The lie about Bitcoin energy use

I have been hearing Elon and a few others complain about Bitcoins energy use. This is a complete lie. I have posted a link to Cambridge's Business school who did a study to prove how much power Bitcoin uses. In short all your plugged in appliances that are not turned on could power the network for 3.4 years.

cbeci.org...

Now, I assume the reason Elon came out against the power consumption was some of his largest investors are those green energy people and were getting upset at how much support Elon was giving BTC.

a reply to: MPoling

That or he’s intentionally manipulating the price for his own gain.

Bitcoin uses what again Mr Musk? What other industry uses massive amounts of Electricity, let me think.

I wonder what the energy consumption of his Tesla manufacturing factories, battery plants, cars and logistics chain is comparatively to bitcoin over a year.

When someone flies in on a private jet to lecture you on carbon emissions i tend to switch off. Between Bill Gates (a man who made his fortune on software which runs on power intensive hardware) and Elon Musk, it makes me want to vomit.

My power meter disagrees

Also bitcoin may be the bigest coin but its far from the bigest power use in the crypto world

Exactly. He does not talk about the how much damage mining for those rare earth materials cause. Nor do they have a real plan for recycling those large batteries in 15 years.

a reply to: markovian

I do understand about Bitcoin not being the largest power use in crypto but this post was dedicated to Elon targeting BTC.

a reply to: MPoling

Somewhat related, I was reading this today which is a bit more compelling than Elon's ranting.

spectrum.ieee.org...

a reply to: MPoling

The power consumption estimates are clearly available in Satoshi's orginal White Paper.

Don't listen to rich guys with an interest in the market.

Do your own math. Always do your own R&D with Crypto.

Always.

a reply to: MPoling

Elon dosent understand there's a diferance between the 2

originally posted by: MPoling
In short all your plugged in appliances that are not turned on could power the network for 3.4 years.

cbeci.org...

Now, I assume the reason Elon came out against the power consumption was some of his largest investors are those green energy people and were getting upset at how much support Elon was giving BTC.

Really? 3 1080s running at 100% 24/7 would be like 10000 BTU AC on 24/7 in power. You need a farm of them as a solo miner and then it would take 5 years. Bitcoins are 20 trillion times harder to mine today than when they started.

One of the reasons farms are in communist countries is because they can get electracy for free in different ways making it actually profitable, but if you tried to do that in your house in the states you will spend much more in electracy to mine one in cost even at today's prices.

originally posted by: MPoling
I have been hearing Elon and a few others complain about Bitcoins energy use. This is a complete lie. I have posted a link to Cambridge's Business school who did a study to prove how much power Bitcoin uses. In short all your plugged in appliances that are not turned on could power the network for 3.4 years.

I don't see how the plugged in appliances using lots of power show that bitcoin using lots of power is a lie, it doesn't. Even if that claim is true which I haven't verified, it says bitcoin is using 1/3 the power of the plugged in appliances always on modes which is a lot of power. So, 1/3 of a lot is still a lot.

Always-on devices are using huge amounts of energy
If you're trying to argue that "always-on" devices are not using huge amounts of energy, prove it, or this thread is a complete fail. All sources I've read say they are.

In California alone, the study found that these inactive devices account for nearly 23 percent, on average, of the electricity consumption of homes.

That's huge.

The most profitable farms use Geothermal power anyway.
They may use a lot of power but it's cheap and sustainable.

I'm betting that Musk said this knowing how it would crash the price, sold all of his BTC just before that, waited and then bought it all back when it went near 30K. Now waiting for it to climb which it will do, although he's already made good money selling before it tanked a couple weeks ago.

A person worth a hundred billion will simply keep wanting to make more especially as ambitious he is to do all kinds of big things that have super high price tags.

a reply to: Xtrozero

Your 100% correct. 10yeard ago a 100$ computer was able to mine Bitcoin in 10minutes. Now it takes over 10,000 super(not gaming, think NASA) to mine for 5 years to produce 1 coin.

It was made this way on purpose. If there is less miners, coins are mined faster. If there are more they are mined slower... Satoshi never thought the world would literally warehouse mine crypto(Costco sized warehouses full of custom designed "slave" chips are mining Bitcoin; and the coin drop blocks are CHANCE BASED.. aka not every block has coins..(think the #ty randomized gatcha loot boxes in pay to win mmos)..

so he never calculated that type of power consumption, on the grand scale that it is mined.

I know, I use to mine when it was actually possible for regular people to do so. Wound up having to sell the stock at 15pcs because I couldn't keep up with the million/billionaires, during the warehouse phase..

Especially when it started costing more electric then sale price.

The energy consumption of Bitcoin is not a lie. And once the mining difficulty increases again (which it will certainly do in the next 'halvening') the energy consumption will increase further.

What's not mentioned is the waste of silicon resources. Bitcoin miners are all competing against one another and the only way to be successful is to have the very latest ASIC from the fastest semiconductor processes. These factories are very expensive to build and their capacity limited---and some of it is going to ASICs which have only a 2-3 year lifetime, whose purpose is to turn electricity into heat, and make some bitcoins along the way.

That's also a big waste of resources and capacity which could be devoted to other uses for humans.

Now that other coin systems have demonstrated distributed security without needing to waste enormous energy, I think it morally objectionable and polluting to continue to keep bitcoin.

I think Ethereum 2.0 (in the future), and Algorand---of the various alternative blockchains/ledgers---will offer as good security as Bitcoin with almost none of the resource consumption.

a reply to: MPoling

Here is a good video on the topic, pretty unbiased look at the issue.

Love all the different view points and clarification. I do think that overtime ETH 2.0 will be the primary use. The beauty of BTC is once they are all mined its over, 21 million and no more. So at that point there is 0 power use right? Unlike the USD that is "mined" forever and continually goes lower in value.