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by Anderkent 1941 days ago
>Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks.

Sure, and? You get other benefits, those might not be relevant for you in which case keep using conventional payment networks. But if things like counterparty risk of your payment processor come into your calculations, even $10 dollars a transaction migth be a good deal.
2 comments
aseipp 1941 days ago
The entire point of this subthread you're responding to is that the cost of transactions is so energy intensive that those "other benefits" are null and void.

It's called an externality. It doesn't matter if you'd pay $10 for it if the cost imposed is too great. There are a lot of things people would absolutely pay for that we don't allow, because of that. Dumb weird fantasies about decentralization or counterparty risk or whatever don't actually matter if the energy cost is that high. It's just not important enough. Sorry.

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Anderkent 1941 days ago
> It's called an externality. It doesn't matter if you'd pay $10 for it if the cost imposed is too great

The cost imposed is proportional to the fee, since the fee has to pay for the electricity used to mine the transaction. And $10 of electricity is just... not a lot to worry about.

If you believe the electricity consumption in general has huge externalities, you have bigger problems than mining, and once you address those the mining cost/diffiuclty will adjust

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mlyle 1941 days ago
> The cost imposed is proportional to the fee, since the fee has to pay for the electricity used to mine the transaction.

No. Miners get rewards for mining blocks, which pay for 80%. Transaction fees don't pay for the electricity used in a transaction: not even close.

> If you believe the electricity consumption in general has huge externalities

Well, sure, I believe that electricity is artificially cheap. I also believe that spending $50+ of electricity per transaction done is absolutely nuts. And that amount is steadily increasing...

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Anderkent 1940 days ago
Hm, OK, I was wrong about the ratio of fees to reward. Good news is that reward is going to halve every 4 years so in 12 years it's probably going to be much more even.
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mlyle 1941 days ago
Sorry, but even if we significantly improve things such that a transaction "only" takes the equivalent of a few days of my electricity use.. that's not so great. There's better ways to do this that don't require mining.

Indeed, from a decentralization perspective, mining is looking worse than proof of stake, etc.

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