[kierkegaard_s]

The people that write these articles haven't the faintest idea of the protocol and repeat the same tired arguments over and over again. Why does Bitcoin have to justify its energy usage when the legacy financial system does not? Who becomes the arbiter of what tech or sector deserves to draw on the grid?

[dale_glass]

The "legacy financial system" is far, FAR more energy efficient in comparison.

Bitcoin's rising power usage doesn't achieve a greater capacity, it's simply the result of an arms race between miners. The faster others mine, the faster you must do so as well, if you want to keep making money. But Bitcoin's design results in that the increased power doesn't really do anything for the network. It doesn't make it faster, or give it a higher capacity.

Bitcoin is also not a financial system, it's a global game of chicken.

Even Bitcoin Cash, which keeps the same stupid design is a more attractive option if one wants to have anything resembling an economy simply due to that they increased the block size limit.

[frankenst1]

> The "legacy financial system" is far, FAR more energy efficient in comparison.

Citation needed. The legacy financial system has a huge infrastructure behind it to secure and maintain it (buildings, transport, security, ...). I would assume the US Petrodollar alone probably exceeds Bitcoin's consumption of resources (I don't have any sources though).

> Even Bitcoin Cash, which copies the same stupid design is a more attractive option due to that they increased the block size limit.

BCH is a scam. Not because they assume that the removal of the block size limit comes without any costs, but because it regularly splits after influential but narcissistic 'leaders' attempt to grab more power and because its community continues to justify deceitful tactics to promote BCH and trick people into buying BCH when they expected Bitcoin.

In fact, the lie that BCH is more energy efficient than Bitcoin is just that, another BCH advertising lie. Energy consumption is a function of block reward only (mined coins + tx fees). Currently miners are rewarded ~$400K for Bitcoin and ~6K for BCH. BCH would consume exactly as much energy as Bitcoin if BCH's prices or number of transactions would rise accordingly.

[dale_glass]

> Citation needed.

A BTC transaction is currently estimated to take 821 kWh. That's ridiculous.

> BCH is a scam. Not because they assume that the removal of the block size limit comes without any costs, but because it regularly splits after influential but narcissistic 'leaders' attempt to grab more power and because its community continues to justify deceitful tactics to promote BCH and trick people into buying BCH when they expected Bitcoin.

I don't care about any of that, actually. I'm mercilessly meritocratic in this regard, and in my case, merit == processing transactions at a low cost.

Whatever nonsense goes on in the community, the drama regarding branding or whatnot isn't of my concern. My interest in crypto is extremely minor and focused straight on the "cash" type of usage. Whoever can provide that earns my interest, and I hold no loyalty whatsoever. BTC had my interest back before it bumped into the block limit, and at that exact instant, lost it.

[frankenst1]

> A BTC transaction is currently estimated to take 821 kWh. That's ridiculous.

It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)?

>> BCH is a scam.

> I don't care about any of that, actually. I'm mercilessly meritocratic in this regard, and in my case, merit == processing transactions at a low cost. My interest in crypto is extremely minor.

If you don't care about the details and your interest in crypto is extremely minor it is super risky to put any money in an altcoin like BCH or to advertise it without a disclaimer.

You are more likely to lose value because

    - a) it has low security (a collusion of only 0.5% of Bitcoin miners can perform a 51% attack on BCH)
    - b) the community and their 'leaders' continuously lie and mislead the public about BCHs performance, adoption and scalability (e.g. unlimited transactions without degraded decentralization)
    - c) the coin and the community splits regularly because of power grabs
    - d) the market's expected value of BCH drops continuously (because of the points mentioned before)

The merit you are looking for, "processing many transactions at low cost" is currently not achievable without sacrifices. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

[dale_glass]

> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what?

The current system, which is far more efficient.

> a) it has low security (a collusion of only 0.5% of Bitcoin miners can perform a 51% attack on BCH)

Not a critical issue, since evidently it's not happening. I'm not putting in more than I can afford to lose.

> - b) the community and their 'leaders' continuously lie and mislead the public about BCHs performance, adoption and scalability (e.g. unlimited transactions without degraded decentralization) > - c) the coin and the community splits regularly because of power grabs

Completely unimportant to me. I'm not loyal to BCH or anyone else. I use whatever works at any given point in time. BCH currently seems to be the most usable for my ends, given how it performs transactions cheaply and has decent enough adoption. But if it dies, no big deal, I'll use something else. Heck, even DOGE seems to be doing okay.

Plus, this is crypto. There is no such a thing as an altcoin. It's all software. Permissionless money, remember? Lies, deceit, cheating, are all fair game since there's nobody to give anybody official blessings or permission on anything. So I couldn't care less who said what or what internal drama is brewing. Does it work or does it not for my use is the only metric, and the second it stops working I'll find something else.

> - d) the market's expected value of BCH drops continuously (because of the points mentioned before)

No, currently it isn't. See the graphs. Plus I'm not interested in the virtual gold kind of usage. So long it more or less holds up, that works for me.

[frankenst1]

>> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what?

> The current system, which is far more efficient.

You keep repeating that. Do you have any sources to back that claim?

[jcranmer]

> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)?

I've done the math before, but I've forgotten the precise results I came up with. The results are in the realm of "Bitcoin uses more energy than that which is used to produce all the US [maybe all the world's] currency." Like, it's not even close--I think shipping gold bars on an airplane may be more energy-efficient than Bitcoin now.

[frankenst1]

Impressive, I wouldn't know where to begin. Could you expand on which items you included and how you decided on how they were weighted?

[analog31]

Ah, but until demonstrated otherwise, the legacy financial system also supports Bitcoin. It's what makes it possible to create the goods and services that people want to buy with Bitcoins, and the electricity to do the computations. We don't even know what society would look like without our present-day economic infrastructure.

For now, the cost of Bitcoin is on top of the cost of the existing system, not instead of it.

[frankenst1]

> For now, the cost of Bitcoin is on top of the cost of the existing system, not instead of it.

You can have a closed loop of exchanging Bitcoin for goods and services without any legacy financial system involved. Just because you prefer to exchange your Bitcoins for your local currency does not imply that the cost of maintaining your local currency should be added on top of Bitcoins own.

[analog31]

Indeed, but we don't know what those goods and services would consist of in the absence of the legacy financial system.

[splintercell]

> Bitcoin's rising power usage doesn't achieve a greater capacity, it's simply the result of an arms race between miners.

When the difficulty rate rises the network is more difficult to be attacked. The upper limit to the difficulty rate is the point at which the miners can be profitable. We want the network to be as secure as possible. Though, I would say that we also want the network to be as efficient as possible (ie larger block size for more tx per block) like in Bitcoin Cash.

[poundofshrimp]

Increased power increases security of the Bitcoin network because it makes a potential 51% attack more expensive.

[NikolaNovak]

>>"Why does Bitcoin have to justify its energy usage when the legacy financial system does not?"

These questions always strike me as disingenuous / intentionally obtuse. But charitably assuming an honest question for purpose of frank discourse, my simplest answer / understanding is that in general, in the daily transactional system, participants work to reduce energy cost per transaction and over most periods of time this energy cost per transaction has been reducing, or if it increases, it is to support some additional identifiable functionality. This strikes me as a rational system.

With bitcoin, my understanding is that effective energy usage per transaction / for the system as a whole has been increasing. This strikes me as iterational.

I am eager to be corrected if my high level perception of bitcoin is incorrect and energy costs have been rationally decreasing / becoming more efficient over time.

If NOT.. Then how does anybody persuade themselves to believe this is a rational currency system, or at the very least, that it's energy usage in particular is in any way whatsoever defensible??

[frankenst1]

The increase in hashrate can be interpreted as an increase in security, i.e. it is much more difficult/expensive for an attacker (even nation-level) to harm Bitcoin. This is mandatory for a financial network that aims to operate on global scale.

Bitcoin does not consume energy per transaction but per block. How many transactions the block contains does not change the energy requirement to mine it. If the number of transactions on the Bitcoin network would go to zero tomorrow, energy consumption would not change (same if transactions were doubled).

Bitcoin's energy usage is a function of hashrate which is affected by mining profitability which is affected by block reward (mined coins + tx fees) and energy prices.

Long story short: Just make "dirty" energy more expensive by including the cost it incurs on the climate. This would make Bitcoin's already large share of renewables even bigger and would improve global energy production and consumption as a result.

[NikolaNovak]

I appreciate the response but we may disagree as to what is the summary / "long story short".

My "long story short" question is: over time, has Bitcoin effective energy per transaction gone up or down?

Not theory, not what nebulous public policy changes should happen to justify the energy mix, not what we think may might need to happen et cetera et cetera.

Is the energy cost per transaction in real world for bitcoin going up or down? (in principle calculated by "energy used for bitcoin system in total divided by number of transactions executed per some unit of time").

Everything else is trying to muddy it up from my personal perspective.

[frankenst1]

> Is the energy cost per transaction in real world for bitcoin going up or down? Everything else is trying to muddy it up from my personal perspective.

Energy is expended to secure the network as a whole and not for the transfer of coins.

But if you insist on computing such a metric with only limited applicability, the answer is: Yes, the metric goes up:

Estimated power consumption per day, 2020-2021 +5%:

    01/01/2020: 0.2 TWh
    01/01/2021: 0.211 TWh

Estimated number of onchain transactions per day, 2020-2021: +6%:

    01/01/2020: 288K
    01/01/2021: 305K

And this doesn't even include all the hidden private transactions that occur off-chain on Layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network:

Number of nodes on the Lightning Network, 2020-2021 +60%:

    01/01/2020: 5K
    01/01/2021: 8K

Capacity of the Lightning Network, 2020-2021 +430%:

    01/01/2020: $6M
    01/01/2021: $32M

[frankenst1]

> Yes, the metric goes up:

Oops, meant to say transactions go up vs energy, so the metric energy/transaction goes actually down.

[thrill]

Because there are alternatives to Bitcoin that don't suffer from that design flaw.