[Cryptography] One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week

[Tony Arcieri]

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 12:28 PM, Jameson Lopp <jameson.lopp at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I don't think it's a useful abstraction, but rather a distraction.
> Transactions don't "use" mining energy - this is a skewed perspective of
> how Bitcoin's thermodynamic security operates.
>
> If you really want to approach this from a "per transaction" standpoint
> then it's only fair to realize that with payment channel tech, orders of
> magnitude more transactions can be occurring that are not measurable on the
> blockchain. I expect that as payment channel tech proliferates, the "per
> transaction" energy usage will drop significantly... but we won't be able
> to calculate it.
>

This view speculates that people actually want to use Bitcoin as a payments
platform, as opposed to speculating on it as a digital asset.

The reality is Bitcoin's transaction volume has largely topped out
recently, with the only exception being a suspected DDoS attack which
appears to have ended shortly before the activation of SegWit:

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all

Perhaps it will grow again. "If you build it they will come." Or not...
there's not a whole lot of incentive to take payments off-chain with
Lightning when there's on-chain capacity. It is otherwise a perpetual "get
out of talking about transaction volume free" card for blockchainiacs who
don't want to discuss Bitcoin's network capacity... even before it ships!

Meanwhile hashpower continues to skyrocket:

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=all

The rise in energy-per-transaction shows the combination of energy being
invested in mining power combined with anemic transaction rates.

This is a very real problem, and a demonstration of why proof-of-work is a
poor solution.

Are there better options? I guess we'll see what happens in 2018. But I
suspect yes...
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