Bitcoin Forum

Hey,

How good is the argument that bitcoin is actually making the world save energy since it is pushing the limits of computer technology making computers more efficient and powerful and so having an overall positive impact in saving the world?
Is that a convincing argument to those that say that bitcoin is a huge waste of energy?

- remotemass

I wouldn't say so.

If a person isn't yet convinced that an internet currency that works 24/7/365 without borders, without censorship, without risk of confiscation, without the danger of central point's abuse, without inflation risk, more efficiently, effectively, cheaply, privately, faster than the already existent electronic forms of money, requires less energy than them and still thinks it's a bad idea, he's not going to be convinced about improving technological efficiency either.

The problem lies with him. Not with you.

Pretty poor argument. Bitcoin isn't really making computers more efficient for one. The development of miners is somewhat separate as they're doing it for a particular purpose. General computers which run our money system, and most other industries are what you'd consider general computers, which don't need the processing power or the hardware that a miner or a gaming machine would need. So, the effect of Bitcoin on advancement of technology, at least when comparing general/personal computers is negligible.

However, BlackHatCoiner's argument is a little more compelling. No one's done the Math, because the data would be hard to collect, but it takes common sense to see how much our current mainstream currency is using to stay afloat. Especially, now we're making the move to digital money, rather than predominately physical money. Although, even the latter has some pretty harmful effects to the environment in itself.

It's a good argument to an extent, and that is that BTC is a part of the emerging technologies that are pushing the limits of computing and demanding for computer tech to keep up with it's demands. So it's definatelly not the only thing, but it's in the category with other new techonlogys and social developements.

Adding to what @BlackatCoiner said, we all know that current fiat finance system wastes way more energy than Bitcoin by realllyyyyy far! And if you think that it's a collapsing system, they you don't need many more arguments.
If one chooses to say out, then, HFSP!!!

I get where youre coming from.

But first Bitcoin uses ASICS not regular computers, so it doesnt directly make computers better. But it also doesnt hurt to have more production sites that could produce computer parts around, just in case.

Second, Bitcoin also uses its fair share of energy. But the economic incentives surrounding it, actually help to produce more cleaner forms of energy. Saving on energy wont work in general on the big scale, we need an abundance of energy for it to be cheap for everyone.

The better argument would be to say that Bitcoin helps us to tackle the issue of energy scarcity, by subsidising the creation of new energy sites and providing a buyer for renewable energy 24/7. During peak demand it can also provide energy to the grid(means cheaper electricity for everyone close).   

But also dont forget that emotional people are immune to rational arguments, so good luck convincing anyone.

It has no effect on real computers, asics only mine btc , and nothing else.
So the argument is false.

Bitcoin is a huge energy waster, mainly because no matter how much energy they use, it does not increase it's security, speed, or transaction capacity.
Every altcoin outperforms btc and every altcoin uses less energy even the other proof of waste coins like ltc.

If your measure of scale is being a useless ponzi token, then yeah every altcoin is outperforming Bitcoin in uselessness by a lot. Handling many transactions and consuming less energy is easy when you’re centralized and no real achievement, because they’re even more inefficient at this than our legacy finance system.

And it’s nice to have nice stats about scalability on paper, but it doesn’t matter when no one actually uses ur token, because it’s whole purpose is to serve some weird VCs and not actual people.

Being decentralised has its energy cost.
It can’t be reduced by feelings or cool marketing lines, if you’re ruled by your emotions go ahead and keep closing your eyes, but it won’t change reality.

This is false. The more the energy that is used, the greater the difficulty. The greater the difficulty, the more infeasible it is to conduct a 51% attack, and therefore, the greater the security.

Good. That's how it supposed to work. It shouldn't have variable block sizes or block intervals.

Do you deliberately try to make it sound as you hate the Bitcoin community? If you do, leave it, we've already debunked your weak arguments and you're constantly ignoring us. There's no point to continue whining about PoW in here, you're only stultifying yourself.

It's contradictory that you keep calling them "altcoins", though. Alternative to what?  ::)

Maybe an alternative to sound money, if we look at the amount of people that got liquidated or gave up their keys for yield in ponzi schemes, i think it’s fair to assume that some people enjoy getting scammed, despite so many warnings. If they’re looking for this, Bitcoin is definitely the wrong place.

Sorry for the sarcasm.

Various infographics show that that banking industry consumes the same order of magnitude of electricity as Bitcoin. But Bitcoin processes up to 1 million transactions per day, while banking industry processes nearly all digital transactions in the world. Even with Lightning Network Bitcoin wouldn't be able to be used by all people in the world. Currently around 30 million people own Bitcoin, while everyone owns fiat. So Bitcoin is actually extremely inefficient between how much energy it consumes and how much utility to the world it provides.

Utility is more complex than transactions per day. The banking industry processes 0 decentralised, immutable, permissionless transactions a day, so in this regard they don’t provide any censorship resistance to the world, while bitcoin does. And this just one of many factors that play into utility. Bitcoin can’t do everything at the same time, without having any limitations or time to grow. These two are also complete opposites with completely different use cases. Bitcoin is way more efficient than anything else for the job it’s supposed to do.

If you want to analyze Bitcoin only as a censorship resistant digital money transfer, then Bitcoin simply has no competition, aside from altcoins, which can be ignored, because they are not secure. And since Bitcoin has no competition in this sphere, talking about efficiency makes no sense, because there's nothing to compare to.

But we can still talk about adoption by global population and energy use. Bitcoin is adopted by 0.4% of world's population, and only a small fraction of those people do transactions regularly, while Bitcoin consumes 0.1-0.2 of world's electricity. This isn't efficient, compared to other industries. Bitcoiners often say that video streaming or gaming consume even more electricity than Bitcoin, but those things provide utility to 10-30% of global population.


I'm not saying here that Bitcoin should be more efficient, or should be shut down because it's inefficient. I just don't want Bitcoin community to lie to the world, because in the long run the world will figure it out, and Bitcoin community will lose trust.

I get your point and it’s fair, i just want to broaden the perspective, that scaling in a decentralized is way harder than in a centralized one. The non bitcoin world often portays it as if bitcoin uses energy for no reason, but the truth is there’s no other way than this currently. If we want decentralized infrastructure we have to use energy.

I think we should also point out the differences in centralized vs decentralized architecture, so people actually understand why it does this and why some limitations are there.

This is the same as saying that it's inefficient because it uses too much energy for only 7 TXs/sec. It definitely is inefficient, that way, but its properties are much broader than that. It's far more efficient to move thousands of dollars oversea now more than ever. It's far more efficient to open a channel with your co-workers, and pay them that way, instantly, with zero fees.

The fact that the world ignores these advantages, doesn't make it unfavorable. It's potentially more efficient than the banking system.

Which is its main property. You can't mention bitcoin to someone if you don't add censorship resistance. That's why comparisons between other payment methods may be problematic. And that's why bitcoin is so valuable anyway.

As bad as it can get!
ASICs are not mainstream computers, and ASICs are far below the top end specs of computer chips right now.

The argument is pretty flawed since the development of ASICs is basically funded by the daily reward miners get, you can't sell them more gear that they need and you can't sell them one every year just because it's fancier. The daily reward is now 18 million, this includes ROI, includes energy costs includes miners' profit, let's say one-quarter of that goes to gear, it means 2 billion years, TSMC alone makes 45 billion.


Potentially, but this potential comes with a different disadvantage, let's assume 1 billion people would be using bitcoin, I highly doubt the price would be 20k and far more likely 100k-200k at worse in such case, right?
Multiplying the reward by 10 times would mean at least a 7-8 raise in energy consumption too, right?  ;)

I can't know. That's complete speculation.

Again, I can't know what the energy consumption will be if the price increases that much, because that's one more speculation. I'm pretty certain that the difficulty would increase if the price did a 10x, even thought price isn't strictly correlated with difficulty. And, even that way, it's more efficient to send money across the globe for a nickle, to pay your employees instantly, for free, privately, efficiently, same as to make a purchase online, and the like.

It's working more efficiently than the banking system that requires skyscrapers, ATMs, transports, credit/debit cards, money issuance, armored cars, servers, further computing power, employees; these resources are just from the top of my head. And, ultimately, you can't know exactly how much energy is used, in contrast with bitcoin, wherein you can find that out with a bitcoin-cli -getinfo. Transparently.

But you can safely assume the price will be higher, maybe 5x or maybe 30x, the price being the same with 1 billion users would be nearly impossible.


No, it's not, but again, a higher reward would make miners spend more on gear.
A simple check on the profitability spikes on every TH/s will show an obvious correlation between a huge increase in the price of miners and them being sold out.


Yeah, you know, back in 2017 bitcoiners were quoting this article a lot around here
https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-vs-visa-electricity-consumption-fallacy-8cf194987a50
It put the banking industry at 100Twh, and Bitcoin's network at 3 times lower just 28.67
Then last year came the report from Galaxy digital, which put the banking consumption at 263Twh, making the bitcoin network still more efficient at only 113Twh.
But early this year, the Bitcoin mining council release their numbers (https://bitcoinminingcouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/2022.04.25-Q1_2022_BMC_Presentation.pdf) which raised bitcoin usage at 247 TWh.

And that was back in March when we were below 200exa, we're now already at 220... ;)
I'm telling you, dropping the bank comparison would be the best, it did not age well at all and it won't be a nice finding in a year or two.

From a different point of view, there is light at the end of the tunnel. In a bid to find alternative energy source for mining bitcoin, without harming the environment, more positive discoveries could be made that will benefit the energy sector as well as being environmentally friendly. The search for alternative energy for mining Bitcoin that is more environmentally friendly, is therefore, pushing the boundaries of technology to arrive at better alternatives. Therefore, the initial perceived negative effect of Bitcoin mining, could turn around to be positive when better alternative energy sources are discovered.

Yeah, right, ASICs are not general-purpose computers but still, you need computer scientists and engineers to push that technology, no? And you will probably end up with skilled people to build the next iterations of computer architectures. Maybe many of them end up building Tesla computer chips and technology... Just sayin'...

- remotemass

I would say that No Bitcoins are not making the computers more efficient and powerful.
I mean whenever we want to mine Bitcoins, we build a miner whose sole work is to completely focused on mining the Bitcoins and hence we can’t use it as a personal computer.
So firstly there is no need to argue on this topic right now, as this is both completely a different things.
Regarding saving the world. I don’t think miner plays any crucial role.
I mean until and unless your miner is running on solar energy, it will generate huge electricity bill.
So yes it’s hampering a natural resource electricity. So yes it doesn’t have a positive impact on saving the world.

If Bitcoin is doing that for all the computers in the world that are used in schools and homes and workplaces, then perhaps we should credit Bitcoin for it. But it's not the case. Well, in the first place, it is not even Bitcoin itself that is doing that. Manufacturing companies are creating advanced technologies that are focused on Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin mining alone. The rest of the world's ordinary computers are having their own development pace. And also, those more powerful technologies have high energy consumption, so I guess there's really no energy saving here.

Its not that wrong to say that mining Bitcoin is a huge environmental disaster. This has nothing to do with Bitcoin but rather the electricity which is generated with really dirty and outdated fuels. If we were all using a renewable energy source, Bitcoin mining would be very expensive which would mean the price of Bitcoin would be a lot higher than it is now... But people are too greedy and stupid. They think short term and do no comprehend the advantages of green technology. As long as there is profit, nobody cares about the air they breathe or the microplastics in their gut.

Bitcoin is technology that is being built for it purpose,but combining it's technology with other computering technology is not what i don't understand it's fact, when observing bitcoin you will see that has it structure of technology and very good structure of undependable technology also, people that is criticisms bitcoin as waste of time and waste of technology plans, are those once who don't know the technology behind bitcoin development and bitcoin technology.

We only have very few argument that points a good part in having bitcoin specially in terms of Energy saving and efficiency , most of the thread and posts that we come across is about banning of Bitcoin in specific area because of Energy expensiveness .

____________________________

But like arguments above? this is a Poor and not supportive topic that only poor relation to the actual users can prove.

not unless people can do wiser in Mining and transacting bitcoin with cheaper electricity ? this issue will always be a problem.

That's reasonable to assume it's true.

I think you're avoiding the big picture. Efficiency isn't just "which of the two requires more energy"; it's what's having a better performance. The banking system uses productive elements such as labor, buildings, cars, various kinds of tools, technology, energy of course etc., all of which could be used to satisfy another need. In Proof-of-Work there's no other real cost besides GPUs/ASICs and the energy that's required.

And again, transactions are settled more efficiently. It's more efficient to pay a merchant with Lightning. It's more efficient to send money oversea. It's more efficient to utilize divided possession.

This is the approach that I have. I mean yes creating it could be inefficient, and sending it from you to your friend sitting next to you could be terrible as well. However, sending money from USA to India, from Japan to Nigeria, from UK to Qatar and what not, all of these are a lot cheaper and the method we have with crypto is quicker and cheaper and more energy efficient then whatever has been done so far in the world.

When the whole world finds a way to make it possible for people to send and receive money via bank wires very cheaply, anywhere from the world to anywhere in the world, it should be cheap in order to make bitcoin not valuable as it is.

If we are approaching it like that, then we would have to say everything that is working at the same time is saving the world energy. Like the battery in cars, the more you use your car, the more it gets regenerated, and it continues to work, rarely they stop to be fair, only if you do not use it for long periods of time.

This is why I highly doubt that it would really matter the same way, computers being used and making money is not the case anymore neither, it is asic miners and GPU rigs that control the mining world. Overall, it is a shame that we have to do it this way, some other way would have been better, but it just doesn't work any other way so far with the big name ones.

In a way, it is, because there's nothing cheaper than Proof-of-Work (https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/). So, if we count this resources-wise, creating a new form of money with Proof-of-Work in a cartel-resistant way is efficient.

Not if we decide to utilize Lightning, it isn't. Nor if my friend is willing to accept a non-RBF transaction as settled. Both can happen instantly.

Note that it isn't just the efficiency that makes bitcoin valuable. It's censorship resistance, privacy (or pseudo-privacy, whatever), self-authentication and lower costs as well.