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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

#151

Post by arcticbull »

johndevor wrote: post #142
arcticbull wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part is that according to Cambridge some 40% of that is coal power [1]. Frequently the dirtiest coal power in the world, between Xinjiang (no longer, probably...) and Kazakhstan. Coal power causes excess mortality of anywhere between 25 and 278 deaths per TWh generated depending on how you're counting it and (most importantly) where it's generated. [2,3,4] Bitcoin's addiction to dirty coal killed between 15…

> In a few years Bitcoin mining will kill way more people than the number of political dissidents How are you counting the number of political dissidents saved?

I was just being glib - but in an ideal world that number should be 0. Any political dissidents that are willing to write their entire transaction history in plaintext on a slow, small public ledger are going to end up in political prison in a hot minute. They're just waiting for automated tooling to file a report with the secret police.

Bitcoin is not the tool you should be using for that. It's just poor opsec.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#152

Post by leshow »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #130
svara wrote: post #61

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:…

What else would you make illegal? High fidelity 3d graphics in gaming? It is clearly wasteful and games are hardly any better because of high polygon count, right?

There's a false equivalence here between proof of work consensus and actually doing work. 3D renders aren't done by a bunch of independent render farms in competition with each other where their work is discarded if they aren't the first to produce the render.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#153

Post by oneoff786 »

frutiger wrote: post #144
thathndude wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a son who is just about 10 years old, and he’s getting to the age where he’s beginning to realize how irrational our world is. We recently had a conversation discussing the fact that we could eradicate hunger and the need for clean water globally, but for a whole host of reasons we have not yet done it. He continues to probe “why“ and all I can say is, essentially, because people are greedy and unmotivated gen…

> and unwilling to sacrifice a modicum for others I agree with your sentiment but I have to disagree with that phrase. The vast majority* of people of people pay quite a lot of money in taxes, which ostensibly** only exist to help others. (*) I know the billionaires have their wealth as unrealized gains; I chose my words carefully (**) I know we all disagree on how that revenue should be spent, but the purpose of tax…

People pay taxes to avoid going to jail. Your tax return has an option to pay more for no reason. Guess how many people choose that option.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#155

Post by hetspookjee »

belltaco wrote: post #85
exeldapp wrote: post #62

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"…

I feel this is the wrong comparison. PoW intentionally raises the difficulty by making computer do more "work" finding useless hashes as the price of crypto goes up. The "work" isn't used for processing transactions, which is why the number of transactions per second is stuck at a pitiful 7 transactions per second for BTC, and 15 for ETH. Programming languages don't have a mechanism where Ruby, PHP or Python have fea…

I agree that the raising of difficulty is problematic. But is it not that running arbitrary javascript in advertisements, and the ever growing scale of said javascript chunked in, is also growing ever more? You state indeed that it's a mere 7 transactions per second, yet I'm settling transactions over 2nd layer networks like Lightning and Liquid. Javascript advertisements bring me nothing but distraction and a settled state of mind. I find this a far bigger harm than commodotizing international transactions, how slow they might be.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#156

Post by tasha0663 »

thathndude wrote: post #108
epolanski wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"technological development". Don't we already have plenty of more efficient coins out there?

I’ve never understood the BTC purists. I’m generally anti-crypto in any variety, but As far as cryptocurrency‘s go, bitcoin is really bad compared to so many alternatives. I’d just as soon see it all go up in smoke. But why does BTC reign?

It's the power of denial. The sunk cost is enormous.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#157

Post by spookyuser »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #66
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 civilis…

Wow this is so weird, I've had this exact same idea before! I don't know if you're familiar with Dark Forest strikes from the Dark Forest book, but in the book, or the one after that, aliens use bombs that slow the speed of light in the space of single solar systems, to prevent civilizations from becoming threats. Always thought it would be funny if actual dark forest strikes were just the bitcoin whitepaper and bitcoin/crypto eventually use up all available resources before civilization can become a problem lol. Hope someone makes this an actual story someday.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#158

Post by joelbondurant0 »

thathndude wrote: post #55
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…

I have a son who is just about 10 years old, and he’s getting to the age where he’s beginning to realize how irrational our world is. We recently had a conversation discussing the fact that we could eradicate hunger and the need for clean water globally, but for a whole host of reasons we have not yet done it. He continues to probe “why“ and all I can say is, essentially, because people are greedy and unmotivated gen…

No post body was provided.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#159

Post by lfdz »

hihihihi1234 wrote: post #102
cryptica wrote: post #92

I like cryptocurrencies but this high electricity usage has kept me away from Bitcoin in the early days. I've since come to forgive Bitcoin for this ridiculous energy usage because of how important a problem Bitcoin is solving (the world desperately needs provably scarce, deflationary hard money). It's just unfortunate that people chose to focus on Bitcoin and not some other PoS crypto which uses less electricity...…

Why does the world need deflationary money?

No post body was provided.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#160

Post by nprz »

hocuspocus wrote: post #121
unicornmama wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share your evidence for the first paragraph?

There's none. It's mind boggling that 12 years later, people like the parent poster are still claiming bullshit like that when there's literally zero evidence, rather the opposite. No country with underdeveloped banking and payment systems is interested in something like Bitcoin. They need something cheap and efficient, federated and... centralized! Many African countries are perfectly fine using M-Pesa.

Nigerians beg to differ: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-of-co...
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