The entire world generates about 25,000 TWh of electricity every year.
Finland consumes about 87 TWh of electricity every year.
An entire Finland of electricity use thinly distributed over the entire planet disappearing is a negligible rounding error on the grand scheme of things. It's about a ~0.3% change.
News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are meaningless out of context. Zooming out, you realize that while Finland is big from an individual human scale, it barely exists in the wider cacophony of human civilization.
And that's just looking at electricity, which is a percentage total human energy use. Much more energy use comes from transportation, industry, and heating, which is much more carbon intensive than electricity generation, since much of our electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, and increasingly solar and wind.
The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist.
If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China.
Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagine.
> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China.
I can't speak for all PoW cryptocurrencies, but this is a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Energy usage does not scale with the number of users. The transactions per second is largely fixed due to the block size limit. If your grandma is using Bitcoin, she will probably be transacting on a second layer, e.g. Lightning or Coinbase.
No, but you don't have to. The point of blockchains is to allow people to opt out when they want to. If you don't want to or need to, you have that option.
It's actually a worse situation that bitcoin synergy usage scales with its price.
So same number of people could be using bitcoin but if the price jumps up by 10X, then over a period a few months it's energy usage would also go up by 10X.
This is exactly what you’d expect to see with market manipulation. It’s the pump before the dump. Or less cynically, it’s just herd mentality seen through data.
Using the words "centralized" or "decentralized" when describing crypto (and probably many other tech things) is perhaps frequently the worst oversimplifications one can engage in.
I think what you want to discuss when using these words is the extent to which it is either likely or possible that a small number of players can unduly influence a thing, but there are frequently MANY MORE FACTORS at work here than "that number." You have to look at how the thing is set up, what governance looks like, what technical limitations there are, and -- perhaps most importantly -- what incentives are there in place for the players to do so.
A lot of the "centralization" fears are bad because they're the sort of thing, that -- if executed -- would destroy the value of the thing to the centralizers themselves, and thus they would literally never do it.
None of it is truly decentralized. Most Bitcoin mining comes from three corporations. You could replicate the whole network by setting up a cross-cloud system that's balanced between AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Wealth always concentrates to few entities in all forms of free market capitalism.
You cannot have decentralized money without distributed wealth that is not concentrated . This usually means a successful form of socialism ( none have proven successful, or looks likely to do so today)
This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few .
> This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few .
Miners nor stakers can decide how the system works, Ethereum does not have on-chain governance. 51% of miners/stakers can't just post invalid blocks crediting them with free money nor can they force anyone else's wallet to do anything that wasn't signed by the private key. The worst you can really do is refuse to include transactions in your blocks for as long as you are controlling the network, all it takes is one honest actor to include your transaction and it will finalize.
Couple of hundred years?[2] Many models look sustainable[1] in the short term - few decades is short for any economic model to show its weaknesses. The soviet model did survive for 5-6 decades years quite well after all.
[1] Sustainable does not mean good or that I (or any else) condone it, just that it can work and survive .
[2] That is the number to make it comparable to modern American Econo-political system that has survived largely intact in pretty much same form from the early years of the revolution. Historically feudal monarchies or other systems like the Tokugawa Shogunate had survived much longer for variety of reasons however that are difficult to compare in the modern techno Geo-political era .
They're brown and 'marginalized' and occupy a small slice of Mexico. You and I may know about them because we probably monitor anarchist/leftist circles. I'm quite anti-socialist myself but I readily admit the Zapitistas have proven 'successful' about as well as they could hope for their situation. But few outside of a few circles wants to acknowledge it as it goes against the conventional thought that democratic or pseudodemocratic society can be trumped by a bunch of fucking 'backwater' community-focused brown people with guns and their own prerogative, who don't fit the mold of the typical example that when society 'breaks down' it must be taken over by savage worlords or drug barons.
You can guarantee if there were a story of a bunch of American rednecks even trying to pull off anything similar it'd be downvoted to hell here and nearly universally hated by American society. Soccer moms everywhere would clap to their execution by the National Guard. Some ATF-esque character would stand over the rubble for photographs like they did over the char of the dead kids at Waco and the public would eat it up.
Admitting the Zapatistas are a 'success' challenges a lot of people's philosophies and assumptions. Hell it even admits some of my own were wrong. This can be difficult to reconcile. It's not surprising that answers to your question are not exactly forthcoming.
But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? It may be obscure, but its success does disprove a very non-obscure claim.
(Side note: my definition of "success" for socialism is fairly modest: to be sustainable long term economically, and to preserve personal freedoms at least to the same degree that modern capitalist liberal democracies have. That's the only way I see it as a meaningful alternative to the status quo.)
There's also Rojava to consider, and it's perhaps somewhat more widely known because it was covered somewhat during the Western press' fascination with ISIS and war with them. These guys are perhaps more interesting than the Zapatistas long term because they're doing it in a somewhat more urbanized & industrialized area with 10x population, and they are explicitly designing a governance framework with intent to scale to nation-state size and beyond. But, well, it hasn't even been 10 years yet, so I don't think it counts as solid evidence of anything just yet.
They talk a big talk about socialism but honestly I wasn't seeing it in the cities like Qamishlo. Full of capitalist street vendors and the like, and poverty on the outskirts. Honestly they seemed pretty vanilla capitalist outside the 'mustache-jesus' (Apo) talk you see in YPG, etc. I do recall free bread/naan line on the street.
In the firmly 'Rojava' 'owned' cities like Deyrik the general structure of the people and markets reminded me quite a bit of Barzani controlled KRG. Of course, I spent most my time with the militia and not civil life, so I'm sure there's lots I missed. I think many of the 'true believers' in the old Kurdish socialist causes probably migrated more to the Iraqi Mountains, sadly those people are getting pounded on by the Turks.
From their agitprop, my impression was that by socialism they mostly mean minimizing economic exploitation, so e.g. street vendors, craftsmen etc who aren't wage workers aren't really incompatible with that approach. I'd be more curious to see the statistics on larger businesses - how many have a hired labor force, and how many are co-ops.
Also, the most recent iteration of the social contract that I have - one from 2016 - has these bits in it:
"There shall be a right to invest in private projects which, while taking account of environmental balance, provide the services necessary for economic development, respond to the needs of society and help to stimulate economic activity in the community.
The right to private property shall be safeguarded in such a way as not to conflict with the public interest, and it shall be regulated by law."
Now this is all rather vague, but it doesn't read like a hardline stance against any hint of capitalism. And given the bottom-up political system, so long as democratic institutions work as declared, it seems that individual municipalities should be able dial the balance as they see fit. From what I heard, while PYD enjoys broad popular support, that doesn't necessarily translate to specific policies they advocate for. So perhaps it's basically as socialist as people actually want it to be at the moment?
Which would make it even more important. While the economics of it is interesting by itself, I think the key part of the experiment is decentralized council democracy. That should be enough to give people actual voice on matters that concern them, as opposed to the sham that representative republics inevitably end up at scale. Once communities actually have control over their commons, they can figure out the economics according to their needs and preferences.
But, again, this is assuming that their governance model is as advertised and can persist in the long term. What was your impression on the ground?
Sorry for the abbreviated response I'm going to give here.
I didn't spend a lot of time in civil life. I saw no large businesses. I saw these in KRG Iraq (even big dealerships, like for farm equipment) but not in Rojava. Basically all the businesses I noticed in urban areas were what I describe as roughly family-unit sized operations run in your typical middle eastern stall. Perhaps a hardware store or something was a bit larger. The biggest 'business' I saw was vehicle repair shop with 4 or 5 stations and that was run by YPG. In civil city such a repair shop would basically be a single booth with the storage-shed style big room and they probably worked on the car while it was outside. I never saw something large-businesses esque like the kind of supermarkets you may see deep in latin America. I also did not notice much presence of 'government operated' retail business and if that was happening for anything other than bread, it was invisible to me (PYD/YPG does run some co-ops, like agriculture and textiles related stuff).
I have no idea how the farms were run. It's possible these were run by the state. The farmers are very dedicated, they gave no fuck and just kept going while active shelling/fighting was happening proximally. It is possible as I mentioned above to get bread for free in the cities. You just walk up and ask for it (of course, you could ask practically anyone for food anywhere, they would probably give you some). No money was seen changing hands, but that is at specific stalls. I do think whatever their food distribution system is, it seemed to be working better than in ISIL controlled territory -- when we took over one village people were begging in a desperate way and fighting over the little food our people were able to give. I never saw such desperation in Rojava proper (lots of beggars in Rojava, but for money not food).
Overall I did not find many devout followers of some particular brand of political writings, although I'm sure some politicians are, but I'm not much a politician myself :) A few 'Westerners' joined the Kurds with extreme political views, but anecdotally I found those people were not very well liked. I have my doubts whether the average people even give a fuck about whatever the PYD or people in charge think. The Kurds have a long history and most of that doesn't include Apo's (Ocalan's) brand of socialism, although they would surely view him highly charitably. There may be significantly different opinions in (the tip of) Northern Iraq where the hardcore socialist elements hold more sway. Then again, given the temperament of the Kurdish people I think it would be hard to impose any sort of anything on them.
I would wager as long as you don't perform some egregious crime you could get away with a lot in Rojava without the government imposing their will on you. I visited a prison and some petty criminals escaped as I was there, the reaction of the guards was just kind of 'meh' as they got away. I do not think the government has the strength to fight their existential threats while simultaneously enforcing any strong form of socialism on the populace, although doing so on a large business would be easy enough as they'd be a big centralized target.
The main attractions I would describe to Rojava are pretty extreme freedom (minimal government, you can have guns, you seem to be able to run a business pretty openly without much fanfare, by middle east standards extremely liberal view on religion, booze is sold openly, people are open and friendly and helpful, personal rights like privacy and ownership appear to be well respected, etc). If I were looking for a socialist utopia, or anything near approximating it, I would not go there.
If I could describe Kurds, I'd call them Americans of the middle east. Instead of America's de facto religion of Christianity, their 'religion' is Apo (Ocalan, the socialist). But like America, the average person seems to be not much a practitioner and Apo is more of a symbol like the cross so many people hang as much for cultural reasons as anything else. Nevertheless their culture is incredibly hospitable, so perhaps their brand of socialism can better described as just being a good neighbor and not the government putting a foot up your ass to redistribute your wealth.
I can pretty confidently say that all of Visa+Mastercard is way more than a few thousand transactions per second, I'm familiar with several companies that push hundreds of transactions per second through Visa+Mastercard and there's no way they're a significant portion of their business.
Visa says they process "150 million transactions every day in 175 currencies" (see page 3 at https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...). That's ~1,800 per second. Mastercard is smaller, so this would be the upper limit for them. Both combined should still fit into "a few thousand transactions per second".
True. The latest financial report from Visa [1] says 164.7B transactions in 2021, or ~5,000 per second. This number is 3x larger! Mastercard is slightly smaller, but comparable at 140B [2].
Imagine we can achieve that throughput with a single server without breaking a sweat![1]. The number of economic transactions all humans engage everyday including cash is perhaps 100x of that: so just in order of 500,000 TPS or less that feels quite small to be honest.
[1] Yes these systems are complex and very distributed and have lot of checks and balances and the actual transactions apps and DBs are running on infra in hundreds or thousands of servers in DCs all around the world.
On the busiest day of the year at peak hour here in the Netherlands the debit card transactions (creditcards are uncommon) reach just over 700/s. [Search for 'pin transacties per seconde' for news items covering this]
Comparing visa and Mastercard transactions with Bitcoin is something that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Do people really think visa settles transactions between two different bank accounts? Those card transactions can take days to settle.
Slow settlement and reversible transactions are a boon for buyers (and for fraudsters abusing chargebacks to get free stuff). For sellers they're a bit of a nightmare since you never know when money you thought you had been payed in good faith might disappear from your accounts with little or no recourse.
Zkrollups on Ethereum can do a couple thousand tx/sec, without security compromises. The plan now is to use the base layer mainly to support rollups, and use data sharding on the base layer to multiply the capacity of rollups. That should get it to about 100,000 tx/sec. That will be a pretty big change, but not as big as what they just did, and they've already got the design mostly worked out.
I doubt that for credit cards. Carrefour or pick your favorite supermarket chain alone probably generate hundreds of transactions per second worldwide during peak periods, and there are tens of major supermarket chains you've never heard of. Add regular grocery stores, cinemas, etc, I'd be really interested in an order of magnitude, but at peak times it has to be in the tens of thousands if not low hundreds of thousands.
For crypto I was trying to be super generous, I know they're incredibly slow.
in PoW, energy consumption scales linearly with the block reward value which is denominated in bitcoin thus scales with value of btc. Reward for mining is [ ( your hashrate / network hashrate) * block reward ].
so it's not usage that scales energy consumption, it's value of btc. Arguably though the two are intrinsically related (this should be obvious - if bitcoin somehow becomes the defacto global currency, a shitload of investment will pour in and bring its value much much higher)
in truth it's a moot point. even with lightning protocol, bitcoin as a protocol couldn't handle that much capacity. If a few hundred million people just wanted to publish a single transaction (putting money in a wallet and thereafter doing everything on lightning protocol), it would take literally years to process that many transactions.
Edit: just to be explicit, the reason energy consumption scales with block reward value is because it becomes very profitable to buy more mining equipment and mine more if the reward say doubles. It’s not an instant effect of course because there’s capital acquisition and operational capacity involved
Misinformation, both from proponents and opponents is the name of the game in crypto.
It's incredibly difficult to find the truth from either side, especially if you're a lay person who doesn't have any grasp of how the technology works.
I can tell you as an opponent of cryptocurrencies.
Experiments on social systems, currencies and stores of value should start small and work their way up OVER DECADES to tens and hundreds of thousands of people.
Experimental stuff put into production, like Communism, can bring suffering for decades, if not centuries, to tens and hundreds of millions of people... billions, even.
So if the proponents want to revolutionize the system immediately for a 5% efficiency improvement, especially since many of them have so MUCH MONEY AND POWER to gain from this revolution, be very, very SKEPTICAL.
Frankly their odds to not be grifters or (smart) idiots are minuscule.
> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket
Beyond your misconception that work scales with users rather than value, it's also a misconception that bitcoin is competing with technologies like Visa and Paypal. It's not supposed to be an alternative payment system.
It's competing with gold and sovereign currencies.
> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China.
You don't understand how any of this works, do you?
> Good try, but trite criticism regarding crypto is required to include the words "Ponzi" and "tulips"
Thank you, I'm trying to come up with an "anti bullshit bingo" since the bullshit bingo from cryptocurrencies has already managed to raise tens of billions of dollars. Glad you like it.
> Quite an imagination! You're very far off, do you have any experience in this space?
I was trying to be generous since crypto supporters always like to point to the newest barely working bleeding edge centralized "layer" called lightning or thunderbolt or some other electricity derived thing, which is supposed to greatly accelerate the glacial rate of crypto transactions.
Again, can I use crypto of any kind to buy $2 peanuts at the supermarket in Bucharest and grandma $1 popcorn at the cinema in Djibouti, without turning Earth into Venus?
> Again, can I use crypto of any kind to buy $2 peanuts at the supermarket in Bucharest and grandma $1 popcorn at the cinema in Djibouti, without turning Earth into Venus?
Probably not, but you can neither use USD (or any sort of dollar) for that either. In Bucharest you'd use Romanian leu (RON) and in Djibouti you'd use Djiboutian franc (DJF).
It's all about finding people in the middle, to agree on what you both have. In this case, you wouldn't be able to buy anything in those locations.
Like my normal dollar based credit cards that allow foreign transactions and have no foreign transactions fees...thr processor converts thr currency to dollars for me and puts it on my statement.
0.3% is a rounding error if you look at the electricity generation of a region, but it's huge if you look at the impact it will have over many years. That's 0.3% less of the global energy supply that needs to be replaced with nuclear or renewables+storage. It's like getting ten free nuclear plants.
>News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are meaningless out of context.
With the media tactics out of the picture, you don't think this is a huge amount of electricity for crypto alone to have been using? Seriously? 0.3% of global electricity use is ABSOLUTELY HUGE.
> The entire world generates about 25,000 TWh of electricity every year.
I know this isn't you, many people use these units, but I cringe every time I see abuse of units like this. 1 TWh/year is 113MW, so you are saying 2.8TW global; Finland is 9.4GW.
Finland consumes about 87 TWh of electricity every year.
An entire Finland of electricity use thinly distributed over the entire planet disappearing is a negligible rounding error on the grand scheme of things. It's about a ~0.3% change.
News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are meaningless out of context. Zooming out, you realize that while Finland is big from an individual human scale, it barely exists in the wider cacophony of human civilization.
And that's just looking at electricity, which is a percentage total human energy use. Much more energy use comes from transportation, industry, and heating, which is much more carbon intensive than electricity generation, since much of our electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, and increasingly solar and wind.