Bitcoin's Energy Consumption 'Equals That of Switzerland' (bbc.com) 227
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Bitcoin uses as much energy as the whole of Switzerland, a new online tool from the University of Cambridge shows. The tool makes it easier to see how the crypto-currency network's energy usage compares with other entities. However, one expert argued that it was the crypto-currency's carbon footprint that really mattered. Currently, the tool estimates that Bitcoin is using around seven gigawatts of electricity, equal to 0.21% of the world's supply. That is as much power as would be generated by seven Dungeness nuclear power plants at once. Over the course of a year, this equates to roughly the same power consumption as Switzerland. "The University of Cambridge tool models the economic lifetime of the world's Bitcoin miners," the report adds. "It uses an average electricity price per kilowatt hour ($0.05) and the energy demands of the Bitcoin network. Finally, the model assumes that all the Bitcoin mining machines worldwide are working with various efficiencies."
A study published last month in the scientific journal Joule found that the electricity used for Bitcoin produces about 22 megatons for CO2 annually. That is as much as Kansas City in the U.S.
A study published last month in the scientific journal Joule found that the electricity used for Bitcoin produces about 22 megatons for CO2 annually. That is as much as Kansas City in the U.S.
Meanwhile India's running out of water (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Meanwhile India's running out of water (Score:1)
The mining fees are similar to collecting commission for laundering money.
Why else do you think it hasn't collapsed yet after a few bubble busting? The answer is that there is a real economy supporting it. Just not the kind that's good for mankind.
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You have identified one of the great central flaws of conservatism. By comparison, the left has no compunction about aggressively advancing evil.
Worst currency ever (Score:5, Insightful)
The mining is energy cost limited, so economics tends to make it the least energy efficient currency possible.
Very unstable pricing relative to physical goods
Partially traceable. So good for low level crime, not good for avoiding serious government scrutiny.
Easy to lose.
Complex to use, so easy to commit fraud on the uninformed.
I'm probably missing some.
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The mining is energy cost limited, so economics tends to make it the least energy efficient currency possible.
You should see the amount of energy that goes into keeping the US Government's military on the move to enforce the US Petrodollar.
Iraq alone was, what, $7T?
P.S. The legacy banking industry's brick-n-mortar business uses something like 14x more power than Bitcoin. Switzerland must be very efficient per-capita.
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P.S. The legacy banking industry's brick-n-mortar business uses something like 14x more power than Bitcoin. Switzerland must be very efficient per-capita.
I don't beleive this. Classical banking uses almost no energy, it's basically just accounting.
Investment banking and other financial crap is more energy-intensive, but it's small.
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And what about all the infrastructure required to print and distribute bank notes? What about the buildings to house all the accountants and the electricity to support electronic banking and credit cards?
I could quite believe that the world's fiat currencies use 14 times as much power as bitcoin but financial transactions world wide amount to well over a billion every day not counting cash transactions (which probably dwarf that number but I can't find anything on the Internet estimating the correct figure)
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And what about all the infrastructure required to print and distribute bank notes? What about the buildings to house all the accountants and the electricity to support electronic banking and credit cards?
What about the infrastructure to support engineers designing ASICs for mining, engineers designing the power plans, roads to the power plants, coal mines, nuclear engineers, universities to teach nuclear engineers, kindergartens to watch for children of PhD scientists, ...
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"Iraq alone was, what, $7T?"
What petro did the US get exactly? How did it, in any way, help the US "Petrodollar"?
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The US got contracts for defense industry. Not much else.
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I'll agree with that. But it doesn't change my point to the GP.
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It's good enough for avoiding serious government scrutiny to be used widely in cybercrime. It's pseudonymous, so you're totally safe as long as the wallets used can't be tied to your real identity. And it works well if you don't care about government scrutiny:
https://www.coindesk.com/north... [coindesk.com]
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The mining is energy cost limited, so economics tends to make it the least energy efficient currency possible.
Very unstable pricing relative to physical goods
Partially traceable. So good for low level crime, not good for avoiding serious government scrutiny.
Easy to lose.
Complex to use, so easy to commit fraud on the uninformed.
Compare all of that to gold.
Gold mining is incredibly energy intensive. Like BTC mining, there are capital costs and other costs as well, but energy cost is the main thing.
Gold pricing is stable in the very long term -- over the decades it keeps up with inflation -- but it's certainly less stable than the dollar or euro month-over-month. Better than BTC, but BTC is still young.
Similar on traceability - both can theoretically allow for large amounts to cross borders undetected, but neither is ideal for tha
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LOL, the stupid is strong with bitcoin nuts.
The large denomination of the "bitcoin" isn't an advantage, it is a disadvantage. You have to deal with mini and micro coins to use it effectively as a medium of exchange, and this is tedious and unnecessary.
As for the "value", you have to look not at a single "bitcoin", but the total money supply. M1 of USD is 4 trillion or so, the "bitcoin" at its current (and ridiculous) valuation is standing at 200b USD. It was less than 100b a few months ago. You don't want t
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The demand for bitcoin isn't because it's a great currency, it's because people think they're going to get rich using it as an investment. So, the way to get rid of bitcoin would be to create investment opportunities that people think are better.
You are also conflating bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. There are cryptocurrencies that have solved Most of joe_frisch's complaints. They are not popular because the very things that make them better currencies make them worse get rich quick schemes.
Re:Worst currency ever (Score:5, Insightful)
How much of the demand is just people hoping to get rich when the price goes up, suckered in by the hype from people selling mining equipment?
Re:Worst currency ever (Score:5, Insightful)
That's so adorable. You actually believe the hype.
My government's fiat currency is already better than crypto.
- I can spend it anywhere in my country
- I can pay my taxes with it
- Its value doesn't fluctuate wildly from day to day
- People don't try to hoard it in the hope of making a quick buck.
- If I use my credit card, I can get some recourse if I get defrauded
- The system is capable of supporting millions, if not billions of transactions every day.
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- People don't try to hoard it in the hope of making a quick buck. ...
That is most likely wrong, or don't you have "rich people" in your country? What are they doing with the money? Most are hoarding it
Re:Worst currency ever (Score:4, Insightful)
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Rich people don't horde money, that is a guaranteed way to make a loss due to inflation. Rich people invest in things other than currency for that reason.
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You forgot:
- used in physical form (aka cash), it is almost untraceable (serial numbers on bills exist, but nobody except banks records them)
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I might ask that if you don't like cryptocurrency
I like the concept of a cryptocurrency just fine. But BTC is a really awful implementation of that concept, one that is clearly worse for humanity than fiat currency (which is fairly bad for humanity).
We need a cryptocurrency that is not proof-of-work based (perhaps proof-of-stake, though more work is needed?), scales to billions of daily transactions, reconciles transactions quickly (probably implied by the previous requirement), and provides proper anonymity guarantees (though it's probably a good idea
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The primary legal demand is from speculators, not anything else legitimate.
Similar to gold, except gold looks nice, but bitcoin you can transfer digitally.
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Virtually all gold investors transfer their gold digitally as well because almost none of them actually hold their own.
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Virtually all gold investors transfer their gold digitally
They don't transfer actual gold digitally, just certificates of ownership. Nice if you want to make some profit trading, but not immune to confiscation.
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None of which disputes my original point.
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That's nothing... (Score:5, Funny)
What's the total thermal energy of everyone masturbating?
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Before or after you subtract the energy consumption of Pornhub?
people are dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
I always chuckled that many of the people that push bitcoin are also ardent environmentalists pushing green ideas and telling people how to commute. It just shows, that a lot of these people are just in to fads and don't really bother learning what they're talking about. They just want to be one of the cool kids.
I avoided bitcoin when it came out because I found no value in simply burning cpu cycles and my electric bill to "mine". Had the cpu cycles at least gone towards distributed scientific research, I'd have considered it. Looking back, I do wish I had been more naive about how useless mining is because I could have made some real money. But that still doesn't make crypto mining have any real value.
Those cycles secure the Blockchain. (Score:1, Insightful)
The CPU cycles secure the Bitcoin blockchain despite the fact that anybody in the world is allowed to participate.
You know what's a waste of energy? The traditional money sector: Militaries, tough men driving cash around in armored vehicles, endless hierarchies of bureaucrats pushing paper, money managers, and all of their human needs such as student loans, medical care, home payments, children, and vanity.
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"You know what's a waste of energy? The traditional money sector: Militaries, tough men driving cash around in armored vehicles, endless hierarchies of bureaucrats pushing paper, money managers, and all of their human needs such as student loans, medical care, home payments, children, and vanity."
You either forgot the /s or you're a clueless troll.
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And yet, when you look at transaction volumes, the traditional money sector still manages to be more efficient than Bitcoin.
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I've never seen an environmentalist pushing bitcoin, ever. I can give you plenty of examples of them complaining about it though.
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Must be a blue moon...I'm in agreement.
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I always chuckled that many of the people that push bitcoin are also ardent environmentalists pushing green ideas and telling people how to commute. It just shows, that a lot of these people are just in to fads and don't really bother learning what they're talking about. They just want to be one of the cool kids.
I avoided bitcoin when it came out because I found no value in simply burning cpu cycles and my electric bill to "mine". Had the cpu cycles at least gone towards distributed scientific research, I'd have considered it. Looking back, I do wish I had been more naive about how useless mining is because I could have made some real money. But that still doesn't make crypto mining have any real value.
Straw man ... I have literally never seen or heard an environmentalist make that case. I'm sure you can dig up a few who have but I defy you to demonstrate this is a common view among environmentalists instead of just claiming it. This isn't Breitbart.
Scientific computation and PoW (Score:2)
Had the cpu cycles at least gone towards distributed scientific research, I'd have considered it.
That the premise on which some crpyto coins like PrimeCoin were built.
The trouble is finding something which complicated to compute, but relatively easy to check.
And also you need a way to evaluate the difficulty of the problem to throttle the network's rate of discovery.
That's the case with the initial "hashcash" used as anti-spam and further developed into bitcoin's proof-of-work:
you need to brute force a lot until you find the specific nonce that produce a hash with the required amount of zeroes in the b
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I'm not sure a Venn Diagram would show as much intersection as you think. I suppose the idea of a currency not controlled by any government may have appealed to some liberals who also probably are interested in conservation (of the planet) I doubt they considered the carbon cost of running servers to "create" this currency.
It could be as simplistic as thinking "My computer doesn't require as much electricity as my AC, so how bad could it be? Besides, my computer has an EnergyStar logo on it". They've neve
Because Science! (Score:1)
More nuclear power, please. Why? Because science. Ever since HBO brought Chernobyl back into popular culture with their mini-series on the accident people are learning more about it through articles and such brought up because of this renewed interest. That includes YouTube videos like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS2YceA2fKg
And it's follow up on the same channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM4AkSK-TA8
People simply do not fear nuclear power like they used to. They are learning what made
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That's not going to work, for practical reasons:
https://phys.org/news/2011-05-... [phys.org]
"Uranium abundance: At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years. (Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified.)"
Even, and especi
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Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified.
That's not a useful statement. What we need to know is how many years of fuel we can get for each cent of higher total kWh cost.
I don't have a problem with nuclear ... (Score:2)
... as a power source but it has a couple of problems.
A) Waste , which admittedly can be sorted for enough years that no one will care but the problem is idiots do care about it in their back yard.
B) Cooling. And this is a much bigger issue - nuclear plants need lots of cooling water and so have to be built near the sea (with its risks) or near rivers. Unfortunately these arn't always available where you want to build them.
Bitcoin energy consumption is manageable (Score:3)
It seems like all we have to do is convince the Swiss to reduce the energy consumption of their country.
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The overwhelming majority of Switzerland's electricity comes from hydro or nuclear [wikipedia.org], which are carbon neutral. The same cannot be said of most bitcoin miners' electricity...
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The same cannot be said of most bitcoin miners' electricity...
citation required.
moar citations (Score:2)
The same cannot be said of most bitcoin miners' electricity...
citation required.
Okay, here we are:
- Electricitry sector in China [wikipedia.org]
and before you ask for it:
- Mining centralization in China is one of Bitcoin’s biggest issues at the moment. [buybitcoinworldwide.com]
(to the point that Chinese government regularly thinks about banning it, on the grounds of wastefulness. Citation: See all the news that pop-up on /. every now and then.
Of course, due to money and corruption, such thinking gets eventually shut down each time. Citation: the non existence of a news with a title like "China started enforcing ban, shor
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You've presented a pie chart for China as a whole, but what wedge are the miners in ?
Elecricity distribution (Score:3)
I'm aware I'm giving rational explanation to a troll but...
Even if miner were exclusively mining using electrons pushed by hydro-dams....
The simplest way to think about it :
If the miners stopped mining, the left-over extra hydro electricity they wouldn't be using could be distributed over the grid to power homes and industry, and a larger chunk of the coal power-plant could be retired.
Ergo, mining increases pollution, because it requires more energetic output in the country, thus requires keeping dirty prod
it's ants ! (Score:2)
you have no idea how electric grids work, do you?
What? You mean it's not tiny ants moving around electrons in their tiny baskets over their shoulders ?
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Neither hydro nor nuclear are carbon neutral, not when you remember that both require vast structures made of concrete.
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I think we would make more of an impact, if we could convince Kansas City to reduce theirs.
Seriously... One city with a carbon footprint about the size of Switzerland, Sri Lanka or Jordan (also mentioned in TFA).
About one million people live in the greater Kansas City, whereas Sri Lanka has a population of 21.7 million!
And there are several cities in the US with a larger footprint but Kansas City is still high up on the list of CO2/capita.
Source: http://citycarbonfootprints.in... [citycarbon...rints.info]
So what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Bitcoin gaining users again. Crank the FUD machine up!
Bitcoin is unstoppable. It's packet networks to circuit switched telcos.
The freedom that BTC provides is worth many times the electrical cost. What is the cost of all the wars to hold up fiat?
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-1 Illucid?
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What makes you think that bitcoin will, in any way, prevent wars about fiat declarations?
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/b... [forbes.com]
Figure it out, sparky..
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If anything, that article hints that bitcoin will disrupt US foreign economic policy. Would you mind showing the reasoning that this will prevent any wars whatsoever, or that it will not encourage wars? The example cited in the article, of bitcoin potentially interfering with US economic power now used to hinder Iran's nuclear proliferation is a good one.
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Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin was perfect for a while, when it become a speculative tool of finance instead of a currency with actual daily usage it lost all its "actual" value. I do not know you but last transaction I made was confirmed in three hours or so, with.the regular transaction fee used by my exchange. Can you imagine waiting in a restaurant for three hours for your CC payment to be processed?
Bitcoin become a very expensive financial speculation tool with lots of inexperienced players and high volatility. It does not provide any freedom as it is almost impossible these days to be used as a routine payment tool. Also four or five years ago most people I know used to carry a full copy of ledger in their notebooks with their actual wallet, so they had an actual control on their own money. These days keeping a wallet in sync with the network became a full time job and most people are using online wallets, to which you need to trust with your money. How free you feel when it is possible to an online wallet can be hacked, DDoSed or just outright can get lost with all coins in storage?
Do not lie to yourself.
And mandatory ps: Most fanbois are blaming me with being a sore loser when I tell things like above issues. I made money from Bitcoin, never got hacked or money stolen from me etc. The risks I mentioned was not mostly valid for me as I was running my own node for storage. It does not worth time spent, energy consumed...
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When was the last time you bought something using gold?
Bitcoin has tremendous value even in it's current form. The exciting part is what Bitcoin enables, which many small time speculators are unable to grasp. X.25 packet networks sucked pretty good too. But they worked.
Securing your funds has nothing to do with running a full node, only verification of balances. If you can keep a private key safe, your funds are safe. There are many ways to do this, and they're getting easier all the time.
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Also this is comparing apples and oranges. Gold's claim to fame is not "freedom" but "actual value". You buy gold in order to invest assuming its value is very unlikely to drop and quick to recover if fell down. Bitcoin OTOH, has a claim to be "independent means of payment". Gold is not independent, be it a gold coin or bullion first thing you check on it is an authorised mint or refinery's stamp and a serial number for bigger o
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One point however, in my opinion "hard" is a weak adjective for actual transactions of Bitcoin. My background is quite mixed so as a programmer with security focus and knowing how networks work over radio (yea quite mixed) I for example shiver in fear seeing people using RFID credit cards. That much ease does not worth the risk. I am not looking for that. But one need to be able to pay
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"The freedom that BTC provides is worth many times the electrical cost. What is the cost of all the wars to hold up fiat?"
Must be some good ganja
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What we the energy consumption of Game of Thrones? (Score:3, Informative)
If you add up every telecommunications device, every television or computer ever used to watch Game of Thrones, what number do you come up with?
Answer: It's totally irrelevant. Each individual party who chose to create, broadcast or watch game of thrones made their own economic decision that the benefits outweighed the costs.
Bitcoin (difficulty re-adjustment aside) _requires_ the energy of exactly one computer to undertake a Proof of Work scheme and process the transactions of every bitcoin transaction world-wide. It _needs_ a lot more than that to have enough computing power that no one bad-actor (ie. Bitmain) couldn't re-write their own blockchain through a 51% attack.
BUT - Every individual who chooses to mine bitcoin is making their own economic decision that the cost of equipment and energy used to mine is less than the benefit of joining the 'bitcoin lottery' and getting their part of the 12.5 BTC generated every time they (or their pool) successfully mines a block.
Bitcoin's energy consumption is simply a reflection of the attractiveness of the worldwide 'bitcoin lottery game'. Not a reflection of what it 'costs to run bitcoin' as a currency.
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Forget about GoT. How much energy do we spend on Facebook ?
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The "proof of work" scheme was chosen because it is a consensus mechanism.
There are other consensus protocol out there that don't depend on mining, and thus don't depend on wasting resources for little gain.
Who is still mining bitcoin? (Score:3)
Seriously. You'd need free electricity and new hardware for each difficulty increase.
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Difficulty increases only happen if mining grows. Similary, if people stop mining because it's getting too expensive, difficulty drops.
So you question doesn't make sense. Difficulty will trend towards a value that makes it profitable to run an efficient mining operation.
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Mining is fastest for those who can afford digital pickaxes with heads made of 1s. Poor people can only afford digital pickaxes with heads made from 0s, which are FAR less sharp, and thus less efficient.
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But every few years, thanks to Moore's law, the 0s get a little smaller.
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The 0s are used for shoveling the pay dirt. You need both 1s and 0s for efficient mining.
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So? (Score:3)
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What about the carbon footprint of people walking across hot coals ?
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And perhaps they should calculate the energy use of fiat currencies and their carbon footprints.
That would be harder to do. Bitcoin is an easy target. But it would be interesting to see energy use of maintaining e.g. US $.
Banks (Score:2)
And how much power do traditional banks use? Think of all the bank branches, servers, ATMs etc...
And then the stock market, not only the power of the exchanges but also all the brokers working on them...
The financial industry uses a lot of power, bitcoin is only just one of many significant contributors.
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If the entire World switched over to Bitcoin, things like stock markets and ATMs* and a lot of the rest of the financial industry would still have to exist. Bitcoin would only obviate the infrastructure needed to support the currency.
Then you have to remember that Bitcoin uses the energy it does running up to five transactions per second. Globally there are around 12,000 transactions per second not including pure cash.
*you'll still need some sort of physical currency so you can do transaction in environment
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Using energy to separate Money from State. (Score:3, Insightful)
ONLY bitcoin (Score:2)
this is counting only bitcoin, not the plenty of other crypto-currencies currently available.
sure they might be small peas compared to bitcoin, but if you add them all up...
i don't even want to know how much energy is wasted in total.
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Bitcoin is about 2/3 of the overall crypto market cap - so you might think that those small peas push crypto's energy usage to 1.5 switzerlands.
It's not quite that simple though because most of the coins' hashing requirements will not be directly proportional to their $-equivalent value or relative 'size' or popularity. It would technically take no more or less energy to run bitcoin at 200b market cap vs 200t market cap.
I know of some alternative coins t
Fake scarcity (Score:2)
At it core the real problem with bitcoin is actually its fake scarcity. It's energy problem is just a reflection of that and exposes a different problem; displaced costs of energy production.
Baseline cost? (Score:2)
What is the energy cost of mining and melting, pulping and printing standard money?
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We must do something! (Score:3)
Not sure about the CO2 (Score:2)
People use Iceland, Norway or France etc who have cheap power with no CO2, because they don't have to purchase the right to put CO2 into the atmosphere.
That's the main reason that it is cheap.
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Americans, sure love their cars, planet be damned.
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That is a very flawd argument. A very apples to coconut comparison. Either you compare the energy it takes to create a bitcoin and a dollar or you compare the energy requirements for the infrastructure around it. You don't get to mix and match.
You're a moron (Score:2, Insightful)
Without bitcoin that 74% of renewable energy would have been used for something productive. Because bitcoin used that clean energy, those productive uses were forced to use fossil fuel energy.
So yes, unless someone built their own dam and generator for a private hydro grid, 100% of bitcoin energy usage led to increased CO2 output.
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Providing financial services to the bad guys while pretending to be neutral!
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Re:Also higher marketcap (Score:5, Funny)