Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We literally are mining coal to burn it in powerplants to energize servers and GPUS to waste clock cycles to find "coins". I'm curious to know what the carbon footprint of a human is, that way we can compare it to the GPUs doing an equivalent amount of work (which I think will be tricky to determine in the first place). > The world is the realm and how we use its people and resources matters, especially when its to…
According to rensmart.com, 1KWh is approx. 0.5 kg of CO2 saved/used. A RX480 uses 160W on average according to TomsHardware, mining might pull more but lets use that as a conservative example. A Mining Rig, decent one, might have 4 cards and pull 100Watts for itself (conservative estimate). That puts the total power of the rig at 750Watts (approximately) This will yield a hashrate of about 20MH/s for each card or 80M…
Assuming those estimates are correct (I haven't verified it), I think it's hard for me to believe that there are fewer than 191K people working to manage an equivalent number of financial transactions in USD.
I tried this wolfram query: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+people+workin...
Yes, we are increasing entropy outside of ourselves but not within, if the population of humans is increasing, humans have acquired more negentropy from the environment and are "winning" against entropy as they get better at extracting energy from the environment, we'll run out of energy in the form of fossil fuels soon, so we'll have to find another source of energy, because we need more energy to decrease entropy.
Let me be clear(er) in saying that I don't support burning fossil fuels, I think OP linked mining bitcoins directly to burning coal -- we're mixing two very separate arguments here. Burning fossil fuels for generation of electricity is a topic on its own.