[ssss11]

To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin!

Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind

[tomxor]

> It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US

I'd bet that _all_ idle "devices" in in the US are providing far more utility by being ready and available to do ... anything (you did say all), than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority.

Sorry but I'm fed up of these stupid comparisons, if bitcoin uses 0.56% of the worlds electricity, there are a maximum of 178 ways to divide up the rest... it's simply not on that scale of usefulness, _and_ it is not comparable to fucking visa because it doesn't serve the worlds transactions, no one buys coffee with bitcoin. It's also not comparable to the USD for the same reason. Everything you compare it to will be of more material value to the world and almost always consume less energy, even if it's icecream. </rant>

[undersuit]

How much energy does encrypting all our video transmissions cost? I don't care how efficient the hardware running HDCP is, it's still wasteful to do so for every application and it's not even to protect the users nor would it be effective in the current form as such.

[tomxor]

Encryption of video specifically is a bit narrow, but lets widen it a bit: we watch a lot of video, video is neat right? I wonder how much energy goes into the transmission of _all_ video on the entire planet? end-to-end, the encoding, the hosting, the network transmission, the decoding on billions of devices and lighting up all those LED backlights, (and the extra overhead added by copyright protection crap)...

It's got to be on a similar playing field right? i wouldn't be surprised if it was a little more than 0.56% globally. But look at how much _billions_ of people get out of it all over the world: entertainment, art, education, something to connect to people with... it has a huge and invaluable impact on society - i dare anyone to try compare that to Bitcoin (not blockchain, not the utopian crypto dream, but Bitcoin).

[bobviolier]

The digiconomist actually compared watching Youtube with a single bitcoin transaction (don't know the specifics and how accurate), but they said 1 btc transaction is the same as 51.000 hours of watching YouTube:

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

[trident5000]

Comparing BTC mining to a small country is just absurd. You could do the same with hundreds of other applications aside from YouTube like all social media servers, gaming, existing banking infrastructure, etc. Also Bitcoin arguably replaces gold which uses more energy and is more destructive to land (while using fossil fuels instead of mostly renewable energy like BTC). Lastly how much energy do we think the dollar which is backed by the US military uses per year? Id wager a lot more.

The pitchforks are out in this thread quite simply because people dont like other people outmaneuvering them in purchasing power but of course is disguised as a virtue signal.

[Griffinsauce]

Your last statement is based on exactly zero data points.

Let me provide one counter though: I couldn't give a rats ass whether you outmanouver me financially, I do care whether my child has a livable planet for his lifetime.

[Natfan]

To clarify, that's fifty one thousand, correct? Some countries use a period (.) as their "digit group separator"[0], and others use a comma (,).

[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/110693

[BillinghamJ]

I generally work on the assumption that if it's being used to separate three digit separation, it's a thousand separator. If only two digits and it's a currency with cents, probably a decimal separator.

[Wowfunhappy]

HDCP's energy usage is marginal, but yes, it's pointless and I'd very much like to kill it. More critically, I'd also like all mobile phones to receive software support for three times as long as what Apple currently provides, and I'd like to build more wind farms and stop shutting down nuclear plants.

None of this excuses Bitcoin.

[undersuit]

I don't know why Bitcoin needs to be excused.

[Consultant32452]

I know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies that are manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of wealth from the poor to the wealthy.

Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are our best chance at the moment.

[tomxor]

> I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies

That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.

[IgorPartola]

Bitcoin is deflationary, isn’t it? How could it ever replace fiat if just by merely holding it you are guaranteed in the long run to increase value? You need mild inflation to get people to actually spend and not hoard. Bitcoin’s supply is fix so there is no point in ever spending it unless you want to cash out.

[trident5000]

Yeah because Ill never buy food and housing until I die because my currency is deflationary. That logic is so tired. Also the fact that you can convert US dollars to investments instantly instead of consuming basically extends the same situation, yet we still spend when we need to.

[Consultant32452]

If we imagine a deflationary currency encourages savings over consumerism... That doesn't sound so bad.

[xur17]

> Also the fact that you can convert US dollars to investments instantly instead of consuming basically extends the same situation, yet we still spend when we need to.

I've actually wondered about this -> why not use the SP500 as a form of currency? It seems like this would fit somewhere in between the US dollar and Bitcoin - store of value, increases in price over time (or at least historically does), pays dividends (so a productive asset). Downsides are no capped supply, and volatility (but so is Bitcoin).

[IgorPartola]

You see a lot of people buying groceries with BTC currently? What I see most people do is buy BTC and hold it, living off their regular paychecks, waiting for the BTC portfolio to hit some goal. They then trade it to the next investor who does the same. It’s not a currency so much as a store of value. It’s a stock, not money.

[solosoyokaze]

Bitcoin continues to grow at an enormous rate. It hasn't failed at anything. Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold. We are actually on our way to getting off fiat.

[mockingbirdy]

This. I've realized years ago that the current fiat system can be unsustainable because it's very hard for regulators to avoid the temptation of applying QE and other monstrosities. But I realized way too late that BTC is the vehicle to flee from that (in a simple way compared to moving physical assets across borders).

It already succeeded in helping rich people in China to bring their wealth out of control. This has maximum utility for a lot of people. I'm not sure what will come after the current financial system (and it most probably won't go anywhere and will co-exist for some years before crypto will be banned everywhere), but this new type of wealth transfer mechanism already gets used a lot. Everyone who distrusts the current financial system or is oppressed by their regime is interested in it.

I don't know how the world will look like (it'll probably be very hard to continue the current path because capital has found a new way to move across borders and avoid taxes, again) and I don't know if it's generally good for global society, but Pandora's box is open.

I agree with the energy discussion and that it's wasteful, but the utility of it (transacting without governmental permission) seems to be higher for the participants. And they don't care about its socioeconomic impact, they care about its utility for them (money for miners and speculators who keep BTC's value high and the network functional, permissionless transaction for the actual target audience / users of BTC). BTC was built for permissionless money transactions, the speculation is just a byproduct and everyone is focusing on it instead of looking at its actual value for its users.

edit for the sibling comments: You need BTC only to move your assets from one country/wallet to another. You can then move it to a stable coin like USDC and slowly and safely get it out of the crypto system without having to deal with the volatility. This takes you half an hour and you're done. It's currently an investment vehicle, but its utility comes from being able to get money from A to B regardless of government intervention. Even if BTC drops to $3k, it still has this value. Looking at the price of BTC is missing the point: it's more than $0 and you can do a transaction in 10 minutes and that is all that matters to move assets.

[Hiopl]

But that high value (and the volatile prices) is entirely the problem (coupled with other issues like the extremely low potential number of transactions per second). As it stands, Bitcoin will never be anything other than an investment vehicle. Maybe another cryptocurrency will be a suitable replacement for fiat, but right now and for the foreseeable future, crypto is still too niche, too complex and volatile. At most we're seeing banks extend their offerings with cryptocurrency, but none of it points to widespread replacement of fiat outright. There are too many institutional, technical and social barriers.

[solosoyokaze]

Bitcoin plays a role in the crypto ecosystem. It's like gold. Ethereum is like the finance industry and things like DOGE are like currency. The value will be pegged to BTC, making it the foundation for the ecosystem.

[tomxor]

> It hasn't failed at anything.

It has failed at being a usable currency, and not merely for socioeconomic reasons. A currency is more than just intrinsic value.

[briefcomment]

We need an uninflatable store of value more than anything, which Bitcoin is.

Think of how much unnecessary transacting and consumption is going on right now to escape a constantly inflating dollar. "Investments" and consumptions will tank with a deflationary store of value.

[trident5000]

Sure, just as Visa, Mastercard, Circle, Paypal and several of the largest major banks just accepted its use and facilitation. And while companies such as Tesla, PornHub, etc accept it as payment. Its totally not going anywhere and will never make that transition.

[rnestler]

> Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold

How would one measure that? The price of one bitcoin compared to the price of a kilogram of gold? That seems arbitrary. Total market value? Transaction volume?

[solosoyokaze]

Total market value.

[Consultant32452]

The computationally wasteful bit is a temporary problem for which solutions are already being created. The Lightning Network is one such effort.

Governments are already taking efforts to fight against crypto. The fact that bitcoin is classified as an "asset" is the government adding friction to using it. Every time you transact in bitcoin you have to put that on your taxes because there's some capital gains/loss. Of course, they don't talk about it as if that is an attack, but it is. And they wouldn't be attacking it if they weren't scared. It's surely not guaranteed, maybe not even likely, but it's still possible that we will win.

[dTal]

The computationally wasteful bit is the proof-of-work, which is an inherent part of bitcoin. The Lightning Network is just about scaling transactions.

Your government rant is a non-sequitor - bitcoin doesn't become any more efficient just because The Man doesn't like it.

[Consultant32452]

The computationally wasteful bit will go away with things like the visa network where they will only have to persist back to the blockchain when you transact with a wallet that isn't on their network. Otherwise it'll just be records in a database not unlike regular currency.

[undersuit]

The first government to move their money onto a crypto us going to have massive control over their economy. Roll their own crypto, keep the keys that allow more money to be printed, have the ability to lock people out of their wallets on a whim? They could even extract taxation by running all the nodes and taking the transaction fees.

[oraphalous]

Having a reliable store of value - is itself extremely valuable. At least to me... and to quite a few others apparently, with more and more by the day.

[Stevvo]

Bitcoin is about as "reliable" as a store of value as a casino chip placed on black on the blackjack table.

Bitcoin has many virtues, but a "store or value" is demonstrably not one of them. Why do you, and many others, feel that it is in spite of its volatility?

[shawnz]

There are a few counterarguments to this.

> about as "reliable" as a store of value as a casino chip

Casino analogies are misleading because the problem with the casino is that the expected outcome is negative. The problem with the casino isn't the volatility.

There are plenty of stores of value which have extreme volatility but are still prized by investors, like real estate or artwork.

> demonstrably not one of them

We are talking about an asset class that has existed for about 1 decade. Nobody is really sure what it will be able to achieve, but its ability to act as a store of value seems promising. As more people form their opinion about this and other matters related to cryptocurrencies, we should expect the volatility to decrease. So the volatility at the current moment is not really a good indicator for the long-term volatility.

[whateveracct]

i can't believe this "store of value" hype pivot that BTC pulled actually worked

[shawnz]

Alternatively, there was no "hype pivot" and that's simply what the market decided they valued most about Bitcoin (for now).

[rzz3]

> than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority

That’s a bit simplistic and completely lacking in big picture perspective. You even underline “only” as if you’re very confident in what you’re saying. Please do some research.

[tomxor]

Oh sorry, please replace "only" with 99.9%. Because of $20 transaction fees, because of the trend of companies that once accepted it shunning it due to aforementioned ridiculous transaction fees, and finally due to numerous papers presenting a statistical analysis of bitcoin transaction behaviour and coming to the same conclusion e.g DOI: 10.1016/j.intfin.2017.12

[smeyer]

Yeah, but the rest of us don't have to put up with legions of people excitedly explaining about how idle devices are great and everyone else should idle more devices.

Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.

[grifball]

Haha, but actually, you might have to put up with that soon. There's recent research on a blockchain technology called: "proof of space" which would require systems with large storage to idle for long periods of time I believe.

EDIT: proof of storage -> proof of space

[kevingadd]

Hey, at least that way all those empty apartments and houses being held as investments will get filled up with proof of space mining nodes

[bluescrn]

We need a way to prove the work was done using renewable energy

[Natfan]

Sure, you could get large Bitcoin miners to get certified with some authority, so that they can put a stamp on their website that tracks all of the transactions that were made with renewable energy.

However, people can, and will, lie and cheat for profit. In this case it's in the form of PR and playing nice with the Government, possibly for tax reasons.

We've seen this same story play out in the car industry[0], and that has far fewer (albeit far larger) players that need to be properly regulated.

So, from a technical perspective, how would you achieve this goal? Could one mathematically and cryptographically prove that the work was done using renewable energy? I don't know, that's something for someone much smarter than me to figure out.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

[grifball]

It sounds impossible, but I've read the abstract of this article which claims to provide a cryptographic proof of a physical object (nuclear warhead): https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8618

I'm not sure if this is possible to extrapolate to prove an energy generation process... But, it's exciting that a physical material can be cryptographically proven over a network (if I'm reading this abstract correctly).

[kfrzcode]

Bitcoin consumes electricity and creates a store of value, fungible, and with easy global transaction methods.

Your dangling iPods and Alarms Clock, however, are just hunks of junk, sitting around, highly illiquid.

[jazzabeanie]

Certainly not on a per gram basis...

[rcstank]

GP claimed that generating dollars using electricity is bad. Isn't that what the majority of companies are doing?

Edit: that's my whole point: mining BTC is generating value by verifying transactions. In turn, the miner gets paid for their work.

[AaronFriel]

Bitcoin consumers more power than entire nations' economies while generating so little value that I suspect my home town in Iowa would exceed the transaction rate on a daily basis. A moderately busy food district in a major city would exceed that every day. (I'm thinking roughly 100,000 people getting lunch or dinner in 1 hour ought to generate 13 to 27 times as many transactions/second as the entire Bitcoin network supports.)

Sure, there's bitcoin cash, lightning network stuff - but uhh, where's the beef? I mean, seriously, where are the users using Bitcoin at volume?

It seems like Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme for people mining (or HODLing) Bitcoin, not a store of value, not a mechanism of currency.

[shawnz]

Transaction rate is not the only possible way to judge the value a monetary system.

Also: Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all (but it would have other trade-offs not related to energy usage, which has made it hard to establish a consensus on the issue).

[AaronFriel]

> Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all

If it can, why hasn't it?

[shawnz]

For example, increasing the block size could have some disadvantages like increasing how quickly the size of the blockchain grows, which will make it harder for new users/miners to join the network and possibly increase centralization.

It's also not clear the market has a strong demand for an increased transaction rate yet. Eventually it will be almost unavoidable, but we might not be there yet. If that's the case then it might be harmful to increase the number of frivolous/unnecessary transactions for no reason.

[vkou]

Transaction rate is the only possible way to judge the value of a monetary system.

A system where you essentially can't transact is economically dead. The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it, not in how wealthy a dragon sitting on a pile of gold can get.

It can be a speculative system, but that's far less useful than being a monetary system. Bitcoin is a terrible currency in the same way that houses, or diamond rings are a terrible currency. Settling transactions in them is slow and incredibly expensive.

[shawnz]

Not true. For example a monetary system might be valuable because it supports high transaction volumes even at a low rate, or because it has high costs to attack.

> The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it

Bitcoin isn't an economy. It is just a small part of the overall economy

[lallysingh]

They're moving money out of their countries past currency export controls.

[kfrzcode]

The BTC market cap is around $650 billion. I don't understand your logic.

[AaronFriel]

Market cap is not a meaningful measure of a currency. A better measure is the velocity of money within a currency.

For context, just one part of the US economy is the stock market. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) which came up in the news recently processed $2.15 quadrillion in securities in 2019.

The 30 day average for estimated transactions in Bitcoin is around 5-6 billion, or still around 1/1000th just one art of the US economy's transaction volume.

At 5 transactions per second, the average transaction size would have to be around $1,268,2308 to equal the velocity of just one portion of one sector of the US economy. 5 transactions per second is actually higher than the average transaction throughput over the past several years.

[xur17]

No it isn't.

[cortesoft]

No, creating new dollars is just updating a database at the fed, basically.

There are no companies that generate dollars. That would be counterfeiting.

[Matticus_Rex]

> There are no companies that generate dollars

Other than banks. Banks generate new dollars through fractional reserve lending, though they also destroy them.

[jki275]

The fed certainly generates new dollars.

[cortesoft]

Yeah, and they aren’t a ‘company’

[sudosysgen]

Companies generate dollars by first generating things that some people find useful. Just generating dollars by themselves should be done with the smallest possible amount of electricity.

[bluescrn]

Or they generate dollars by trading and speculating but not actually creating anything. How much power is used worldwide by stock trading, HFT, etc?

[sudosysgen]

I agree that this is an issue, but I don't think that's anywhere near what Bitcoin uses.

[shawnz]

Bitcoin's energy usage is proportional to its market value so you might say it always uses the smallest possible amount of energy (given the current valuation).

We have yet to see if alternative systems like proof-of-stake can gain the same trust and replace proof-of-work while actually consuming less energy in practice. I'm hopeful though.

[sudosysgen]

Creating currency by itself does not create any value.

[shawnz]

Right, the creation of Bitcoins only redistributes the value. The value mining provides is actually in outcompeting potential attackers who might want to change the consensus of the network.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

It's unclear how much value is being created by Bitcoin vs how much is being captured/transferred from elsewhere.

Plenty of reasonable people likely think that Bitcoin doesn't create any value.

[airstrike]

Companies are generating value, not dollars.

[Closi]

No, companies do not create new money. They create goods and services in order to generate value/profit.

[jld]

Banks are companies and their service is to create new money.

[Closi]

Banks that are for-profit companies add to the money supply (via loans) but don't 'create new money' in the same sense as mining Bitcoin.

Mining bitcoin is most similar to a central bank printing/issuing money (except it's issued to the person that can waste the most electricity or show proof of stake rather than being issued selectively by the central government).

Banks can add to the money supply by lending out money which has been saved in them by others, but there is nothing unique to fiat currencies about this, and the same can be done with Bitcoin or other crypto. I suspect you wouldn't say that 'banks can create new bitcoins without mining', but that's the same thing as saying 'banks can create new money without printing it'.

[cosmodisk]

It's not sensationalist at all. Just because idle devices in the US consume the same amount, it doesn't become less important. It's still absurd amount of energy that could be used for much much better purposes. Another good example, albeit on much greater scale is Youtube, which already uses 1% of the world's electricity output.

[hulahoof]

A good idea in theory that hasn't seem to have taken off in any major way is designing a PoW that is mobile device optimised so that the consensus can be driven by idle phones that are charging etc., Major problem being how can you ensure that the miners are indeed an idle device instead of a dedicated server farm. I have a feeling PoS such as in ADA or ETH 2.0 will likely emerge as the front runner in the next decade (by usage, BTC will likely hold top spot in total market cap for a while to come)

[sailingparrot]

Ah yes the good old "but something worse already exists therefore it is ok" argument. Always very effective.

[cortic]

more like; "but the amount of electricity is so insignificant to us that we use more doing absolutely nothing"

[read_if_gay_]

GP didn’t conclude “therefore it is ok”.

[trident5000]

More like theres hundreds of things in the world that use more energy than BTC like gaming, gold mining, existing banking infrastructure, social media servers, etc - and the comparison is stupid in the first place. People just want to virtue signal because they dont like other people getting ahead of them and they didnt invest. Thats the crux of the outrage just like people get into stock investment wars.

[fendy3002]

Rate of growth. For bitcoin to be useful as currency, it needs to be used by many more people, while idle devices may not grow much more.

However idle devices power consumption also needs to be addressed.

[christophilus]

Streetlights/ night time lights which (besides often consuming fossil fuels) have the additional feature of ruining the night sky for stargazers, insects, nocturnal animals, etc.

[playingchanges]

How about empty cruise ships running off generators. Or all the oven lights left on accidentally across the world every night lol.

I wonder how much electricity California will be consuming when we stop selling gas cars and go all electric...

[Griffinsauce]

This kind of whataboutist counterargument is so tired and asinine. Multiple things can be bad. Bad things do not cancel each other out.

If someone is murdered in one city, that doesn't suddenly become less bad when someone else is murdered in another.