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«I haven't computed it, but you need to take into account the energy it takes to mine a block»

No, because the energy consumption is the same regardless if a block contains zero or a thousand transactions. Therefore it is misleading to attribute mining energy as the "cost" of transactions. And Bitcoin doesn't operate at max capacity: its lightning network is very under-used at the moment.

As to the transaction fee, it is relevant: even though it was already "paid for", it is being redistributed to miners again, therefore drives energy consumption further up than if it was not being redistributed.



Also worth considering: Proof of Transfer consensus mechanisms like Stacks allow entire networks to run in paralleled with Bitcoin by piggybacking on Bitcoin's consensus mechanism. That's a whole big pile of transactions happening that go entirely unaccounted for by folks who just count the number of transactions in a block.


Looking at the Stacks block explorer, there’s very little activity on it.




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