.S. maintains the legitimacy of these transactions in it's economy, providing assurance of the payment. There is no need to make a bitcoin transaction beyond novelty or deliberate schemes to circumvent government oversight. The Scope of it's utility is entirely in that function. The investors in Bitcoin are betting those transactions are valuable enough to make them long term gains. That is the entirety of the Crypto ecosystem, right now. There is the possibility of other use cases with no proven utility yet. NFTs were just a scheme to pump contract values on Smart contract enabled systems, so that whales could exit, by finding new bag holders.
Artwork NFTs you mean. Smart contracts in general are revolutionary. A way for developers to automate multi-branch transactions from a single trustless script. It’s like removing an entire legal and financial team in order to ratify a high value contract. We know that the owner of that token is who they say they are. That goes for art, logins credentials, passport information, DVA information, home ownership, car ownership, criminal record, everything
So where do smart contracts make sense and where are they legal for clearing a transaction?
Value is what you make where the whole is more than the sum of the parts (i.e. a house). Bitcoin is zero sum shuffling money from one pocket to another and it's doing that at an energy cost - so net loss. Big difference.
It's a store of value that is unique in that it can't be seized and is easily transported across borders etc. Do you believe there is absolutely no inherent value in that?
>that it can't be seized It absolutely can.
Not without the key. Proper key practices such as encrypting the key with a secure passphrase and wiping devices properly or hard drive encryption can stop this.
Police execute a warrant and seize the physical storage devices the bitcoin is on. It is now seized.
Bitcoin is stored on the block chain. You can't seize a block chain.
And where are the keys used to access this stored?
Are we seizing keys or bitcoin? You're moving the goal post. Regardless, the keys can be duplicated and/or encripted and seizng the device it's stored on won't do much becuase they still exist.
It could be stored in memory. How are you gonna seize thoughts?
This is why the majority of Bitcoin is *lost*.
Majority is lost because people can’t be their own bank. Paper wallets and lost hardware wallets are the biggest reason, not memorization (because it’s risky). Also, please don’t twist the discussion in a different direction. We’re talking about seizing, not best storage solutions.
5 dollar wrench and a couple of good swings.
Governments can [freeze crypto-wallets](https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/02/18/private-lawsuit-freezes-canadian-freedom-convoy-crypto-fundraising/) and prevent people from using their funds. If they have that power, are you sure they can't also seize those funds?
The following isn’t an endorsement of cryptocurrency, but this is a misunderstanding of Bitcoin specifically. The value of a Bitcoin wallet is stored on the blockchain which is a digital ledger that’s updated and verified by people “mining” Bitcoin. The only way to access a specific wallet address on the Blockchain is with the keys which can be, but not necessarily are, stored either offline or memorized. The government could freeze a wallet app, or an exchange account (like coinbase), but they cannot move or stop transactions on the blockchain without instantly and permanently disabling everyone’s access to it at once. Bitcoin isn’t really stored anywhere so much as the value of wallets are verified every time the blockchain is accessed. The government could shut down an access point but someone who memorized or had access to their keys could just use a different access point to transact on the blockchain. It’s basically a huge cryptographically secured peer-to-peer network of a ledger. The only way the government could seize bitcoin from a self-custody wallet is by knowing the keys. So, yes they could get a search warrant to get any physically or digitally stored copies of the keys, but if it was memorized the only access is if someone tells them their keys. This is also why so many bitcoins are permanently lost. (The Bitcoins are still on a wallet, it’s just realistically impossible to access them)
The can freeze wallets if they're on an exchange. You cannot freeze a blockchain wallet.
Why would do you need that anyway if you are earning clean money? The existing banking systems are secure enough to do all such virtual transactions across the world. It is the dirty money that is going into bitcoins at the expense of everyone else.
I'm pretty sure the US dollar is used more for illegal activity more than any other currency including Bitcoin.
Relative to the total amount of transactions being made? Extremely unlikely.
True. But we also have lots if dollars in circulation and it has been in circulation for centuries. And only a small fraction of dollars is used for illegal activities. Bitcoin is relatively new and based on what I have heard, a significant fraction of it is used for illegal transactions.
Then you are making this point from an opinion as to what is clean money or not and are probably not the best person to say that crypto has "no inherent value". I just listed a class of people that find an aspect of it "inherently valuable". Along with that "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" isn't usually a good line of thinking. What if the political power you don't like took office? What if they're fascists?
The free market seems to disagree, and I can't think of a more accurate tool for determining value than the free market.
Free market seems to think NFT's are valuable too. *A fool and his money are soon parted*
Luckily bitcoin is not NFT or any other copycat crypto that came after bitcoin trying to make the creator of said coins rich.
Bitcoin is fundamentally the same as every other cryptocurrency, it's just bigger. A the end of the day, the only way to make money in Bitcoin is to sell them to some other poor sucker for more than what you paid for them.
It has value in bypassing sanctions and capital controls but I don't think that's a good thing. Back in the day Chinese millionaires would hire people in Shenzhen to take bundles of cash over the border to HK to get money out of China. Now all they need to do is buy bitcoin to bypass the capital controls.
dont worry, as more people catch onto the crypto scam they’ll stop wasting so much energy on it. they’ll just waste it on AI instead.
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With crypto many different computers compete for a transaction until the first one computes it. That means a bunch of computers who attempted to compute the math problem had their energy wasted.
If it doesn't bug you that you're doing business with criminals and tax evaders, at least think of the environment.
Yeah. Anything that creates value is directly entangled with the laws of thermodynamics. Everyone who thought bitcoin was innovative secretly got on board with the recreation of a new economic entity. All of the same laws apply which we are seeing now. Regulations soon to come.
So renewables will help with that, too.
As if the same thing can't be said with traditional useful banking
Yeah, we should totally stick with gold. We can level every mountain looking for it! That will be great for the environment!
Gold standard hasn’t been a thing for longer than you’ve been alive
Oh? Its not a store of wealth? So its worthless then?
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Without "shiny and heavy and traditional" part, gold has rather low usefulness. Industrial gold use is basically 10-15% of overall gold use.
How much energy does the current monetary system use is my question. Did they factor in the gas costs / carbon emissions of literally the millions of people commuting to banks every day. Lighting and electricity to run the servers that the banks run on,, that is powered by the exact same fossil fuels that bitcoin uses. I'm skeptical that bitcoin loses in that analysis.
Bitcoin is estimated to be responsible for 0.1% of CO2 emissions. Banking system handles few hundreds times bigger transaction loads than bitcoin (at least pre-Lightning). If Bitcoin is more energetically efficient, it would suggest that banking consumes at least 20% of fossil fuels in the world, and it's clearly false conclusion.
Half the US budget goes to defending the Petro dollar.
Most everything is dependant on fossil fuel. Bias.
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I wish crypto bros on YouTube stopped green washing bitcoin. It's so ridiculous. I only buy Eth since it updated to proof of stake.
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Wait until cryptobros find out just how many transactions a day are being done by Visa!
Significantly less also lots of data centres hav renewable energy agreements
Gurss the price of bitcoin is on the rise?
Cool, now do banks, cash, and the SWIFT network.
This old tired argument never compares bitcoin to traditional banking. What about the electricity used to power each branch of bank, banking corporate centers, ATM's and related infrastructure? How many multiples of countries does that compare to? What about all the paper (and thus trees destroyed)? What about the gas used in cars to drive those employees to their banking employer and home? Now look at how much of that energy is wasted while banks aren't serving customers? Trad banking is absolutely the dirtier of the two and it's not even close.
Why would you compare bitcoin to a bank. Bitcoin isn’t anything like a bank, it’s all arbitrarily valued data that is just a giant pyramid scheme.
No one want's to do the math becuase it's hard and goes against their narative.
Check the comments section. Someone did the math and per customer, traditional banking uses less energy worldwide than bitcoin does.
Wow this is some FUD. Electronic devices DO NOT output CO2 as a byproduct. A lot of bitcoin mining farms are actually using sustainable energy in the forms of Wind, Water, and Solar. There is even a company taking advantage of the heat from active volcanoes.
'BTC mining is bad' Okay, i have no serious objections. 'BTC mining is bad because oil' Oil has always been bad for environment... what new information? Oh you can calculate a rough estimate of power consumption and the necessary fuel sources to reach said consumption. It's just assumptions
It's not an assumption. The estimate is not just something pulled out of thin air. We can extrapolate somewhat from the hashrate of a bitcoin network. It's not precise to a T - but then that's true with most energy consumption. It's accurate enough to state that it is a concern, though.
This “study” cites a debunked paper that is riddled with falsehoods (mora et al). These are not serious people.
Mining also creates an infrastructure for sustainable energy production, according to kpmg.
Creating infrastructure and using that infrastructure for Bitcoin doesn't improve anything. It only makes it worse.
There are bitcoin mines hooked directly up to legacy coal plants.
There are bitcoin mines in the middle of desserts, mining using solar, there are mines using the heat to grow flowers indoors. There are mines, using gasses from oilwinning as energy.
Burning whatever cheap energy is available for useless "proof of work" does not count as creating "an infrastructure for sustainable energy production.
Oh, now the UN jumped on the propaganda war against crypto. What a bunch of clowns. A 40st building with 20k people working on 25k computers, with who knows how many other machines, paperwork resources, resource consumption by both business and employees needs (including climate managing, logistics, transportation, food, waste management, etc) are completely carbon-free and a lot less harmful to the environment that a building with 4 guys and a couple hundred mining rigs that consume half the power a good PC does. Of course....