
Running Bitcoin uses a small city’s worth of electricity - sizzle
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin
======
BoiledCabbage
I'll repost the same comment I made previously on an Etherium thread. I think
We're really under appreciating the pandora's box we've opened. Energy is one
of the most important items for societal progress. And the fact we've now
designed an industry to get rich quick for throwing it away is a societal
burden we'll never get rid of.

> Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs
> in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines,
> vehicles products they can create.

Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the
70s) and boom by sudden drops in cost of energy.

So we've created an "industry" where you are essentially paid by comverting
energy to waste. Paid to perform extremely intense difficult (ie wasteful)
operations to back a useful technology (digital currency).

Assuming it catches on, energy will never be cheap, there will always be a
higher floor now due to options for "mining". As we get better at it and it
becomes less wasteful, the digital system will simply raise the reward so
people are incentivised to once again waste it.

Ignore the short term for the moment, and which ever currency you're backing.
We've created a long term societal motivation/reward to harvest every joule
produce by the sun and use it to calculate hashes. I'm not talking about the
next decade obviously, but we have incentivised that behavior.

If there is anything technologists should understand is that whatever your
beautiful perfect technology is, it will instead be used based on whatever has
been incentivised.

Regardless of the technology it powers, this is a terrible societal incentive
- and one that will be around a lot longer than people are considering.

~~~
sillysaurus3
If Bitcoin reaches a 2 trillion market cap, it will require less than 1%
additional world energy output.

Is less than 1% additional energy usage worth a 2 trillion cap? Well, I'm sure
people can find a way to argue that it's not, but the point is that bitcoin
isn't this enormous threat to energy usage that people try to argue it is.

~~~
kafkaesq
_If Bitcoin reaches a 2 trillion market cap, it will require less than 1%
additional world energy output._

The key question raised in the parent comment, which your own riposte artfully
dodges, is once again - _who stands to benefit_ from this N% increase in
global energy usage?

~~~
uncoder0
Not the poster but, I assume the beneficiaries are the users of the bitcoin
network by the added security from the increases hash-rate/ energy
consumption.

------
qudat
The most striking statistic was that bitcoin is 5000 times more energy
intensive than a VISA transaction.

Maybe my naive interpretation of what VISA actually does is showing here, but
I don't see how it's a valid comparison. Bitcoin doesn't simply replace credit
card transactions, it replaces an entire banking system. Who confirms VISA
transactions? How can you send and receive transactions through VISA? What
about all the facilities that are supporting that transaction?

I think it's easier to trace the cost of a bitcoin transaction, which bears
the entire cost succinctly, compared to an institution like VISA, which has
its tentacles in a ton of energy costing faculties.

~~~
lukev
Bitcoin isn't a payment processor. It can't handle the tiniest fraction of
Visa's transaction volume natively.

Of course you can work around this by having third party payment processors
that sit between customers and the raw blockchain. But because Visa already
does much of that, you need to include the cost of those as well, in order to
get an apples-to-apples comparison.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_It can 't handle the tiniest fraction of Visa's transaction volume natively._

Not actually true. See the Lightning proposal.

~~~
lawn
1\. It's not Bitcoin, it's a sidechain utilizing Bitcoin

2\. It's not certain it can work in a decentralized way

~~~
AgentME
> 1\. It's not Bitcoin, it's a sidechain utilizing Bitcoin

I think you're mixing lightning up with something else; lightning is not a
sidechain[0]. In lightning, at every step participants create standard Bitcoin
transactions that can be finalized and settled at any time by just publicly
broadcasting them on the Bitcoin network. The participants hold off on
broadcasting the transactions until they're done with the payment channel so
that they save on transaction fees (and avoid bloating the blockchain).
They're immune to counterparty risk like normal transactions are, and it
doesn't rely on any central or trusted authorities.

[0] [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/greg-maxwell-
lightning-...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/greg-maxwell-lightning-
network-better-than-sidechains-for-scaling-bitcoin-1461077424/)

~~~
lawn
Maybe sidechain isn't the best term but I don't know a better one.

You're saying it yourself, it creates standard Bitcoin transactions (not
lightning transactions). They hold off on broadcasting them, but that may mean
if they both go offline they loose their state. It's using Bitcoin as a
settlement layer but it's still not interchangeable with Bitcoin.

It still has not been shown that LN can even work in a decentralized fashion.

It uses Bitcoin and it may even become the default way to transact and be
better in any way. But it doesn't matter, Lightning is not, and will never be,
Bitcoin.

How can this distinction not be clear?

~~~
AgentME
>You're saying it yourself, it creates standard Bitcoin transactions (not
lightning transactions). They hold off on broadcasting them, but that may mean
if they both go offline they loose their state.

Yeah, the guarantees aren't exactly the same. Personally I expect that the
risks will be for the most part smoothed over by things like lightning
software that automatically syncs the state of payment channels between all of
your devices for redundancy.

>It's using Bitcoin as a settlement layer but it's still not interchangeable
with Bitcoin.

When a payment channel is settled by any of the participants, it's normal
Bitcoin that comes out.

>It uses Bitcoin and it may even become the default way to transact and be
better in any way. But it doesn't matter, Lightning is not, and will never be,
Bitcoin.

I really think that's splitting hairs. If it becomes the standard way to send
Bitcoin around, such that nearly everyone talking about making or receiving
payments in Bitcoin is using Lightning, and if it does end up working very
well in practice with many transactions per second, then I think it's more
than fair to argue against statements like "Bitcoin can't scale up to VISA
volume". Are you insisting on always explicitly referring to them as a
combination ("Bitcoin/Lightning")? Kind of reminds me of the losing battle
fought by some to correct all references to Linux as "GNU/Linux"...

------
matt_wulfeck
I hate wasteful software. A city’s worth of energy and a max throughout of 7
transactions per second[1]. When everybody’s done trying to get rich quick we
can talk about improvements.

1\. [https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/53620/what-is-
th...](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/53620/what-is-the-maximum-
transaction-throughput-of-the-bitcoin-network)

~~~
CyberDildonics
The mistake is thinking that the energy used from mining is a direct result
from the number of transactions being processed.

The reality is that the two are not coupled together. Larger block sizes are
obviously possible as demonstrated by bitcoin cash (and by anyone with common
sense who hasn't been taken in the censorship on /r/bitcoin). More transaction
throughput doesn't affect how much hash power is needed, therefore the main
limiting factor is mostly just how many transactions are actually being made.

------
andrewla
One of Bitcoin's biggest obstacles to widespread adoption is the utility
problem -- how can Bitcoin transition to being a transactional currency.

The problem is a dual one; on the one hand, if you can denominate your supply
chain in Bitcoin, then that removes much volatility, because you no longer
care about the cost of Bitcoin. But that requires that all of the components
of your supply chain are also denominated in Bitcoin. And on the other hand,
what is the "appropriate" value for Bitcoin? Is it too expensive right now, or
alarmingly cheap? This relates to volatility as well; the uncertainty in how
to price the asset is real.

The power/Bitcoin correspondence is a way to take a crack at both of these
problems. The price of Bitcoin and the price of energy are fundamentally
related, once capital costs of Bitcoin mining equipment is removed from the
equation. An energy provider can safely denominate their provided energy in
Bitcoin because they know that they can use any unpurchased capacity to mine
Bitcoin directly.

Once we start to see Bitcoin appearing on commodity exchanges, which should be
soonish, I think it's likely that power companies (which are already
notoriously active in the securities market) will find that they can hedge
against price fluctuations with Bitcoin futures; basically leveraging that
correspondence. We might be a long way off from them directly billing in
Bitcoin, but it would not surprise me to see correlations between energy
futures and Bitcoin futures once there's a more liquid market for the latter.

------
rwcarlsen
Thinking of the bitcoin network "wasting" money as a "feature" (rather than
incidentally) to process transactions is not quite the right way to think
about it. From a bird's-eye-view the current baking/financial system of
transactions (banks+visa+federal reserve, mints, FINCEN, etc.) all are part of
what makes it difficult to cheat with money like USD. Rather than use this
huge network of organizations to make it difficult to cheat, bitcoin uses
proof-of-work. Replacing all those big, expensive organizations is, well,
_expensive_! I believe bitcoin (or technologies like it) have the potential to
be more efficient at this than the current system; bitcoin just makes more
explicit the cost of making it expensive to cheat.

------
csomar
Isn't an Energy-Free-Bitcoin or Cryptocurrency having your lunch and eating it
too? If you are going to have a cryptocurrency that consumes little energy (or
energy consumption doesn't scale with transactional value), how do you secure
the network?

~~~
maxerickson
It depends on whether you consider distributed consensus to be fundamental to
cyber coins or not.

For instance, a cyber coin could publish a hash of their block chain in the
New York Times everyday. A sound implementation would secure the chain up to
that point.

~~~
AgentME
But who is it that picks the hash to publish into the NYT? You're putting that
picker in control of the whole network; it's not decentralized at all.

If you're going to have a trusted authority involved, then having a globally-
synchronized blockchain is unnecessary. Users could just check with the
trusted authority about whether a transaction is valid (not a double-spend),
or even just have the trusted authority maintain balances for them.

~~~
maxerickson
They would publish a hash of a public ledger.

The central authority would still choose what ended up in the ledger but they
would not be able to rewrite history because of the publicized hashes locking
it into place.

I meant to sketch out a centralized way of finalizing a public ledger, so
yeah, it isn't decentralized.

------
stephengillie
How much energy does it take to run the US Mint and the US banking industry?

~~~
deadmetheny
Energy used to run the mint is incidental, so lower energy usage can be an
attainable target if it's prioritized. The energy wasted from Bitcoin, on the
other hand, is a feature and cannot be reduced without reducing Bitcoin's core
functionality.

~~~
lufte
But in Bitcoin's case it's the same, even the article mentions that "doing
today’s calculations would “consume way more power than is generated on the
entire planet” if it were done using the CPUs available when Bitcoin launched
in 2009.". Energy used when mining Bitcoin could also be considered
incidental, the goal is to calculate hashes.

~~~
imtringued
No it wouldn't because increasing energy efficiency of the bitcoin miners just
means that the difficulty will rise until you're back to the same power
consumption. The power consumption depends on the block reward and transaction
fees.

>Energy used when mining Bitcoin could also be considered incidental, the goal
is to calculate hashes.

The goal isn't to calculate hashes. That is the incidental part. The goal is
to have a randomly chosen node create one block every X seconds.

------
bitL
Anyone finds it silly/irresponsible to trade non-renewable resources for
virtual ones?

~~~
CyberDildonics
Wouldn't rendering 3D movies fall under that category?

~~~
bitL
You don't make billion movies. You probably make billion transactions though;
when these are energy-demanding, you are burning precious resources for very
little value. If all of humanity switched to bitcoin, imagine we spent 50% of
energy production to run mining and blockchain verification. It's a nice proof
of concept, we need something different though to survive.

~~~
CyberDildonics
That's not how bitcoin works. The mining power being spent now is not tied to
the number of transactions. The price is what is dictating all the mining that
is currently being done. More transaction throughput requires almost nothing
more from the miners than they are doing now.

------
sboselli
This is known and well understood. Bitcoin's implementation consumes lots of
energy.

There have been however lots of developments in the blockchain space,
especially as it refers to different proof systems and algorithms. The alt-
coins in general, though mostly badly viewed due to the often poor and sleazy
behaviours, are a playing ground for exactly this kind of problem.

I won't give specific names because I'm not an advocate for any one in
particular, but there are several other coins and implementations that try to
do away with the energy consumption and improve scaling. Some have even gotten
to the point of eliminating mining and transaction fees altogether (yup, zero
fees: transfer value anywhere in the world, instantly, and pay absolutely
nothing for doing so).

A quick google search should point you in the right direction if it sounds
interesting.

~~~
lawn
> Some have even gotten to the point of eliminating mining and transaction
> fees altogether

But it's not clear if they even work.

------
mooneater
Putting the "trust" back in "trustless" using drm'd hardware, is antithetical
to bitcoin's design.

------
xiphias
Energy of a small city is still not big enough to protect from a government
takeover. Also what matters more is the cost of the mining equipment (which is
more than 1.5 years of electricity if the equipment is refreshed every 1.5
years).

Anyways if Intel can make North Korea trust its hardware, I might take a look
at their project.

------
louprado
The alternatives proposed in the article are also known as Proof of Luck and
Proof of Time. Both require a trusted execution environment, which is what
Intel's SGX enabled processors provide.

Perhaps Intel can find new blockchain applications for their technology, but
it is unlikely to be adopted by a digital currency.

------
lftl
Could Bitcoin just halve the difficulty and half the reward for mining a block
at the same time? Wouldn't that effectively double the throughput of the
system? I'm guessing there's some negative consequences to this I don't
understand.

~~~
alanfalcon
Then we’d get blocks twice as quickly, but the transaction capacity of each
block is not related to the difficulty or reward, it’s an artificial
constraint. You could, say, have blocks 8x as large and increase capcity 8x
without affecting the difficulty directly. (Some argue there are other
ramifications to this, of course.)

~~~
lftl
Right, so speeding up blocks is roughly equivalent to increasing the block
size, which is what the whole BCH vs. BTC split was over, correct? So I guess
the arguments against it would be the same? And if I understand correctly the
core argument is that it would make it harder for anyone to verify the entire
block chain. Is there any real argument against it beyond that?

------
mrb
« _But estimates by independent researchers suggest it’s around 500 megawatts_
»

My work is starting to pay off. This author appears to have used estimates
coming from my research: 470-540 MW as of 26 February 2017.¹ Sometimes people
stumble upon and blindly trust the flawed estimate published by digiconomist
of ~2000 MW.²

¹[http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-
consumption/](http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/)

²[http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-
beci/](http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/)

~~~
antisthenes
I absolutely love your blog and have used it many times to show that Bitcoin
is much less wasteful than people think it is, mostly due to obsolete miners
no longer being used.

The data and graphs are very well presented.

~~~
mrb
Thank you! I did put a lot of effort into it, eg. my energy estimate research
represents 30-40 hours of work.

------
clarkmoody
All of the comments in here that are saying something like,

 _> "well at Bitcoin's current throughput it consumes X, and
$large_financial_institution does Y, Bitcoin's equivalent energy usage would
be Z" _

have a fundamental misunderstanding of Bitcoin's mining. The current
difficulty to a produce a block is the same, regardless of the transaction
throughput of the system. The Merkle root of the block's transactions goes
into the block header, and that is hashed over and over. Empty blocks or huge
blocks would require approximately the same energy in mining effort.

------
gambiting
At the same time there was an article here some time ago showing that bitcoin
uses as much energy in a year as a coal mine uses in a day. Everything is
relative.

------
wickedlogic
The objections in the comments around this are somewhat funny. There is more
than a small city's worth of electricity in whole system waste alone. It is
like complaining that you didn't eat all of your bell pepper, when behind you
is a whole dumpster full of individually wrapped bell pepper sandwiches being
thrown away because a pending sell-by-date or a marketing material change.

------
cocktailpeanuts
Dear author: Compare Bitcoin mining vs. the entire infrastructure that powers
Visa and you'll be so ashamed of yourself for writing this.

~~~
Noos
if bitcoin were used anywhere near visa was, it would be mining + the
infrastructure. How else would you spend them at walmart? They'd need a POS
for example.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
I'm not saying POW is perfect. I'm just pointing out how idiotic it is to just
make this type of statement.

Also, Bitcoin is not trying to beat Visa. BitTorrent disrupted the entire
entertainment industry without being as fast as regular download.

------
jimjimjim
do people understand electronic payment transactions?

most payment specifications were written when every single byte in a message
was important. A lot was done to keep message (and data storage) size as small
as possible because that was just common sense.

you may think that there are a lot of coin transactions but that's just
peanuts compared to the vast vast amount of normal payment transactions.

------
AKifer
Isn't that what really backs that currency ? The more you spend value to make
it, the more valuable it becomes. Just look at the relative values of BTC and
other altcoins that require less energy to mine. IMO there's nothing to worry
about it, it's just the natural order of things, you cannot find gold in every
house backyard.

~~~
allenz
No, you have the causality backwards: the high value of BTC is what
incentivizes large investments of electricity and servers. The value of a
currency depends only on supply and demand. BTC has the highest demand among
cryptocurrencies mainly due to network effects.

------
nvk
You could say it's much worst to dig gold out of the ground. (even accounting
for the percentage for industrial use)

~~~
danmaz74
But at least gold isn't designed to make you waste as much energy as you can
to secure its value. Instead, Bitcoin (and every other proof of work
cryptocurrency) is based exactly on this principle.

~~~
duskwuff
Precisely. Bitcoin is, by design, a Red Queen's race -- miners are
incentivised to spend more energy on mining, but the total reward available to
miners is fixed.

 _" Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd
generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've
been doing."_

 _" A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all
the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get
somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"_

------
lotsoflumens
I used to worry about this. Now I realise that my worry came from a scarcity
mindset.

There is no reason at all to believe that electricity production will always
be difficult or expensive. These problems will be solved.

------
jontro
Not sure if I like where this is going. [https://software.intel.com/en-
us/sgx](https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx) sounds like drm for code.

------
VMG
My best hope is that there will be some kind of OPEC cartel that agrees to
limit production. The members could have unused reserves of mining hardware
that ramps up when somebody violates the agreement.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "My best hope is that there will be some kind of OPEC cartel that agrees to
> limit production."

Those limits were baked into the design from the start. In the current design
there are only 21 million Bitcoins that can be mined, and we're approximately
80% of the way to that target.

[http://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/](http://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/)

Also, Bitcoin is designed to be harder to come by as time goes on. The number
of new coins issued diminishes over time. See the Supply Growth section here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin)

"12.5 bitcoins per block (approximately every ten minutes) until mid 2020, and
then afterwards 6.25 bitcoins per block for 4 years until next halving. This
halving continues until 2110–40, when 21 million bitcoins will have been
issued."

There will come a time when Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable. If the
scaling problems with the transactions are solved in time, we may see more
people trading in Satoshis (fractions of a Bitcoin). The scaling problems are
pretty hard to solve though, it's probably going to take a hard fork to make
Bitcoin a true alternative to traditional government-backed currencies.

~~~
VMG
I am aware of this, what I meant was a limit on hashrate

~~~
ZenoArrow
Hashrate is also limited by design:

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_network_hash_rate...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_network_hash_rate_results_in_a_given_difficulty.3F)

~~~
VMG
Each miner has an incentive to outcompete other miners. A mining cartel can
agree to keep difficulty and hashrate low. It is also comparable to a truce in
a military conflict.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "A mining cartel can agree to keep difficulty and hashrate low."

Won't work. If a mining cartel agrees to keep difficulty and hashrate low,
they're just making it easier for those outside the cartel to mine more
Bitcoin.

~~~
VMG
With unused mining hardware reserves they could smash outsiders by ramping up
the hashrate.

Cartels usually don't last forever, but they can last for a while. In the case
of bitcoin, it could reduce total energy consumption.

~~~
ZenoArrow
In one comment you're suggesting a cartel should keep the hashing rate low, in
another comment you're suggesting the same cartel should increase the hashing
rate to keep out the competition. What are you really proposing? Keeping it
low until any form of competition shows up? That competition is always likely
to be a factor for as long as Bitcoin mining is popular.

~~~
VMG
> Keeping it low until any form of competition shows up?

Exactly. This is similar to how price dumping works:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\))

~~~
ZenoArrow
You're not listening. I'm suggesting it'll never work for Bitcoin as the
available competition is ever present. A cartel gains nothing by mining at a
slower rate.

------
elif
Running USD uses a small planet's worth of hydrocarbons

------
sp332
I think this will solve itself over time. As the block reward gets smaller,
miners will afford less and less wasted electricity.

~~~
tromp
Unless bitcoin doubles in price every 4 years, the frequency of reward
halvings. Then cost of electricity used in mining will remain constant.

~~~
sp332
I don't think it's going to double forever. Transaction fees will eventually
outpace the actual block reward and level things out, but even with that it's
going to be a much smaller amount per block.

------
samstave
Yeah...

Weird thought... (I do not know if thi already exists, as I dont care about
crytocurrency - only because I dont have the cycles, currently)

What if there was a crytocoin that was just a centrally mined 'thing' \- and
the value of the coin was what others were willing to bid on the next coin vs
volume of those willing....

Isnt that literally how gold currently works?

So rather than consume billions of watts on bitcoin - just make digital gold?

~~~
noncoml
No need to bid.

Just give X amount of coins to every person and newborn for free.

~~~
hoosieree
Whuffie?

~~~
noncoml
More like Universal Basic Income

------
Synaesthesia
Compared to the environmental damage and pollution caused by the mulitary, it
will surely be much smaller. Also motor racing is another huge waster of
resources, with no real benefit to the population.

------
gt_
My novice armchair estimate is that something like ZCash is broadly much less
efficient than Bitcoin. Of course, no measure can go beyond a loose estimate.

~~~
AgentME
I don't think it makes any sense to try to compare the efficiency of different
proof of work systems.

Now you could compare the work that goes into synchronizing the blockchain
between all nodes, but I'd expect that has a near-negligible environmental
impact compared to all of the miners. (Individual Zcash transactions are a
bigger file size than individual Bitcoin transactions if I remember right.)

~~~
gt_
OK I'm confused. Thank you though!

------
freech
That is exactly the point of proof of work. Criticizing Bitcoin for this, is
like criticizing DNA Evidence for being hard to fake.

------
CJefferson
There are real costs to bitcoin, the electricity being burnt in China is
killing hundreds of people.

------
progx
Burstcoin!

------
pbreit
So...way, way, way less energy than mining for gold?

Isn't the energy consumption the whole point?

~~~
BoiledCabbage
Mining for gold has become orders of magnitude more efficient over time. Bit
coin will become orders of magnitude less efficient by design...

------
marank
is not bitcoin consuming energy's is people's greed, china or whatever can ban
mining same of US can ban industrial mining, bitcoin won't be affected a bit,
I would be happy to be able to mine it on my laptop.

------
jimjimjim
bitcoin is the This Is Fine dog pouring petrol around the room saying "I wish
I started pouring earlier"

------
horusthecat
They hate us for our freedoms

------
jimjimjim
burn the world to make a buck

------
ece
Pyramid schemes are expensive, no shit.

------
chrisco255
/s

~~~
xapata
We can tackle problems in parallel. Cultural issues are not a blocking
problem.

------
s0rce
I'm guessing many of the miners are located in regions like Washington State
or Quebec with low cost relatively-green hydroelectric power and the power use
doesn't correspond to the environmental impact of an average small city
(except obviously one located where the miners are).

~~~
_h_o_d_
Most of the miners are in China, which runs a lot of coal and gas

~~~
CyberDildonics
Actually lots of mining is done in China using cheap electricity that comes
from a glut of hydro-electric power created by government infrastructure
spending.

------
knodi123
But that electricity is cheaply available. We could stop bitcoin's use of
electricity overnight, if electricity began to cost more than the expected
return on investment. And this will inevitably happen anyway, since bitcoins
only get harder to mine over time. This is a temporary problem.

Honestly it seems more like "bitcoin is a way to launder stolen electricity"
rather than "oh noes, if people keep mining, eventually they'll have a huge
impact on global energy consumption"

------
brockers
I'm not sure I understand the issue. I'm betting that the amount of energy
used to power online games for Play Station Online is orders of magnitude
worse than for bitcoin with arguably less benifit to society. What am I
missing?

~~~
curiousgal
Exactly, this is a non-issue at best.

------
nnfy
How much power is drawn by the "ever-expanding" racks of servers powering
other stores of value? How many servers are running in the banking and
financial industries just to enable non pseudonymous transactions of value?

This article is sensationalist nonsense. I would argue it is a positive point
that a globally tradeable cryptocurrency with billions in market cap only
requires the energy of a "small city."

~~~
djrogers
> a globally tradeable cryptocurrency with billions in market cap only
> requires the energy of a "small city."

It only sounds good because we haven't really considered the scale here, so
let's scale that up a bit.

What if even 1% of non cash financial transactions in the US were handled with
BTC? For 2015, that would have worked out to about $1.8T.

How big would BTC need to be to handle that? Well, it looks like last year
it's estimated to have done a little over $100B, so it'd have to scale
somewhere around 15-20x to even cover 1% of _one country 's_ transactions...

[1]
[https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/2016-p...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/other/2016-payments-
study-20161222.pdf)

[2][https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-
volume?...](https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-
volume?timespan=1year)

~~~
nnfy
You may have a point, except you haven't mentioned how many city's worth of
power non-btc transactions currently require, not to mention the additional
inneficiency of hundreds of thousands of staff which could possibly be reduced
in number because of the distributed ledger.

I really don't think things are as clear cut as the article implies, but I
dont have numbers for the amount of energy consumed by modern electronic value
transaction and storage.

Edit: also, "city's worth" as a measure of electricity, as in the article, is
a terrible choice because it immediately biases the reader and does not convey
much useful information. My GPU maxes at 300W; the article provides no way of
conversion. Never mind that a small city may be a suburb using one hundredth
of the power used by a small city center full of servers and a handful of
skyscrapers.

~~~
djrogers
> you haven't mentioned how many city's worth of power non-btc transactions
> currently require

No, I didn't but the article did, and it's cited elsewhere on HN - Visa for
example uses 1/7000th of the energy per transaction...

