While I was scrolling through Leo Finance posts, I came across @therealwolf asking for the power consumption of running various Hive nodes. This is because of the Elon Musk Tweet stating that they are no longer accepting Bitcoin (killed in less than a month) due to concerns about the power consumption mining uses.
It is an interesting topic in regards to energy usage, but I also think it is largely irrelevant considering how much potential vlue Bitcoin is adding to the world over time as it builds a new economy and, that estimates are that over 70% of the energy used to mine comes from renewable resources. I wonder if Tesla cars can say the same? Not only this, it is able to utilize energy on location, meaning that it doesn't have to transport the energy very far, making it more efficient and allowing it to capture energy in places that there isn't the need for the energy. Even in "dirty old China" that mines 60% of all Bitcoin, most of the energy comes from hydro when the waters are flowing and only turns to coal for the winter months.
But, what about Hive?
Firstly, I have no idea and I am not overly great with these kinds of numbers, but @arcange was able to add a graph to the post that covers the energy usage of running three nodes, which are on a hosted server.
Here is the consumption of server hosting:
1 Hive top20 witness backup node
1 Hive-Engine witness node
1 Hive testnet node
Server has Dual Intel Xeon X5650 2.666Ghz CPU and is not a recent energy-optimized model.
Yep, that means nothing to me either, so I asked for a bit of clarification. I am really bad at numbers - until I can visualize them in context of something I can understand. 100 watts rings some bells, even though everything has now gone LED and filament lights are no longer commonly available in Finland at least.
Does this mean it is about the same as leaving a 100W light bulb on?
No, it means it's 20% less than a 100W light bulb! _@arcange
Looking good Hive, Looking good.
If energy consumption is your concern, dPOS should help. Elon, how about shilling HIVE and taking it as payment at Tesla?
I am still unsure why "taking payment in" a particular crypto currency is an issue at all, considering it should be very possible to take payment in any token now in a number of ways. For example, Wirex can be used anywhere that takes credit cards or even proximity pay, as it is partnered with Mastercard and will even do an automatic selection of which of the several tokens that can charge it offers the best deal in the moment. That means, the retailer doesn't need to take crypto, to take crypto.
Crypto is borderless -
It dinnae care
Said in the voice of @meesterboom
I think this is going to be the future though, as there are going to be many crypto projects that offer value for participants doing all kinds of things all over the world, and they are going to be able to use that value, no matter where they want to spend it. I see this as one of the usecases of the Liquidity Pools, where a pool offers a service that swaps the tokens on the fly into local currencies, essentially cutting Mastercard and Visa out of the loop, with the fees going to distributed providers. Eventually, the retailers will want the crypto direct instead of local currency too, potentially setting up their own distributed pools, keeping more value locked into crypto with less to support the current economy.
I don't think this is what the governments and banks envisaged in their push for a cashless society.
But, while people focus on the irrelevancies of energy consumption in Bitcoin mining, the industry will keep innovating in a thousand directions simultaneously to bring more advanced and convenient solutions to many of the problems facing our economic world. Tokenization is going to fundamentally shift the way we organize ourselves, create value and invest our activities in the future to the point that what many have accepted as the "way it has to be" is seen as so archaic, it will look brutal, violent and pathetic that it was accepted as so long.
You can leave the light on.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]