[andirk]

Is there hard evidence that shows the energy consumption of bitcoin? How is that calculated? I do believe it's "a lot" when I see those giant farms churning. And how do we compare it to fiat where the security is via vaults and sharks with lasers and other types of security?

[dmitriid]

> And how do we compare it to fiat where the security is via vaults and sharks with lasers and other types of security?

You can easily compare. Fiat provides orders of orders of magnitude more value added services on top of just money. Bitcoin is consuming all that energy while struggling to send money between to people at a (often an order of magnitude) higher cost.

Oh. There’s not just bitcoin, of course. There’s the joke called ethereum which was crippled by a game which in real world can be run on a mid-2000-era netbook.

Yup. Incomparable.

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Edit: On Singles Day Alipay handled over a billion (yes, a billion) transactions in a day, with a peak of 120 000 transactions per second.

Bitcoin would deplete the Sun attempting the same thing.

[nybble41]

The amount of energy used for Bitcoin mining has very little to do with the rate of transactions. The limiting factor is mining profitability, which depends on capital and energy costs on on hand and current and expected Bitcoin prices, the block reward (which decreases over time), and transaction fees on the other. Only the transaction fees increase with more transactions, and for now they're insignificant compared to the block reward.

A billion Bitcoin transactions would be about 250-500 GiB, depending on the transaction size. If we were willing to accept block sizes of 1.5 to 3.5 GiB then we could handle that many transactions per day using no more energy than the current system. Of course, you'd need a 50+ Mbit dedicated downlink and some fairly capable hardware just to keep up with all the traffic, which is why we don't permit such large blocks.