The Network Keeps Getting More and More Inefficient. Now Just One Bitcoin Transaction Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week
Bitcoin miners now have to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.
This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On a larger scale, De Vries' index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes.
God this makes me so hard, capitalism fuck yeah. Farms burning electricity away for gainz, meanwhile that energy could power up Nigeria.
Lincoln Long
good thing the chinaman doesent give a shit and power is dirt cheap there
Jaxon Rodriguez
you taking all the energies stop!
John Green
What will Nigeria so with this energy? Nothing. They are decades behind. The major part (both wealthy and smart people) are running away instead of building up their country. Despite the massive curroption this will need decades to solve and no (invisible)help with tech or anything will hell them. The situation is even more fucked than the whole Islam.
Fuck wrong Board.
Robert Taylor
what's your point
Ayden Moore
Faggotry, plenty of opportunity to switch to sustainable methods but governments don't give a fuck, don't hate the player. Hate the game.
Dominic Sanchez
It costs visa 0.0002 cents to transfer a million dollars. It costs the bitcoin network 1000 dollars to transfer 7000 dollars.
Seems a little retarded.
Jeremiah Phillips
Bitcoin is pure trash. Soon there's going to be a movement against Bitcoin because of how much power it takes to keep it running. Soon BTC will be worthless because people will become aware and move to stop its use. Stop living in the past fags.
Bentley Brooks
So who is losing these 1000 you talk of on the transaction? Miners are making money People sending 7k dont pay 1k on fees, more like 5$ You are full of shit pajeet
Austin Martin
The network itself is burning millions every day. It only stays afloat because new money keeps pouring in. It's a ponzi scheme. As soon as there is a slight hickup of new suckers the entire thing implodes to zero.
Liam Evans
>chinas government >mfw bitcoin really is a cia psyops evonomic weapon
Jaxson Cooper
Why would you give free energy to those inbred animals? Fuck off you refugees welcome faggot.
Nicholas Wilson
What a piece of garbage coin haha
Jack Lopez
when will bitcoin go pos?
Daniel Perry
You have clearly no idea what you are talking about
Ian Morales
Bitcoin needs to pop. Its dragging down all the alts. Also thats how much it costs to mine bitcoin, not transfer bitcoins. Dont they know the difference in basic words? >Vice Ahh. Makes sense.
James Lee
irony
Logan Martin
no, new money and new people add to the transactions and stress the network even more. Also Hashrate is increasing since the beginning, so more people are actually mining
Hudson Robinson
Why do people celebrate such inefficiency. An electronic coin should cost close to nothing
Isaiah Reyes
The only irony is that vice is too stupid to realize that they add electricity allready used.
They makde the false claim it costs so much electricity to make a transaction because the coin that is transfered is automaticly labeled with the electricity used to make it.
In reality the electricity used to transfer one Bitcoin from account 1 to 2. is minimal but retarded vice reporter say: >Well because you need power to produce Bitcoin is costs automaticly power to trasnact bitcoin XD
This is stupid as fuck.
David Barnes
true it's the pow system that fucks it
Lincoln Perry
Have you tried running a mine farm and paying the electricity bill? An antminer needs 600watt for a shitty bitcoin return
Asher Foster
transactions dont 'use' mining power. take your vice crap somewhere else
Jonathan Gonzalez
Whats fucking worse, is people on this board, in this thread, on this website dont know the fucking difference.
Jaxon Hall
probably the same people that think price follows hashpower
Isaiah Cook
it's 1300 watts retard.
Adrian Cook
Never did understand why people think that. Its like saying, More people are farming strawberries than cherries so Strawberries are going to cost more this season!
Must be Europeans, other than Austrians, none of them can understand economics.
Jace Green
so invest in tesla batteries, nuclear power, coal?
Liam Martinez
And?
This is just a testament to the security of the network.
It also highlights the incredible scarcity of the coins themselves.
I don't give a fuck about poorfag commies complaining about "muh electricity". Some electricity is a small price to pay for a free, open monetary system when the alternative is government money which results in billions being used to wage wars all across the world and kill millions.
Get bent nocoiner faggots.
Carter Torres
Correct. We blockchain pros know the number of miners has no influence on how fast new blocks are unlocked. You can transact just as fine no matter what the miners do. In fact I don't even know why we have them.
Andrew Russell
So if the cost of transferring 1 coin would be 2 coins you think the network would be even better? You clearly have no understanding of basic economics.
Oliver Ortiz
This bubble will clearly burst when the fork happens. You have to be a moron to think it rising to almost $7500 is sustainable
Kevin Myers
Can't decide if FUDding or just retarded
Dominic Cox
>i will be right this time!!!
Ian Perez
Op is right, Bitcoin is destined for failure. No one actually uses it for transactions or as a currency, they just buy it to hold as an investment. It's worthless unless these exorbitant fees are fixed and it becomes easier to use by normies.
Ethan Long
Hey Peter. How you doing boy.
Nathaniel Morris
>burgers are smart most people here leave their coins on coinbase
Jose Hall
215 kilowatt hours does not cost 2 BTC my friend
any infrastructure has maintenance costs
Noah Russell
You have to go back, Roger.
Jaxon Miller
sorry for being dumb but i have a question.
why transactions require so much computing power? its not like its a rendering farm or anything. its simply there to process some numbers. is it because the code is shit or something?
Lincoln Campbell
You claim to be a "blockchain expert" but don't even understand the role of mining?
Unlike the client-server model which relies on asymmetric information the bitcoin network is entirely open. The process of mining, or more generally "proof of work", makes it costly to attack the network, and in most cases economically unwise to do so. If it took no electricity to mine blocks state-sponsored actors could easily re-organize transactions and the network would be unusable.
It's an inevitable cost of decentralized consensus. Nocoiners love to point to the "inefficiency" of blockchains vs. Visa servers. They ignore the millions Visa spends on fraud prevention and the billions Visa charges vendors. They also ignore the inherent weaknesses of government money one being the trillions in "real wealth" the government steals from us through inflation.
The "solution" to this "problem" is scaling the network to handle more transactions per block or moving a certain portion of transactions off-chain. Miners play a vital role in the ecosystem and to attack them for "wasting electricity" demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire concept.
Brody Murphy
No. It's inherent in the blockchain idea. If you want to base everything on cryptographic security then you have to pump a lot of electricity.
Colton Cruz
>1 billion suns VS >1 billion bitcoins Who would win?
Cooper Carter
>you have to pump a lot of electricity proof of stake
Chase Rodriguez
So how does Bitcoin plan to solve this issue? Is this truly Satoshi's vision?
Levi James
>moving a certain portion of transactions off-chain Then it's just a shittier version of paypal.
Ian Thompson
Haha, is anything not these days
Joshua Brooks
He already cashed out. His vision of becoming a ponzi millionaire is achieved.
Isaiah Taylor
Wrong, satoshi never moved a single coin.
Brayden Mitchell
How about store of value and no bank can take my money because FDIC is insolvent????
Jace Thomas
so he didn't pre-mine it? how was the first distribution of bitcoin was made? i can't find information anywhere
Kevin King
Where is SATOSHI BITCOINS?
Isaac Sanders
You are holding them. And he is holding your dollars. And he has no plans of giving them back.
Henry Bailey
no he didn't premine anything
are you fucking new?
he released bitcoin, nobody gave a fuck, so he was mining by himself until the first people contacted him and started getting involved
someone had to start the network, it's not his fault that nobody gave a fuck by then in mining something that was worth $0
he mined it post-release, so it's not a pre-mine
also im pretty sure hal finney (first person ever to recieve a bitcoin transaction) was satoshi, and hal finney is now dead, so the coins will never move.
dave kleiman is another proponent, also dead.
and another dead proponent: john nash.
David Miller
there was no first distribution you ico fuck
Eli White
Computing the actual transactions is negligible. The costs come in finding a qualifying hash in order to author the next block, something the network makes artificially more and more difficult in order to insulate itself from attack.
"Proof of work", bitcoin's consensus algorithm, was inspired by "hashcash" which was originally proposed as an anti-spam measure.
Imagine you had a public email address and were constantly bombarded by spam. One way to prevent this would be to automatically throw out all emails unless the header contained a hash of the email's content which started with 000. This would require anyone trying to send you an email to burn a certain amount of time/energy to reach your inbox and so the emails you did actually receive would probably be important. Companies could no longer blast millions of spam emails to everyone because doing so would cost them a fortune.
But then you become famous one and now millions of fans are trying to spam your inbox. People are now willing to burn electricity to find 000 hashes just to reach your inbox and soon you're inundated with spam again. So you're forced to raise the requirement to 0000 and are able to find some peace again...
This is how bitcoin protects itself from attack. Each change to the ledger is guarded by ever-growing hash requirements ensuring attacks are costly. As the price of bitcoin raises so too must the hash requirements, similar to a "hashcash" protected email address becoming more and more famous.
Jacob Martin
>people on Veeky Forums are so new that they think it all started with a pre-mine pajeet bullshit ICO
Wyatt Lee
It better cost that much to mine bitcoin, just like it costs a lot to mine gold.
Logan Turner
Except the underlying asset is bitcoin, not government funny-money and schemes like LN exist which, not without downsides of their own, permit trustless transactions.
Adam Lopez
in addition
another reason of why bitcoin can never be replicated: there will never be a time where people don't care about cryptos and the growth is organic and natural
now every new crypto is under:
1) heavy speculation since day 1 2) surveliance and endless amounts of hackers looking for valuable coins to attack
back then it was easier to develop this new technology because nobody cared
now if anyone dares to come up with a bitcoin competitor, it's going to get rekt as fuck during development phase unless they make it closed source (which would make it a failure already)
also no other crypto can claim a track records of years of non stop uptime without hacks, bitcoin will always have an advantage of years
bitcoin cannot be replicated sorry
Eli Davis
When it's just going to sit there and burn energy and not even do anything. Then it's rather pointless. Why not just back it with gold at that point.
Nathaniel Jenkins
i didn't say they pre-mine it but its silly to think that there wasn't any manipulation going on during that time
Adam Sullivan
Because you can't digitally transfer the ownership of gold to a total stranger half way across the world.
The COPE is strong.
Jose Perez
Of course I can. Or have you never bought stocks.
Alexander Cook
I tried to email the author of that motherboard article. It is so misleading and wrong. Miners use power to create new bitcoins AND process transactions. Me sending bitcoin to someone uses no more power than an email. Its the mining operations that use power not the individual transactions. Fucking ignorant normies have no clue how shit works.
Adrian Morales
You're transferring gold IOU's, not gold itself. When I send someone bitcoin I am literally transferring bitcoin, not an IOU for bitcoin.
Luis Fisher
>You're transferring gold IOU's, not gold itself. When I send someone bitcoin I am literally transferring bitcoin, not an IOU for bitcoin.
Exactly. That's why people like Peter Schiff who say a crypto currency that's "backed by gold" just don't get it. No digital currency can ever be "backed by gold" it can only ever have an institution's promise that it can be exchanged with gold, therefore it can never be trustless. Trusting GoldMoney™ to store your gold and using a currency issued by them is just replaying the history of how fractional banking evolved in the first place.
Daniel Ward
Please. The majority of people store their coins in exchanges. Wich are a million times worse than conventional custodians.
Dylan Young
Peter Schiff is a coping boomer. "Gold backed crypto", lmao.
Jayden Rivera
In 5 years Bitcoin will be integrated into society just like computers and the internet were. It'll become simplified and eventually everyone will know about it. Especially once the dollar crashes into complete shit. I guarantee that for Christmas this year, people will be giving out Bitcoin to family and friends and informing them on it.
Blake Cruz
I hope they don't listen to do. You are going to ruin them financially.
Bentley Lopez
Their fault, not bitcoin's. They should've learned their lesson in 2013 when MtGoX went under and again in 2016 when Bitfinex was hacked.
These people are technically nocoiners so I don't really give a shit what happens to them :^)
Jason Brooks
The true king is about to claim the throne.
Mason Young
WE
Blake Butler
Turn the lights off when you go out off vacations
Kayden Edwards
>red tulips are crashing >but I will be safe >because I only have shit-colored tulips
Anthony Wood
That's where you're wrong, kiddo. A full reserve gold bank already exists, you can use it today and send gold to your wife's boyfriend.
>buying Bitcoin for someone else >ruin them financially
Are you retarded?
Carson Brown
>shitty return I like the fact normies think this, keeps the difficulty low
Juan Jenkins
You are going to make them think they have a lot of money and they will make decisions based on that. When it vaporizes they will get smacked by reality and hate you for it.
Caleb Thompson
>BTC >""""""""""""currency of the future"""""""""""" >deflationary >tech already outdated and archaic why is this $7000 again? I'd buy one for like $10 tops lmao
Alexander Morgan
You're more retarded than I thought...
David Myers
The issue is... it's not trustless. That's how the current banking system evolved. We all trusted a centralized group of people to keep our assets for us because gold was too inconvenient to use, and since people only ever interacted with the tokens or promissory notes they issued the institutions could slowly start becoming fractional reserve, and moving off the gold standard. It just proves that we don't NEED the actual gold sitting there in the vaults, it's just sitting there collecting dust, we just need a way for everyone to agree who has what and that no one can cheat and start printing more of it. The only way to do that in the past was gold, now we have cryptography and mathematics.
Jaxon Allen
So? They're retarded. It still gives you the ability to store your wealth on a 12 word passphrase you can memorize, and send it to anyone around the world. Can you store millions of dollars of gold in your brain and fling it across the world to someone? No, you have to trust the jews at GoldMoney™ to manage it for you.
David Lewis
Yes yes goyim. Electronic pretend coin is the same as gold.
Thomas Adams
The traditional banking system transfers money A LOT more efficiently than Bitcoin.
Kevin Miller
>Yes yes goyim. Electronic pretend coin is the same as gold.
I mean yeah, it kind of is when all the gold is doing is sitting in a vault and people only ever interact with pieces of paper or digital data that correspond to the gold. All it does at that point is ensure scarcity, which is done better with cryptography.
Owen Kelly
this is still early days, folks
bitcoin mining will get more and more efficient - as in, the most profitable miners will be the ones that find the most efficient/profitable way to use the heat generated from bitcoin mining chips
bitcoin asics, or really any computer chip, is really just an electric heater. it converts electricity into heat. instead of heating some coils to generate heat like a space heater, it runs calculations in silicon to generate heat
I can imagine a future world where every home/building has built in infrastructure supplying hash power and using that to heat the home / hot water heater, etc.
Jackson Scott
>$1000 to transfer $7000
are you intentionally pretending to be retarded
because it rustled my jimmies
Ryder Mitchell
>The whole Islam
Matthew Hill
k
miners want to make profit miners buy expensive hardware miners use lot of energy
12.5 btc bonus per block will half every x blocks so less moneys per block
what miners do? they mine less, so less energy, problem solved
Jason Taylor
the problem is that all that power is going into "useless" calculations
Jaxon Sanders
I currently heat my room with an Rx 580 and 560 mining 24/7 it's more efficient than a space heater and makes about a 3 bucks a day.