What an absolutely absurd waste of resources. There should be some sort of enforcement/restrictions of energy usage from these clowns.
Removed by mod
Up next: AI
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Whatever the motives of those that wrote it, the fact that cryptocurrency uses power wastefully to ensure validity is absurd when we want to reduce climate change.
The concept is great. The execution needs altering.
The concept is great.
Is it? I really don’t see how cryptocurrency is a good thing for humanity. The name is a problem in and on itself, since it’s not currency and can not scale up to be used as one.
I mean this is exactly what the established banking system has spewed out in propaganda all of which have been thoroughly debunked. Only difference is Bitcoin is not a company and does not have a propaganda department to counteract. It relies on people educating and thinking for themselves.
This isn’t propaganda and none of this has been debunked. Bitcoin can only handle a theoretical maximum of 7 transactions per second (in practice it’s closer to between 3 and 5) and I’m not aware of any cryptocurrency that can handle more than 60 transactions per second. Regular financial transaction networks meanwhile handle thousands of transactions per second while consuming far less power (both in terms of electricity and computing power).
So you have not heard of the lightening network?
In practice, How many transactions are done on the lightning network before returning to the main network?
Bitcoin lightning solves this scaling problem by keeping transaction data off-chain but using the main chain for security. You lock up liquidity in lightning and then you can send infinite transactions through that channel between you and anybody else on the planet who uses lightning. Transactions settle in seconds and cost pennies in fees. Often less than a single penny.
Lightning adds a layer of complexity and additional failure points. It also centralizes power in the bitcoin network even further.
It doesn’t actually change anything about the fact that Bitcoin isn’t a currency: Despite the fact that it’s claimed to be theoretically able to handle millions of transactions per second, it only handles a few million per month or about half of all Bitcoin transactions after having been around for six years (and most transactions aren’t payments for goods or services). The vast majority of online commerce does not accept bitcoin nor any other cryptocurrency, which isn’t surprising, given that their values fluctuate wildly. Currencies need, acceptance and stability, neither of which applies to anything crypto.
Lightning adds a layer of complexity and additional failure points. It also centralizes power in the bitcoin network even further.
Complexity, sure, though honestly I find the UX simpler than on-chain payments due to instant confirmation times. It doesn’t centralize power at all. Lightning nodes are just as easy to run as Bitcoin nodes, you don’t need high-powered servers to run them. They are dependent on main chain for security, which is highly decentralized as it is. If anything, it increases decentralization as miners are no longer the only ones who can earn BTC for supporting the network. Miners must buy expensive ASICs, but you can run a lightning node off a 10 year old laptop and that isn’t something that will change anytime soon. Bitcoin started with one of the most equitably distributed resources in the world: energy. And now it’s adding the second most equitably distributed resource in the world: bandwidth and storage.
It doesn’t actually change anything about the fact that Bitcoin isn’t a currency: Despite the fact that it’s claimed to be theoretically able to handle millions of transactions per second, it only handles a few million per month or about half of all Bitcoin transactions after having been around for six years (and most transactions aren’t payments for goods or services).
Hard things to get hard numbers on due to the opacity of lightning payments. The theoretical maximum is not based on some made up fantasy, it’s based on decent back-of-the-napkin math on how it can scale. The base chain’s scalability issues were due to limited blockspace, lightning does not have that problem, there are no real scaling limits on it as a result except “the storage and bandwidth of whatever portion of the internet participates in it” which is massive.
The vast majority of online commerce does not accept bitcoin nor any other cryptocurrency, which isn’t surprising, given that their values fluctuate wildly. Currencies need, acceptance and stability, neither of which applies to anything crypto.
Determining value relative to other currencies is a single API call, that is not complicated. The reason they don’t accept it is due to lack of usability for many online merchants in their integrated platform and the belief that many users would prefer not to pay in crypto. Which is weird considering 1 in 5 Americans own crypto, which is a number that continues to grow. I think a lot of them dropped support due to high on chain fees, but lightning has solved that to the point that accepting lightning it 10-1000x cheaper than credit cards for a merchant. That’s a savings they can pass on partially to customers as well, which means customers can be incentivized to use Bitcoin. We are just now seeing the effects of that. At the same time, many online merchants do accept and even prefer cryptocurrency. Same with many online contractors. PayPal is a royal pain to use, and so are most other platforms for online international payments. There are some items I would refuse to sell online with PayPal due to rampant buyer fraud and chargebacks. Same reason why when you go on Facebook marketplace everybody refuses to take venmo for so many items.
How many merchants is enough until people are satisfied Bitcoin is actually useful? Idk. As far as I can tell, from Bitcoin detractors, basically all of them. Transaction volume grows, on average, over time, and that trend has not been broken yet. Fees also grow on main chain, which indicates increased demand for chain space since supply has not changed there.
You’ve clearly never tried to send money between countries that dont have an interconnected bank system. Or has your credit card stolen. Or has to make large transactions outside the bank system, say for a car. Or used PayPal.
The concept of sending money without requiring a third party to be trusted is great. It should not be a store of wealth.or a gambling machine. Enabling cash transfers is it’s only purpose. And that concept is good. And what is cash, but government sanctioned ways of transferring currency. The name is apt.
The need for power is to make it extremely difficult to take over the network. If the power needed was minimal, 1 person or group could easily take over. Power is what keeps it secure and as we enter the AI and quantum computing age, blockchain tech and how they are secured is one way to protect ourselves. Centralized databases are sitting ducks as we have seen with the amount of hacks going on at an increasing pace.
No, it needs non-useful computation to make it more and more difficult to mine. This needs more and more power to do. The power wastage is not required, but is a side effect. There are other methods of securing digital currency. Bitcoin should be seen as a proof of concept at this stage, rather than a complete technology.
The problem is trying to prevent concentration of power and ensuring new good faith actors can enter the ecosystem at any time on a similar footing.
The irony is that the more widespread it is, the less likely for any one entity or group of entities to have control, yet the more total power is being consumed.
The need for power is to make it extremely difficult to take over the network.
This used to be true. Mining pools have now concentrated that governance and specialized hardware has removed the ability for the everyman to mine.
2nd and 3rd generation blockchains will provide the growth in use cases and adoption.
Bitcoin’s unique selling point it it’s price. It is tulips2.0
Ummm if you follow the links to the EIA’s report, it does not show their method of calculating
The report discusses a few methodologies for estimating the electricity consumption, and if you follow the trail of references, there’s a table of sales and use of electricity by sector. And the data in that table comes from "Form EIA-861, “Annual Electric Power Industry Report.”, Form EIA-861S, “Annual Electric Power Industry Report (Short Form)” and Form EIA-923, “Power Plant Operations Report”.
So the report discusses a few possible ways to estimate the crypto consumption by using overall sales and usage data. And they give references on finding that data.
What a total fucking waste.
Oh I don’t know. We are providing the NSA with a mapping to the low values of SHA256 hash algorithm. That could be useful.
2% still seems really high.
It’s absurdly high.
Context: The US consumed ~4 Trillion kWh for 2022. If you take 2% of that, you get 80 Billion kWh.
oh so more then 160,000,000,000 lightbulbs.
And less than 0.00000001% goes to Ethereum
ThIs Is GoOd FoR bItCoIn
How much electricity goes to normal financial institutions though?
A tiny fraction by comparison, given the amount of transactions they handle per second (Visa alone handles thousands per second whereas bitcoin only does 3-7 transactions a second). Either way, I wouldn’t mind seeing the stock market and the vast amounts of effort wasted on that bullshit getting shut down.
It’s estimated the finance industry issues about 260 TWh, JUST Bitcoin alone uses 114 TWh. So Bitcoin is using a little less than half as much energy as the entire financial industry.
Bitcoin is orders of magnitude less efficient than traditional finance.
The entire “web 3.0” scam has basically been selling “databases but worse” to people who don’t know what a database is
Dunno but probably worth it for the amount of transactions they process.
Pay your taxes in buttcoin and I’ll tell you the answer.
Eth has moved to staking, which is good for the environment because it doesn’t have a bunch of computers competing for transactions, unlike bitcoin - instead the network picks a computer for the transaction and takes staked coin if the computer does something nefarious to the transaction. The problem though is that staking requires coins / money. Mining requires electricity and can make money (albeit pennies depending on your setup and electricty costs). For this reason, it’s not just bitcoin that’s a problem, but a whole bevy of other mining-based coins like bitcoin cash, cudos, etc. That problem (the desire for folks to spin up new farms to mine crypto coins which they can mine using the spare CPU/GPU cycles) is likely not going to go away soon.
Does someone feel like giving me an ELI5 why Bitcoin mining eats up so much electricity these days? Is it just because the problems the machines need to solve have gotten more complex? Do other cryptos tax the resources as bad? Is there a viable crypto that would be considered “green” at this point?
Sorry for overboarding my questions if anyone even attempts to answer this lol
All crypto is essentially designed around competition for who gets to be the one mining it. Things escalate, and that’s how you end up with these ridiculous crypto farms that use as much power as entire cities. No crypto currency is “green”. And UNLIKE cars, lights or banking, crypto serves no purpose, it’s currency that doesn’t get spent, it’s basically just there to fuel speculation for tech bros.
Crypto is a complete waste of energy, it’s not ‘big money spinning Bitcoin as negative’, it’s just objectively idiotic, don’t listen to that comment.
If you haven’t, I recommend watching Dan Olson’s documentary “Line Goes Up” on Youtube.
It is the cost of securing the network. It is intentional as if it was low power and easy to mine, 1 person or organization could take over the network and thus it would loose its decentralization. Nothing wrong with using power as long as it is green. No one is complaining about how much energy social media uses, or electric cars, or the fiat banking systems or all the lights left on etc etc. Power usage is not the issue here, it is power generation. You best believe that big money is spinning Bitcoin as negative as possible as it is a threat to their establishment. Don’t be a sucker for the BS.
It still a problem if it’s using green power as it’s preventing that green power from replacing fossil fuels in more useful and essential parts of the economy. Therefore essentially increasing demand for fossil fuels. Additionally by increasing the nations total energy use it’s making the task of decarbonising energy just that little bit harder.
Energy use is going up with or without crypto. It is a solvable problem. We just have to have the will. The focus should be on more green power, not restricting those who use it already.
Yeah, but the problem is that the green energy could have gone to powering a hospital or a factory, something actually useful. But instead it’s going to crypto. The hospital and the factory still need power and they are likely to pull it from a fossil fuel source. Essentially ’green’ crypto mining is creating demand for fossil fuels making it not actually green. Also we don’t have the time for our energy transition to be slowed down by crypto. Especially considering how utterly useless it is.
You can make this argument with anything that demands electricity. This is how we generate full stop. Anything else is a distraction that propaganda has placed in your mind.
The problem with green energy is that it produces on its own schedule, divorced of when people actually want electricity. Bitcoin miners are “buyers of last resort”. They have to compete with every other miner on the planet, they don’t buy electric at peak usage hours (which is when you fire up the non-renewables to meet demand). If anybody else was there to buy that electricity, Bitcoin miners don’t. They can only afford the cheapest electricity and electricity which has nowhere else to go.
Bitcoin mining is part of the green revolution. By always having a buyer of last resort, it makes it easier to invest in renewable infrastructure knowing that somebody will always buy the power even if demand isn’t ordinarily there to meet supply. It allows you to build your grid out to be almost entirely renewables. It’s a form of energy storage. And it means when regular people buy power, it’s cheaper, because they don’t have to make up for that time period when electricity was being produced but there was nobody to buy it. Regular people don’t have to subsidize the cost of a solar panel farm that is only useful for a few hours a day when demand is at the peak and otherwise produces energy there is no use for.
Price goes up, chances go down, more people/machines trying to mine, more electricity usage.
If you want to have rather green cryptos, you need to exclude those who rely on proof-of-work to secure the network.
Btw. Ethereum showed that a transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is possible.
If you’re not interested in the complexities that a lot of cryptos have, because you just want to transfer value efficiently, have a look at Nano (https://nano.org)I have heard nano uses a lot less energy compared to Crypto. Though how does it compare to visa/traditional payment systems?
Indeed it does use little energy, because its consensus is in some ways similar to PoS, so there’s no mining involved. If you want to know more about it, have a look here: https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/orv-consensus/
I believe that the Nano network can process around 100 transactions per second; at least that’s a result from throughput tests I remember. That’s way less than VISA can do, but a lot more than most other cryptocurrencies can process.
And in difference to the vast majority of cryptocurrencies, Nano has no built-in limits of transactions per second. As soon as hardware gets more powerful (faster CPUs, faster network connection, faster SSDs), Nano gets faster!The problem with nano is that it makes the assumption you can just give away transaction space for free. You can’t. If you do, spammers and other low-value uses take up all the space. The more space gets taken up, the more expensive it is to run a node, and the more centralized your network becomes. So what did they do when they ran into this problem? They added a proof-of-work component. The very thing they created their coin to avoid! If you look at almost all of these non-PoW cryptos, the only reason they can get better transactions per second or low tx fees is because they are very centralized or because nobody is actually competing for that space because nobody uses them.
Bitcoin solves this scaling/fee problem with Bitcoin lightning, which is a layer on top of the main chain. The main chain provides security, while actual transactions live on the second layer. Fees on lightning measure in the pennies and confirm instantly. The scale you can take lightning to is basically infinite. That’s actually useful as a currency.
Nano has alwas has a computational part associated with transactions. It once was used to prioritize transactions. Nano has evolved to a different prioritization scheme. That computational part will be phased out.
The lightning network is a silly attempt to merge bad parts of cryptocurrencies with bad parts of traditional finance: you need the electric energy guzzling Bitcoin and middlemen just like in traditional finance - or would you care to open and close your own channels, pay watchtowers etc. or “simply” use the channels of middlemen?
And how would you have cheap transactions without those middlemen, if operating your own channels requires transactions on layer 1?Nano has alwas has a computational part associated with transactions. It once was used to prioritize transactions. Nano has evolved to a different prioritization scheme. That computational part will be phased out.
We’ll see. It had to be “phased in” in the first place for a reason. Either you limit chain space and charge for it, or your chain grows an infinite size. There is no way around that problem.
And how would you have cheap transactions without those middlemen, if operating your own channels requires transactions on layer 1?
Because once a channel is opened, you can have essentially infinite transactions within it. So there is not a 1:1 relationship between channel opening/closing costs (layer 1) and transaction relaying costs (lightning). You need the layer 1 underneath to provide the security for the lightning transactions. Without layer 1, if somebody you are transacting with doesn’t follow the rules, you have no way to enforce the rules. Incentives are setup in such a way that it’s incredible rare you ever need to to go L1 to get that enforcement, since the deck is stacked against anybody who tries to break the rules.
I stated the reason for it being phased in: prioritizing transactions.
Tell me how to keep a channel open without risking loss of funds through flood and loot attacks.
- If you have a custodial wallet: Literally nothing, the wallet handles everything. You don’t even need to know what a channel is.
- If you have a self-custody wallet: Install it on your phone and make sure you can connect to the internet once every 5 days. You don’t have to open the wallet, some background service does everything automatically. Most wallets have built-in automatic watchtowers, so you don’t ever need to connect to the internet and somebody else watches the channel for you.
The attacks you can do in lightning are very limited. Basically the only one you can do is force close a channel and broadcast an old state on-chain. But your other party in the channel can correct you by publishing the more recent state. They have several days to do this. If you tried to cheat this way, not only do you not get the coins you wanted, but there is a penalty as well. You lose money. So nobody ever does it.
There’s about 200M USD currently locked up in lightning contracts. If you think you can hack lighting, have at it. The best hackers in the world have tried, they have all failed.
the power is needed because trustless distribsuted ledger is mathematically impossible.
So there has to be some mechanism that actually prevents someone being able to just change anything at will. This is the mathematical impossibility part. What bitcoin does to get around it is to (artificially) make it cost resources to write into the ledger by making everyone solve a random useless puzzle. And with each block depending on the one preceding it, changing implies also changing all the subsequent ones.
This of course assumes that the chain is ever growing, otherwise the attacker just needs time to catch up. Bitcoin’s security guarantees come from ensuring the network keeps growing faster than any one single entity could write to it. The only thing that keeps anyone from writing whatever is that they just can’t do it fast enough.
This implies that the network is only (probabilistically) secure as long as there are people mining it. If people stop mining, bitcoin instantly loses all of its security.
It then follows that the security of the chain depends on its ability to keep its users wanting to mine it. This is handled by it being a currency. something that humans would have a psychological need to hoard.
This is also why any non-cryptocurrency application of blockchain simply cannot possibly work.
the power is needed because trustless distribsuted ledger is mathematically impossible.
So there has to be some mechanism that actually prevents someone being able to just change anything at will. This is the mathematical impossibility part. What bitcoin does to get around it is to (artificially) make it cost resources to write into the ledger by making everyone solve a random useless puzzle. And with each block depending on the one preceding it, changing implies also changing all the subsequent ones.
This of course assumes that the chain is ever growing, otherwise the attacker just needs time to catch up. Bitcoin’s security guarantees come from ensuring the network keeps growing faster than any one single entity could write to it. The only thing that keeps anyone from writing whatever is that they just can’t do it fast enough.
This implies that the network is only (probabilistically) secure as long as there are people mining it. If people stop mining, bitcoin instantly loses all of its security.
It then follows that the security of the chain depends on its ability to keep its users wanting to mine it. This is handled by it being a currency. something that humans would have a psychological need to hoard.
This is also why any non-cryptocurrency application of blockchain simply cannot possibly work.
To those that say this is a waste and has no good purpose, you should know that most energy used by miners is renewables because renewables (especially during off-peak hours) are the cheapest source of energy.
Bitcoin’s value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There’s a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it’s actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that’s bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it’s a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you’d be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it’s available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are “unbanked” and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.
Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That’s to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it’s 1910. You just don’t see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it’s not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.
The energy used by miners is needed to secure the Bitcoin network. Historically, we have built currencies of incredibly inequitably distributed resources: precious metals, stable governments, etc. Bitcoin was the first one to build an economy based on pure energy. This stuff literally falls from the sky. While it is not perfectly equitably distributed, it is the most equitably distributed resource on earth that can be used for this purpose.
and if bitcoin wasn’t wasting all that energy, we could be powering actually useful stuff with that renewable energy. It’s not ok that energy is being wasted. It coming from renewable sources does not make wasting it on useless hash calculations is good. That energy could be used elsewhere, for useful work.
How much energy do banks use? Or remittance services like Western Union? Notice how you never see those numbers alongside these headlines. These articles are for clicks and outrage, not for serious discussion and weighing pros vs cons.
Sending transactions from A to B is “useful stuff”.
Read the article - some of the mines are deliberately near fossil fuel plants that had been tapering off production.
Those fossil fuel plants are the problem, the problem is not that somebody is willing to buy that electricity. Those fossil fuel plants probably only even still exist because of subsidies of fossil fuels. Renewables are cheaper, have been for quite some time, it’s just a matter of getting enough capital to build out their deployment in the first place and fight existing subsidies for fossil fuels.
That is a governance and policy problem, not a Bitcoin problem. Bitcoin finds the cheapest energy it can, which tends to come from renewables. So does every other energy-intensive industry on earth. Bitcoin is not unique in this aspect, but what does make it unique is the ability to rapidly turn on/off use of electricity according to current electric rates, unlike say a cement plant or factory.
Fake
You’re so low effort, why even bother.
Because it’s fake.
Source?
