Projection: by 2020, Bitcoin transactions could consume as much power as Denmark

[Read the post]

That is pretty much intentional. Bitcoin’s power consumption has to scale with the value of transactions running over it. If it becomes a universal medium for exchange, it must consume some significant percentage of the worlds computing power and electricity.

4 Likes

Has anybody other than the author of that article ever wondered that? Does he also wonder why virtual reality requires expensive headmounted displays? Or virtual credit card numbers generate real debt?

3 Likes

Won’t we be a full Mad Max Mohican & leather jacket based economy by then?

3 Likes

Of course, there’s no way everybody will lose faith in Bitcoin by 2020. Couldn’t possibly happen.

7 Likes

Can’t you say regular money in banks uses electricity too? Your savings are just numbers stored in databases right? Hard disks, and tape backups maybe don’t use electricity when turned off, but if you want to use your money the whole banking system has to be powered up.

1 Like

One of the articles I saw about this a while ago pointed out that Bitcoin doesn’t have much extra capacity and their current transaction volume is tiny, suggesting that while current electronic (and physical) banking uses more power it uses less power per equivalent unit of value moved.

Bitcoin is still a promising currency, but this is definitely a big issue with it, and hopefully the community manages to improve it somewhat.

4 Likes

Yes, but the difference is that the amount used per transaction is miniscule and there is no particular reason why it has to increase.

1 Like

Denmark is fairly small anyway.

Can we start calling it ‘Danegeld’ if that should happen?

1 Like

It is by design that Bitcoins consume a lot of power. The currency depends on new Bitcoins being mined over time and the integrity of the Bitcoins being tamper-proof depends on the mining process being expensive in terms of money, time, electricity, and/or computing power. Bitcoins are mathematically based on encryption so it has been designed to be impractical to “crack” the encryption.
As more Bitcoins are released into existence they get progressively more computationally expensive to mine, and thus will continue to consume more and more energy.

1 Like

Bitcoin: When you absolutely need to get virtual money to someone…eventually…

Massive power consumption is mostly related to mining, because it’s certainly not going to transaction processing.

Dogecoin 4 teh win, shibes!

Lower power, lower value, massive funz funds.

But then we’ll never get rid of them!

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.