If you do 12 Bitcoin transactions per year, you use a higher amount of energy than we use for a complete family (including: heating, warm water, electricity, car charging) in the same year. We do all via electricity.
@masek Dammit, this is crazy. At first look I thought this must be grossly exaggerated, but I checked numbers at statista.com: 140 TWh per year for bitcoin, and 250,000 transactions per day, averages out to 1500 kWh per transaction. This is total insanity. I had no idea it was this badly out of control.
@gavinisdie
"Proof of Work" is one part of Bitcoin. Because nobody trusts noone, you need something that nobody can easily fake. That's computing power. So you create a benign challenge that is very hard to solve and if you solve it, you get a reward.
The challenge is intentionally so hard that all computers create roughly one block every 10 minutes. If more computers are added, the problem just gets (artificially!) harder. @masek@tkinias
@gavinisdie the challenge I'm talking about is basically "try to find a number that turns this other number into a specific format".
Computers try millions of hashes per second to find this special number by brute force. That number is not special though. We just say "these are the rules that must be met" - we could also instead do different rules and most of that energycost would just vanish.
I can't overstate how arbitrary and insane this is.