>"banks could become more energy efficient. Bitcoin, however, cannot do this, by definition...there's more power being used than several entire small countries to perform something like 100 transactions a second."
I don't see how bitcoin cannot become more efficient "by definition". In fact it is a very straightforward process. All you have to do is add more zeros onto here and get people to use it.
/** The maximum allowed weight for a block, see BIP 141 (network rule) */
static const unsigned int MAX_BLOCK_WEIGHT = 4000000;
> Widespread Bitcoin adoption would require more energy for mining coins than the entire world can currently produce.
No. Bitcoin could work exactly the same even without any more hash power, or energy consumption, ever being added.
This is because mining is only a competition to produce a block and defines the security of Bitcoin. But it has no bearing on how many transactions the network can process.
Any scaling that happens is completely orthogonal.
>A single bitcoin transaction (amortized) uses as much electricity as an entire house uses (on average) in more than 2 days.
That could be true, but how much energy does the finance world consumes through all the quantitative easings and other shenanigans? I doubt it's even possible to burn that worth of energy in electricity.
> Is the energy cost per transaction in real world for bitcoin going up or down? Everything else is trying to muddy it up from my personal perspective.
Energy is expended to secure the network as a whole and not for the transfer of coins.
But if you insist on computing such a metric with only limited applicability, the answer is: Yes, the metric goes up:
Estimated power consumption per day, 2020-2021 +5%:
01/01/2020: 0.2 TWh
01/01/2021: 0.211 TWh
Estimated number of onchain transactions per day, 2020-2021: +6%:
01/01/2020: 288K
01/01/2021: 305K
And this doesn't even include all the hidden private transactions that occur off-chain on Layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network:
Number of nodes on the Lightning Network, 2020-2021 +60%:
01/01/2020: 5K
01/01/2021: 8K
Capacity of the Lightning Network, 2020-2021 +430%:
> either Bitcoin becomes widely deployed for actually facilitating transactions, in which case its energy use grows proportionally, or its energy use plateaus
Again thats not how it works. Energy usage does not grow in proportion with transactions. It grows in proportion to hash rate which is a function of market capitalization value. I can assure you the MC of bitcoin is not going to grow exponentially infinitely because that is a physical impossibility.
> ... climate change doesn’t care about hypotheticals.
But increasing the block size limit wouldn't reduce the energy consumption. It would just make Bitcoin support a higher maximum transaction count per second, which perhaps the market doesn't even need or care about.
> there is not a certain amount of electricity needed per transaction.
Not yet. But that will be increasingly the case in the coming decades as the block subsidy gets repeatedly halved into insignificance. Then the brunt of Bitcoin's security (protection against 51% attacks) will have to be borne by transaction fees.
> The energy usage of Bitcoin doesn't meaningfully go up with more transactions,
No it just always always goes up regardless of transaction volume as the block-difficulty increases infinitely. You've built a system that by design can literally only become less efficient.
It's actually even worse and stupider than if it were a per-transaction energy usage.
> And if the maximum daily number of transactions is more or less fixed, and the total energy spend is also relatively stable, then it’s very easy to calculate the energy cost per transaction.
You don't understand how transactions work.
A transaction can have arbitrary value, an arbitrary number of inputs, and an arbitrary number of outputs.
Therefore Bitcoin has infinite throughout and 1 hour confirmation/finality latency.
An example:
My company has 100 engineers each paid USD10k in bitcoin per month. We generate 1 transaction worth USD1M with 100 outputs.
Similarly when paying numerous suppliers for hardware, machinery, logistics, transportation, catering. 1 transaction of high value with numerous heterogeneous outputs.
Transaction count is not the correct way to measure the throughout of the Bitcoin network at a given block height or over several retargets.[0]
If it can, why hasn't it?
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