Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wpietri 1609 days ago
I look forward to seeing your math on that. But for a fair comparison you can't just look at "casinos to date" and "Bitcoin to date". After all, as Bitcoin proponents never tire of telling us, this is supposedly the early days.
1 comments
Tenoke 1609 days ago
Some of the most expensive casinos (just the building) to build are:

Venetian Macau – $2.4 billion, Wynn Las Vegas – $2.7 billion, Resorts World Sentosa – $4.53 billion, Marina Bay Sands – $5.36 billion, CityCenter Las Vegas – $9 billion.

That already likely costs more than the combined electricity used by Bitcoin so far, if it doesn't you can easily reach trillions by combining the costs of just Casino buildings. Money roughly translates into resources, so I can't see a way in which the gambling industry hasn't consumed much more than Bitcoin as of right now. Maybe in a century if Bitcoin keeps going really strong it can start to catch up.

0. https://casino.partycasino.com/en/blog/the-most-expensive-ca...

link
joshuamorton 1609 days ago
> you can easily reach trillions by combining the costs of just Casino buildings.

I have my doubts about this.

BTC energy cost was in the realm of 10 billion/year this year, and increasing quickly year over year. That's from around 150 TW hours, or around 5x Nevada's consumption.

The hash rate this year averaged around 140 million THash/sec. It appears that efficient equipment costs about 10k per 100THash/sec. So you're looking at another 14 billion in currently running hardware, conservatively, not to mention the price of the buildings those Asics need to be put in.

There's another big flaw here, which is that cost isn't just reflective of consumption but of demand. The same hotel building on the Vegas strip is a lot more expensive than if you built it in rural Idaho, and BTC has the advantage of being able to use the cheapest land and electricity.

link
wpietri 1609 days ago
Comparing the cost to build a casino with the raw electricity cost of Bitcoin is not so much an apple-to-oranges comparison as apples-to-tire-rims.

But if your point is that Bitcoin is basically a big casino, I agree. And I think we should regulate it like one.

link
kergonath 1608 days ago
In the case of buildings, that money went largely to engineers, workers, and materials. It’s not the best way of stimulating local economies (it’s fairly inefficient because of bribes and margins), but still much better than Bitcoin.
link