Bitcoins gaining credibility and use

[bae]

Bitcoin isn't very eco....

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[razz]

An I reading ir correctly? Bitcoin uses 1/3 of the total world's electric consumption? Facebok wants to start a banking system based on a similar currency? What am I not understanding here?

[jp1]

It's 0.32%, not 32% of all electricity, but that's still a huge amount of electricity.

[bae]

It's 0.32%, not 32% of all electricity, but that's still a huge amount of electricity.

Especially considering it isn't really doing any useful work.

[jp1]

Especially considering it isn't really doing any useful work.

Indeed. And imagine if people were actually using bitcoin in any sort of sizable numbers how much electricity that would take.

[Teacher Terry]

It’s not using bitcoin but mining that uses electricity. That actually bothered me.

[jp1]

My understanding is that mining is essentially propagating the bitcoin transaction database, which will only become more energy intensive as the number of transactions increases, thus making the transaction database ever larger. Because of the distributed nature of the transaction database there's no way to make doing a transaction energy efficient. It's not like doing a credit card transaction where the data only gets posted to the buyer's bank and to the merchant's bank. Every bitcoin transaction gets posted to every one of countless copies of the entire transaction registry. That's the secret sauce of how cryptocurrencies work, but it also means that it's wildly inefficient energy-wise.

The part that's not clear to me is what will happen once the finite supply of bitcoin have all been mined. At that point no one will be interested in providing mining services so it's unclear to me who will actually be providing all the processing necessary to keep the database of transactions propagated.

[bae]

It’s not using bitcoin but mining that uses electricity. That actually bothered me.

Alas, using bitcoins uses a lot of power to verify the transaction. "Mining" also incorporates doing the transactional processing.

https://www.economist.com/the-econom...so-much-energy

When I looked about two years ago, it took about 200KWh to process a single transaction. That's enough to power my 4500 sq. ft. home for about 2 weeks. You can see why micropayments using bitcoin are having trouble getting off the launchpad.

[Teacher Terry]

Thanks Bae for the explanation)

[iris lilies]

...When I looked about two years ago, it took about 200KWh to process a single transaction. That's enough to power my 4500 sq. ft. home for about 2 weeks .

good lord. And this transaction gets you— a bit? A coin???

No answer needed I am too ignorant to ask real questions I just I just don’t get it.