Whoever Satoshi was, I wonder how he’s responding to the thought that he’s personally contributed more to global warming than the average billionaire.
Probably not thinking about it on his yacht that he doesn’t pilot or maintain, having built the most successful grifter scheme of all time
I feel like calling bitcoin a grifter scheme is kind of like calling fiat currency (edit: in general) a grifter scheme. Which I guess isn’t entirely untrue…
Oh not this again.
Crypto is also fiat. It’s backed by nothing except the trust that it exists, therefore it’s fiat.
It’s a drop in the ocean compared to how much energy the banking industry uses.
Banks use negligible electricity lmao
Yeah. 600k Branches, 1 million atms, data centers…
Including everything, about a million times less energy per transaction than crypto.
The banking industry uses at least 50x more, right?
Lets talk about the bank branchs, data centers, and energy consumption vs crypto.
"Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity
“Traditional banks’ total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. Totaling 139 TWh.”
Not to mention banks impact on people’s lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class… to purchase disposable products. Like the old tale of buying a expensive boot vs a cheap one.
I’m all for less power usage … but seems like a witch hunt compared to what banking gets away w. It’s the the first time banks can point the finger at someone other then themselves.
https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks
A system used by everybody, and a system still used by a tiny fraction of the population are using a comparable amount of energy?
That’s why I prefer Cardano, it has a good PoS (unlike Ethereum) and uses thousands of time less energy than Bitcoin.
I’ve always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like “Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy” and we’re supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn’t say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.
Also, we don’t make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don’t go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.
There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me
Air conditioning literally saves lives, especially medically vulnerable people, the hell are you on about?
As others have pointed out, ~2% of the entire US’s energy output is absolutely insane. According to the eia.gov, the US produced around 100 quadrillion BTUs worth of energy in 2022 (I don’t fully know why they chose BTUs to measure the total energy output, they explain on the website, but that’s besides the point). 2% of that is 2 quadrillion BTUs. According to psu.edu (I googled these sites on my laptop so don’t have exact urls on my phone at the moment), the entirety of US households in 2017 used 4.58 quadrillion BTUs.
Think about that. Bitcoin/PoW coin miners are using enough electricity to power around half of all homes in the US. According to statista.com, in 2022 there were 144 million homes. These miners consume 72 million homes worth of energy. And for what? To solve math problems that benefits no one but Bitcoin/PoW coin investors?
We’re literally seeing our weather patterns become more and more extreme every year due to climate change, which is also killing our oceans which is causing a severely negative chain reaction in the rest of our ecosystems… But, you know, fuck all that, I need to use an extremely inefficient method of generating currency that no one but enthusiasts/speculators/investors asked for. I’m not inherently against cryptocurrency; however, fuck Bitcoin and other extremely wasteful PoW coins.
And yes, printing dollar bills/other fiat currencies creates pollution, too. I agree that process should be modernized as well. And in some ways, it already has been undergoing modernization as more and more people use electronic payments vs cash, thus decreasing the need to print more bills.
Misleading title - the problem is not “crypto”, it’s pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top
109 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.dogecoin is top10
ah yes the 10th place - still, Doge is estimated to use ~1% of the energy Bitcoin uses and it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
the entire Bitcoin block chain could be run on the phone I’m using to write this. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.
and dogecoin merge mines with all the other script coins so how can you even calculate its independent usage?
there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.
Yes there is, massive power use is the entire point of proof-of-work. If Bitcoin blocks could be produced without massive power use then the blockchain’s system of validation would fail and 51% attacks would be trivial.
the hash rate for the first blocks was achievable with a pentium 3. the protocol functioned then. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates more hashpower is used. a 51% attack is the protocol functioning properly.
That’s because there were just a handful of people mining the first blocks and there was no demand, so the price was basically zero.
The protocol is meant to promote decentralization, so I have no idea how a 51% attack would be an example of the protocol functioning properly. A 51% attack is a demonstration that the protocol is controlled by a single entity.
a 51% attack means that 51% of the hashpower has agreed on a certain chain. this happens every 10 minutes.
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can always just pump up more oil out of the ground.
No, this is actually exactly the fucking problem
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Electricity is too cheap for these uses.
Why is commercial power so cheap and residential so expensive? We could fix two problems by balancing that back.
Because companies > people in the eyes of the state.
Something something job creators….something something trickle down
It depends on which state, which is even more sad.
It’s more like companies = jobs in the eyes of voters.
ETA: What’s with the downvotes? You guys think this is wrong?
I have never once gave a flying fuck about a nebulous concept of “jobs.”
Sounds like you are in a very good position to appreciate how the average voter feels about this.
ETA: I think we’d all be better off if people had a more realistic and practical attitude to jobs.
My understanding is tha some commercial/industrial users will get a highly variable tariff. This may be cheaper much of the time, but can get ridiculously expensive at times of high demand.
The difference is that a bitcoin farmer can shut down at those expensive times, but a home user still needs to heat/cool their house, run their fridge etc, so the savings cancel out. Because of this, averaging the costs works out easier/better for most home consumers
You can get time of use billing at home with many power companies. Only makes sense if you have solar panels or storage batteries or some such.
They don’t produce anything except some numbers. A total waste of energy. I had to laugh when this guy I know who is very “progressive” and environmentally concerned got pissy when I pointed out how much energy was wasted on bitcoin mining just because he was into it.
You should check out the impact of gold production also.
My comment here is a much better use of energy
My lower-down comment is an even better use of energy
Right this is the fundamental problem. There needs to be some value to the Blockchain application which the crypto tokens support beyond just token speculation.
Destroying the environment and not even for real money
What makes it less real than other fiat currencies, if I may ask? If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I’d argue it is “real money”.
It’s a speculative asset, based on the bigger fool theory. You need to sell it for real money to pay your taxes.
You’d think with all of the money they’re pulling in, they’d invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.
Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?
Vs. Banks. That have offices, branches, atms, data centers… banking does use more energy yearly. So why not both invest in renewables
Sure, but how much of the global financial market does crypto represent?
I susptect that the energy consomption per transaction is considerably higher for crypto than for a normal financial transaction.
no, it is exorbitantly higher for a single crypto transaction
fuck crypto shit ffs
More like fuck crypto mining. There are cryptos that dont need mining.
This is as useless as saying “fuck currency shit ffs”.
Crypto isn’t a currency, it’s a commodity for trading. One that doesn’t physically exist. No inherent use and no inherent value.
The vast majority of “real” currencies are fiat currencies and don’t have inherent value or use either.
US dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it’s collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.
But there’s so few uses of actually buying things with crypto. People don’t use it as a medium of exchange outside of illicit goods and money laundering. We’re more than a decade into this and using crypto to buy a pizza is still a novelty.
A major proof of this is that FTX collapsed and took a chunk of the crypto market out with it. The market at large shrugged this off. If it were actually linked in to the broader economy, then it would have had similar ripple effects to a major US bank failing.
I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I’m an artist) and to pay my VPS’s rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.
And, honesty, it’s pretty great, compared to alternatives.
Last time I’ve used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.In the EU they’re getting a digital euro which allows them to avoid bowing down to Paypal, Payoneer, and all the services interlinked with them (e.g. Patreon) - the ancillary services can even offer digital euro payouts instead, too. So as long as what you’re doing is legal, you can break the Paypal/Payoneer terms of service as much as you want and avoid their privately enforced authoritarianism that goes beyond the scope of the law for whatever reason. So those problems are being solved as we speak, depending on where you live.
The “Criticism and risks of the digital euro” section on Wikipedia outlines my concerns about such a system pretty well.
Unless they are going to implement a cryptocurrency with centralized minting (essentially giving themselves both as much and as little control over the digital currency as they have over physically printed money), it doesn’t seem that much different from what we have already. Just because it’s going to be a new system, doesn’t really mean it not going to have issues with false-positives suspending regular transactions or fees that are higher than they need to be.
You literally just defined the attributes of a currency.
The only difference is that crypto isn’t backed by a government.Edited. See below. Apparently some crypto is government backed. There is no functional difference between traditional currency and (at least some) crypto.
“Crypto isn’t backed by a government”
“CBDC is a digital form of fiat—money that is issued by central banks. It is designed to be a digital representation of the country’s physical currency. Unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, CBDC is backed by the government and is legal tender.”
CBDC is blockchain based, i.e cryptocurrency.
Japan is developing a similar cryptocurrency as well.
There is no reason for CBDC to use blockchain.
