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But on the other side, hey blockchains are so cool they can do the same work as banks but six orders of magnitude less efficiently.
This seems completely outrageous to me. I had seen similar numbers thrown around casually in the past but still found it hard to believe to be true, (despite being pretty bearish on Bitcoin myself). This seems to provide some pretty detailed evidence, analysis and validation directly addressing criticisms. It seems pretty thorough. Is there any more to discuss on the topic of Bitcoin being outrageously wasteful? Or i…
Not to mention, a single transaction can power an infinite amount of (wash) transactions thanks to 2nd layer stuff like the lightning network. So it'd be similarly misleading to try quote in terms of that.
So the correct unit would be power usage, per block or time unit.
I saw this a couple days ago when @arcticbull mentioned it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21256112 Jaw dropping. Converted to Telsa Model S miles as per https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S Comes out to about 2000 miles or 3200 kilometers for one Bitcoin transaction. Astounding.
"Getting rich" at cost of the environment (extremely high resource consumption)? No thanks, I'd rather leave that world for future generations.
This seems completely outrageous to me. I had seen similar numbers thrown around casually in the past but still found it hard to believe to be true, (despite being pretty bearish on Bitcoin myself). This seems to provide some pretty detailed evidence, analysis and validation directly addressing criticisms. It seems pretty thorough. Is there any more to discuss on the topic of Bitcoin being outrageously wasteful? Or i…
My opinion is that if you find this outrageous then you don't understand the core principles of Bitcoin. The difficulty of mining a block on the network goes up with the amount of mining being done to maintain a constant block mining rate.
There are massive bitcoin mining warehouses in China, and for each one that opens all of them are less effective at mining, but still consume the same amount of energy.
So, yeah, it's pretty much a tire fire.
Edit: to add to this, many industries can use technology to produce more value with less energy. Bitcoin is fundamentally unable to do this for the same reasons I mentioned above. When bitcoin specific mining hardware first came out, it briefly gave an advantage to the first people to have it, but then the advances were completely neglected when they became widespread.