[miracle2k]

> The reality is that if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa (let alone the entire world economy), it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces, and produce as much e-waste as the entire world put together.

It's fair to judge Bitcoin's energy use by its tps, but the above is not true. Energy use and tps are, as you then acknowledge, not related. It is possible to increase the number of tps by many multiples. The trade-off is centralization due to hardware requirements.

[ashtonkem]

Unfortunately for Bitcoin, it needs more than “many multiples” in order to actually handle function as a currency. At 4tps they’re several orders of magnitude short of what the market actually needs.

[uh-quan]

That's why second-layer technologies like the Lightning Network are being built.

Bitcoin doesn't have to function as a currency to be wildly successful (since being a currency isn't the only relevant use case), but with second layer networks it will be able to.

[arcticbull]

Once they increase it, which they won’t for philosophical reasons, I’ll update my assessment. Until then it’s strictly fair and accurate.

It’s representative of the world in which we live today not some hypothetical world that could exist in the future - that the team has promised and failed to deliver for a decade. I can make up numbers for visa that match too.

After all climate change doesn’t care about hypotheticals.

[miracle2k]

They will not increase it. I am merely pointing out the idea "to do twice the number of transactions it would consume twice as much energy" is not correct, because raising the block size would not necessarily increase energy consumption.

[arcticbull]

That’s not the point I’m making. The point I’m making is it takes more energy per transaction even after factoring in all specified and unspecified externalities because it’s not thermodynamically possible for visa to use as much energy per transaction. Visa would have to consume roughly 3X the entire worlds power output to match the sheer waste of Bitcoin.

[ClumsyPilot]

"Until then it’s strictly fair and accurate."

Your argument is about as convincing as "well you couldn't make a payment billion dollars because a penny weighs 1 gram, and their combined weight would be too heavy to transport"

[arcticbull]

How so? I said on a per transaction basis by falsification it’s not possible, factoring in all externalities for a Bitcoin transaction to be more efficient than visa. It is not. End of story. The scaling is a thought experiment not a plan.

Your counter example is nonsense.

Could it be in the future more efficient given unspecified future changes? Who knows but it sure as shit isn’t today. I was pushing back on Nic’s theory on pricing in externalities.

[r3ctilinear]

"Future changes"? "Who knows"?

The more efficient changes ALREADY HAPPENED years ago in the form of Lightning network.

The Bitcoin blockchain is the bedrock of this new peoples currency and upon it has been built the Lightning network which is a Bitcoin integrated sidechain for cheap and small transactions.

Lightning facilitates Bitcoin transaction capacity to scale in a ludicrously efficient manner and has now been technically maturing for years now. Please keep up.

[arcticbull]

The number of lightning transactions and channels rounds to zero, so in a way, I did include them. Same number of channels, about half the capacity per channel, same quantity of locked up value (about 1000BTC total) and the same number of users since 2019. [1]

Of course it's not a solution to scaling, because it requires one on-chain transaction to open, one to close, and if an intermediate node happens to go down your funds are locked. It's garbage. Vastly overcomplicated garbage.

By the way to just open a single channel for everyone on earth today and close it will take about 70 years, so right around the year 3000 if you (very optimistically) factor in births and deaths. And about $265 billion dollars at current fee rates - $18.99 as quoted today. Elon better pony up! This of course assumes the blockchain isn't used for anything else in the interim.

How small can the transactions be if a channel open/close costs almost $40?

The only L2 solutions that scale are permissioned, centralized and/or trustful. Because that's how you scale. And you can back those with anything as none of the guarantees of the underlying asset are conferred to these L2 networks simply because they notionally operate on top of Bitcoin for net settlement and the (soon to be unlawful) non-custodial wallet.

[1] https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning

[rspeele]

> By the way to just open a single channel for everyone on earth today and close it will take about 70 years, so right around the year 3000 if you (very optimistically) factor in births and deaths. And about $265 billion dollars at current fee rates - $18.99 as quoted today. Elon better pony up! This of course assumes the blockchain isn't used for anything else in the interim.

LOL. Nice. I like it even better than my other favorite example, that issuing a paycheck in Bitcoin to the 125 million full time employees in the US would take about a year to process.

[shawnz]

> ... climate change doesn’t care about hypotheticals.

But increasing the block size limit wouldn't reduce the energy consumption. It would just make Bitcoin support a higher maximum transaction count per second, which perhaps the market doesn't even need or care about.

[arcticbull]

I would love to see you defended active tire fire in your backyard with the same logic.

[shawnz]

Can you explain what you mean?

The power consumption of Bitcoin is proportional to the price of Bitcoin, it is not related to the demand for making transactions or how many transactions are being made.

[arcticbull]

You folks keep saying that like it’s a good thing but in my opinion that is a scathing indictment of the system. You’re talking about something that’s intentionally anti-efficient. It’s the only technology I’ve ever seen in my entire lifetime but becomes less efficient when more people try and use it. It’s horrifying.

[edit; to your reply: that sounds like a bad solution and I think you know that lol]

[shawnz]

That fact says nothing about the efficiency. What it says is that market forces will decide what level of energy they want to dedicate to the security of the network. Whatever the market is willing to pay, it will be 100% efficiently spent on outcompeting attackers on the network.

> that sounds like a bad solution and I think you know that lol

I don't think it's a good or bad solution. It is basically just the same as how market forces control the values of fiat currencies which in turn affects how much energy is required to secure them.