
Binance moves $1.26B worth of Bitcoin for $125 in network fees - rexbee
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/05/29/bitcoin-binance-cryptocurrency-billion-network-fees-transfer-blockchain/
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jraines
I'm probably more favorably inclined to cryptocurrency & bitcoin than 98% of
commenters here but this is becoming a rather stale boast.

Quoting @jgreco on Twitter:

"Why are crypto people so impressed by this? 1) Do they think wires cost more
as the dollar amount increases? 2) Do they not understand that wires are free
for corporations and HNW individuals?"

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conanbatt
You have lots of police and regulation in the bank transfer. Lawyers galore,
and the promise of the state to back it.

They are very different finance operations.

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jraines
I'm very happy with the liberty/access aspect of it, but it's much more
relevant for small transfers. People moving this amount of money already have
access, unless they're a drug lord or from a sanctioned country (and ofc they
have their ways, too, shoutout to HSBC, Wachovia, DB, etc)

~~~
conanbatt
I think everyone wanted/expected bitcoin to serve for the distributed/small
case, but reality has made it the other way around so far.

The capacity to avoid sanctions and the enforcement of law are greatly
valuable assets: anything that limits the power of the state is a step towards
liberty. (Not towards crimeless-ness)

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nosuchthing
Don't forget the total costs of running Bitcoin software:

Bitcoin's current estimated annual electricity consumption* (TWh) 63.23

Bitcoin's current minimum annual electricity consumption __(TWh) 38.25

Annualized global mining revenues $6,705,703,327

Annualized estimated global mining costs $3,161,647,973

Current cost percentage 47.15%

Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption Switzerland

Estimated electricity used over the previous day (KWh) 173,240,985

Implied Watts per GH/s 0.125

Total Network Hashrate in PH/s (1,000,000 GH/s) 57,577

Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 465

Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin 5,854,904

Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a
single transaction 15.7

Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity
consumption 0.28%

Annual carbon footprint (kt of CO2) 30,036

Carbon footprint per transaction (kg of CO2) 220.7

Source: [https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-
consumption](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)

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onlyrealcuzzo
I see these stats all the time. What's the carbon footprint for a similar
sized bank or stock exchange? How many people are employed? How much carbon do
they emit traveling to work? How much money does it cost to employ all those
people?

It might be worth comparing a transaction cost of 220.7 kg of CO2 to the
average American's carbon footprint per year -- which is 16400 kg CO2. That's
basically what the average American emits in 5 days. That DOES seem like a
lot. I really doubt transferring similar amounts of money is anywhere near
that. But I don't know.

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femto113
Even without the exact figures it should be obvious that the inefficiency in
Bitcoin is astounding. Consider e.g. that the Bitcoin network performs about
400K transactions per day while the Visa network performs about 150MM
transactions per day. That works out to 375x. Coincidentally Switzerland
consumes about 1/375 of the world's electricity. If the Visa network used the
same amount of electricity per transaction as Bitcoin it would require all of
the electricity used by the entire world.

~~~
viklove
Does the amount of electricity used by the Bitcoin network scale with the
quantity of transactions?

~~~
femto113
Bitcoin can't easily increase the quantity of transactions, so it's hard to
answer that directly. Bitcoin transaction rates are currently limited by the
time to mine a block and the number of transactions per block. Technical and
political barriers exist to changing either of those numbers. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem)
for more details.

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annonch
I think that this is misleading, they didn't really "move" anything, they just
used a current key that was locking 1.26B to lock the funds with a different
key. So the network only processed this small amount of cryptographic
computation. For the Bitcoin network, the size of the transfer (i.e., fee) can
be the same for sending 1 BTC as 1000000 BTC

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xchaotic
App stores and various middlemen like Uber getting a cut funded a lot of tech
innovations and SV fortunes, I wouldn't say low fees are absolutely best. In
this case though, the fees are mostly spent on electricity and are rather
large for a single transfer.

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zippzom
Is this due to some special technology or implementation details they used, or
just the current going rate of getting your bitcoin transactions confirmed?

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dawhizkid
My hunch is the number of crypto-related articles on HN is correlated with
upward price movement

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sdinsn
So $124.60 more than the cost of a wire. Wow, BTC is sooo efficient.

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781
I'm, all for bitcoin, but articles like these are bullshit.

How many cryptography and bitcoin experts were consulted/hired to babysit this
transaction, knowing that the smallest mistake could lead to total and
irreversible loss of funds?

What was their compensation?

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mpoteat
Probably none... That just isn't how it works. What do see the "bitcoin
expert" doing in this case other than double checking the receiving address is
correct?

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mirimir
I do lots of transfers between VMs (different personas) via mixing services.
So I always verify receiving addresses using md5sum. I presume that prudent
folk routinely do something like that. It's ~hard to see some single-character
errors, but md5sum changes completely.

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osrec
Even $124.60 seems high for moving a number from one place to another!

I'm kidding of course, but we do live in a world where transaction costs
bolster some of our biggest businesses. Not sure if that's a good thing.

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dmix
The article mentions the person transferring $212 million for just $3.93.

