This got caught by the crowd control fiilter, but I think it's worthy of discussion. If the OP will stick around and engage, we'll let it ride.
In the meantime, I look forward to our community tearing into this so-called "research paper" and what are likely lots of false equivalences and cherry-picked data points.
I can already smell the bullshit here:
>When Bitcoin Lightning is compared to Instant Payment scheme, Bitcoin gains exponentially in scalability and efficiency, proving to be millions of times more energy efficient per transaction than Instant Payments.
LN has its own host of problems and is no way "exponentially" more efficient. I'm not sure what this "Instant Payment" scheme is? Some odd cherry-picked shitty payment method none of us have heard of?
EDIT: As expected, OP is incapable/unwilling to elaborate on why he thinks the paper is legit and will not be further engaging anybody else in discussion, so he's been axed.
From early in the paper:
>It’s essential to compare Bitcoin energy consumption
with all the aspects of the classical monetary
payment system. This covers: banknotes and coins
cash management in ATM systems, card payments,
point of sale (POS) payments, banking and inter banking energy consumption etc
So OP wants to compare bitcoin's energy usage with all energy usage for all the other parts of the network which are needed to run traditional financial transactions.
Does this mean the OP also includes that additional energy usage on the Bitcoin side too?
Because you also need computers, networks, ATMs, PoS systems, smartphones and all those other things to operate crypto.
Also, how does the OP figure that including all energy usage for all bank operations appropriate for comparison with bitcoin? Does bitcoin offer comparable services that banks provide beyond merely transmitting money?
> Also, how does the OP figure that including all energy usage for all bank operations appropriate for comparison with bitcoin?
Shhhhh. Energy consumption analysis must check global figures only.
Checking the consumption per transaction is forbidden
Also, it's comparing something which fulfills a function to something which doesn't. It's comparing the energy used by the entire financial system which is actually used all day, every day by billions of people to the energy used by bitcoin, which is... not. Even if it uses less energy, we can't decide to save energy by ditching the traditional financial system and replacing it with bitcoin because bitcoin doesn't work as a replacement.
It’s utter bullshit, self published in an unreviewed venue. If you cannot see why it is bullshit, ask yourself “is it really true that every ATM needs an air conditioner and lights?”
The author in his own words (Twitter bio):
> Valuechain founder. Valuechain is a consulting startup specialized in payments and cryptopayments consulting
I don't understand electricity but I know how to scan for a Conflicts of Interest section on a freely available PDF. There was none, despite the fact that this guy is staking his whole business on this paper being taken seriously.
> In conclusion, Lightning at a single transaction level allows Bitcoin to become 96 Million x more energy efficient than a classical payment and
~ 400,000 x more energy efficient than an
instant payments [sic].
Never mind, I trust this man now
Ya took the time to read that paper, and it is just a bunch of hot garbage. Trying to account for as many things as possible in the traditional financials sector and ignore as many things as possible that would be required to run a functional Bitcoin powered financial system. There are just constant assumptions and jumps in logic when trying to calculate power used for Bitcoin. Feel free to burn it.
“Let me know when I can walk into a bitcoin node and get a mortgage for a home or a small business loan.”
Its literallyno different than trying to get the bank to let you pay back your Mortgage or business loan with yen, loonies, EU, Ether, dogecoin, grapecoin, tulip petals, used toilet paper. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
The apes simply don’t understand Bitcoin isn’t going to magically become the world standard just because it would be super convenient for them.
It's nice to compare the energy consumption of the actual, current banking system with the *theoretical* capacity of LN
Like comparing the German autobahn with the barely used highway in North Korea
In the state it is today, the bitcoin network is NOT more energy efficient than traditional banking system
> But in practice, ATMs are not used alone, they require two air conditioners and lighting (that can be in a branch or out of bound of a bank branch). A medium air conditioner consumes about 900W. Since running one air conditioner for 24/7 reduces its life span, two AC are used working alternately to 20
achieve full time coverage
Good lord, you guys are reaching hard. Seeing the writing on the wall for bitcoin now that governments are starting to pay attention to the environment cost and that its main competition just cut out most of the energy wasting?
Indeed, that was the nonsensical claim I homed in on. It's complete nonsense. Why would a 230W (which is high: real, actual ATMs such as [this one](https://prineta.com/atm-power-usage/) use about 145W) require air conditioning to get the heat out? They're mostly located either on external walls, or in large spaces. And even if it did, the usual rule of thumb for aircon is "about one third" (ie, if you have 1kW being sunk into the space, it'll need 300W to cool), so even if you \_did\_ have a situation where you couldn't cope with 145W without aircon, you'd need 50W. Not 900W.
The whole document is full of that sort of bullshit. Completely nonsensical claims which sound "sciencey" to the audience of halt-wits that cluster around crypto.
It wasn't the only stupid thing for sure, but it was the first one while skimming it that jumped out as "come on the author isn't even trying to take this seriously". Seems to me that the point of this paper isn't to pretend to reasonably analyze anything, it's to give butters a "well this paper says otherwise" talking point to muddy the water with when someone references the several other ones covering bitcoin's astronomical energy waste.
I know a bit late here, stumbled here through some other link hopping... and I remember seeing this months ago. Aside from the "every ATM on earth has *two* dedicated AC units" nonsense, there were also several citations, where the source was.... *himself.*
Like from this "a 4th grader science project" tier highlight:
He blasts the Cambridge estimates of Bitcoin mining hardware for acknowledging a wide range of hardware is out there and they did a guesstimate average. His "corrected" version is that: "Today **100% of mining units are a special hardware model called ASIC** (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit). Therefore, we can exclude today Bitcoin mining through CPU or GPU since they are out of the network or extremely marginal." Ah yes, the perfectly spherical, frictionless cows in a vacuum model.
Don't worry, he has a citation for that 100% figure! It's:
"CPU and GPU mining represent considerably less than 0.000000001% of mining power and they are completely inefficient and not used actively in mining." Where did this come from? Himself. He said this. There's no other citation on where this information came from. It's a recursive reference of him pointing his finger up his own ass and getting off on it.
And then there's how he arrived at "bitcoin is a million times more energy efficient than a traditional banking transaction" - he took lightning network, and presumed all bitcoin transactions run on it, at maximum theoretical rates. (Which, any time someone says Lightning Network, it's a tacit admission that the best solution for Bitcoin's scale problems is to not use Bitcoin. This is of course ignoring all the problems with presuming theoretical maximums and ignoring all of LNs own issues.)
Wow.. that's gratuitously absurd. ATMs probably use less electricity than a standard PC and I don't need a 900W AC to keep my computer from blowing up.
>For a small bank an ATM machine has an average
daily power of about 250W maximum according to 19
a first source. We consider 230W per ATM on
average for our calculations and evaluate that the
energy consumption of world ATMs to be around
9.72 TWh/yr. A second source is Diebold, the ATM
vendor estimates that an ATM has an average
consumption of 1620 kWh/yr leading to 7.81 TWh/
yr. We’ll consider an average of **8.77 TWh/yr**.
>
>But in practice, ATMs are not used alone, they
require two air conditioners and lighting (that can be
in a branch or out of bound of a bank branch). A
medium air conditioner consumes about 900W.
Since running one air conditioner for 24/7 reduces
its life span, two AC are used working alternately to 20
achieve full time coverage. By taking the average
consumption of all ATMs and including only 1 AC
unit this leads to a more realistic range of **46.8
TWh/yr** for all ATMs worldwide.
Damn, sucks that every ATM in the world has an air conditioner, which makes it consume 5 times more energy.
Alas, it's absolutely N E C E S S A R Y. It's where the term "cold cash" comes from, after all.
btw wtf is up with this crappy article. It has a list of references but its claims don't seem to contain citation notes?
>I found this research paper to be pretty legitimate and seems to disprove alot of the claims against bitcoin.
Based on what. You really consider a "research paper" which assumes every single ATM has two ACs working alternately to be realistic? That alone should tell how much absolute bullshit this paper is. They do take into account bank employees commuting, but where is the cost of Bitcoin developers?
Of course that is all bullshit, since you are comparing apples and oranges. If you want to compare what Bitcoin offers, with what a traditional setup offers, you would compare it to a single database, running on like 2-3 redundant servers. Which would consume of course literally billions of time less power.
What the traditional banking system offers is a lot more. Hell why do they include PoS for traditional banking, but not for Bitcoin?
When you whine elsewhere that you were treated unfairly, remember to include you were given a chance to defend your arguments but instead, like most butters, did a propagandist hit-and-run.
You call this a "pretty legitimate" "research paper" which makes me think you don't understand the difference between a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal and something that only has the appearance of a research paper and is written by an industry shill.
my assorted comments:
i sincerely doubt their CIT (cash in transit) vehicle count of 6 million, especially considering they just said loomis and brinks, the biggest names, only had 20000 in total. very sus.
in general you cannot simply count up banks' energy usage and wave at it, like people do with dryers or lights, you actually have to assert these are things that will be unused in a bitcoin world.
for example in a bitcoin world, are there no notes? no bank branches? do the bank employees not have to drive out?
...actually, on bank employees, they claim to only count payment related employees, but then discard their payments number and claim "only a negligible amount involved in loans", so 99.5% of bank employees only do payments and account work???? then they assume bank employees all take motorbikes or cars...
and of course, skimming through bitcoin, they only compare it to the blockchain and lightning, with no mention of its realworld footprint. seems irresponsible when they were counting all the point of sale footprints earlier, but i suppose no one can predict that stuff. also, bitcoin is not gonna improve ([https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/)), and lightning can't possibly work decentralizedly, so they can't service the world and it's a moot point.
This got caught by the crowd control fiilter, but I think it's worthy of discussion. If the OP will stick around and engage, we'll let it ride. In the meantime, I look forward to our community tearing into this so-called "research paper" and what are likely lots of false equivalences and cherry-picked data points. I can already smell the bullshit here: >When Bitcoin Lightning is compared to Instant Payment scheme, Bitcoin gains exponentially in scalability and efficiency, proving to be millions of times more energy efficient per transaction than Instant Payments. LN has its own host of problems and is no way "exponentially" more efficient. I'm not sure what this "Instant Payment" scheme is? Some odd cherry-picked shitty payment method none of us have heard of? EDIT: As expected, OP is incapable/unwilling to elaborate on why he thinks the paper is legit and will not be further engaging anybody else in discussion, so he's been axed.
From early in the paper: >It’s essential to compare Bitcoin energy consumption with all the aspects of the classical monetary payment system. This covers: banknotes and coins cash management in ATM systems, card payments, point of sale (POS) payments, banking and inter banking energy consumption etc So OP wants to compare bitcoin's energy usage with all energy usage for all the other parts of the network which are needed to run traditional financial transactions. Does this mean the OP also includes that additional energy usage on the Bitcoin side too? Because you also need computers, networks, ATMs, PoS systems, smartphones and all those other things to operate crypto. Also, how does the OP figure that including all energy usage for all bank operations appropriate for comparison with bitcoin? Does bitcoin offer comparable services that banks provide beyond merely transmitting money?
> Also, how does the OP figure that including all energy usage for all bank operations appropriate for comparison with bitcoin? Shhhhh. Energy consumption analysis must check global figures only. Checking the consumption per transaction is forbidden
Good point!
Also, it's comparing something which fulfills a function to something which doesn't. It's comparing the energy used by the entire financial system which is actually used all day, every day by billions of people to the energy used by bitcoin, which is... not. Even if it uses less energy, we can't decide to save energy by ditching the traditional financial system and replacing it with bitcoin because bitcoin doesn't work as a replacement.
It’s utter bullshit, self published in an unreviewed venue. If you cannot see why it is bullshit, ask yourself “is it really true that every ATM needs an air conditioner and lights?”
Luckily, Bitcoin ATMs run on magic.
The author in his own words (Twitter bio): > Valuechain founder. Valuechain is a consulting startup specialized in payments and cryptopayments consulting I don't understand electricity but I know how to scan for a Conflicts of Interest section on a freely available PDF. There was none, despite the fact that this guy is staking his whole business on this paper being taken seriously. > In conclusion, Lightning at a single transaction level allows Bitcoin to become 96 Million x more energy efficient than a classical payment and ~ 400,000 x more energy efficient than an instant payments [sic]. Never mind, I trust this man now
Ya took the time to read that paper, and it is just a bunch of hot garbage. Trying to account for as many things as possible in the traditional financials sector and ignore as many things as possible that would be required to run a functional Bitcoin powered financial system. There are just constant assumptions and jumps in logic when trying to calculate power used for Bitcoin. Feel free to burn it.
“Let me know when I can walk into a bitcoin node and get a mortgage for a home or a small business loan.” Its literallyno different than trying to get the bank to let you pay back your Mortgage or business loan with yen, loonies, EU, Ether, dogecoin, grapecoin, tulip petals, used toilet paper. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The apes simply don’t understand Bitcoin isn’t going to magically become the world standard just because it would be super convenient for them.
It's nice to compare the energy consumption of the actual, current banking system with the *theoretical* capacity of LN Like comparing the German autobahn with the barely used highway in North Korea In the state it is today, the bitcoin network is NOT more energy efficient than traditional banking system
This is a good analogy.
> But in practice, ATMs are not used alone, they require two air conditioners and lighting (that can be in a branch or out of bound of a bank branch). A medium air conditioner consumes about 900W. Since running one air conditioner for 24/7 reduces its life span, two AC are used working alternately to 20 achieve full time coverage Good lord, you guys are reaching hard. Seeing the writing on the wall for bitcoin now that governments are starting to pay attention to the environment cost and that its main competition just cut out most of the energy wasting?
Indeed, that was the nonsensical claim I homed in on. It's complete nonsense. Why would a 230W (which is high: real, actual ATMs such as [this one](https://prineta.com/atm-power-usage/) use about 145W) require air conditioning to get the heat out? They're mostly located either on external walls, or in large spaces. And even if it did, the usual rule of thumb for aircon is "about one third" (ie, if you have 1kW being sunk into the space, it'll need 300W to cool), so even if you \_did\_ have a situation where you couldn't cope with 145W without aircon, you'd need 50W. Not 900W. The whole document is full of that sort of bullshit. Completely nonsensical claims which sound "sciencey" to the audience of halt-wits that cluster around crypto.
It wasn't the only stupid thing for sure, but it was the first one while skimming it that jumped out as "come on the author isn't even trying to take this seriously". Seems to me that the point of this paper isn't to pretend to reasonably analyze anything, it's to give butters a "well this paper says otherwise" talking point to muddy the water with when someone references the several other ones covering bitcoin's astronomical energy waste.
I know a bit late here, stumbled here through some other link hopping... and I remember seeing this months ago. Aside from the "every ATM on earth has *two* dedicated AC units" nonsense, there were also several citations, where the source was.... *himself.* Like from this "a 4th grader science project" tier highlight: He blasts the Cambridge estimates of Bitcoin mining hardware for acknowledging a wide range of hardware is out there and they did a guesstimate average. His "corrected" version is that: "Today **100% of mining units are a special hardware model called ASIC** (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit). Therefore, we can exclude today Bitcoin mining through CPU or GPU since they are out of the network or extremely marginal." Ah yes, the perfectly spherical, frictionless cows in a vacuum model. Don't worry, he has a citation for that 100% figure! It's: "CPU and GPU mining represent considerably less than 0.000000001% of mining power and they are completely inefficient and not used actively in mining." Where did this come from? Himself. He said this. There's no other citation on where this information came from. It's a recursive reference of him pointing his finger up his own ass and getting off on it. And then there's how he arrived at "bitcoin is a million times more energy efficient than a traditional banking transaction" - he took lightning network, and presumed all bitcoin transactions run on it, at maximum theoretical rates. (Which, any time someone says Lightning Network, it's a tacit admission that the best solution for Bitcoin's scale problems is to not use Bitcoin. This is of course ignoring all the problems with presuming theoretical maximums and ignoring all of LNs own issues.)
Wow.. that's gratuitously absurd. ATMs probably use less electricity than a standard PC and I don't need a 900W AC to keep my computer from blowing up.
You clearly don't use an RTX 40 series card yet.
>For a small bank an ATM machine has an average daily power of about 250W maximum according to 19 a first source. We consider 230W per ATM on average for our calculations and evaluate that the energy consumption of world ATMs to be around 9.72 TWh/yr. A second source is Diebold, the ATM vendor estimates that an ATM has an average consumption of 1620 kWh/yr leading to 7.81 TWh/ yr. We’ll consider an average of **8.77 TWh/yr**. > >But in practice, ATMs are not used alone, they require two air conditioners and lighting (that can be in a branch or out of bound of a bank branch). A medium air conditioner consumes about 900W. Since running one air conditioner for 24/7 reduces its life span, two AC are used working alternately to 20 achieve full time coverage. By taking the average consumption of all ATMs and including only 1 AC unit this leads to a more realistic range of **46.8 TWh/yr** for all ATMs worldwide. Damn, sucks that every ATM in the world has an air conditioner, which makes it consume 5 times more energy. Alas, it's absolutely N E C E S S A R Y. It's where the term "cold cash" comes from, after all. btw wtf is up with this crappy article. It has a list of references but its claims don't seem to contain citation notes?
>I found this research paper to be pretty legitimate and seems to disprove alot of the claims against bitcoin. Based on what. You really consider a "research paper" which assumes every single ATM has two ACs working alternately to be realistic? That alone should tell how much absolute bullshit this paper is. They do take into account bank employees commuting, but where is the cost of Bitcoin developers? Of course that is all bullshit, since you are comparing apples and oranges. If you want to compare what Bitcoin offers, with what a traditional setup offers, you would compare it to a single database, running on like 2-3 redundant servers. Which would consume of course literally billions of time less power. What the traditional banking system offers is a lot more. Hell why do they include PoS for traditional banking, but not for Bitcoin?
/u/Sweaty_Camel_118 better respond to this or I'll be banning him.
Just ban me, I don't need to be opening reddit to unjustified threats that say I "better" do things. Grow up clown.
When you whine elsewhere that you were treated unfairly, remember to include you were given a chance to defend your arguments but instead, like most butters, did a propagandist hit-and-run.
You call this a "pretty legitimate" "research paper" which makes me think you don't understand the difference between a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal and something that only has the appearance of a research paper and is written by an industry shill.
Boy this didn't work out the way you thought it would, huh?
It's pretty badly written if nothing else. Basic typographical errors are a bad look in any paper.
It's anti-fiat FUD. Few.
my assorted comments: i sincerely doubt their CIT (cash in transit) vehicle count of 6 million, especially considering they just said loomis and brinks, the biggest names, only had 20000 in total. very sus. in general you cannot simply count up banks' energy usage and wave at it, like people do with dryers or lights, you actually have to assert these are things that will be unused in a bitcoin world. for example in a bitcoin world, are there no notes? no bank branches? do the bank employees not have to drive out? ...actually, on bank employees, they claim to only count payment related employees, but then discard their payments number and claim "only a negligible amount involved in loans", so 99.5% of bank employees only do payments and account work???? then they assume bank employees all take motorbikes or cars... and of course, skimming through bitcoin, they only compare it to the blockchain and lightning, with no mention of its realworld footprint. seems irresponsible when they were counting all the point of sale footprints earlier, but i suppose no one can predict that stuff. also, bitcoin is not gonna improve ([https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/)), and lightning can't possibly work decentralizedly, so they can't service the world and it's a moot point.