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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday June 27 2018, @12:22AM
from the my-bubble-is-bigger-than-yours dept.
from the my-bubble-is-bigger-than-yours dept.
As reported in the Evening Standard, the Bank of International Settlements published an annual report with four criteria to continue economic growth. However, it was rather overshadowed by a statement in the appendix (reported here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere) where cryptographic currency was described as a "combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster".
I agree and so does a Canadian electricity company.
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Bank of International Settlements: Bitcoin is a Bubble, a Ponzi Scheme and an Environmental Disaster
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 27 2018, @12:05PM (2 children)
Whatever you are smoking must be some good shit; would you like to share? That is an insane amount of power to process one transaction. 250kw/h is enough to fully charge 3 electric cars! I would say in a month, I probably have 20 or so transactions. 20 * $25 = $500 / month in transaction costs. Your .10 kw/h is on the cheap side in the US. I pay more than that.
Lets do some math. A nuclear power plant near me outputs about 1600MW. It has 2 reactors. A typical nuclear reactor generates 800MW. 20 transactions per month is 5MW/h per month. There are about 720 hours in a month. 800 * 720 = 576,000 MW/h per month of output from a nuclear reactor. I am a card carrying tightwad, so at 5MW/h per month, a nuclear reactor powering nothing but bitcoin transactions can only support 115,200 people. The average residential customer in the US uses about 900KW/h per month. A single reactor can power 640,000 average homes. If all those homes used bitcoin for everything, they would need an additional 5 nuclear reactors! That is at tightwad spending levels! I am being conservative!
If everyone used bitcoin for everything. The US would have to generate more than 6 times the electricity we currently do!
Not a lot of power!?!?!?! Seriously!?!?!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 27 2018, @12:26PM (1 child)
I gather most transactions happen through secondary markets which normally don't trigger actual bitcoin transactions on the primary one. There are many problems with secondary markets (fraud, theft, etc), but they do work to massively reduce the cost of transactions.
Or conduct most transactions through secondary markets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 27 2018, @01:24PM
That 6 times thing is funny since the number of transactions per block is just a choice. JUst change the blocksize from 1 mb to 1 gb, problem solved: https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-the-worlds-first-1gb-block/ [bitcoin.com]
The only problem is the price of memory limits who can then run the software. If memory became 1000x cheaper tomorrow this would be done immediately. In reality memory seems to get about 100x cheaper per decade: https://jcmit.net/mem2015.htm [jcmit.net]
The total ignorance about the topic of the people who are making these arguments is ridiculous.