
The electricity for 1BTC trade could power a house for a month - niyikiza
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/the-electricity-required-for-a-single-bitcoin-trade-could-power-a-house-for-a-whole-month/
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basicplus2
This shows the ultimate futility and failure of crypto currencies.

bitcoin could consume as much electricity as Denmark by 2020

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-
co...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-could-
consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020)

~~~
niyikiza
I believe it's more of a challenge than "ultimate futility and failure". An
alternative to PoW would reduce the problem by much.

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westurner
The article seems to imply that a 1BTC transaction requires 200kWh of energy.

First, what is the source for that number?

Second, what is the business interest of the quoted individual? Are they
promoting competing services?

Third, how much energy does the supposed alternative really take, by
comparison?

How much energy do these aspects of said business operations require:

\- Travel to and from the office for n employees

\- Dry cleaning for n employees' work clothes

\- Lights for an office of how many square feet

\- Fraud investigations in hours worked, postal costs, wait times, CPU time
and bandwidth to try and fix data silos' ledgers' transaction ids and time
skew; with a full table JOIN on data nobody can only have for a little while
from over here and over there

\- Desktop machines' idle hours

\- Server machines' idle hours

With low cost clean energy, these businesses are profitable; with a very
different cost structure than traditional banking and trading.

~~~
westurner
Anyone want to guess how much the quoted concerned party has invested in
cryptocoins / cryptocurrencies? Guy's prolly just sitting at home, shorting
it, just waiting for the price to move.

By comparison, with an ICO, there's less back-and-forth on the cap table.

"My job is to feed the machines."

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betawaffle
I'm just going to leave this here:
[https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-
many-...](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many-
kilowatts-to-get-an-electric-747-8-airborne)

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kentt
The second line was factually incorrect, the first was click bait. Did it get
better after that?

~~~
niyikiza
Well, it's not a technical paper but it raises valid concerns worth
discussing. What's your take on it?

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petre
It can consume electricity that is lost (by transport through power lines,
batteries full on off grid PV systems) or sold at a loss due to weak demand.

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amitprayal
Criminal waste of energy

~~~
CyberDildonics
I'm sure it seems like that if you don't understand that the energy consumed
has almost no correlation to the number of transactions being put through.

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beingmyself2
Those who missed the boat and now hope everyone else's fun will be spoiled
fail to notice through their already shaky logic that this problem is being
solved. Proof of stake means we don't have to waste nearly as much electricity
for a functioning cryptocurrency. There are already coins using PoS
successfully (Lisk, Peercoin). Ethereum plans to move to proof of stake. Can
we stop beating this dead horse?

