Bitcoin Forum

interesting article:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/the-electricity-required-for-a-single-bitcoin-trade-could-power-a-house-for-a-whole-month

....just another reason why the Bitcoin bubble will ultimately fail.

Of course this will not change the minds of the Bitcoin fans who are entirely delusional and will dismiss any rational arguments against their Bitcoin-religion with the words "FUD" or "You don't understand" or "This is different" or any variation thereof. It is already a certainty that these people will lose their imagined "profits".

For those who are not hardcore Bitcoin religious believers, this is the last chance to GTHO (Get The Hell Out).

https://assets.weforum.org/editor/kObXsDs2YP6eRya2e_23MwU0aOHxpqJzCcuKxcpmWEc.png

Bitcoin network takes a lot of electric power, but these numbers are 20 times less than the whole banking system consumes.

Look at the data. A bitcoin transaction takes 20000 times more electricity than a transaction with a visa card. What do you think will happen if all transactions switch to Bitcoin? That is simply not physically possible - and that is one of the reasons why Bitcoin for sure will fail spectacularly. The only reason price now is high is because of the "greater fool theory". There are still many people out there who are dumb enough to believe price will go up for ever ("to the moon"). Once reality kicks in - and it always does eventually - there is nothing left. GTHO

i think BTC as it is now, it's primitive and it has no change to become an e-currency. the old "holders" are doing propaganda, they own media, exchangers and so on...but the truth is that BTC has no future if it will continue without any real upgrade.

they will more  then likely change bitcoin to use less electricity when it becomes a huge issue 

BTC has actually gone beyond being a mass currency trading platform, the huge crypto industry is now 600 to 800 BILLION USA or 1% of the worlds GDP and it is the value unit against which all other crypto is now valued.

So it is now a slow and expensive storage system for the platinum coin that later crypto coins are now all judged against.

I don't know if the collective here wanted it that way or not, but we now have a slow expensive BTC being the way all new crypto is valued.

It's actually funny, so while another may take it's place as to the most likely to become a fast mass transaction crypto like Ripple with 80 BILLION coins or a yet launched new crypto even, the fact remains, like minded people value BTC as the original crypto and as long as exchanges use it to value other crypto the newer coins that end up having applications inside many big companies and the coins that become usable mass transaction coins, will have value but they will be judged against BTC which for a generation or so will have all it's original supporters holding it and waiting for the day the messiah Satoshi returns.

haha

Anyway, BTC is now how you store crypto wealth.

You use other crypto for 100x plays and maybe to start to buy stuff with, but if you have BTC you usually don't sell or trade in it, you are a HODL

Crypto is now like the old world metals value system

BTC is platinum
ETH/BCH is fighting for gold and loser takes silver position
LTC and XRP are fighting for copper and zinc positions

Now it may be that xrp takes over the world, but it will always be a ratio of the value of btc

20 million btc
80 billion xrp

so crypto and wealth storage now equals btc

I would forget btc ever being a mass transaction crypto

you do know that all the btc transactions on exchanges aren't even in blockchain right

you park some btc or dough in the exchange then all the volume is smoke and mirrors the exchange saying we traded in house all these millions in value

so the coins on the exchanges move around between traders?

heck no, they move around digits in their own ledges showing who now owns what

the coins are not being traded around, only rights to the ones the exchanges keep in cold storage

so your wallet does not show the transactions, only your fake account on an exchange shows your moves, none of it is the block chain

if these coins were hitting the block chain you couldn't be trading at 0.10 or 0.25%

it's already an issue. only few chinesse miners can afford to mine.

Everybody can afford to mine. It won't be profitable, but they can.

If energy use actually ever became a real issue, it wouldn't take all that much for the community to change algorithm. If there will be a need, things will move towards--as usual--a new Equilibrium.

The "bubble" might eventually explode, but it won't be down to energy use.

One BTC is worth tens of times more than monthly power.

do you mine? :)

This sounds strange of course, but if we do some simple calculations, we find that if we turn all power we use for mining Bitcoin into powering houses, we could power 54000 houses.
If we'd believe the internet, that's less than 1/20000th of the total number of houses in the world.

Anyways, I also believe that there are far better uses for our electricity, but these kinds of articles use comparisons that make the situation look far worse than it really is.
Let's just start using a better crypto that doesn't require as much electricity. (and preferably one that also allows for cheaper & faster transactions... and more anonymous too!)

Bitcoin is melting icebergs! This is the biggest PR headache for Bitcoin, they need to get a solution going.

The food thrown in the garbage in one day could feed the whole African population that day.
Interesting fact? Who care?
The money spent in the wars could implant solar panels in all the world Sahara or even in every meter in the earth.
Interesting fact? Who care?
From where came the cotton used to create fiat including USD? Poor workers you said?
From where came the shitty papers used by banks to sign your contracts?
Renewable energy and Virtual crypto could make the world better. That's my point of view.

Edit
Let's nuke that iceberg and deny climate change?

I do not see any problems for bitcoins, tied to a shortage of electricity. There are many different sources of alternative types of electricity in the world. It is the energy of the wind, the sun, which are inexhaustible. If there are some problems like in China, people will find other countries where bimojun will be profitable. The Chinese have already chosen the province of Quebec in Canada, are considering the possibility of mining in Russia. Recently, Belarus has fully authorized in its country any activities with the crypto currency, including its mining, and any activity with a crypto currency for the next five years is exempt from any taxes. In this regard, I generally do not see any problems with the shortage of electricity for bitcoin mining.

Back from a long vacation with my fiance to see that bitcoin price was falling below $13,000 good thing that he was with me all this time or else he would've tried to sell my precious coins for so darn cheap prices :D
Don't be silly, You can't print $16,000 dollar bills and then give a digital copy of it to VISA and expect them to transfer it to someone else, Cost per transaction is actually zero or could be zero, Miners could mine an empty block or a block with only 5 transactions, If you had to calculate their cost it would be probably near $5000 cost per tx. Including tx's in to blocks is completely optional, You could pay zero fee and without incentive of course no one would even look at it. Would you like to mine bitcoin without any costs? No one would buy such bitcoins from you because they could mine them with no costs :D

That is actually worth considering, and I do now wonder about what will happen eventually... is this a road to ultimate failure?
Or can there be another way?
I think finding another way is a must.
So there is a huge difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin when it comes to power consumption per transaction, I guess that means there can be a fork and the resulting outcome would use less power?

The article is highly misleading. It doesn't give any explanation on how they calculated that. It looks crazy to me because they don't talk about the electricity to mine one BTC but the electricity to process one transaction, which is hugely variable. The electricity needed to mine one BTC depends on the number of computers mining. The electricity needed to process one transaction depends of the size of the transaction, and the number of transactions in one given block. As they say on cars, your mileage may vary.

I wish we'd have some data about Google. I'm sure Google' servers consume much more electricity than all miners combined. And note that it's only BTC haters who complain about electricity consumption.

Maybe also bitcoin will change to Pos in the future.
Does anyone know if this is possible ? Or is POW / POS a choice early in the development process that can not be altered easily later on ?

They do some stupid things with those articles and the way they do their research..

First is that nobody has a clue how much energy is spent on mining.
And nobody will ever now.

We only have two things to go by:
-difficulty > and we can approximate hashrate and thus the numbers of miners pluged in.
Hashrate is about 8,481,426,187 GH/s , an S9 goes by 13 000 GH/s so we can say we have about 700k of them.
And taking into consideration 1200KW is not that impressive

-bitcoin price (and reward)
And this is the stupid way of doing math.
They take the reward (12.5 btc every block) multiply it by the price and then divide by transactions.
So we end with 27 millions /400k and 67$ spent for every tx.
But this is the stupid way of doing it.

In any case, bitkoin will be mined until it is economically profitable to do so. However, if we look at the types of electric power production, recently alternative sources of electricity are widely used for mass use, which are practically inexhaustible. Therefore, you should not worry about electricity.

I get the point, but that's not the fairest representation of the situation. The trend in electricity input has largely been driven by speculation. Once some long term market equilibrium is reached (perhaps years out), the pendulum should swing the other direction. And then FUD will probably be more focused on the down-trending hash rate than electricity input.


That seems unlikely. I'll be curious to see where we are in a few years, in comparison to the gold minting and banking industries. Both require huge amounts of energy.


That problem has less to do with electricity costs than ASIC production costs. There are many geographic locations that are comparable in electricity costs to China, and some percentage of people always have subsidization/free electricity.

All the more reason to use renewable energy. Solar and wind power technology have improve through the years. The two would make mining operations’ less costly.

Studies have shown christmas lights consume more electricity than bitcoin. According to polls only 2% of americans have used bitcoin of crypto. Some mining ops in china utilize hydroelectric power which is both cleaner and cheaper than coal. Russia proposed powering their bitcoin mining via nuclear reactors.

The idea that bitcoin consumes hideous amounts of electricity (in comparison to other things) while being fueled exclusively by environmentally damaging power sources such as coal, is primarily a media contrived view.

Bitcoin is both powered by environmentally clean energy sources and probably doesn't consume more electricity worldwide than personal massagers.