When I Fell Down the Crypto Rabbit Hole

As I've said many times before, my responses to bounties on Cent are basically ready-made blog posts. My response today to a bounty asking how fellow Centians first fell down the proverbial crypto rabbit hole is just another example. I hope you enjoy.

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It seems that most people differentiate between when they first heard of crypto versus when they actually fell down the so-called crypto rabbit hole – well, I’m no different.

I first heard of BTC sometime back in 2014. At the time a small group of work buddies and I would gather every morning at a café in downtown Gangnam to shoot the shit. One buddy had already bought some BTC (I think because of an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience that Andreas had appeared on) and he managed to get a few others to speculate, but not me. Passive wealth acquisition didn’t much interest me then, and still doesn’t tbh.

By the middle of 2015, most of the original morning coffee group had moved on to the next phases of their lives and careers, but one buddy who invested in BTC at the behest of our mutual friend in 2014 remained. In lieu of morning coffee, we began taking afternoon strolls where we would talk about this or that. I remember one walk on a brisk autumn afternoon in mid-October in particular – that’s when my friend asked me if I’d heard of Ethereum. I hadn’t. And then he mentioned smart contracts.

That started everything. I spent the rest of that afternoon pulling up what articles I could find on Ethereum and smart contracts (smart contracts!!). But before hopping on the company shuttle and heading home for the day, I made the discovery that ultimately ended up pushing me head first down that damned crypto rabbit hole. There was a very striking name that was mentioned across a few separate articles that had caught my eye: that name was Vinay Gupta.

A quick google search of Vinay resulted in a link to an episode he’d done on The Future Thinkers Podcast. I must have listened to that episode at least 6 times before somehow falling asleep. Tbh, I’m not sure I every really woke up. I hope I never do ;)

Multiple Perspectives on Bitcoin's PoW Energy Consumption

It seems like more than a few (needlessly long) articles are popping up re-hashing the energy consumption issue related to Bitcoin's Proof of Work consensus algorithm. 

A simpler way to see the issue is through bullet points of both the optimistic side as well as pessimistic side.

A few months ago the Token Economy email newsletter did just this and provided this awesome list of pessimistic/optimistic takes on Bitcoin's energy use. I'll share then with you here:

Pessimistic view:

- Bitcoin uses as much energy as 520,000 Canadians every day

- Bitcoin uses as much energy as the Democratic Republic of Congo

- Bitcoin uses more energy than 116 countries each

Optimistic view:

- The energy that Bitcoin consumes in a year would only last the U.S. for 19 hours.

- Bitcoin uses only 20% of the energy from a single coal power plant in Taiwan

- The Three Gorges Damn in China produces three times as much electricity as Bitcoin consumes

- The U.S. produces more electricity from a single Geothermal plant than Bitcoin requires

- 17 NSA Data centers together consume more electricity than Bitcoin

- Google used about double as much electricity in 2015 than Bitcoin does today

- Bitcoin miners will consume an estimated 8.27 terawatt-hours per year, but that's less than the estimated 11 terawatt-hours per year to produce the global cash and coin supply, while gold mining burns the equivalent of 132 terawatt-hours - and that doesn’t include armored trucks, bank vaults, security systems and such.