I just wonder if bitcoin, in this respect, is a victim of its own proactive effort to publish energy costs.
Suppose clash of clans, gmail, or the most watched viral video on facebook each had their own published estimates of energy use. Perhaps the most watched tiktok user is responsible for electricity usage on par the entire country of Croatia.
If you could compartmentalize all the different major apps, major platforms, games, videos, specific accounts, etc and publish their power usage, my question would be where bitcoin ranks relative to those. Maybe it’s still uniquely bad, in which case, fair enough. And it certainly seems, given the numbers in the article (energy equivalent to 200k homes), that it’s uniquely bad. But I would like to see it in context of other usages.
Pretty sure Bitcoin is uniquely bad. The whole blockchain mechanisms revolves around solving ever more complex equations, which at this point requires dedicated high-powered hardware that sucks up tons of energy. Highly watched Youtubers might get lots of internet connections too, but those can and usually are somewhat optimized for efficiencym Bitcoin has exponentially growing inefficiency baked into its protocol.
with cryptos all the info you need to the the math is public. In the fiat-sector, everything is secret.
cryptocurrencies are destroying the planet like nothing else, hopefully more countries can ban them soon
other than manufacturing in general, which has the largest footprint of any aspect of our society, and more than crypto-mining in my opinion, atleast with crypto-mining you can use renewable energy.
None of these articles ever seem to even attempt to calculate the “energy usage” of fiat currencies 😒
I remember reading a study comparing it to the credit-card system (which obviously is only a small part of the overall fiat currency system), but compared to crypto-currencies the entire global credit-card system had only negligible power consumption if I recall correctly.
Yeah, If you look at a naive “cost per transaction” of credit cards it seems unbeatable. but that’s only just part of the puzzle. You need to factor in big banks and a bunch of other stuff to start getting the full picture. I’d argue that all armored trucks cost the world more in energy than cryptos, but I haven’t actually crunched the numbers =/
I don’t think cash is really a fair comparison though. Physical cash is IMHO needed regardless of how you manage the digital currency transfer.
But sure, loads of bank buildings and customer centers etc. do also have an impact on energy use.
We share cake day OwO @poVoq@lemmy.ml
Yay! More cake for all :)
