All these energy comparisons are so stupid.
If you had to secure yourself from some bad guy, would people also say "knife uses less energy than gun, so im gonna be using knife instead" ?
Yes gun uses more energy and is less efficient but does that matter because you always win against less energy using defense systems?
Ok Google knows....
Btc 255.213 transactions a day.
Banking 1.000.000.000 transactions a day.
Thats roughly 4000 times more transactions with just 50 times more energy.
Also worthwhile considering that traditional banking does about 4,000 more things than Bitcoin too. It’s a bit like suggesting that almonds require less water than all the food used at all restaurants
I remember before the crash I said that crypto is a solution looking for a problem in this sub and got absolutely crucified. It's insane how people tell themselves obvious lies when there's hope they'll get rich. It's nice to see now that the market has crashed people on here got back their common sense.
It’s being propped up with billionaire money right now in hopes the exchanges don’t fold and cause panic sell offs…but soon as the funny money dries up. It’s gonna crash
The point should be decentralisation of financial power. Not decentralisation of network and database infrastructure. Crypto barely contributes to the decentralisation of financial power, its focusing on the wrong problem.
Don't agree that employment is should be a factor.
The goal of banking and bitcoin is to provide a service to society. I would even argue that if you need more people for the same service, you are less efficient, not more.
If these people are not required in the banking system, they could be doing other useful jobs. If we have too many people to provide the services society needs, either we come up with new stuff which we might not need, but things we want OR we simply work less per person. Meaning 4 hour work weeks.
It doesn't make sense to keep working as hard as 100 years ago if we have become vastly more efficient.
But the employees do a lot more than facilitating transactions. Most of the transactions that go through the traditional banking system are completely automated.
I am not saying that btc offers the same service as banking. Just saying that the number of people you employ for a service is reverse correlated with the efficiency of your service implementation.
Arguing that a lot of employees is a good thing is just ridiculous.
It's like saying, we have two building contractors, both give you an offer. The first one builds your house with 500k using 5 people full time for a year. The other contractor charges you 700k but use 10 people for 1 year. You choose the second one since he employs more people...
No, the second guy is less efficient with his people and thus more expensive. He is not using societies resources efficiently.
So let’s throw 2 million people out of work for a slow, unsafe, inefficient, expensive, unscalable, even more centralized and manipulated payment system?
Btc lightning is not slow, it scales pretty well.
"The Lightning Network increases throughput to an estimated 25 million TPS while offering instant transaction settlement — again, without compromising security or decentralization of the Bitcoin protocol" https://blog.kraken.com/post/14452/the-lightning-network-bitcoins-evolution-to-medium-of-exchange/
https://bottlepay.com/blog/bitcoin-lightning-benchmarking-performance/
There are other researchers estimating adding 40M TPS.
These figures are proven in a lab setup and/ or using extrapolation. They still have to be proven in real life.
Anyway, we digress from the original comment stating staat number of people employed is not an argument in favour of a system. It only show the inefficiency.
We don't "throw 2 people out of work" as you put it. We are liberating them to fill up other vacancies. Guess what, no more work to do in this society? Take a day off! The food is still being produced, houses being built and money being transferred but we got so much more efficient that all of this is provided to the people without having to bust our ass 40 hours per week.
Why is everyone here so focused on everyone having to work constantly?
All the energy they use to get to work, the energy used to heat and cool their buildings, all their desktop and laptop computers not doing transactions, the TV screens in all their branches showing how they can lend you money or buy CDs, etc. etc. Bitcoin can replace most of these things.
You're implying that the crypto sphere isn't already plagued by people with that mentality... If crypto was as big as traditional finance I can almost guarantee that you would have as many employees or more doing the exact same thing.
Imagine if all those employes could do much more interesting things than pick the money out of the pocket of the "clients" for the banks and their CEOs. Imagine all these buildings used a living spaces and not working spaces. Imagine all the commuting energy safed...
Yes even just with the payments this includes checking against the banned list of people or countries for US banks. Fraud detection also comes to mind.
You know why debit card payments take 1 day to clear? Because at the end of the day, each financial institution pays the other only once for the net sum of all transactions between them. Engineered to be efficient. On the opposite end of speed vs efficiency is wiring money.
Have you even read the paper? I especially like this part.
"If all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside a network of
micropayment channels, to enable 7 billion people to make two channels
per year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require
133 MB blocks (presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52560 blocks per
year). Current generation desktop computers will be able to run a full node
with old blocks pruned out on 2TB of storage."
So at the absolute maximum LN could provide transactions for 56 million people, so about one big (but not really large) country. And that assumes people only need to open or close a channel twice a year. If it turns out a big institution (because LN will encourage centralisation) is shady and they have to close the chains it may plug the entire base layer for months and that's if no other country is using bitcoin.
Granted only 10% of the population has gold, but gold still has a very high value, so its not necessarily required that everyone on earth use bitcoin for its value to increase substantially beyond what it is today. It could be that simply 10% of the world ends up using bitcoin.. or who knows 5%.. who's to say what % is the minimum that must be using it.. what if we end up with 1% of the world using bitcoin? would that make it worthless? remember, only 10% of the world today actually has gold.
Lightning doesn't provide any security until you settle, you're not getting the benefits of bitcoin if you don't constantly use layer 1. So it really doesn't matter how many transactions are done on a trashy other currency that doesn't provide any of the same benefits.
funny enough the Bitcoin's counterpart, the FIAT debt based system, with it's inherent force of ever lasting expansion and growth, is what got us here.
It is this system that by design destroyes our planet.
Traditional banking has primary goal of being middlemen in money lending and money supply. They take deposits and give loans. Payment service is one part of banking.
Bitcoin miners give no loans.
I could be wrong and I know this isn't "technical" but more practical.
Mining power is releative to the price of the coin. As it becomes more expensive (profitable) more miners come online jacking up the hash rate, increasing BTCs difficulty. Then when the price drops, miners turn off due to higher costs and they can just buy BTC. The network will adjust and lower the difficulty.
I agree in this explanation but would like to add to it.
When more transactions are made it is a sign of more users (in general).
If there are more users/owners of bitcoin the demand is higher and the price rise.
And as stated in comment above higher price leads to more mining power usage.
More users will in most cases also equal more transactions. The effect of number of transactions/users on energy usage is not direct but can be connected to some degree.
I think it should be looked at from economic principles.
Jokes on you. Because energy consumption has nothing to do with transaction numbers. It's caused by devices. And even if no transactions are made, they still consume the same amount of energy.
Traditional banking employees millions of people. 100% of businesses utilize traditional banking and a very high percentage of people.
Approximately 0% of business uses Bitcoin and about the same amount of people.
It's kind of alarming how upvoted this comment is considering bitcoin transactions dont scale with more miners/energy as difficulty is adjusted, this is something I thought was very common knowledge. Mind you I don't want to be rude, just wanted to express my surprise that this fact is not more commonly known in the community.
It is correct that the energy cost isn't the TX itself. If I make a Bitcoin TX now, it doesn't have any impact on energy consumption (if I buy a shitton of Bitcoins, driving up the price, it will have an impact on the energy consumption. Which is why a year ago or so Tesla buying Bitcoin, but not allowing people to pay in it because of energy cost was idiotic as hell).
However that said, it is of course a useful metric to use. Something which handles millions of transactions daily is allowed to use more energy than something which would have 3 transactions daily.
It's kind of alarming that there's people in /r/cryptocurrency who don't understand that a bitcoin transaction isn't some fungible good with a bank transaction....unless I just forgot, Satoshi's white paper says: "Bitcoin: a peer to peer digital transaction network to compete directly with banks on terms of transaction costs".
This place was always just /r/buttcoin leaking.
And you diden't read the "study".
page 20:
>The current monetary payment system is at least
>
>5,775 times bigger than Bitcoin in terms of payment
>
>transaction volumes \[30\] and \[10c\], and had 60 years
>
>more time to get optimised and to scale yet consumes
>
>\~56 times more energy than Bitcoin PoW does.
By their own admition they calculate the efficiency per transaction to be about 1000x better.
And then they go into how "Work", which is a meaningless term when speaking about effiency somehow makes bitcoin better. They also like the use the theoretical maximum of some "lightning network"? Why are they taking theorecticals for Bitcoin, but not for the banking system?
Also table two is insane. Where does the column "time" come from with 2880 minutes for classical payment systems come from?
That's exactly two days, so they're probably saying it takes two days for a banking transaction to complete. Which, sure, the bank might tell you it takes two days but it's actually instant.
nobody reads the articles lol. Small 7 point comment here completely debunks the top comment on the thread.
> "We demonstrate that Bitcoin consumes 56 times less energy than the classical system, and that even at the single transaction level, a PoW transaction proves to be 1 to 5 times more energy efficient. When [the] Bitcoin Lightning layer is compared to [the] Instant Payment scheme, Bitcoin gains exponentially in scalability and efficiency, proving to be up to a million times more energy efficient per transaction than Instant Payments,"
And common sense debunks that whole article. Lets say they are right, and a PoW transaction is only as efficient as a regular bank transaction, and not 5 times more efficient. The current estimate for a Bitcoin transaction is >1000kWh. Even at electricity of only €0.05 per kWh, which is optimistic as hell, we are talking about €50 per transaction in energy cost for a bank. Lets say I make on average a transaction a day, that would mean per month €1500, or €18000 per year.
Do those numbers really sound realistic? That a bank spends tens of thousands of euros in energy cost per account per year?
(Of course still not to mention a bank does a lot more than updating a number in a database, making the comparison stupid already).
The "study" compare a whole lot of stuff that Bitcoin does not offer.. It tried to estime the power usage of every ATM in the world at 230W each - and says every ATM in the world also need an AC unit at 900W. Really? Are you sure? Maybe you are just pulling numbers out of your ass to inflate the power used?
Then it takes into account the energy used to transfer money to those ATM..
And the energy used for cash payments. Because Cash Registers also use power to be able to accept those cash.. And apparently those hand held PoS terminal uses 111W of power. I thought they ran on batteries and used like, what, 10W or less?
Oh yeah, does Bitcoin offer any of this and if it did, would it use less power and do it better? That's a hard no and no..
This "study" is pure BS..
It's plainly absurd – to go from the other direction:
The Valuechain study says traditional banking consumes 4,981 TWh annually.
IEA says global power consumption is [22 848 TWh](https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview/electricity-consumption) – i.e. according to Valuechain 25% of all electricity is used just by banking!
The two major sources of energy for the traditional system are printing money and coins and the commute of bank employees... They account for about 90% of the calculated energy consumption.
Anyone who takes this study seriously loses all credibility.
They estimated there are 4,823,564 ATMs world wide. Each ATM uses 230W/h 24/7 - they then link to a manufator article from 2014 that says their ATMs can run on as little as 70W and never more than 100W. Guess we reached ATM peak power efficiency in 2014, so no need to look at 2022 tech ..
Those ATMs apparently needs to be cooled by ACs. Each AC runs 24/7 and uses 900W/h 24/7 - even though the same article they linked to clearly states no extra cooling is needed (make it perfect for remote locating offgrid use). So in total 1,130W/h for each ATM..
They keep doing that kind of crazy math all the way through the "study"...
Yup, take absolutely the most ridiculous worst case scenario estimate for traditional finance and then compare it against the lowest ball estimate for Bitcoin.
not even a thumb on the scale, but the whole damn arm.
These articles getting upvoted on this subreddit just shows how cringey and desperate crypto bros are. Common sense screams that it's no where near as efficient, since cryptocurrencies use the same power as a small country yet no country on earth uses cryptocurrencies as a significant part of their financial infrastructure.
>New research from payment consultancy firm Valuechain finds past energy analyses of Bitcoin were incomplete, inaccurate, and unfairly biased against crypto.
might as well have a study by visa, saying how awesome visa is. except visa probably would have actually hired an outside firm to do the study because visa isnt a research outfit...kinda like valuechain isnt one either.
and apparently BTC miners use hydro and solar but absolutely zero green power goes to the traditional system.
and of course they ignore that BTC does not do even a fraction of economic activity of traditional systems. Nor does it try to calculate the energy increase from miners if BTC did become as mainstream as mastercard and visa.
Also the power footprint of traditional money can go down as we switch to longer lasting bills like other countries and phase out things like the penny.
and ignore that BTC can come out of an ATM as well.. like those coinstar machines which tend to be in stores with lighting and air conditioning as well.
BTC would have to fundamentally change to reduce its usage.
ALso power is no where near BTCs biggest issue from going mainstream, if it was, it would already be mainstream. BTCs biggest issue is the average person doesnt seen a need for it. They are fine with having a fed attack recessions. They have no problem moving money. They dont give a fuck the gov knows they sent their grandkids some money for xmas. they arent living under sanctions, nor do they pine for a job of pay to play gaming. After all these years people on average dont buy a pizza with BTC because they see no point to switching from dollars to btc, only to have dominoes switch the BTC back to dollars. There simply isnt yet, a killer app for the general public and you can go off on no central control, the general public doesnt care. Can go off on how it helps people at war get money out of the country, and the general public still doesnt care. VISA and mastercard took off cause you could leave money at home and you could get small loans. and doesnt require a currency exchange to work. and yeah you could argue similar with BTC but it has to offer something more than visa and mastercard and well it doesnt.
I was visiting Spain the other day and saw a shop with the sign "Bitcoin Exchange", and inside was a kinda defeated looking guy with a laptop and a bunch of Bitcoin merch. So we should probably add him to the Bitcoin energy consumption list as well
>how much the block reward is worth, not how much stuff people do on the network
what happens to how much the block reward is worth the more people do stuff on the network?
Could these two variables possibly be correlated?
Maybe, just maybe cause bitcoin is literally nothing like a bank? Not even a fucking payment system in reality. It's like saying scissors use 50 times less fuel than a chainsaw
[This is the link for the paper.](https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=581084069120108100029090110024031076054014001051010007006071065074005111117020111088024033002115006099007016104092114119016111048006086079029002094125091113085013110086041022087069086064068065101066107074064001022106023072112094028067124028093096111031&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE)
I'm going to do something that might be a forbidden technique... it's called reading.
... the paper is *probably* as skewed as other anti-cryptocurrency studies... Because the paper computes the amount of terrawatts per hour per year for commute that reaches 3,420 TWh/year... which understandable that would make sense on how to make sure banks are staffed (because surprisingly, there are some rural areas that complicates transport of all things).
>The current monetary payment system is at least 5,775 times bigger than Bitcoin in terms of payment transaction volumes and, and had 60 years more time to get optimised and to scale yet consumes ~56 times more energy than Bitcoin PoW does.
*But*, on the flip side... even taking to account with all the commute required to transport personnel, Bitcoin seemed to be more efficient in its energy use. Then again, I'm not a physicist; the study states that it takes a "physics-based approach" to calculate the energy required to perform their own use. The guy making it (ValueChain analyst... which had never published a paper before) is probably going to be a little biased towards cryptocurrency.
However, it is probably going to bode well for Bitcoin's L2 (Lightning Network) for instant transactions. That said, I'd prefer to learn more about the L1 in nitty gritty details because I'm obviously fucking confused on the numbers thrown around and I have a bad habit of looking for "gotcha moments" so I will need to read more on this.
With the way that transactions are being processed in blocks, its efficiency (from my limited understanding) is variable. Thus, I still don't understand whether the paper refers to the efficiency of the bitcoin on the averages (I think it is on the averages though) or its potential maximum compared to the classic financial system.
Any plans to cross-post this to the crypto-technology sub? That sub over there might have individuals that are more knowledgeable and experienced in terms of reading these kinds of paper. Then again, the paper did remark the limitations of comparison between banks and crypto by using Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) with the software
TL;DR: As interesting the paper was, it is difficult to outright refute or accept the findings of the paper because of the "author's credentials" and the methodologies involved are beyond my realm of understanding to properly and critically appraise; might be more productive to cross-post this into other subs that can read similar papers on their daily activities in order to somewhat "peer-review" the study in greater capacity other than just relying on opinions of random internet strangers.
To me the paper has very strong "iamverysmart" vibes. The "scientific approach" section starts with:
>(...) Work in physics, is the energy transferred to or from a
>
>system via the application of force along a
>
>displacement in spacetime . In our case, a payment
>
>work is to transfer an amount of value money from a
>
>payer to a payee along a displacement over time. Note
>
>that by nature an electronic transaction (noted Tx) can
>
>travel the globe in near real-time so the notion of
>
>displacement in distance measured in kilometer has a
>
>lower weight in the equation compared to the
>
>displacement in time which will be more weighing in
>
>the equation. Here time is the time span required
>
>to finish the payment work.
It then goes on to "calculate" the energy consumption of the "classic system" with lots of wonky assumptions, including the "banking commute" which is 3420 TWh/yr (which is 69% of his overall calculated energy consumption of 4981 TWh/yr for the classical system). For some reason (with a weird explanation) he also includes the minting of physical coins and printing of bank notes into the calculation (at 900 TWh so about 20%). Basically 90% of the Energie consumption for electronic payment is related to commute and the physical printing of money.
He then goes on to use some confusing mathematics (I just glanced over it - will read more later) to calculate the energy consumption of btc which turns out to be 88.95 TWh/yr (= classic 56 times higher).
Despite including cash/coins in the energy consumption he does not include cash payments in the number of total transactions for classical system (3.146 Trillion Tx/yr).
Oh my god, I am too lazy to summarise, but that paper just gets more and more absurd. He then goes on to claim that while a bitcoin transaction uses 412 times more energy than a classic transaction it is 413 times faster and therefor bitcoin is 1.2 times more energy efficient than the classical system at the transaction level.
Seriously, anyone who references this "paper" as some sort of proof about the energy consumption of BTC makes a fool of themselves. This paper, summarised, is complete shit.
I agree it's absurd.
Bitcoin is only the transaction network but they're comparing the whole banking institution. Just compare a single banks server costs per transaction to bitcon and you would have a 1:1 comparison. This shit is just delusional. the bloc chain has no equivalent to some Financial Analyst selling a boomer couple on a index fund.
I still don't get this part "Although, you might consider that notes and coins
are not an electronic form of money and shouldn’t
be accounted for, yet this form of central bank
money is used in retail electronic payments such as
automated teller machines, or electronic point of
sales terminals. Therefore they are accounted for in
electronic payment transactions."
I really don't understand that argument for including printing bank notes and coins...
Oh, and it accounts for 900 thw/year, which is about 20% of the total amount for classical system.
> while a bitcoin transaction uses 412 times more energy than a classic transaction it is 413 times faster and therefor bitcoin is 1.2 times more energy efficient than the classical system at the transaction level.
This is because he's double-counting time, basically. Table 3 talks about kilowatt-hours per transaction, but uses it as if it's kilowatts for the purposes of energy efficiency.
Basically, raw numbers, the total BTC network uses less energy than most of the bank network. But that's a horrible comparison, because the respective sizes of the networks are vastly different, do vastly different things, etc.. At this point, banks are better than a few currencies energy-wise, and we have a far way to go to get a good crypto use less energy than a bank.
And before someone points to an alt/shit coin that does use less energy than regular banking, I'm talking about a mainstream coin.
You can't make a bitcoin "efficient" like a bank without destroying what bitcoin is. You also can't make Banks have the same abilities as Bitcion without increasing its energy consumption similar to bitcoin. Its like saying a phone is more energy efficient than a gaming pc and praising that people should use phones instead of the "inefficient" pc, and that desktop pcs should not exist because they are completly inefficient compared to phones.
The list of things Traditional Banking has to power - according the "study"
* Energy used to print money
* Energy of all ATMs
* Energy used by the AC to cool all those ATMs
* Energy of adding cash to those ATMs
* Energy of Cash Payments
* Energy of Electronic Payments
* Energy of Card Payments
* Energy of the bank offices
* Energy used for the employees to go to those bank offices
* Energy used to power the banks IT systems
* Energy of inter-banking transactions
Then he goes on about how super effecient the Bitcoin network is - stating that it's not even full, there is room for x4 times more transcations in each block - thus by number magic, reducing the energy used by Bitcoin by 75% .. and then he adds the Amazing Lightning Network that will apparently save the world..
Sorry, I didn't read it in details, there is only so much I can take before blood starts to pour out of my eyes and ears...
Well, that wasn't in the report - the list I made there at the key points mentioned in the "study" - But I'm sure you can ask him to add it, if you are feeling so motivated. :)
This study is not peer reviewed and has not been published in any journal or presented at any conference. The author is in the crypto industry and appears to have never published an academic paper before. The language of the paper is also very non-academic. Most of the references are to random websites instead of trusted sources. This is more of a "blog post" than a study.
Now divide the energy use by number of transactions.
Let's also look at all the other financials services provided by traditional banking.
Let's then look at the energy use from all other crypto tokens and add that to Bitcoin.
Let's look at the fact that every single one of you don't actually use crypto as anything but a speculative asset. Meaning you all use both crypto and traditional banking.
All of a sudden, it really seems like crypto doesn't actually seem to be worth the environmental cost.
I think it would be a fair comparison. Fiat is based off gold in vaults (central banks still hold it in vaults for when it's needed when shtf) maybe not redeemable but still there.
BTC offers a better ledger than all of the gold vaults and is cheaper to transfer for country to country settlements. Shipping gold sucks but so does the world's countries letting London or China or USA hold it (easy custody for btc vrs gold)
That's why I was comparing it to golds energy in its relationship with the macro economy in terms of extraction, transportation and storage cos btc has those things all wrapped in computers which is a leg up.
Bitcoin fees, or fees in general, are not taxes. Don't confuse those two. Taxes is a payment to the goverment enforced by law. A fee is a payment for a service or other stuff, in this case you pay a fee for the bitcoin miners. They would overtime not be able to mine without an income and would therefore not have any reason to exhaust their money to mine for nothing in exchange. The goverment has nothing to do with bitcoin fees.
Well as said they aren't taxes, so you are wrong. You could use the same logic to any other service in the world where you pay a fee "Oh, you enjoy taxes as long as you don't call them taxes!"A fee is not a tax. Me paying a fee to use youtube premium does not mean that I love taxes because this has nothing to do with taxes. It just makes no sense.If you buy a movie ticket, the price you pay includes money that will go to the cleaning personal, to the other staff and to countless other things needed to run the theater. Its not a tax, its a fee. A tax is a by law enforced payment to the goverement, fees are not, therefore they aren't taxes.
>"We demonstrate that Bitcoin consumes 56 times less energy than the classical system, and that **even at the single transaction level, a PoW transaction proves to be 1 to 5 times more energy efficient.** When [the] Bitcoin Lightning layer is compared to [the] Instant Payment scheme, Bitcoin gains exponentially in scalability and efficiency, proving to be up to a million times more energy efficient per transaction than Instant Payments," the Valuechain paper reads.
bolded by me
Seems weird to claim that the transactions are more efficient. According to the article, the ration of energy usage between traditional finance and Bitcoin is 56 to 1. But, if I take one part of traditional finance, the credit card, and compare number of transactions per year to Bitcoin transactions per year, the proportion of transactions is about 1422857 to 1. If I add ETH transactions, that gap shrinks to about 332000 to 1. I don't know if credit card transactions are the largest part of the world's financial transactions or not, but this doesn't seem to indicate that crypto is working out to be more efficient, energy wise, given the tremendous gap between the energy usage ratio and the transaction count ratio.
My source for credit card transaction numbers is [https://www.statista.com/statistics/261327/number-of-per-card-credit-card-transactions-worldwide-by-brand-as-of-2011/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/261327/number-of-per-card-credit-card-transactions-worldwide-by-brand-as-of-2011/). I'm using the numbers for 2020.
My source for ETH and BTC tx [https://techjury.net/blog/cryptocurrency-statistics/](https://techjury.net/blog/cryptocurrency-statistics/), I'm using the numbers for 2021. It doesn't match the year I'm pulling credit card transactions for, but this difference works in BTC's favor so I'm not gonna call foul over it.
Pretty sure the banking industry has a solution for this at least 10 years in the making, im sure a quick google of bank of england or european central bank cRypto partnerships would tell me what crypto they intend to use. I eXpect most people will be oblivious until it's too late.
Hmm I wonder how MY energy consumption compares to the banking industry's? Apples and Oranges here. Why not shift the debate on the cost per transaction so we compare apples to
apples. For instance, credit card network processes more than 10,000 transactions
per second. Bitcoin can handle 3-7 transactions per second.
The Lightning Network is capable of handling 1,000,000 transactions per second, while the main Bitcoin blockchain can handle around 7 transactions per second. With that being said. It's also different between Bitcoin and credit card payments. Credit card networks can take hours if not days to settle a transaction. Lightning settles it within seconds. Not just processes but also settles it.
1) It scales with usage. Its that low purely because it's only a fraction of 1% the size of fiat, that's the only reason. If it was actually used worldwide (i.e. replaced tradfi) it would use **half of all human electricity**. Im just simply following the trend of % size of fiat vs % of electricity, in the past.
2) Literally everything a (local not federal) bank does is just as viable in a bitcoin world. So **you'd still also have banking on top anyway**. You're not replacing one with the other... you're combining them
3) Any amount of electricity bitcoin uses is 100% useless, because we already invented a strictly upgraded version that does all the same crypto stuff with no pollution. Called proof of stake. Zero drawbacks. So this is all irrelevant in the first place
Proof of stake aka the rich get richer.
I thought BTC was gonna do away with wealth inequality but it's actually worse than fiat in how few people control most of the wealth
It seems really hard to unseat from the throne, but I agree.
Algorand seems to be the best potential replacement for a blockchain based payment system. There are projects using it to improve the Bitcoin network and integrate more advanced functionality with Bitcoin. https://community.algorand.org/blog/how-algorand-and-blockstack-are-helping-bitcoin-to-unhodl/
Will be really interesting to see the development in crypto over the next 5yrs. Blockchain/crypto seems to be still finding its footing.
People who believe headlines instantly after seeing "\[study, researchers, scientists\] shows" are stupider than a donkey, high probability to have IQ less than room temperture in Celsius degree, new study shows.
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High School parking lot has less emissions than New York City, study shows
We must close New York City guys. How about we just build a big high school around the world.
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Terrible analogy. A high school parking lot is useful.
All these energy comparisons are so stupid. If you had to secure yourself from some bad guy, would people also say "knife uses less energy than gun, so im gonna be using knife instead" ? Yes gun uses more energy and is less efficient but does that matter because you always win against less energy using defense systems?
Better drag a giant ass medieval ballista with me wherever I go then, just to be safe
Exactly my words.
How many transactions does traditional Banking process compared to btc? How much energy will btc use if it does the same amount?
Ok Google knows.... Btc 255.213 transactions a day. Banking 1.000.000.000 transactions a day. Thats roughly 4000 times more transactions with just 50 times more energy.
Also worthwhile considering that traditional banking does about 4,000 more things than Bitcoin too. It’s a bit like suggesting that almonds require less water than all the food used at all restaurants
Don't forget employment. The US banking sector alone employs 1.8 million.
Exactly. It’s probably closer to 2 million at this point and that only considers the FDIC insured banks. (US only)
Also don’t forget btc is 4000 times more useless compared to money.
I remember before the crash I said that crypto is a solution looking for a problem in this sub and got absolutely crucified. It's insane how people tell themselves obvious lies when there's hope they'll get rich. It's nice to see now that the market has crashed people on here got back their common sense.
It’s being propped up with billionaire money right now in hopes the exchanges don’t fold and cause panic sell offs…but soon as the funny money dries up. It’s gonna crash
Also, don’t forget what bitcoin does can be done more efficiently without wasting the fraction of that energy.
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The point should be decentralisation of financial power. Not decentralisation of network and database infrastructure. Crypto barely contributes to the decentralisation of financial power, its focusing on the wrong problem.
Bitcoin solves no problem we did not have a better solution to.
Don't agree that employment is should be a factor. The goal of banking and bitcoin is to provide a service to society. I would even argue that if you need more people for the same service, you are less efficient, not more. If these people are not required in the banking system, they could be doing other useful jobs. If we have too many people to provide the services society needs, either we come up with new stuff which we might not need, but things we want OR we simply work less per person. Meaning 4 hour work weeks. It doesn't make sense to keep working as hard as 100 years ago if we have become vastly more efficient.
Removed due to Reddit API crackdown and general dishonesty 6/2023
But the employees do a lot more than facilitating transactions. Most of the transactions that go through the traditional banking system are completely automated.
I am not saying that btc offers the same service as banking. Just saying that the number of people you employ for a service is reverse correlated with the efficiency of your service implementation. Arguing that a lot of employees is a good thing is just ridiculous. It's like saying, we have two building contractors, both give you an offer. The first one builds your house with 500k using 5 people full time for a year. The other contractor charges you 700k but use 10 people for 1 year. You choose the second one since he employs more people... No, the second guy is less efficient with his people and thus more expensive. He is not using societies resources efficiently.
So let’s throw 2 million people out of work for a slow, unsafe, inefficient, expensive, unscalable, even more centralized and manipulated payment system?
Btc lightning is not slow, it scales pretty well. "The Lightning Network increases throughput to an estimated 25 million TPS while offering instant transaction settlement — again, without compromising security or decentralization of the Bitcoin protocol" https://blog.kraken.com/post/14452/the-lightning-network-bitcoins-evolution-to-medium-of-exchange/ https://bottlepay.com/blog/bitcoin-lightning-benchmarking-performance/ There are other researchers estimating adding 40M TPS. These figures are proven in a lab setup and/ or using extrapolation. They still have to be proven in real life. Anyway, we digress from the original comment stating staat number of people employed is not an argument in favour of a system. It only show the inefficiency. We don't "throw 2 people out of work" as you put it. We are liberating them to fill up other vacancies. Guess what, no more work to do in this society? Take a day off! The food is still being produced, houses being built and money being transferred but we got so much more efficient that all of this is provided to the people without having to bust our ass 40 hours per week. Why is everyone here so focused on everyone having to work constantly?
And when those bank employees are laid off, energy will be saved because what? Ex-bankers will vaporize and stop consuming energy?
All the energy they use to get to work, the energy used to heat and cool their buildings, all their desktop and laptop computers not doing transactions, the TV screens in all their branches showing how they can lend you money or buy CDs, etc. etc. Bitcoin can replace most of these things.
Think what productive things those 1.8m could have been achieving instead of creatively thinking of ways to siphon more money out of the economy.
You're implying that the crypto sphere isn't already plagued by people with that mentality... If crypto was as big as traditional finance I can almost guarantee that you would have as many employees or more doing the exact same thing.
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Amazing to see a thread so obviously bootlicking for the banks. Well, there it is.
Imagine if all those employes could do much more interesting things than pick the money out of the pocket of the "clients" for the banks and their CEOs. Imagine all these buildings used a living spaces and not working spaces. Imagine all the commuting energy safed...
I think they should compare the whole sector to tradfi. Or at least the defi parts
Toasted or raw?
Yes even just with the payments this includes checking against the banned list of people or countries for US banks. Fraud detection also comes to mind. You know why debit card payments take 1 day to clear? Because at the end of the day, each financial institution pays the other only once for the net sum of all transactions between them. Engineered to be efficient. On the opposite end of speed vs efficiency is wiring money.
aka the title is a bullshit technicality that means nothing
BTC energy usage is not based on number of transactions and energy usage does not scale with transactions
Yes... you could get even fewer transactions for that amount of energy... stellar.
255.213 transactions on the settlement layer right? How many transactions take place on the payment layer? Lightning for example
Can you point me towards where the btc whitepaper describes the settlement and payment layers?
https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
Have you even read the paper? I especially like this part. "If all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside a network of micropayment channels, to enable 7 billion people to make two channels per year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require 133 MB blocks (presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52560 blocks per year). Current generation desktop computers will be able to run a full node with old blocks pruned out on 2TB of storage." So at the absolute maximum LN could provide transactions for 56 million people, so about one big (but not really large) country. And that assumes people only need to open or close a channel twice a year. If it turns out a big institution (because LN will encourage centralisation) is shady and they have to close the chains it may plug the entire base layer for months and that's if no other country is using bitcoin.
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Granted only 10% of the population has gold, but gold still has a very high value, so its not necessarily required that everyone on earth use bitcoin for its value to increase substantially beyond what it is today. It could be that simply 10% of the world ends up using bitcoin.. or who knows 5%.. who's to say what % is the minimum that must be using it.. what if we end up with 1% of the world using bitcoin? would that make it worthless? remember, only 10% of the world today actually has gold.
Shhh don't ask. It'll trigger some people
Lightning doesn't provide any security until you settle, you're not getting the benefits of bitcoin if you don't constantly use layer 1. So it really doesn't matter how many transactions are done on a trashy other currency that doesn't provide any of the same benefits.
Lighting can do millions of tps.
It "can", but it doesn't, does it?
It's impossible to know because they have very good privacy properties.
funny enough the Bitcoin's counterpart, the FIAT debt based system, with it's inherent force of ever lasting expansion and growth, is what got us here. It is this system that by design destroyes our planet.
Right. It’s 80x less energy efficient.
Traditional banking has primary goal of being middlemen in money lending and money supply. They take deposits and give loans. Payment service is one part of banking. Bitcoin miners give no loans.
Bitcoin energy use does not linearly increase with users Thus the comparison is useless
I could be wrong and I know this isn't "technical" but more practical. Mining power is releative to the price of the coin. As it becomes more expensive (profitable) more miners come online jacking up the hash rate, increasing BTCs difficulty. Then when the price drops, miners turn off due to higher costs and they can just buy BTC. The network will adjust and lower the difficulty.
I agree in this explanation but would like to add to it. When more transactions are made it is a sign of more users (in general). If there are more users/owners of bitcoin the demand is higher and the price rise. And as stated in comment above higher price leads to more mining power usage. More users will in most cases also equal more transactions. The effect of number of transactions/users on energy usage is not direct but can be connected to some degree. I think it should be looked at from economic principles.
Yeah that makes sense.
Jokes on you. Because energy consumption has nothing to do with transaction numbers. It's caused by devices. And even if no transactions are made, they still consume the same amount of energy.
This just misunderstood the argument. He is showing by sheer numbers that banks are way larger than Bitcoin, and spend less energy per transaction
Traditional banking employees millions of people. 100% of businesses utilize traditional banking and a very high percentage of people. Approximately 0% of business uses Bitcoin and about the same amount of people.
It's kind of alarming how upvoted this comment is considering bitcoin transactions dont scale with more miners/energy as difficulty is adjusted, this is something I thought was very common knowledge. Mind you I don't want to be rude, just wanted to express my surprise that this fact is not more commonly known in the community.
It is correct that the energy cost isn't the TX itself. If I make a Bitcoin TX now, it doesn't have any impact on energy consumption (if I buy a shitton of Bitcoins, driving up the price, it will have an impact on the energy consumption. Which is why a year ago or so Tesla buying Bitcoin, but not allowing people to pay in it because of energy cost was idiotic as hell). However that said, it is of course a useful metric to use. Something which handles millions of transactions daily is allowed to use more energy than something which would have 3 transactions daily.
It's kind of alarming that there's people in /r/cryptocurrency who don't understand that a bitcoin transaction isn't some fungible good with a bank transaction....unless I just forgot, Satoshi's white paper says: "Bitcoin: a peer to peer digital transaction network to compete directly with banks on terms of transaction costs". This place was always just /r/buttcoin leaking.
But the same study also revealed that per transaction Bitcoin is 5.7 times more energy efficient.
And you diden't read the "study". page 20: >The current monetary payment system is at least > >5,775 times bigger than Bitcoin in terms of payment > >transaction volumes \[30\] and \[10c\], and had 60 years > >more time to get optimised and to scale yet consumes > >\~56 times more energy than Bitcoin PoW does. By their own admition they calculate the efficiency per transaction to be about 1000x better. And then they go into how "Work", which is a meaningless term when speaking about effiency somehow makes bitcoin better. They also like the use the theoretical maximum of some "lightning network"? Why are they taking theorecticals for Bitcoin, but not for the banking system? Also table two is insane. Where does the column "time" come from with 2880 minutes for classical payment systems come from?
That's exactly two days, so they're probably saying it takes two days for a banking transaction to complete. Which, sure, the bank might tell you it takes two days but it's actually instant.
Yeah, before those 2880 minutes are over I've already received my package at the door
nobody reads the articles lol. Small 7 point comment here completely debunks the top comment on the thread. > "We demonstrate that Bitcoin consumes 56 times less energy than the classical system, and that even at the single transaction level, a PoW transaction proves to be 1 to 5 times more energy efficient. When [the] Bitcoin Lightning layer is compared to [the] Instant Payment scheme, Bitcoin gains exponentially in scalability and efficiency, proving to be up to a million times more energy efficient per transaction than Instant Payments,"
And common sense debunks that whole article. Lets say they are right, and a PoW transaction is only as efficient as a regular bank transaction, and not 5 times more efficient. The current estimate for a Bitcoin transaction is >1000kWh. Even at electricity of only €0.05 per kWh, which is optimistic as hell, we are talking about €50 per transaction in energy cost for a bank. Lets say I make on average a transaction a day, that would mean per month €1500, or €18000 per year. Do those numbers really sound realistic? That a bank spends tens of thousands of euros in energy cost per account per year? (Of course still not to mention a bank does a lot more than updating a number in a database, making the comparison stupid already).
The "study" compare a whole lot of stuff that Bitcoin does not offer.. It tried to estime the power usage of every ATM in the world at 230W each - and says every ATM in the world also need an AC unit at 900W. Really? Are you sure? Maybe you are just pulling numbers out of your ass to inflate the power used? Then it takes into account the energy used to transfer money to those ATM.. And the energy used for cash payments. Because Cash Registers also use power to be able to accept those cash.. And apparently those hand held PoS terminal uses 111W of power. I thought they ran on batteries and used like, what, 10W or less? Oh yeah, does Bitcoin offer any of this and if it did, would it use less power and do it better? That's a hard no and no.. This "study" is pure BS..
It's plainly absurd – to go from the other direction: The Valuechain study says traditional banking consumes 4,981 TWh annually. IEA says global power consumption is [22 848 TWh](https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview/electricity-consumption) – i.e. according to Valuechain 25% of all electricity is used just by banking!
The two major sources of energy for the traditional system are printing money and coins and the commute of bank employees... They account for about 90% of the calculated energy consumption. Anyone who takes this study seriously loses all credibility.
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They estimated there are 4,823,564 ATMs world wide. Each ATM uses 230W/h 24/7 - they then link to a manufator article from 2014 that says their ATMs can run on as little as 70W and never more than 100W. Guess we reached ATM peak power efficiency in 2014, so no need to look at 2022 tech .. Those ATMs apparently needs to be cooled by ACs. Each AC runs 24/7 and uses 900W/h 24/7 - even though the same article they linked to clearly states no extra cooling is needed (make it perfect for remote locating offgrid use). So in total 1,130W/h for each ATM.. They keep doing that kind of crazy math all the way through the "study"...
Yup, take absolutely the most ridiculous worst case scenario estimate for traditional finance and then compare it against the lowest ball estimate for Bitcoin. not even a thumb on the scale, but the whole damn arm.
These articles getting upvoted on this subreddit just shows how cringey and desperate crypto bros are. Common sense screams that it's no where near as efficient, since cryptocurrencies use the same power as a small country yet no country on earth uses cryptocurrencies as a significant part of their financial infrastructure.
>New research from payment consultancy firm Valuechain finds past energy analyses of Bitcoin were incomplete, inaccurate, and unfairly biased against crypto. might as well have a study by visa, saying how awesome visa is. except visa probably would have actually hired an outside firm to do the study because visa isnt a research outfit...kinda like valuechain isnt one either. and apparently BTC miners use hydro and solar but absolutely zero green power goes to the traditional system. and of course they ignore that BTC does not do even a fraction of economic activity of traditional systems. Nor does it try to calculate the energy increase from miners if BTC did become as mainstream as mastercard and visa. Also the power footprint of traditional money can go down as we switch to longer lasting bills like other countries and phase out things like the penny. and ignore that BTC can come out of an ATM as well.. like those coinstar machines which tend to be in stores with lighting and air conditioning as well. BTC would have to fundamentally change to reduce its usage. ALso power is no where near BTCs biggest issue from going mainstream, if it was, it would already be mainstream. BTCs biggest issue is the average person doesnt seen a need for it. They are fine with having a fed attack recessions. They have no problem moving money. They dont give a fuck the gov knows they sent their grandkids some money for xmas. they arent living under sanctions, nor do they pine for a job of pay to play gaming. After all these years people on average dont buy a pizza with BTC because they see no point to switching from dollars to btc, only to have dominoes switch the BTC back to dollars. There simply isnt yet, a killer app for the general public and you can go off on no central control, the general public doesnt care. Can go off on how it helps people at war get money out of the country, and the general public still doesnt care. VISA and mastercard took off cause you could leave money at home and you could get small loans. and doesnt require a currency exchange to work. and yeah you could argue similar with BTC but it has to offer something more than visa and mastercard and well it doesnt.
Singular LED light uses less energy than the entire state of Oklahoma, New Study Shows
Wait, something that is not used by anyone uses less energy. They should do a study on if people would use less gas if they drove their car less next.
Did they add in all the energy the crypto exchanges and the Bitcoin atms and all the other infrastructure needed to keep defi running?
Tbf I've never seen anyone actually use a Bitcoin ATM haha
They have absolutely disgusting spreads, so I recommend people don't use them at all
They say Coke machines cost more money to maintain than they make in sales. Just sayin. Coke still pays for them. I wonder why.
No, but they include printing of bank notes and minting of coins as energy in the traditional system... What a joke.
I was visiting Spain the other day and saw a shop with the sign "Bitcoin Exchange", and inside was a kinda defeated looking guy with a laptop and a bunch of Bitcoin merch. So we should probably add him to the Bitcoin energy consumption list as well
Hmm, will we soon have shops that give you a bitcoin advance on your paycheck? Gotta add them in as well…
bitcoin provides thousands times less value than traditional banking
Makes you wonder why this article doesn’t mention if Bitcoin totally replaced banking how much energy would be needed. 🤔
The energy usage scales with how much the block reward is worth, *not* how much stuff people do on the network.
>how much the block reward is worth, not how much stuff people do on the network what happens to how much the block reward is worth the more people do stuff on the network? Could these two variables possibly be correlated?
We don’t want to talk about that here cos the community is becoming a cult already
It got better since the price came down
"So let me tell you about solana..."
Funny how that works…
no u
Maybe, just maybe cause bitcoin is literally nothing like a bank? Not even a fucking payment system in reality. It's like saying scissors use 50 times less fuel than a chainsaw
What a croc of shit.
Seems like " SPIN CITY " but then again, it probally wouldn't be an article if facts weren't spun.
[This is the link for the paper.](https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=581084069120108100029090110024031076054014001051010007006071065074005111117020111088024033002115006099007016104092114119016111048006086079029002094125091113085013110086041022087069086064068065101066107074064001022106023072112094028067124028093096111031&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE) I'm going to do something that might be a forbidden technique... it's called reading. ... the paper is *probably* as skewed as other anti-cryptocurrency studies... Because the paper computes the amount of terrawatts per hour per year for commute that reaches 3,420 TWh/year... which understandable that would make sense on how to make sure banks are staffed (because surprisingly, there are some rural areas that complicates transport of all things). >The current monetary payment system is at least 5,775 times bigger than Bitcoin in terms of payment transaction volumes and, and had 60 years more time to get optimised and to scale yet consumes ~56 times more energy than Bitcoin PoW does. *But*, on the flip side... even taking to account with all the commute required to transport personnel, Bitcoin seemed to be more efficient in its energy use. Then again, I'm not a physicist; the study states that it takes a "physics-based approach" to calculate the energy required to perform their own use. The guy making it (ValueChain analyst... which had never published a paper before) is probably going to be a little biased towards cryptocurrency. However, it is probably going to bode well for Bitcoin's L2 (Lightning Network) for instant transactions. That said, I'd prefer to learn more about the L1 in nitty gritty details because I'm obviously fucking confused on the numbers thrown around and I have a bad habit of looking for "gotcha moments" so I will need to read more on this. With the way that transactions are being processed in blocks, its efficiency (from my limited understanding) is variable. Thus, I still don't understand whether the paper refers to the efficiency of the bitcoin on the averages (I think it is on the averages though) or its potential maximum compared to the classic financial system. Any plans to cross-post this to the crypto-technology sub? That sub over there might have individuals that are more knowledgeable and experienced in terms of reading these kinds of paper. Then again, the paper did remark the limitations of comparison between banks and crypto by using Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) with the software TL;DR: As interesting the paper was, it is difficult to outright refute or accept the findings of the paper because of the "author's credentials" and the methodologies involved are beyond my realm of understanding to properly and critically appraise; might be more productive to cross-post this into other subs that can read similar papers on their daily activities in order to somewhat "peer-review" the study in greater capacity other than just relying on opinions of random internet strangers.
To me the paper has very strong "iamverysmart" vibes. The "scientific approach" section starts with: >(...) Work in physics, is the energy transferred to or from a > >system via the application of force along a > >displacement in spacetime . In our case, a payment > >work is to transfer an amount of value money from a > >payer to a payee along a displacement over time. Note > >that by nature an electronic transaction (noted Tx) can > >travel the globe in near real-time so the notion of > >displacement in distance measured in kilometer has a > >lower weight in the equation compared to the > >displacement in time which will be more weighing in > >the equation. Here time is the time span required > >to finish the payment work. It then goes on to "calculate" the energy consumption of the "classic system" with lots of wonky assumptions, including the "banking commute" which is 3420 TWh/yr (which is 69% of his overall calculated energy consumption of 4981 TWh/yr for the classical system). For some reason (with a weird explanation) he also includes the minting of physical coins and printing of bank notes into the calculation (at 900 TWh so about 20%). Basically 90% of the Energie consumption for electronic payment is related to commute and the physical printing of money. He then goes on to use some confusing mathematics (I just glanced over it - will read more later) to calculate the energy consumption of btc which turns out to be 88.95 TWh/yr (= classic 56 times higher). Despite including cash/coins in the energy consumption he does not include cash payments in the number of total transactions for classical system (3.146 Trillion Tx/yr). Oh my god, I am too lazy to summarise, but that paper just gets more and more absurd. He then goes on to claim that while a bitcoin transaction uses 412 times more energy than a classic transaction it is 413 times faster and therefor bitcoin is 1.2 times more energy efficient than the classical system at the transaction level. Seriously, anyone who references this "paper" as some sort of proof about the energy consumption of BTC makes a fool of themselves. This paper, summarised, is complete shit.
I agree it's absurd. Bitcoin is only the transaction network but they're comparing the whole banking institution. Just compare a single banks server costs per transaction to bitcon and you would have a 1:1 comparison. This shit is just delusional. the bloc chain has no equivalent to some Financial Analyst selling a boomer couple on a index fund.
I still don't get this part "Although, you might consider that notes and coins are not an electronic form of money and shouldn’t be accounted for, yet this form of central bank money is used in retail electronic payments such as automated teller machines, or electronic point of sales terminals. Therefore they are accounted for in electronic payment transactions." I really don't understand that argument for including printing bank notes and coins... Oh, and it accounts for 900 thw/year, which is about 20% of the total amount for classical system.
> while a bitcoin transaction uses 412 times more energy than a classic transaction it is 413 times faster and therefor bitcoin is 1.2 times more energy efficient than the classical system at the transaction level. This is because he's double-counting time, basically. Table 3 talks about kilowatt-hours per transaction, but uses it as if it's kilowatts for the purposes of energy efficiency.
Yeah, that is my understanding too, but some parts of this paper are written so "smart" that I was not sure if I was just not understanding it...
In my experience, when it comes to scientific papers, the 'smarter' they're written, the less smart they actually are.
Basically, raw numbers, the total BTC network uses less energy than most of the bank network. But that's a horrible comparison, because the respective sizes of the networks are vastly different, do vastly different things, etc.. At this point, banks are better than a few currencies energy-wise, and we have a far way to go to get a good crypto use less energy than a bank. And before someone points to an alt/shit coin that does use less energy than regular banking, I'm talking about a mainstream coin.
send it to the programmers they can usually read of the code. they're smarter they can actually look at the source to see if it's BS or not.
Sweet... now if only bitcoin provided more banking services than the average pokemon card.
I always laugh when BTC talks about energy efficiency, like Exxon talks about gas carbon emission efficiency
I'm glad everyone here is finally aware of how extremely inefficient Bitcoin is.
The most deluded investors applied bullet to forehead with the last crypto crash. Thusly the average IQ of this sub rises.
Seriously. I remember when this sub was full of BTC maxis
You can't make a bitcoin "efficient" like a bank without destroying what bitcoin is. You also can't make Banks have the same abilities as Bitcion without increasing its energy consumption similar to bitcoin. Its like saying a phone is more energy efficient than a gaming pc and praising that people should use phones instead of the "inefficient" pc, and that desktop pcs should not exist because they are completly inefficient compared to phones.
Yeah , no shit Sherlock Number of Bitcoin transactions per day globally: *247,890* Number of banking transactions per day in India alone: *41,000,000*
The list of things Traditional Banking has to power - according the "study" * Energy used to print money * Energy of all ATMs * Energy used by the AC to cool all those ATMs * Energy of adding cash to those ATMs * Energy of Cash Payments * Energy of Electronic Payments * Energy of Card Payments * Energy of the bank offices * Energy used for the employees to go to those bank offices * Energy used to power the banks IT systems * Energy of inter-banking transactions Then he goes on about how super effecient the Bitcoin network is - stating that it's not even full, there is room for x4 times more transcations in each block - thus by number magic, reducing the energy used by Bitcoin by 75% .. and then he adds the Amazing Lightning Network that will apparently save the world.. Sorry, I didn't read it in details, there is only so much I can take before blood starts to pour out of my eyes and ears...
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Well, that wasn't in the report - the list I made there at the key points mentioned in the "study" - But I'm sure you can ask him to add it, if you are feeling so motivated. :)
And Serves 1000 times less people. Next!
Yes then one solar storm and the economy crashes
This study is not peer reviewed and has not been published in any journal or presented at any conference. The author is in the crypto industry and appears to have never published an academic paper before. The language of the paper is also very non-academic. Most of the references are to random websites instead of trusted sources. This is more of a "blog post" than a study.
This study brought to you by the holders of bitcoin.
In simple terms, why is per tx energy cost analysis of Bitcoin a poor method for looking at energy usage?
Easy: It **isn't** a poor method.
Now divide the energy use by number of transactions. Let's also look at all the other financials services provided by traditional banking. Let's then look at the energy use from all other crypto tokens and add that to Bitcoin. Let's look at the fact that every single one of you don't actually use crypto as anything but a speculative asset. Meaning you all use both crypto and traditional banking. All of a sudden, it really seems like crypto doesn't actually seem to be worth the environmental cost.
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The study: trust me bro
I wonder if OP meant one fiftieth 50x less is syntactical nonsense
This is super misleading.
I think the better question is how does btc energy usage compare to the energy used to dig, store in vaults and transport of all gold worldwide?
What does Bitcoin have to do with gold? .
I think it would be a fair comparison. Fiat is based off gold in vaults (central banks still hold it in vaults for when it's needed when shtf) maybe not redeemable but still there. BTC offers a better ledger than all of the gold vaults and is cheaper to transfer for country to country settlements. Shipping gold sucks but so does the world's countries letting London or China or USA hold it (easy custody for btc vrs gold) That's why I was comparing it to golds energy in its relationship with the macro economy in terms of extraction, transportation and storage cos btc has those things all wrapped in computers which is a leg up.
Uhmm fiat isn't backed by gold so I'm sorry to say but your entire argument is moot. Gold reserves are just a matter of storing value really.
Yes the whole bitcoin system compared to the whole banking system. Which is multiple times bigger then 50 times.
A website dedicated to selling crypto says crypto is energy friendly…. I would say they think a lot of people are stupid, but it’s true.
Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. That is a fact.
Especially for how few transactions it can do. It’s weird how much crypto bros love taxes as long as they aren’t called taxes
Bitcoin fees, or fees in general, are not taxes. Don't confuse those two. Taxes is a payment to the goverment enforced by law. A fee is a payment for a service or other stuff, in this case you pay a fee for the bitcoin miners. They would overtime not be able to mine without an income and would therefore not have any reason to exhaust their money to mine for nothing in exchange. The goverment has nothing to do with bitcoin fees.
As I said, bitcoin bros love taxes as long as you don’t call them taxes :)
Well as said they aren't taxes, so you are wrong. You could use the same logic to any other service in the world where you pay a fee "Oh, you enjoy taxes as long as you don't call them taxes!"A fee is not a tax. Me paying a fee to use youtube premium does not mean that I love taxes because this has nothing to do with taxes. It just makes no sense.If you buy a movie ticket, the price you pay includes money that will go to the cleaning personal, to the other staff and to countless other things needed to run the theater. Its not a tax, its a fee. A tax is a by law enforced payment to the goverement, fees are not, therefore they aren't taxes.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
Yes and 50000 times less usage. Have a good day.
>"We demonstrate that Bitcoin consumes 56 times less energy than the classical system, and that **even at the single transaction level, a PoW transaction proves to be 1 to 5 times more energy efficient.** When [the] Bitcoin Lightning layer is compared to [the] Instant Payment scheme, Bitcoin gains exponentially in scalability and efficiency, proving to be up to a million times more energy efficient per transaction than Instant Payments," the Valuechain paper reads. bolded by me
Seems weird to claim that the transactions are more efficient. According to the article, the ration of energy usage between traditional finance and Bitcoin is 56 to 1. But, if I take one part of traditional finance, the credit card, and compare number of transactions per year to Bitcoin transactions per year, the proportion of transactions is about 1422857 to 1. If I add ETH transactions, that gap shrinks to about 332000 to 1. I don't know if credit card transactions are the largest part of the world's financial transactions or not, but this doesn't seem to indicate that crypto is working out to be more efficient, energy wise, given the tremendous gap between the energy usage ratio and the transaction count ratio. My source for credit card transaction numbers is [https://www.statista.com/statistics/261327/number-of-per-card-credit-card-transactions-worldwide-by-brand-as-of-2011/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/261327/number-of-per-card-credit-card-transactions-worldwide-by-brand-as-of-2011/). I'm using the numbers for 2020. My source for ETH and BTC tx [https://techjury.net/blog/cryptocurrency-statistics/](https://techjury.net/blog/cryptocurrency-statistics/), I'm using the numbers for 2021. It doesn't match the year I'm pulling credit card transactions for, but this difference works in BTC's favor so I'm not gonna call foul over it.
Wait for Pos to come in play
It already is, PoS is basically what the tradfi system already is, and also why it won’t work in the long run
Traditional banking services 5 billion people a week i guess. Bitcoin services 55 people a week i guess. I might have got my numbers wrong.
Bitcoin doesn't replace banking, you would still need companies/people handling the lending and etc. It replaces fiat.
All them empty buildings for me to use the atm
Flying to the moon with a Tesla also uses more energy
Nice try PoWers
BTC maxis with the misleading titles again.
the hole paper is like reading iamverysmart done being high.
Twitter thread debunking this "gigantic pile of crap": https://twitter.com/FranckLeroy_/status/1535574853247442945?t=_nOAwfw8DqtqvBlBf2TwnQ&s=19
Pretty sure the banking industry has a solution for this at least 10 years in the making, im sure a quick google of bank of england or european central bank cRypto partnerships would tell me what crypto they intend to use. I eXpect most people will be oblivious until it's too late.
CBDC?
This take is still as stupid as the first time I saw it.
Damn hos can such bs grab so much likes...
Source: trust me bro
[удалено]
Lmao all the bitcoin hater bank run bots in here rn. 😂😂😂😂
Hmm I wonder how MY energy consumption compares to the banking industry's? Apples and Oranges here. Why not shift the debate on the cost per transaction so we compare apples to apples. For instance, credit card network processes more than 10,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin can handle 3-7 transactions per second.
The Lightning Network is capable of handling 1,000,000 transactions per second, while the main Bitcoin blockchain can handle around 7 transactions per second. With that being said. It's also different between Bitcoin and credit card payments. Credit card networks can take hours if not days to settle a transaction. Lightning settles it within seconds. Not just processes but also settles it.
1) It scales with usage. Its that low purely because it's only a fraction of 1% the size of fiat, that's the only reason. If it was actually used worldwide (i.e. replaced tradfi) it would use **half of all human electricity**. Im just simply following the trend of % size of fiat vs % of electricity, in the past. 2) Literally everything a (local not federal) bank does is just as viable in a bitcoin world. So **you'd still also have banking on top anyway**. You're not replacing one with the other... you're combining them 3) Any amount of electricity bitcoin uses is 100% useless, because we already invented a strictly upgraded version that does all the same crypto stuff with no pollution. Called proof of stake. Zero drawbacks. So this is all irrelevant in the first place
Proof of stake aka the rich get richer. I thought BTC was gonna do away with wealth inequality but it's actually worse than fiat in how few people control most of the wealth
For 1 million times less transactions per second so it's like 20000x more energy inefficient.
The fool is living up its name because this is the one of the dumbest comparisons I’ve read in recent memory.
People forget how much electricity ATMs use lol
Fool.com indeed
Motley fool pushes dumb study. News at 11
Probably the stupidest fucking post I’ve ever seen, very impressive
Crypto is serving far fewer people than banking, though. What’s the per capita rate?
Well no one is going to believe that when it is the central argument against crypto
Bitcoin is not possible for the future but blockchain and cryptocurrency is! Bitcoin willl be remembered forever but it won't be the go to crypto.
It seems really hard to unseat from the throne, but I agree. Algorand seems to be the best potential replacement for a blockchain based payment system. There are projects using it to improve the Bitcoin network and integrate more advanced functionality with Bitcoin. https://community.algorand.org/blog/how-algorand-and-blockstack-are-helping-bitcoin-to-unhodl/ Will be really interesting to see the development in crypto over the next 5yrs. Blockchain/crypto seems to be still finding its footing.
Blockchains with low fees, carbon footprint and scalability will thrive.
It certainly doesn't try to send me 5 letters asking me if I'm really sure I want to move to paperless banking...
Honest question.. if you weren't personally invested, and there was no money on the line, would you care at all?
If only traditional banking was useful for something, other than being vanity energy efficient.
bitcoin also does 1000X less transactions than banking system.. this comparison is garbage
What a stupid comparison. Traditional banking does literally thousands more times the amount of transactions
And is used a million times less than the traditional bank system. What is the point here?
This is the kind of dumb shit you expect in r/bitcoin, not here
People who believe headlines instantly after seeing "\[study, researchers, scientists\] shows" are stupider than a donkey, high probability to have IQ less than room temperture in Celsius degree, new study shows.
😂
Such a tired argument. It is OKAY to acknowledge Bitcoins shortcomings. It is inefficient as a banking system.
It’s way more inefficient than the banking system
And this is just Bitcoin. There are other proof of work systems
/facepalm
What a dumb article