Bitcoin and Energy Consumption - RebuttalsAndreas Antonopolous was featured on a CaSE podcast. At around -00:15:00, he provides a great response about energy consumption in Bitcoin.Summarized:-Energy is being wastedClearly, Bitcoin is useful to some people. Judgements about whether or not something is wasted is best left to those using it. We don't end up with a good society if we start deciding for other people what is useful and what is not.To people who value censorship-resistance, neutrality, global access, completely decentralised system of currency with no geopolitical attachments, Bitcoin is a very useful application. Some would argue it is the most useful application in the 21st century.You can't do the security of Bitcoin without the investment in energy. To those who say you can, they are saying that you can get something of value out of nothing. There's a reason why the security of reason costs that much in terms of energy; if you do it for less, it's less secure. If it's less secure, you won't have a valuable network.The energy in Bitcoin is not wasted - it's used to make the network secure without central authority. No one has demonstrated at scale an alternative.-What about Proof of Stake?There is a lot of complexity in using an intrinsic currency as stake for the security of the same currency. The game theory gets very complicated. Proof of Work is straightforward: you spend resources on energy in order to secure the virtual asset. If you decide to fuck it up, not only do you lose the value of the virtual asset, but you also spent money on energy that you are not going to get back. This creates a level of grounding.This is the primary basis on which Bitcoin achieves immutability; the idea that it is as computationally expensive to re-write the ledger for 3 days as the amount of energy you spent to write the ledger the first time for 3 days. It is one of the security guarantees that Bitcoin has - in order to re-write the ledger, you have to expend the energy again, but you receive the reward once. This makes it very very expensive to re-write even small stretches of the ledger. We do not know of a better basis for immutability that doesn't use energy, and I would challenge anyone who claims that there is.-The Nirvana fallacy - comparing Bitcoin to something perfectIf this world produced all energy from renewable resources, and all energy is used for useful things, then perhaps we may look at Bitcoin and ask whether or not the value of Bitcoin is commensurate to the energy we are using. None of the journalists did even a cursory examination of what energy is being used for today.Let me give you just 3 examples: Bitcoin's energy use is one hundreth of the energy used in mining gold. Gold is integral to the monetary system that Bitcoin is directly trying to replace. There are also environmental costs of mining gold - from sulphuric acid leeching into rivers, denuding hills, destroying mountains, etc. A tiny fraction is being used for industrial use, the vast majority of gold is being held as store of value.Let's take a look at things like Christmas lights. The entire electricity use of Bitcoin in a year pales in comparison to the 1 week of electricity being used to power Christmas lights in the US alone. There are additional effects such as light pollution, and the majority does not come from renewable resources. You can argue about the pointlessness of such tradition.More practically, every charging device with a step-down converter sits plugged in and coverts electricity to heat. The estimated power this consumes is 2 orders of magnitudes greater than what Bitcoin consumes. This is a worldwide phenomenon which is an enormous drain of energy. Cherry on top: the world's largest polluters and energy spenders are military; the main purpose they serve is to kill people.We haven't even discussed the amount of energy required to support the existing banking system.-Journalistic dishonesty and sensationalismSpare me the righteous indignation of the environmental impact and waste of energy of cryptocurrencies - it is unscientific and completely hypocritical. All of the journalistic analysis goes like this: if it takes X kilowatts to conduct 1 transaction, and we took it to world scale, how much energy would that cost? They disregard that the energy used is completely unrelated to the # of transactions. The equivalent flawed thinking would be, "if this pregnant lady's belly is THIS large at 3 months, then in 5 years, it will be as big as this entire room." That is the exact scientific value of extrapolating something on a variable that is not dependent.-How are you sure of your numbers?We can estimate the lower bound of energy consumption, and say that it is unlikely that the real number is twice as much as the lower bound. The energy requirement to do a hash is a fundamental thermodynamic law. You're flipping bits, and they take a certain amount of energy to flip. You know the computational energy efficiency of 16nm ASIC-based chips. If you assume the network operates on this (which is incorrect, but again, lower bound estimate), and we know exactly how many hashes/sec are being calculated, because that's recorded on the blockchain, then we can calculate exactly how many joules of energy it takes. If you assume 50% of miners have 1 generation of miners behind (unlikely, because miners require optimisation), then it is at most 1.5x the lower bound of energy consumption.It is easy to estimate the amount of energy being used in Bitcoin, which makes it an easy target. When you use your VISA card, you do not see the 600,000 employees who commute to work using gasoline-burning cars, the 26-story buildings which are lit 24 hours a day, data centers which are doing fraud prevention and analytics, as well as selling data to intelligence agencies and advertisers. All of this costs a lot of money and energy, and arguably just as "wasteful," but it's a hidden cost. via /r/Bitcoin http://ift.tt/2GPP6rG
Andreas Antonopolous was featured on a CaSE podcast. At around -00:15:00, he provides a great response about energy consumption in Bitcoin.
Summarized:
-Energy is being wasted
Clearly, Bitcoin is useful to some people. Judgements about whether or not something is wasted is best left to those using it. We don't end up with a good society if we start deciding for other people what is useful and what is not.
To people who value censorship-resistance, neutrality, global access, completely decentralised system of currency with no geopolitical attachments, Bitcoin is a very useful application. Some would argue it is the most useful application in the 21st century.
You can't do the security of Bitcoin without the investment in energy. To those who say you can, they are saying that you can get something of value out of nothing. There's a reason why the security of reason costs that much in terms of energy; if you do it for less, it's less secure. If it's less secure, you won't have a valuable network.
The energy in Bitcoin is not wasted - it's used to make the network secure without central authority. No one has demonstrated at scale an alternative.
-What about Proof of Stake?
There is a lot of complexity in using an intrinsic currency as stake for the security of the same currency. The game theory gets very complicated. Proof of Work is straightforward: you spend resources on energy in order to secure the virtual asset. If you decide to fuck it up, not only do you lose the value of the virtual asset, but you also spent money on energy that you are not going to get back. This creates a level of grounding.
This is the primary basis on which Bitcoin achieves immutability; the idea that it is as computationally expensive to re-write the ledger for 3 days as the amount of energy you spent to write the ledger the first time for 3 days. It is one of the security guarantees that Bitcoin has - in order to re-write the ledger, you have to expend the energy again, but you receive the reward once. This makes it very very expensive to re-write even small stretches of the ledger. We do not know of a better basis for immutability that doesn't use energy, and I would challenge anyone who claims that there is.
-The Nirvana fallacy - comparing Bitcoin to something perfect
If this world produced all energy from renewable resources, and all energy is used for useful things, then perhaps we may look at Bitcoin and ask whether or not the value of Bitcoin is commensurate to the energy we are using. None of the journalists did even a cursory examination of what energy is being used for today.
Let me give you just 3 examples: Bitcoin's energy use is one hundreth of the energy used in mining gold. Gold is integral to the monetary system that Bitcoin is directly trying to replace. There are also environmental costs of mining gold - from sulphuric acid leeching into rivers, denuding hills, destroying mountains, etc. A tiny fraction is being used for industrial use, the vast majority of gold is being held as store of value.
Let's take a look at things like Christmas lights. The entire electricity use of Bitcoin in a year pales in comparison to the 1 week of electricity being used to power Christmas lights in the US alone. There are additional effects such as light pollution, and the majority does not come from renewable resources. You can argue about the pointlessness of such tradition.
More practically, every charging device with a step-down converter sits plugged in and coverts electricity to heat. The estimated power this consumes is 2 orders of magnitudes greater than what Bitcoin consumes. This is a worldwide phenomenon which is an enormous drain of energy. Cherry on top: the world's largest polluters and energy spenders are military; the main purpose they serve is to kill people.
We haven't even discussed the amount of energy required to support the existing banking system.
-Journalistic dishonesty and sensationalism
Spare me the righteous indignation of the environmental impact and waste of energy of cryptocurrencies - it is unscientific and completely hypocritical. All of the journalistic analysis goes like this: if it takes X kilowatts to conduct 1 transaction, and we took it to world scale, how much energy would that cost? They disregard that the energy used is completely unrelated to the # of transactions. The equivalent flawed thinking would be, "if this pregnant lady's belly is THIS large at 3 months, then in 5 years, it will be as big as this entire room." That is the exact scientific value of extrapolating something on a variable that is not dependent.
-How are you sure of your numbers?
We can estimate the lower bound of energy consumption, and say that it is unlikely that the real number is twice as much as the lower bound. The energy requirement to do a hash is a fundamental thermodynamic law. You're flipping bits, and they take a certain amount of energy to flip. You know the computational energy efficiency of 16nm ASIC-based chips. If you assume the network operates on this (which is incorrect, but again, lower bound estimate), and we know exactly how many hashes/sec are being calculated, because that's recorded on the blockchain, then we can calculate exactly how many joules of energy it takes. If you assume 50% of miners have 1 generation of miners behind (unlikely, because miners require optimisation), then it is at most 1.5x the lower bound of energy consumption.
It is easy to estimate the amount of energy being used in Bitcoin, which makes it an easy target. When you use your VISA card, you do not see the 600,000 employees who commute to work using gasoline-burning cars, the 26-story buildings which are lit 24 hours a day, data centers which are doing fraud prevention and analytics, as well as selling data to intelligence agencies and advertisers. All of this costs a lot of money and energy, and arguably just as "wasteful," but it's a hidden cost.
Andreas Antonopolous was featured on a CaSE podcast. At around -00:15:00, he provides a great response about energy consumption in Bitcoin.Summarized:-Energy is being wastedClearly, Bitcoin is useful to some people. Judgements about whether or not something is wasted is best left to those using it. We don't end up with a good society if we start deciding for other people what is useful and what is not.To people who value censorship-resistance, neutrality, global access, completely decentralised system of currency with no geopolitical attachments, Bitcoin is a very useful application. Some would argue it is the most useful application in the 21st century.You can't do the security of Bitcoin without the investment in energy. To those who say you can, they are saying that you can get something of value out of nothing. There's a reason why the security of reason costs that much in terms of energy; if you do it for less, it's less secure. If it's less secure, you won't have a valuable network.The energy in Bitcoin is not wasted - it's used to make the network secure without central authority. No one has demonstrated at scale an alternative.-What about Proof of Stake?There is a lot of complexity in using an intrinsic currency as stake for the security of the same currency. The game theory gets very complicated. Proof of Work is straightforward: you spend resources on energy in order to secure the virtual asset. If you decide to fuck it up, not only do you lose the value of the virtual asset, but you also spent money on energy that you are not going to get back. This creates a level of grounding.This is the primary basis on which Bitcoin achieves immutability; the idea that it is as computationally expensive to re-write the ledger for 3 days as the amount of energy you spent to write the ledger the first time for 3 days. It is one of the security guarantees that Bitcoin has - in order to re-write the ledger, you have to expend the energy again, but you receive the reward once. This makes it very very expensive to re-write even small stretches of the ledger. We do not know of a better basis for immutability that doesn't use energy, and I would challenge anyone who claims that there is.-The Nirvana fallacy - comparing Bitcoin to something perfectIf this world produced all energy from renewable resources, and all energy is used for useful things, then perhaps we may look at Bitcoin and ask whether or not the value of Bitcoin is commensurate to the energy we are using. None of the journalists did even a cursory examination of what energy is being used for today.Let me give you just 3 examples: Bitcoin's energy use is one hundreth of the energy used in mining gold. Gold is integral to the monetary system that Bitcoin is directly trying to replace. There are also environmental costs of mining gold - from sulphuric acid leeching into rivers, denuding hills, destroying mountains, etc. A tiny fraction is being used for industrial use, the vast majority of gold is being held as store of value.Let's take a look at things like Christmas lights. The entire electricity use of Bitcoin in a year pales in comparison to the 1 week of electricity being used to power Christmas lights in the US alone. There are additional effects such as light pollution, and the majority does not come from renewable resources. You can argue about the pointlessness of such tradition.More practically, every charging device with a step-down converter sits plugged in and coverts electricity to heat. The estimated power this consumes is 2 orders of magnitudes greater than what Bitcoin consumes. This is a worldwide phenomenon which is an enormous drain of energy. Cherry on top: the world's largest polluters and energy spenders are military; the main purpose they serve is to kill people.We haven't even discussed the amount of energy required to support the existing banking system.-Journalistic dishonesty and sensationalismSpare me the righteous indignation of the environmental impact and waste of energy of cryptocurrencies - it is unscientific and completely hypocritical. All of the journalistic analysis goes like this: if it takes X kilowatts to conduct 1 transaction, and we took it to world scale, how much energy would that cost? They disregard that the energy used is completely unrelated to the # of transactions. The equivalent flawed thinking would be, "if this pregnant lady's belly is THIS large at 3 months, then in 5 years, it will be as big as this entire room." That is the exact scientific value of extrapolating something on a variable that is not dependent.-How are you sure of your numbers?We can estimate the lower bound of energy consumption, and say that it is unlikely that the real number is twice as much as the lower bound. The energy requirement to do a hash is a fundamental thermodynamic law. You're flipping bits, and they take a certain amount of energy to flip. You know the computational energy efficiency of 16nm ASIC-based chips. If you assume the network operates on this (which is incorrect, but again, lower bound estimate), and we know exactly how many hashes/sec are being calculated, because that's recorded on the blockchain, then we can calculate exactly how many joules of energy it takes. If you assume 50% of miners have 1 generation of miners behind (unlikely, because miners require optimisation), then it is at most 1.5x the lower bound of energy consumption.It is easy to estimate the amount of energy being used in Bitcoin, which makes it an easy target. When you use your VISA card, you do not see the 600,000 employees who commute to work using gasoline-burning cars, the 26-story buildings which are lit 24 hours a day, data centers which are doing fraud prevention and analytics, as well as selling data to intelligence agencies and advertisers. All of this costs a lot of money and energy, and arguably just as "wasteful," but it's a hidden cost.
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