What a ridiculous article. Household air-conditioning wastes energy. Running your television wastes energy. Serving up webpages for The Guardian is apparently a waste of energy. If the problem is that the price of energy does not encompass the negative externalities it creates, then we need a Pigouvian tax on it. The price rises, and miners reassess whether or not they are profitable in a carbon-neutral world. The author seems to think that market participants using energy in a profitable manner are at fault here, rather than the policymakers who are not interested in tackling the Greatest Moral Challenge of Our Time (TM). But sure, jump on the bandwagon and write op-eds while Bitcoin is in the news.
Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
21–30 of 78 posts
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's zero. Exchanging banknotes or coins for goods or services does not consume electricity. Can't believe this was "sincere question".
what about running bank of america and visa?
If you're suggesting virtual currencies won't need trustworthy managers, I think you better check your wallet.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#23As I know, there is only 2 million Bitcoins unmined left. Once we mine all, aren’t we done with mining and miners ?
No, because miners secure the blockchain. They will be rewarded primarily by transaction fees as the reward gradually phases out.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's zero. Exchanging banknotes or coins for goods or services does not consume electricity. Can't believe this was "sincere question".
Many bitcoin proponents believe that bitcoin can fully replace the current financial system so whenever the energy consumption problem comes up you should expect to hear someone talking about how much banks spend on air conditioning every year.
Of course banks wouldn't go away with Bitcoin. There are still physical branches despite the ubiquity of online banking and credit/debit cards. People like having humans to interact with. And Bitcoin is trying to add in the Lightning network, which requires large trusted entities where people can store their coins for off-chain transactions, IE banks.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#25As I know, there is only 2 million Bitcoins unmined left. Once we mine all, aren’t we done with mining and miners ?
Miners are transaction processors, and instead of block rewards, they get paid in transaction fees. So, no, you're never done with them until you're done with Bitcoin.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#26How does a nation expand credit with a cryptocurrency? Like as in the case with fractional reserve banking?
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#27How does a nation expand credit with a cryptocurrency? Like as in the case with fractional reserve banking?
it doesn't.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#28Sincere question: what's the energy usage for e.g. USD or EUR?
> Sincere question: what's the energy usage for e.g. USD or EUR? Using VISA transactions for fiat currency, BTC uses 5K times more energy per transaction than VISA. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is...
5k and growing by orders of magnitude, where it's likely the case that Visa is continuously reducing their energy usage.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#29Sincere question: what's the energy usage for e.g. USD or EUR?
Irrelevant question though, in many ways. There's simply no chance that bitcoin is replacing fiat money. I realize that offends the bitcoin True Believers, but fiat money is not going away unless nation states go away, and if that happens there's some more issues we have to deal with than the cost of a transaction.
That's even worse, because it means that Bitcoin's energy usage is additive on top of the energy used by the existing financial system.
Re: Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's zero. Exchanging banknotes or coins for goods or services does not consume electricity. Can't believe this was "sincere question".
Coindesk did a write up of this. https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-real-costs-dollar/ Looks like data was taken from places like: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/ba... and rest of the numbers were taking into account of how much each note costs to make. "The Euro publishes sustainability statistics on their currency, and according to latest estimates, 3 billion banknotes printed in 2003 ha…
According to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption, Bitcoin is currently at 42 TWh. That's over 20 million tonnes of CO2.
If we assume energy costs to produce annual supply of new banknotes and coins in entire world is at 1 TWh. You see how insane energy consumption of Bitcoin really is.
And that's comparing an entire money supply of the world to single cryptocurrency.
Banks cannot be part of the equation as the need for banks would not cease if the world would switch to Bitcoin or similar.