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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

#121

The only way to beat Bitcoin or other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies is to remove the need for them. Bitcoin and other cryptos have a use-case; it may not be apparent to someone living in a developed country with access to a good banking system or it may be one you don't like and involves criminal activity, but there absolutely is a use-case. The only way to stop this is if the traditional banking system catches up a…

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.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#122
Just copying another comment abotu the energy consumption of online adverising

"The online advertising ecosystem resides in the core of the Internet, and it is the sole source of funding for many online services. Therefore, it is an essential factor in the analysis of the Internet's energy footprint. As a result, in 2016, online advertising consumed 20–282 TWh of energy. In the same year, the total infrastructure consumption ranged from 791 to 1334 TWh. With extrapolated 2016 input factor values without uncertainties, online advertising consumed 106 TWh of energy and the infrastructure 1059 TWh. With the emission factor of 0.5656 kg CO2e/kWh, we calculated the carbon emissions of online advertising, and found it produces 60 Mt CO2e (between 12 and 159 Mt of CO2e when considering uncertainty). The share of fraudulent online advertising traffic was 13.87 Mt of CO2e emissions (between 2.65 and 36.78 Mt of CO2e when considering uncertainty)." The paper was: "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019592551...

It was the one of the five papers included in the authors PhD thesis, "Towards Sustainable Data Centers and ICT Services"

https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/38725/i...

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#123

The world used about (12,000 Mtoe = ) 140,000 TWh [1], making this 0.1% of world consumption. OP claims 64 MtCO2e of associated GHG emissions, which is also about 0.1%. I'd call these figures under "troubling but not yet material to the climate." [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2020...

CO2 concentrations are a bit like traffic jams: a small increase can lead to catastrophic consequences.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#124
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

... Thats your utopia? How about we figure out a way to store/transfer wealth which doesnt need to perform arbitrary calculations and cause massive power consumption

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#125

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…

Consider a Blockchain where proof-of-work mining takes place by solving a hard problem: for a given set of parameters, determine how long life will last in a realistic ancestor simulation. Consider also a play-to-earn game in the form of a realistic ancestor simulation where players grind menial portions of the game and sell the artifacts of their progress in a market backed by the aforementioned Blockchain. With apologies to Bostrom, we must accept exactly one of these as true:

- that this is not technologically possible with current or future tech

- no one would possibly do something this stupid

- it is nearly 100% certain that our universe exists in someone's hair-brained web3 Ponzi scheme

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#126

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.

There are a lot of countries where people need anything but centralised money. Because they have every reason not to trust the ones who would run the central authority.

It's hard for some first-world country citizens to imagine that.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#127

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?

This is what I find strangest. At least coins like Ethereum and Solana have entire ecosystems of complex projects being built up around them (no matter how skeptical one may be of those projects), Bitcoin seems like an incredibly spartan ecosystem with basically one use, and the sole advantage of being first.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#128

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…

Would torrent this movie

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#129

Bitcoin and Data centers are two major global warming behemoths no one talks about. It's about time it became an issue.

? data centers are a net negative for carbon emissions.

1. no need to drive to a bank/govt office/business when it has been digitized

2. watching a video on youtube, netflix or tiktok is basically carbon emission free compared to other forms of enterntainment that would be consumed if the internet wasn’t available

3. emails instead of paper snail mail, billions of trees saved since the 90s

The list goes on and on

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#130
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?
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