Jet CashIt would be more interesting to calculate the amount of power used by the bitcoin network per transaction. Sure, central banks have huge server farms but the amount of transactions they handle each day are enourmous compared to bitcoin.
If I remember correctly then there was a study that said that each bitcoin transaction eats the power that 1.XX average US-households use per day.
They will probably include the cost of running each node as a standalone functiion. I'm running core 0.12 as a background task whilst I do some other work on the computer. How much extra electricity is that going to consume?
Good question. Though I think the normal nodes are not the important part in electricity usage. The miners are. And that study said that the bitcoin protocol is 100 times more secure than needed. Means we have way way too many miners. Raising fees to reward miners is not needed, lowering rewards is needed to bring that into proportion.
I wish I could find the link to that study again. I think the energy usage per normal bitcoin transaction was said to be 1.25 or 1.75 average us-households use a day. Bigger transactions does use even more.
Well, at the beginning of the bitcoin protocol nobody thought we would have to fight an artificial restriction that limits the amount of transactions. The energy price per transaction can get cheaper the more transactions can be included in 10 minutes too.
MicroGuyI read this great quote today, "In their introductory white paper, Danezis and Meiklejohn argue that the bitcoin network suffers from a scalability problem tied to its computationally intensive mining process, by which energy is expended to secure a reliable ledger of transactions."
Do these academics have any idea what it costs to keep the lights on for our current central bank authorities from their briefcases, to their choreographed press releases to their board room meetings and meet-ups, to the banks that administer their bidding and to all of the millions of personnel around the World. I would just wildly estimate it to be about $500M - $1B per day verses Bitcoins $16M per day.
So technically being 2% or less the size of the current framework - " is not scalable" evidently.
The bitcoin network is growing to become an energy behemoth of apocalyptic proportions. If cryptocurrencies overtake fiat money (and I believe they will), it will become the social responsibility of these communities to make Satoshi's protocol more eco-friendly.
I lived through the unshackling of information by the Internet. As I reach the end of my lifetime, it will be my great honor to witness the unshackling of money by this great digital currency revolution.
But as we free the fiat slaves from their monetary bondage, it is essential that we also address the energy sucking reality of the POW lottery beast.
Block halving will do their part. Miners will stop to mine and we will be safe way more than needed. We surely don't need a fee market because that means more miners will stay active and use energy for bitcoin. It's a simple market. As long as the reward for mining is high enough more miners will flow in. Raise the reward and you raise the energy consumption by the network. And vice versa.
Some even want to compensate for block halving with a fee market. Guess as a miner it would make somehow sense. As a bitcoin user it makes no sense.
