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Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

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Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#61

Post by svara »

PoW mining (at least), must be made illegal. I have no doubts that it will end by becoming illegal, the question is how and when.

It boggles the mind that there is now essentially a worldwide tax on semiconductors, which is used to do... nothing of any value whatsoever.

And this thing just keeps growing. The effects will be felt in more and more economic sectors. Something will have to give.

So, the only question is: Will we be smart enough to ban it soon and avert the worst consequences, or will this thing blow up in a huge way and we ban it afterwards.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#62

Post by exeldapp »

I don't doubt the number, but it does make me genuinely curious. How does this compare to other software? How much energy does running, for example, Facebook require? How much extra energy is required if you use a language like Ruby, PHP, Python, etc. versus a language like C?

It will be interesting to see how energy consumption will be a part of software in the future. I wonder if we will see something like "green" programming languages.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#63

Post by thathndude »

qwertygnu wrote: post #50
robomartin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blockchain is the single largest threat to banking, and that doesn’t come without a price. That's an interesting statement. The first question that occurred to me was: Why does banking have to be threatened? In other words, is this a solution looking for a problem?

Yes there are lots of problems with banking. Cryptocurrency does have a reason to exist, though of course we went and fucked it all up. It can help ordinary people outmaneuver oppressive regimes. It can perform that same core functions that banks can (i.e. keeping track of and moving around money) in a public and distributed way. The banking industry (often metonymically known as "Wall Street") is literally the canon…

I saw a great, pithy tweet recently, and I won’t do it justice, but I’ll give it a shot.

Crypto, and Blockchain, are like little fiefdoms that are being created, and the people who create them, and in the process mine the first couple million blocks, will be the Lords.

As you say, the rich getting richer. And doing it all by hijacking this message of the “little guys” banding together against the establishment.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#64

Post by superkuh »

How much energy did the standing army for the dollar and it's logistics network consume during 2021? Much, much, much, more. And yet the energy expenditure to defend the Bitcoin network from attacks both succeeded using far less and the energy was used completely non-violently. Bitcoin's efficiency and morality stands head and shoulders above nation state based mechanisms for defending the integrity of their currencies.

And no, bitcoin doesn't depend on one single country. If, say, China made it illegal (hmm!) it'd still keep working. So no, a nation state going down does not actually kill bitcoin but it would kill that nation's currency. We'll see how well the Ukrainian hryvnia holds up this spring.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#65

Post by NickM »

grzm wrote: post #14
hrhrhrhrhr wrote: post #8

Gold mining consumes 240.61 TWh per year, which is comparable to the electrical energy consumed by a country like Australia. Source: https://globalenergyprize.org/en/2021/11/24/the-bitcoin-gold...

Gold as a material has many uses, not only to back currency. Comparison to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is not particularly useful.

Even if gold were exclusively used as an investment, it would still be lower-carbon than Bitcoin. The energy spent per dollar of gold mined is much less than the energy spent per dollar of Bitcoin mined.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#66

Post by Negitivefrags »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #45
sktrdie wrote: post #7

With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. No other system works so efficiently towards such goal. What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Since we only…

>> My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Dyson spheres and stellar engineering to power cryptocurrency mining rigs. I shudder at the thought.

One day a swarm of self replicating probes will turn up and start building a Dyson sphere around our sun. The purpose is to power the alien equivalent of Bitcoin mining.

Another storyline I came up with is this: Imagine that an alien civilisation has the ability to send electromagnetic signals faster than light by some mechanism such as a micro wormhole but not ships and such.

They still want to destroy other civilisations before they become a threat. They are able to connect to some unsecured wifi networks and start posting on forums. The username: Satoshi Nakamoto

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#67

Post by throw0101a »

sktrdie wrote: post #7

With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. No other system works so efficiently towards such goal. What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Since we only…

> The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy.

An observation from 2018:

> imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin

* https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1030225104234373121

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#68

Post by belltaco »

sktrdie wrote: post #7

With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. No other system works so efficiently towards such goal. What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Since we only…

> start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun

Does heat dissipate well in vacuum? Won't having it so close to the sun result in more heat? I guess the only way to dissipate so much heat would be via radiation. Outer space seems to be really really cold so that might help.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#70

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

mwattsun wrote: post #25

The counter argument is that Bitcoin is a battery [1] so that if you live in a place like Iceland with plentiful energy, so much that even exporting it as aluminum leaves extra, then you can turn it into Bitcoin and export it that way. But most Bitcoin mining is not that. I feel like Joni Mitchell in the Big Yellow Taxi: "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" [2] Why are we allowing this to happen? (Well, at…

Except it’s not really like a battery because you can’t get the energy back out. The energy ultimately turned into resistive heat and was lost. It’s more like something you manufacture using energy, which is most (all?) things.
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