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

[John Levine]

In article <CALL-=e6A-PSsLoBSat2ihWd_FeR=zcGWTXw+YX98g3iAb+FcXw at mail.gmail.com>,
Karl  <gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:
>Rather, this quantity should be compared to the combined energy usage of
>all the financial security systems of the world combined.  All the security
>cameras.  All the guards, bank tellers, and PoS machines.  All the armored
>trucks moving cash around: manufacturing, driving, fueling, and maintaining
>them.  All the 24/7 ATMs running.  All the constant financial
>infrastructure that you can think of, and all the energy involved in
>sourcing and processing the materials for it, running it, maintaining it,
>and repairing it.  Not just the transactions.

Well, OK, but you also need to scale it to the size of what they're
managing.  At the ridiculous current price, the total value of
bitcoins is about $100 billion.  Poking around on the intertubes I see
numbers like $300 trillion for financial assets, $200 trillion for
real estate (all those deed registries), and a somewhat implausible $1
quadrillion for derivatives.  That's between 5,000 and 10,000 times as
much as bitcoins.

I don't understand why people try to deny the obvious fact that
blockchain, and particularly proof of work blockchain, is the most
expensive and inefficient database ever invented.  That's what you get
if you want fuly distributed storage and update.

R's,
John