
Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland' - saravana85
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48853230
======
stuffbyspencer
Someone created Bitcoin. It was a neat idea and people played with it. When
the first pizza was bought with Bitcoin, I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh
cool, real world use!"

Then Bitcoin bubbled. People panicked and jumped on board without researching,
Bitcoin went up a bazillion %. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh wow... Lots
of people want this!"

Then the bubble burst, price went down, people got mad, but, most importantly,
Bitcoin inspired others. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh huh... This is
really changing the world..."

Now, the problems are rearing their heads. Energy consumption, 51% attacks,
scalability issues, etc. I wonder how the creator feels? "Oh dear..."

[ this is, of course, assuming the creator is still alive ]

It just boggles my mind that this weird internet currency exposed something so
powerful in society: The intense desire for personal wealth that one truly
owns.

~~~
lumberjack
> The intense desire for personal wealth that one truly owns.

Not at all. It's the desire to get rich quick without lifting a finger. Also
philosophically speaking, "wealth that one truly owns" as in "wealth that is
not dependent on others" is not a thing. If your wealth is in Bitcoin, you are
trusting in fellow Bitcoin users and your wealth is entirely dependent on
their feelings about the cryptomarket. That is hardly a better safer store for
your wealth.

~~~
lone_haxx0r
I prefer depending on the market instead of the state dictating how much my
money is worth.

~~~
aidanlister
Why? The market is dumb (in a technical sense). The state is constantly
monitoring and adjusting. It’s like saying you trust a car with a brick on the
accelerator over a self drive Tesla.

Sure the Tesla makes mistakes and kills someone every now and then, but I’d
take that over the brick.

~~~
lone_haxx0r
> Why? The market is dumb (in a technical sense). The state is constantly
> monitoring and adjusting.

The market is relatively 'dumb', but its decisions are based on human
expectation and applied peacefully through voluntary transactions. The state
is relatively 'dumb' too, but it's also evil most of the time, and its
decisions use violence to be committed.

Also, when the market is wrong, some people may lose money (specially those
that were the most wrong), but the system corrects itself. When the state is
wrong, the error accumulates because the system can't self-correct.

>It’s like saying you trust a car with a brick on the accelerator over a self
drive Tesla.

The market is much like a machine learning algorithm. I say the market is the
Tesla AI and the state is a drunk driver.

------
Lerc
Interestingly, article cites a source that contradicts the headline. The Joule
paper puts the number at 45.8TWh. The main focus of the article has some guys
putting the number at 58.93TWh. That's quite the discrepancy.

In general I have come to treat anything that cites Alex de Vries with
suspicion. Amongst other things, the repeated discussion of the number of
transactions and the power expenditure. The power expenditure does not scale
by number of transactions. Associating the two without mentioning one is not a
factor of the other creates a misleading impression. Doing so repeatedly
suggests bad faith.

Bitcoin does use a lot of power though. On the other hand, the reward halving
does mitigate some of this. If you are confidant that Bitcoin won't increase
on average 20% every year forever then you should be happy that the problem
will fix itself.

The current problem comes from the value rise being greater than the reward
halving. To sustain that it has to double in value every 4 years _forever_.
The early growth has been higher than that, but to just sustain current power
levels BTC would have to be worth millions in a few decades.

~~~
phiresky
Exactly. People here always seem to assume that its power consumption will
increase linearily the more people it use (from what the whole network
consumes now).

But in the future, the amount of energy consumed for a single transaction will
tend towards exactly the fee paid for that transaction multiplied by the
cheapest electricity price in the world.

So either the transaction fees will be outlandish, or for a transaction that
costs $0.10 you will consume roughly 2kWh.

~~~
layoric
You make it sound as if it is reasonable for a transaction is to cost 2kWh,
that is a huge amount of electricity/energy. If anything that used that much
energy became the dominant means of payment, the average person would use more
energy in payments than they would in powering their home in a day.

Trip to the shops, but fuel, some take away and a few things online when you
get home and you’ve used 10-16 kWh of energy, multiple that by a population
(even a small one), and even the massive investment into renewables that there
is now will be quickly eclipsed.

Adding transactions that are so intensive to people’s everyday energy
consumption would be a huge step backwards IMO.

~~~
dr_win
Who is claiming that bitcoin transactions will be used by average person for
everyday payments?

Making a bitcoin transaction is like recasting gold bars - not something you
want to do often with small amount of gold. This will be done only for large
individual payments or for large settlement payments aggregating thousands or
millions of normal payments. Everyday payments will be performed on second or
higher layers (e.g. Lightning Network)

------
jmauritz
[https://medium.com/@hillpot/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-hurts-
the-...](https://medium.com/@hillpot/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-hurts-the-
environment-more-75193863dfb6)

gold vs btc, at least BTC energy expenditure can be patched / limited to only
renewables.

~~~
igravious
Neat! I wonder how they arrive at these numbers though?

I had a conversation with a non-techie friend the other day about
cryptocurrencies and she expressed scepticism about the technology because of
its immateriality or intangibility. Something about cryptocurrencies being
artificially constructs doesn't sit well with some non-techies. I mean, when
you think about it it's just as arbitrary that precious metals and gems have a
store of value/worth above and beyond their utility. I guess we're in a
transitionary period.

~~~
H8crilA
Eh, try to explain to people that money (as in USD) is the same thing as
Bitcoin, except in centralised databases (plus a very small portion in
portable pieces of paper/metal). There's a database in the FED that tracks who
has how many dollars (it's coarse grained, banks subdivide it into accounts
themselves). And new dollars are minted all the time when someone is issued
credit, ending their life when the credit is paid back.

This is not to defend Bitcoin, but it is mind boggling how few people ask
themselves "where does money come from, exactly?".

~~~
9HZZRfNlpR
I think this is the reason all sort of conspiracies regarding who controls the
money become so popular. People just use money, no time or reason to think of
those things or even why the world moved to fractual first place.

------
kmitz
Relevant info is at the end of the article :

"The electricity used for Bitcoin produces about 22 megatons of CO2 annually,
a study in the scientific journal Joule estimated. That is as much as Kansas
City in the US."

Bitcoin = Kansas City

~~~
mikekchar
Interesting: Kansas City = Switzerland??? A bit mindblowing if true.

------
thisisit
Oh I see it is that time of the year - People upvoting Bitcoin has breached $X
or Bitcoin energy consumption is equal to Y country stories.

And the discussions are also same old - People criticizing bitcoin, others
defending and then a small majority who feel quite smug about buying at $10.

Can we really stop upvoting stories which add zero value to what we already
know?

~~~
Tepix
Bitcoin's price is going up again, however its many severe problems remain
unsolved.

On the other hand, the climate crisis is more urgent than ever. Is a huge
waste of precious resources by something as useless as today's bitcoin really
tolerable by society?

My hope is that bitcoin is soon abandoned in favor of something more eco
friendly, scalable, usable and with better privacy. With a low bitcoin value
there will be fewer miners and less waste of resources.

------
scottlocklin
The last time some ding dong did this, it was Czech republic, and the math was
off by a factor of 10,000 or so.

Bitcoin, realistically, uses about as much energy as a popular video game. For
reasons which should be obvious.

------
hbbio
Does this energy consumption come more from mining (i.e. finding the new
bitcoins) or from transactions?

If the former, then the Bitcoin network should find a way to reward nodes for
transactions in a more environmentally-friendly manner since mining should (in
my understanding) disappear or become insignificant at some point.

~~~
cycrutchfield
Why would miners ever agree to that?

~~~
onion2k
The alternative is government regulation eg banning mining cryptocurrencies.

~~~
solveit
Bitcoin was literally designed for the express purpose of surviving that.

~~~
onion2k
In the sense that bitcoin miners can 'just' more their operations to mining-
friendly countries until there are no more mining-friendly countries, sure.
But _pragmatically_ Bitcoin would not survive a coordinated assault on it's
legality if enough countries decided it's too environmentally toxic.

Plus, there's no reason why _Bitcoin_ should survive. Another cryptocurrency
that's much more energy efficient would work just as well, so people could
move their money if regulation was likely. It's one of the existisitential
threats that Bitcoin faces in the long term.

------
founderling
The energy consumption is priced into the cost of holding and transacting
Bitcoins.

I wonder if it is any different with any other thing you pay for. Or if any
money you pay for anything ultimately results in energy being used up.

~~~
sddfd
That is all fine and good, but is it necessary at all (even if some people are
willing to pay for it).

~~~
solveit
At the moment, we don't have anything clearly better. But everyone except the
most hardcore Bitcoin maximalists believe some form of Proof-of-Stake will
work well enough. PoS will bring along a different suite of problems, but
requiring a nuclear power plant's worth of energy will not be one of them.

~~~
_Kristijan_
I would like to bring Open Representative Voting (ORV) into the game. On ORV,
every account can freely choose a Representative at any time to vote on their
behalf, even when the delegating account itself is offline. These
Representative accounts are configured on nodes that remain online and vote on
the validity of transactions they see on the network. Their voting weight is
the sum of balances for accounts delegating to them, and if they have enough
voting weight they become a Principal Representative. The votes these
Principal Representatives send out will subsequently be rebroadcasted by other
nodes. Open in this context means, that every account can be chosen as a
representative by every account.

------
tummybug
I know the most people on here have a terrible opinion of bitcoin and
cryptocurrency in general but I think a lot of the criticism based on energy
usage and transactions per second is in bad faith. When you consider layers
built on top of bitcoin (lightning network) this argument holds a lot less
weight.

~~~
ArthurBrussee
If every single transaction in the world was Bitcoin it would still be a
_ridicilous_ amount of energy by several orders of magnitude. It is totally,
fundamentally, broken

~~~
kerng
Just to play devil's advocate, how much energy could be saved by closing all
bank facilities and backend systems etc, in case they wouldn't be needed
anymore?

Would BTC mining consume more or less energy then today's mainstream
solutions?

~~~
viraptor
For a fair comparison, you'd have to match the current bank features first,
and they're simply not available in current cryptocurrency.

------
kerng
Just to play devil's advocate, how much energy could be saved by closing all
bank facilities and backend systems etc, in case they wouldn't be needed
anymore?

Would BTC mining consume more or less energy then today's mainstream
solutions?

~~~
Lutzb
Do not forget the energy expended by the employees necessary to run the bank,
i.e. housing, commutes, food, etc.

~~~
viraptor
Unless you plan to kill the ex-employees after closing the bank, I'm not sure
why this is applicable ;)

------
supergilbert
I have yet to see a technical subject that polarizes the HN crowd so much.

Interesting data point.

You know what they say about products that polarizes people..

------
vinni2
Which is why we need useful proof of work. There is no appropriate solution
yet. But I know researchers are working on it.

~~~
schoen
It's pretty hard to do. It appears that you need problems where (1) you can
generate a practically unlimited number of arbitrary instances, (2) of
arbitrary difficulty, (3) deterministically based on a random seed, (4) that
are roughly constant difficulty to validate, and (5) where a randomly-chosen
instance is likely to be useful to know a solution to.

~~~
jdijdhud
If someone thought those cycles could be put to better use they would pay out
bitcoins themselves to mining machines to convince them to run their
computation instead, it's straight arbitrage.

~~~
schoen
You might be able to convince a lot of cryptocurrency adopters to switch to
coins that were based on a useful proof-of-work (sometimes called "proof-of-
useful-work") even if the kind of useful work that secures the coin isn't one
that many people are currently paying for. After all, some present and
prospective adopters care a lot about externalities, whether ethically or out
of fear of future regulation or marketing.

A wonderful case would be where biomedical research somehow had an unlimited
and ongoing need for solutions to arbitrary, random simulation tasks (where it
was also relatively easy to confirm the correctness of an alleged solution).
This doesn't really seem to be the case, but cryptocurrencies' impact and
popularity would be improved quite a bit if it were!

------
arisAlexis
it's important to note that it should be compared with what it's supposed to
change: gold mining, bank stores, payment systems. Then the cost is less.

Also important that this is the first iteration of a technology that will
eventually be replaced with Proof of Stake systems which will be replaced by
X.

~~~
viraptor
There are already online only banks without physical presence in most places
and many countries don't tie their currency value to gold. The payment systems
are not great on either side of the issue.

~~~
gerikson
> many countries don't tie their currency value to gold

Is there any national currency still on the gold standard?

~~~
viraptor
It doesn't look like it. I wanted to stay on the safe side without research
:-)

But it's interesting - not really a gold standard, (they're pegged to USD) but
it looks like Lebanon has between 1/3 and 1/2 GDP worth of gold backing it's
currency.

------
gingabriska
But how much energy does a bank serving as many customers as bitcoin consumes?

~~~
supergilbert
That's the right question, how much energy does the current financial system
use, solely for our "basic" transactional needs (store/retrieve/send
payments).

Did anyone come up with an estimate?

~~~
pintxo
Back of an envelope maths:

bitcoin does some ~450k transactions/day [1]

Switzerland has some 8.5m people [2]

Let’s assume bitcoin is only used in Switzerland, meaning we get some 0.05
transaction per person per day, or in other words every citizen of Switzerland
may execute one transaction every 20 days. I have no numbers for how many
financial transaction swiss people perform per day, but lets use a
conservative estimate of one per day (think of the daily coffee paid by cc),
so that there are 8.5m transactions/day handled by the swiss banks.

Now, if the total energy budget of Switzerland would be going to running their
banking system (which it probably does not do) it would still be 20 times as
efficient as bitcoin.

[1]
[https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions)

[2]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland)

------
gdhbcc
This is not a bug, it's a feature.

~~~
realusername
It is a feature yes but that makes this technology very inefficient to process
transactions.

~~~
Mengkudulangsat
Bitcoins energy consumption has no correlation with its transaction
throughput.

Price goes up > People turn on more miners > Difficulty goes up > Less
efficient miners become unprofitable > People turn off more miners >
Difficulty goes down.

It's a self-correcting dynamic purely due to economics, not linked to usage.

~~~
sk0g
So ever since Bitcoin's creation, it has been using the exact same amount of
power? Because the transaction throughput surely has changed.

Do you not agree that, loosely, there is a correlation between transaction
throughput/ popularity/ real world usage, and the amount of people being happy
to invest time, effort, and money into mining?

~~~
viraptor
Throughput increased (from 0), since people started using it. But the maximum
throughput cannot increase without protocol changes. There are workarounds
like lightning network, but that's off the main blockchain. There's a hard
limit on how many transactions you can put in one block. More mining power
doesn't change that maximum.

------
techrich
This will be bad for global warming. All that extra energy being produced.

~~~
fareesh
I read somewhere that many of the larger mining operations use solar power to
make it affordable.

~~~
latchkey
Hydropower works at night.

------
r32a_
Another day, another anti-bitcoin article on HN.

~~~
xiphias2
It looks like HN has to be anti-Bitcoin while the adoption rate of Bitcoin is
tiny.

As more people adopt it, they will probably be less afraid of it / against it.

~~~
nikolay
Yeah, but more people are NOT adopting it. Plus, HN is a community of highly
intelligent people, who know technology, unlike the vast majority of Bitcoin
holders.

------
lone_haxx0r
Bring it on.

The net benefit of Bitcoin existing outweighs the energy consumption. If we
really care about the planet and all of that, then let's start by cutting down
our use of internal combustion engines first.

~~~
Tepix
> The net benefit of Bitcoin existing outweighs the energy consumption.

Says who? The laughable number of transactions and the huge energy required
per transaction are saying quite the opposite.

~~~
nikolay
Well, sickos need to be able to pay for child porn somehow. Without Bitcoin,
it just not possible. Chinese Commies also need to move their dirty money out
mainland China - how is this possible without Bitcoin? So, there are many use
cases for Bitcoin, but none of them are good for the planet!

------
shownedeadnnn
So Bitcoin cannot trivially be subject to a 51% attack, certainly not by
Sweden anyway.

~~~ So awesome, I have to make an account to see the dead comment. Way to go
HN mods.

~~~
nullandvoid
Hashing power is not directly equal to power consumption

Sweden may hypothetically purchase miners 2x more efficient than the average
miner and therefore need only half their countries power output.

In addition I would be surprised if Sweden can't source power from other
countries ( prove me wrong I'm not sure on this one)

~~~
masklinn
> In addition I would be surprised if Sweden can't source power from other
> countries ( prove me wrong I'm not sure on this one)

They absolutely can, though I think they've been mostly net exporters for the
last ~10 years.

According to [https://www.svk.se/siteassets/drift-av-
stamnatet/bilder/map-...](https://www.svk.se/siteassets/drift-av-
stamnatet/bilder/map-of-the-national-grid.pdf), Sweden has 7 HVDC (Denmark x2,
Germany x1, Poland x1, Lithuania x1, Finland x2) plus 2x 400kV to Denmark, 2x
to Finland and 4x to Norway (plus a 220kV).

------
modeless
Missing from all of the discussions about this is the fact that almost all of
the electricity is purchased with the mining reward, which is _temporary_. It
is cut in half every 4 years, and will eventually dwindle to nothing. The
amount of electricity Bitcoin miners can afford to buy therefore will fall.

Of course, until now that effect has been more than compensated by the
increase in the Bitcoin price. But that certainly can't continue forever
either, and so the electricity usage and carbon footprint of Bitcoin will
inevitably fall in the future.

~~~
gerikson
Mining rewards will be replaced by transaction fees. There will still be an
economic incentive to keep the hardware running.

~~~
modeless
But at that point the cost of the electricity consumption of Bitcoin will be
borne entirely by Bitcoin's users, who will not pay more than the value they
derive from use of the network. That would only fund a small fraction of
today's Bitcoin mining electricity consumption.

~~~
gerikson
> But at that point the cost of the electricity consumption of Bitcoin will be
> borne entirely by Bitcoin's users

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If a certain percentage of energy is used
by PoW, less is available for other purposes, and thus prices will rise for
all energy users.

~~~
modeless
My point is that Bitcoin users will not pay transaction fees that are anything
close to the current mining reward that is subsidized by inflation of the
Bitcoin money supply. Therefore when the subsidy inevitably falls, so will the
total income of all Bitcoin miners. And in the long term Bitcoin miners
collectively cannot afford to buy more electricity than their total income,
therefore their electricity consumption will also fall.

~~~
gerikson
Thanks for clarifying!

Fees are denominated in satoshis though, and even today the average USD amount
of fees is around $8,000 per block[1] (around 6% of the total reward). A 10x
increase of the BTC price will make that amount around the same as the current
total reward.

[1] [https://fork.lol/reward/fees](https://fork.lol/reward/fees)

~~~
modeless
Fees may be denominated in satoshis but unlike the block reward they are not
fixed. Users choose their fees at every transaction, and they will not pay
more than the value they derive from making transactions. The total value of
all fees paid is determined by the actual usage of the network, not the
Bitcoin price.

Of course today usage of the network is somewhat correlated with price, but
it's not directly proportional and the correlation will weaken in the future.

------
bobdamarley
The sensationalism ignores that this tends to be trapped pockets of otherwise
wasted surplus energy. Bitcoin creates a global energy arbitrage market for
the first time. Energy can't be transported long distance, but it can be used
to mine bitcoin. The benefits here are massive, including incentivizing cheap
green energy, or the use of mining for ambient heating.

~~~
tlb
"Energy can't be transported long distance" \-- Electric power is regularly
transported long distances with low loss. Total transmission losses in the US
are about 5%, and a lot of power is shipped 1000 km or more.

"Bitcoin creates a global energy arbitrage market for the first time" \--
There are existing energy arbitrage technologies, such as aluminum smelting.
The requirement is low capital cost with high energy cost, so you can have
plants that are idle most of the time, waiting for low marginal-cost energy.
Bitcoin mining isn't actually very good for this: the capital costs of rapidly
depreciating mining chips are quite high.

"Incentivizing cheap green energy" \-- every consumer of energy does this.
Consumers that run mainly during the day are much better at incentivizing wind
and solar.

"Mining for ambient heating" \-- also suffers from the problem that mining
chips are too valuable to leave idle, so you can't place them in homes and
only run them when it's cold.

~~~
latchkey
re: aluminum smelting... @see Coinmint [0]

In this case, the Moses Saunders dam [1] used to get a nice steady stream of
draw (necessary to keep the equipment operational) from the Alcoa plant, but
when it shut down that draw went away. Throwing a bitcoin mining operation
into the old facility is a great way of keeping things running smoothly.

    
    
      [0] https://www.coinmint.io/
      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses-Saunders_Power_Dam

