250 PH/s, 1 W/GH/s, 0.1 $/kWh and you get 219 million dollars per year to run the Bitcoin network. At 75.000 transactions per day this yields 8 dollars per transaction. And these are real costs somebody has to pay for. Maybe most of that is currently covered by the influx of new money but this is not going to last forever. And once the block reward is gone this has to be covered by the fees. Neither lowering the hash rate nor reducing the the mining costs is an option because it undermines the security of the system. The only option is to process more transactions per block and this is not without problems on its own.
So your position is that no one is ever going to figure out how to make cryptocurrencies sustainable? Bitshares is already doing it today, and any strategy that proves itself can easily be added to Bitcoin. It's a bad bet, but good luck with that.
Does it matter? My point was that Bitcoin transactions are not cheap, that only looking at the transaction fee is misleading. The electricity costs per transaction are currently 200 times larger than the transaction fees, not accounting for hardware costs or any profit for miners. So the whole thing has to change a lot if you want a sustainable system with transaction costs close to transaction fees.
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Bitcoin speculators. The folks who hook up their bank accounts to the Bitcoin network don't hold bitcoins or pay the block rewards.
250 PH/s, 1 W/GH/s, 0.1 $/kWh and you get 219 million dollars per year to run the Bitcoin network. At 75.000 transactions per day this yields 8 dollars per transaction. And these are real costs somebody has to pay for. Maybe most of that is currently covered by the influx of new money but this is not going to last forever. And once the block reward is gone this has to be covered by the fees. Neither lowering the hash rate nor reducing the the mining costs is an option because it undermines the security of the system. The only option is to process more transactions per block and this is not without problems on its own.
So your position is that no one is ever going to figure out how to make cryptocurrencies sustainable? Bitshares is already doing it today, and any strategy that proves itself can easily be added to Bitcoin. It's a bad bet, but good luck with that.
Of course you have also done the calculation for the current system right?
Hundreds of thousands of people involved in making the current system work. Legislation and so on.
Does it matter? My point was that Bitcoin transactions are not cheap, that only looking at the transaction fee is misleading. The electricity costs per transaction are currently 200 times larger than the transaction fees, not accounting for hardware costs or any profit for miners. So the whole thing has to change a lot if you want a sustainable system with transaction costs close to transaction fees.
Yes it matters as thats also part of the cost.