LasseCash runs on a fifth of a household. Bitcoin runs on Sweden.
Years ago I wrote on the old LasseCash about page that we used the resources of a modern household while Bitcoin used a country. I believed it. I had read a calculation from the Steem days suggesting the whole chain could run on about twenty Raspberry Pis — because the top twenty producers are the chain — and I did the household arithmetic from there.
Now LasseCash has moved to MAGI, the contract is days from being frozen forever, and I thought I should find out whether the sentence I wrote years ago was true, or whether I had just been repeating something that felt good.
A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight. I did not grow up quoting Proverbs, but that one has stayed with me, because it is the whole of what we are building: a scale nobody can lean on. So I weighed my own claim first, including the parts that make us look worse.
Bitcoin is Sweden. That part was exactly right.
Cambridge puts Bitcoin at 138.2 TWh a year, with a theoretical range of 74 to 242.
Sweden, the entire country, uses about 140 TWh.
Within a couple of percent. I used to say Malaysia too — I should stop. Malaysia is now around 210 TWh, which is more than Bitcoin. Sweden is the honest comparison.
And before anyone reaches for the pitchfork: I am not calling for anything to be done about it. Bitcoin's energy use is voluntary. Miners buy electricity at a price, from sellers who agreed to sell it, to secure a ledger nobody is forced to use. That is a market, and a market does not need my permission.
Every time I hear a politician discover the climate cost of Bitcoin, I notice they never discover the climate cost of the banking system it competes with, or of the aircraft they arrive in. Energy moralism is almost always a pretext for control — a reason why someone else's voluntary exchange should require someone's approval. I am an anarcho-capitalist. I do not want Bitcoin banned. I want it outcompeted, by people who built something better, with their own money, on their own time.
Which is the only thing this post is actually about.
What LasseCash runs on
Three layers, and only two use real power.
Hive's consensus. Twenty-one witnesses produce every block. Each runs a block producer, usually a backup, publishes the price feed, often seed nodes. The hardware is not exotic — one witness has publicly documented running consensus on a Dell thin client with a Pentium Silver and 8 GB of RAM. Ten to fifteen watts.
MAGI's consensus. Seventeen witnesses — a number I did not take from a press release. I read it off the chain while writing this.
LasseCash. One contract. Its cost is the processor cycles to execute a call. There is no LasseCash server anywhere.
Counting generously — backups, seed nodes, and the big public API servers that make the chains usable:
| What the chains need to exist | ~3.7 kW |
| What makes them usable | ~4.2 kW |
| Both chains, everything on them | ~7.9 kW ≈ 69,000 kWh/year |
A Danish household without electric heating uses about 4,000 kWh a year. So all of Hive, all of MAGI, and every app, token and game on either, is roughly seventeen households.
My watt assumptions could be wrong by a factor of ten and it would still be between five and forty. I would rather publish a number that survives being wrong than one that flatters me.
LasseCash's own share
Two honest ways to count. Here are both.
What disappears if LasseCash disappears: nothing. Thirty-eight validators produce blocks whether I exist or not. Only my calls' processor cycles vanish — single-digit joules, an LED bulb for a second.
A fair share of the infrastructure, divided by who uses it. Measured today:
- On Hive: 14 calls a day against 420,000 transactions a day. That is 0.0033% — a fraction of one watt.
- On MAGI: about 7% of a small chain's traffic. Roughly 100 watts. A fifth of a household.
The part that actually matters
Forget the ratio. Here is the difference that survives every argument about watts.
Bitcoin's energy use rises with its price, by design. Mining is a race for a fixed reward: the more it is worth, the more hardware chases it, until the last miner barely breaks even. Success causes consumption. That is not a flaw — it is the mechanism that makes the ledger expensive to attack, working exactly as Satoshi intended.
Ours cannot do that. Twenty-one witnesses and seventeen witnesses produce blocks whether the chains carry ten transactions a day or ten million. Ten thousand new users add joules, not machines. There is no race. Nothing to outspend.
So the claim is not "we are greener than Bitcoin". Nearly everything is greener than Bitcoin. The claim is narrower and much harder to argue with:
LasseCash's energy cost does not grow when LasseCash succeeds.
A structural property, not a promise. And on 10 October I burn the owner key, so I could not change it even if I wanted to — nor the hardcap, nor the 0% swap fee, nor anything else. Let your yes be yes. A promise you are still able to break is not a promise; it is a mood. Code that cannot be changed is the only honest way I know to say a thing and mean it permanently.
Don't trust me. Check it.
Everything above is verifiable by someone who doesn't like me.
The validator count is on chain. Hive's transaction rate is in its blocks — I sampled five of them. The gas each LasseCash call burns is returned by the chain itself. The contract is open, the migration tree is published leaf by leaf, every burn sits visibly at the null account forever.
That is the cypherpunk part, and it is older than any of this: we write code. Not petitions, not manifestos demanding that someone else fix the system. Hughes wrote that cypherpunks write code because somebody has to, and it will not be the people who benefit from the current arrangement. You cannot argue a bank into honesty. You can build a ledger that cannot lie, and let people choose.
And the healthy part of distrusting official stories is not believing every alternative one — it is doing the arithmetic yourself. I am asking you to distrust me the same way. The numbers above are mine. The chain is everyone's.
What I am not counting
The API servers are in my total but not charged to LasseCash — they run for every Hive app and would exist without me. Your phone uses more power rendering this page than the chain spends settling what it shows. And the weakest number is watts per node, estimated from published hardware rather than measured.
So if you run a witness on Hive or MAGI, tell me what your node actually draws. I will correct this and credit you. I have no special access to anybody — I read what is public and measured what the chain would answer. That is the honest limit of what one man can do alone, and it is why I am asking in the open rather than in a private message that would go unanswered.
The Stoics had a rule I keep coming back to: separate what is yours to control from what is not. Whether anyone shows up for this, whether the price rises, whether a witness ever answers me — none of that is mine. The design is mine. The measurement is mine. Telling the truth about both, including the parts that are unflattering, is entirely mine.
So that is done. The rest is not my department.
You heard it here first.
Lasse Ehlers