Digiconomist

I like to point people to this page: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ The breakdown in cost pr. Transaction really drives home what a ludicrous system it is. Bitcoin is a fantastic example of a great invention put to horrible use.

Lots of comments here mention bitcoin. Here's something funny: the author of the paper mentioned in the article owns a website called Digiconomist[0], which seems to have been exclusively focusing on "environmental impact of cryptocurrency". Their latest article is about AI. Looks like a pivot to me. 0: https://digiconomist.net/

> Even if the base layer of Bitcoin is using energy, one can argue that the functionality it offers (trustless, borderless, permissionless, programmable, digitally-native money) is worth the energy cost. The idea that Bitcoin (#23) is worth as much or more as all the economic and general human activity of Poland (25), Thailand (24), or Vietnam (22) is highly suspect: * https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Writing a few bytes into a ledger is consuming 0.5% of global energy, but of course it's also consuming a country worth of power and generating a country of e-waste. So far, and that's just limited by the current price. Its trajectory is clear. [1] [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Check the numbers. Bitcoin is just not worth it's ecological footprint: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

And, estimating the cost... I see some site say $27k for tuition per year. Assume four years per person; assume people live for 80 years; assume half the population goes to college; then 1/40 of the population is attending college in any given year. If we say the U.S. has 300M people, then that's about $200 billion per year, for this proof of work. Meanwhile, this site estimates Bitcoin's annual electricity consumption at $7 billion worth: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Are there any estimates of how much power crypto mining has consumed and how much running all of the Facebook/Instagram/whatever servers has consumed? Best i found for Bitcoin was 40-100 TWh per year: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption And for Facebook it appeared that they used 5140 GWh in 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-facebook/ So essentially: Entity Consumption (GWh) Facebook 5 140 Bitcoin 40 000 - 100 000 I wouldn't have expected Facebook to consume comparatively so little energy, if i'm doing conversions right.

If each concert ticket generated the carbon footprint of a household for an entire month[0] then people may start asking questions if concerts are even worth it. [0] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

Don't forget the new coins being mined which have to be immediately sold to pay the $2.7 billion dollar operating cost [0] to secure the network. It should come as no surprise that the price of bitcoin has fallen so much and peak mining capacity has fallen by 30% when you have $2.7 billion dollars worth of newly generated bitcoin supply being sold each year. [0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

> It seems I have hit a nerve! :D Hit what exactly? You have failed to refute any of my points. > AI in general, and LLMs in particular, will change Society to a scale only comparable to what the Word Wide Web has done since the 90s. I don't think you would trust a black-box 'AI' in any high risk activity such as medical, financial, legal advice and especially transportation which there is a lack of a human driver or pilot, end-to-end to hold accountable once something goes wrong. Hence it will be totally regulated and licensed. Not only techies like you wish to accelerate everyone further into a dystopia no-one asked for, but to even recklessly risk deploying untrustworthy AI models unchecked which can easily hallucinate and confuse themselves over a single pixel or any adversarial input. Making them unsuitable for anything serious, unless they are strictly regulated for that purpose. Regardless, my environmental argument still stands unchallenged. Crypto has alternative greener methods to proof-of-work right now, and former PoW blockchains like Ethereum have shown that it is possible to significantly reduce its emissions by 99% by moving to a greener consensus method. [0][1] AI (Deep Learning, LLMs, CNNs, etc) however still does NOT have any viable greener alternative methods of training, inference and fine-tuning available and continues to waste tons of electricity and water. [2] > Crypto is basically penny stocks - or actually, in good truth - a glorified pyramid…

You are confusing Bitcoin with crypto. Ethereum uses drastically less energy after it transitioned to proof of stake. Many other cryptocurrencies are similar. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption Nor do I agree with your assessment of banning Bitcoin because its power usage doesn’t match what we would like. I assume we all somewhat believe in the free market and the free market is solving this problem. Bitcoin price appreciation has been anemic at best and is only about 2% over the SP500 (+54%) in the past five years. Ethereum is quite a different story. +177%. Innovation is working. How much power and materials are wasted when Apple releases incremental changes with a new number each year to resell the same thing to materialistic buyers annually? Should they ban themselves for the greater good of the planet? I’d say so. https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/apples-colossal-e-waste-timeb… >Assuming the ecosystem was made up entirely of iPhones, an iPhone, on average, weighs 150g and are 130mm long. This means that you're looking at a pile of iPhones weighing 250,000 metric tons (the Empire State Building weighs in at roughly 330,000 metric tons), and if laid end-to-end would circle the Earth more than five times. And that’s just the e-waste. How much energy went into making them, how many dollars were wasted paying salaries and gas etc.?

> It currently uses .1% of global energy ie. about between 300 and a million times more energy than VISA/Mastercard when adjusted to the number of transactions. [0] > It makes use of stranded energy Miners who mine 24/7, by definition, do not consume stranded energy. There are no numbers whatsoever that can affirm which part of the miners use stranded energy. On the other hand, when one coal mine got flooded in China last year, 33% of the mining power came to a halt. [1] > off peak energy stabilizing grid production So much stabilizing it has caused blackouts in several countries [2]. Texas has resorted to pay miners so they don't cause blackouts [3] > incentivizes green energy build outs No, it incentivizes cheap electricity sources. Moreover in the topic of climate change the greenest energy is the one you don't consume. > with the landfill methane caputure business will soon be the only digital asset that is carbon negative What? Landfill methane business is basically saying "instead of just burning methane, let's burn it and use the heat to power up some BTC mining". At best, that makes the operation carbon neutral. If you are trolling, I must say, congrats, you triggered me. [0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [1] https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-environment-p… [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-25/kazakhstan-unplugge…

This is almost a half decent article. And I think it's really valuable to point out we should revisit the energy usage discussion about bitcoin. The key thing to understand basically is that energy usage of bitcoin has a weird distribution over time[1]. Between June 2017 and June 2018 energy consumption of Bitcoin quadrupled. So at that point it was a reasonable thing to say "Oh wow, bitcoin is using tonnes of energy this is worrying". But then the consumption stayed flat for about 3 years. Now, it's reasonable to suggest that the reason that this trend happened is that essentially the energy consumption follows the value of BTC. It's true to say that at the scale of other currencies, it looks unlikely that BTC mining will consume a large percentage of electricity consumption. It could stay in low single digit percentages even if it's used widely. But there's something else to think about. The adoption of bitcoin isn't just about the value of bitcoin, it's about using it for transactions. So let's look at the number of bitcoin transactions per day[2]. Looking at that I'm not sure I would describe bitcoin as efficient - the blockchain is handling about 300k transactions per day. Visa processes hundreds of millions. You have essentially a fixed number of transactions that is determined by the algorithm, since the block size limit is roughly 4MB and you're only going to have 1 block per 10 minutes. So in terms of actually handling transactions, Bitcoin seems ridiculously…

"Norton is installing a Cryptocurrency miner" sounds like when 10-15 years back it made the news when one app or one OS installed adware or spyware. We did nothing, and now it is becoming the norm. If that's the trend, then, ladies and gentlemen, we're screwed: every piece of software will attempt to monetize from user's hardware, no matter the cost, particularly when cost is on the users. Name one reason why they shouldn't do that, there's no law forbidding it except common sense. Cryptocurrency is cancer. It doesn't scale, it can't scale, it's becoming a huge unsustainable environmental disgrace, and it's the #1 reason why certain hardware is harder to find and overpriced, followed by energy, of which we have plenty but decided to waste it in mining farms. Here are some numbers, just look at the trend: from 77 TWh to 204 TWh in one single year. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-usage-more-… Now just picture what will be like 5 years from now with possibly one PWh of miners worldwide pumping heat in the atmosphere 24/7, and energy prices skyrocketing because it will always be allocated to this task, therefore demand will always be higher than offer. Seriously, WTF! Of course I expect downvotes from users with vested interest in cryptocurrencies, however I politely ask others to reply with "You're wrong because ..." followed by a believable explanation. I want to be…

That's a fair explanation. A crypto token with a supply of 1. But here's the problem. And? This takes the idea that anything has value only due to scarcity to such an extreme, it's laughable. So much so, people thus had to try redefining the idea of ownership to justify its existence. These NFTs aren't "free" in existence. While this is true of anything is digital and on the internet, the cost of an Etherum NFT is far more expensive and more worthless in its own existance (which is an amazing feat). If you post 1 piece of artwork on imgur, artstation or even deviantart, the amount of electricity used to upload and view is going to be difficult to sustainably measure since it's so low. A single Etherum transaction to create an artwork NFT takes 60kWh (https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption). 2 days of an average household's energy usage. It's solutionism that's trying to create a false narrative of problems that it can "solve". But even a regular solutionist would be disgusted and demand a new word to be formed so they're not lumped into the same category. I don't have a grief with those trying to simply profit off a craze. I don't hate the player, I respect the hustle. I hate the game and the zealots. The zealots who drop on their knees and pray to the almighty crypto whitepapers are sucking in victims just like a cult. And just like cults, "Put all your money into us. We're far safer from those evil outsiders. Stay and never listen to the outside world.…

My understanding of the situation is: 1. Wind/solar energy are being trumpeted around the world as the cheapest source of electricity available. 2. Bitcoin miners' profits are directly `sale price of BTC - buy price of electricity`. Other costs are marginal in comparison. 3. BTC mining is a extremely competitive, trivially mobile, trivially liquid, global market. 4. Given 1, 2 & 3 there is a lot of fretting that BTC is creating a coal-powered financial system. With the recent spike, the currently reasonable cost for a fast, median-sized transaction is $10.46 [1] [2] According to the fretting articles I read, that is enough to power an average home for a 23 days and motivates sending over 300kg (700lb) of C02 into the air [3] That's 35 gallons of gasoline at 20lb CO2/gallon. :/ For what it's worth, I get the concern. But, I also see equal shares of BTC hate|BTC fanboyism everywhere I go. Latching on to the environmental concerns of BTC is trendy right now. It's hard to argue against without sounding like an asshole and it's not entirely false. But, it's not entirely honest either. Everything I read and calculate shows that BTC makes total sense as a defacto green energy subsidy. But, that does not spark outrage. So, instead there is a lot of fretting about the second rise of a coal-powered economy. IMHO, the way Ethereum is going is great: Bootstrap with POW then switch to POS after enough investment is built-up that staking actually means something. It's…

> it seems that environmental groups in Iceland are fighting the expansion of bitcoin because it is directly driving extra demand for electricity, not simply using the existing production As someone who lives and works here I can assure you there is absolutely no environmental group fighting the expasion of btc mining here in Iceland, we are however viciously fighting the increasingly destruction tourism influx that has been happening since 2012. It does far more damage that the dams that were built here well before btc mining even existed. >while currently not paying much of anything to the local government[2] and hiring next to no people, like most tech industries. This is also untrue, construction and remote hands as well as grid infrastructures resulted from them, the companies that run the facilities also incorporate here and pay corp and employee tax here. >And it is not my place to have productive ideas for how a country could use its natural resources. My claim was that bitcoin mining should be stopped as soon as possible, as it is driving an overall increase in power needs for the entire world, at a time we should be looking for every possible means to reduce our energy consumption. If you followed your own citations you'd see one of them linked to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption which shows est electric consumption going back as far as 2018. Notice the graph has not really changed since 2018 (since the last halving). >You came and brought…

> Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Exactly. I’d need to do some homework to prove it, but my theory is more power is used every second for Bitcoin than an hour’s worth of videoconferencing worldwide. That said, we have to start somewhere, but is videoconferencing really the thing that’ll have any positive impact on CO2 emissions? Edit: Per this source[0] (no claims to its accuracy), a single transaction on Bitcoin causes nearly 300kg of CO2 to be emitted. So compared even to the high point of the article’s range (aka 1kg per hour meeting, though the included chart shows ~1/10th that for Zoom), that’s multiple orders of magnitude higher, per transaction. [0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Edit 2: I did some further research and multiple seemingly solid sources give conservative estimates of Bitcoin electricity consumption in the range of 80-100TWh per annum. To put that number in perspective, that’s more electricity per year than all of Google’s servers worldwide combined since its founding over twenty years ago (estimates put that number around 75TWh). I’m not going to keep digging, but based on the numbers I saw, I have a feeling Bitcoin uses more electricity per year than AWS, Google, FB, Microsoft, and Apple’s data centers combined per year. I’ll leave it to you to decide if Bitcoin is worth it and you should just turn off your webcam next time you’re on a videoconference to save the environment!

This is one of many reasons why Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake (PoS) and ditching Proof of Work (PoW). The already functional Ethereum 2.0 chain has Bitcoin's security guarantees for a tiny fraction of the electricity costs. Bitcoin's yearly electricity consumption is now estimated at $3.8 billion. This must be sustained indefinitely, and is a huge target for regulation and nation state interference. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ Bitcoin's "store of value" has a forever price tag in the billions yearly. This doesn't make economic sense. If Ethereum can fulfill Bitcoin's role as a "store of value" at a much lower yearly cost, I don't see how it would not eventually become more attractive as a store of value. For a great detailed explanation on why PoS is better see Vitalk's blog. Vitalik views attacks on chains in terms of costs, which IMHO is the proper paradigm to quantify attack costs. https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html (BTW, the TLS cert looks like it has an issue at the moment). In 2011 I assumed Bitcoin would transition because PoW's weaknesses were obvious. Unfortunately, the majority of the leftovers in Bitcoin no longer share my sentiment. Electricity consumption is a reason that PoW is the most likely downfall of Bitcoin if they don't transition to another technology. To keep PoW Bitcoin will need to morph into something else, like a semi-centralized "reserve" asset which is not a technology that excites me. …

> On POW and the electricity argument, I think we waste electricity on lots of frivolous things. I'm willing to bet Christmas lights also consume more than the state of Delaware. Delaware used 11.26 TWh of electricity in 2016 ("total retail sales", i'm ignoring the direct use bit, sue me): https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/delaware/ Bitcoin is using 50.88 TWh of electricity per year: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption A light user of LED christmas lights ("1 to 3 wreaths, a garland, and a total of approximately 10 strings to wrap their outdoor trees"!) will use 96 watts while operating for 5 hours a day, 30 days a year, for 14.4 kWh in total: https://www.christmaslightsetc.com/pages/how-much-power.htm Delaware uses as much power as ~782 million light users of LED christmas lights. Bitcoin uses as much as ~3533 million such users. > do your own research Excellent advice.

A transaction needs to be part of a block to be valid. So using transaction validation is a red herring. The validation uses same amount of energy it is required to be included in the block. But, I see your point. So let's see how this thing will unfold if we talk about blocks (assuming all data is correct): From the article: > This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction So, as per the article a house needs 215kwh per week. Data Source for the article here: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Energy consumption for yesterday shows as 24.25 Twh. Block is generated every 10 mins so 144 blocks in a day. 24.25/144 = 0.17 Twh ~ 168 MWh or 168000 kwh for each block. When divided with per house per week from article - 168000/215 ~ 781 houses So the apt headline, as per you is - "One Bitcoin Block Now Uses as Much Energy as more than 750 Houses in a Week" I am sure people will love to talk about consumption per transaction if that was the headline.

About 1,200 kWh per transaction, currently[0]. I wrote about this back in 2022, when it was about 2,200 kWh per transaction[1]. Edit: made a chart with this data, but adding in a bitcoin transaction[2] [0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [1]: https://rollen.io/blog/crypto-climate/ [2]: https://imgur.com/a/ggAGylW

Bitcoin manages to consume more power than all the AI systems were wringing our hands over: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption And provides approximately none of the scant benefits of asking Claude to fix my spelling.

Bitcoin is _not_ magically produced by the sun striking the ground. There are mild returns to scale in running large-scale mining operations and as a result mining power seems to actually be somewhat centralized under the control of a small number of players: https://digiconomist.net/cryptocurrency-decentralization/ Not to mention that "decentralization" is a technical property and not necessarily desirable in itself. Users might care about fairness, avoiding sanctions, purchasing illegal goods, etc, but these are only weakly connected to technical decentralization.

I was skeptical that Bitcoin still uses more than AI but it seems to indeed be the case (or close) - current Energy estimates for Bitcoin recently are at 175 TW/h[0] (though I don't know if those are extra pessimistic or not). For AI the total consumption is perhaps a little less currently (the figures I find quickly differ) but mostly projected to go over twice that in the next couple of years[1]. 0. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption 1. https://www.windindustrie-in-deutschland.de/meldungen/electricity-cons…

Bitcoin still refuses to move to proof of stake. It's obscene https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Visa used 189GWh in 2017, worldwide, of which around half was data centres [1]. That handled 111.2 billion transactions, so about 1.7Wh per transaction (half for datacentres). Bitcoin used 844670Wh per transaction [2]. [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibility/visa-2… [2] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

In terms of energy consumption per transaction, it's not even close. Digieconomist [1] states that a single Bitcoin transaction is "equivalent to the carbon footprint of 1,044,177 VISA transactions or 78,521 hours of watching Youtube." Statista [2] estimates a similar energy-cost ratio of about 470,000 Visa transactions to 1 Bitcoin transaction. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-…

It's a giant tulip bubble. Bitcoin was never supposed to be a store of value. It's a decentralized currency that many scam artists and criminals use to transfer wealth -- alongside with consuming massive amounts of energy, bitcoin does nothing but bring a huge net negative value to society: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption But hey, let's keep this up and see how long it lasts :)

> the solution there is not to create an entire secondary financial system that burns down rain forests to execute transactions This complaint is out of date for ethereum, the cryptocurrency system under discussion. The carbon footprint of an ethereum transaction is now about the same as watching two hours of youtube according to https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption and that's for the L1 - say you use Argent on Zksync as an example L2, you're most likely saving even more energy.