The only meaningful comparison is to the energy usage of the legacy banking system. Banks have a lot of data centers, office space, employees who drive to work etc.
Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
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Re: Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying "has a Bitcoin wallet" = "own bitcoin"? Only ~60M households (50%) have an investment account. I'm skeptical that there's a huge portion of households with bitcoin but w/o a traditional investment account. I'm also skeptical that ~80% of people with investment accounts have Bitcoin. Almost everyone I work with and most of my friends and family have an investment account. I only know a couple of people…
I'm not saying either way (as this wasn't specified in the tweet either) - just pointing out the huge discrepancy between easily accessible statistics and the story the author of the tweet is trying to tell. There is a huge assumption being made (10 million people hold bitcoin) and zero justification for that assumption.
It also seems like there is zero justification for you 46M Americans figure.
https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoin-users/
There might be 46M wallets related to US accounts with Bitcoin in them, but 1 person could own 45M of them (I seriously doubt it, but you get the point).
Re: Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
#43The tweet makes an assumption that there are 10 million people holding bitcoin, and the tweet goes on to imply that this is actually an overestimate. The first google result for "how many people hold bitcoins" says that an estimated 46 million Americans own bitcoin. The huge inaccuracy shows the author's bias and kills the credibility of the rest of the thread.
Are you saying "has a Bitcoin wallet" = "own bitcoin"? Only ~60M households (50%) have an investment account. I'm skeptical that there's a huge portion of households with bitcoin but w/o a traditional investment account. I'm also skeptical that ~80% of people with investment accounts have Bitcoin. Almost everyone I work with and most of my friends and family have an investment account. I only know a couple of people…
where did you get the 60M households from and why are you counting households? Everyone in my family has an investment account, so you should be looking at per individual/capita which is closer to ~150 million. So the number of bitcoin holder is significantly higher even if you consider 20% of 150 million.
Re: Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if that's your goal, wasting electricity on Bitcoin might not be the optimal route to getting there...
Are you really incapable of understanding that bitcoin might not be a waste? An unfathomable transfer of wealth from normal people to the rich is happening because of the Fed. How? The rich can borrow money from the Fed at near zero rates. They use that money to buy assets. Meanwhile, the government borrows money from the Fed at near zero rates. The government spends the money, inflating the circulating money supply.…
> Are you really incapable of understanding that bitcoin might not be a waste?
Quite capable of understanding, thank you. I just think you're wrong.
Re: Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a way to differentiate clean hydro and dirty hydro? In the US the most recent "green" standards exclude hydroelectricity as renewable energy.
Really? That seems dumb. Have any references for why they made this decision?
I don't have the details, but when my company went to purchase RECs for 2021 we were told that hydro is no longer considered to be in the level of REC we were targeting (extra green something or other). So the cost for this year was much higher than 2020.
Re: Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
#46This whole thing is a racket. Bitcoin's actual market value is entirely a function of its' utility in facilitating cybercrime payments. There is precisely zero actual use for it beyond that. And now that all the biggest names on Wall Street are getting a piece of the pie, we can be guaranteed it's not going anywhere.
> There is precisely zero actual use for it beyond that
I was staying in a hotel in Nepal around 10 years ago. I was sharing a room with someone I met. I paid the hotel, and my roommate paid me in bitcoin. It was pretty convenient considering my home currency is USD, his was EUR, and the local currency was rupees.
Anyway, as far as I'm aware there wasn't any cybercrime taking place that day :)
Re: Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgive me if this is a dumb comment, but my understanding is that bitcoin's footprint is largely due to mining, correct? But bitcoin itself is considered an asset (in the US, at least). So in theory, it's possible to just trade bitcoins off-chain (either on another blockchain or just using boring centralized tech) without necessarily incurring a corresponding increase in mining-related costs, right? IIRC Polkadot st…
But if you’re trading bitcoins “off-chain”, doesn’t that mean you’re negating the point of a blockchain-based currency?
Yes, but for my purposes as a layperson using a currency, I'm choosing to trust a system that is opaque to me anyways (be it a bank/exchange/other financial institution vs a validator pool). One could argue, for example, that anti-fraud mechanisms in off-chain systems don't have a on-chain counterpart, despite being a desirable feature, so IMHO, if the argument goes that crypto can't do things on-chain that regular currencies can, it seems most feasible to just treat them as digital assets to be tradeable over existing centralized systems, no?
Re: Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying either way (as this wasn't specified in the tweet either) - just pointing out the huge discrepancy between easily accessible statistics and the story the author of the tweet is trying to tell. There is a huge assumption being made (10 million people hold bitcoin) and zero justification for that assumption.
It also seems like there is zero justification for you 46M Americans figure. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoin-users/ There might be 46M wallets related to US accounts with Bitcoin in them, but 1 person could own 45M of them (I seriously doubt it, but you get the point).
Yep - it seems we're getting deep into "73.6% of statistics are made up on the spot" territory no matter which source we choose :) Which then raises the question - why did the author of the tweet choose 10 million?
Re: Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
#49Right now very few people are actually using Bitcoin for everyday transactions, and yet still the carbon footprint rivals many large countries. If this became the world’s primary currency (as many crypto fans seem to want) it would increase our total carbon footprint by multiple orders of magnitude. I do not see many people in the crypto community approaching this with the deadly seriousness it deserves. Most convers…
If the cost of electricity rose 100% now, the kwh used to mine bitcoin would drop correspondingly. IOW, Bitcoin isn't a scheme to destroy the world by exhausting energy or destroying the planet, it's just a bunch of people who want distributed consensus and they're willing to pay for it and you can't fathom why. You don't complain about aluminum fiends or anybody else spending money and potentially exploiting carbon…
Except exponential scarcity is built in, we're not near the end yet, and the scarcity is causing exponential growth in energy expenditure, carbon release, and heat. Bitcoin would be the perfect scheme to destroy the world.
Re: Bitcoin consumes 2nd highest electricity per capita
#50Right now very few people are actually using Bitcoin for everyday transactions, and yet still the carbon footprint rivals many large countries. If this became the world’s primary currency (as many crypto fans seem to want) it would increase our total carbon footprint by multiple orders of magnitude. I do not see many people in the crypto community approaching this with the deadly seriousness it deserves. Most convers…
Forgive me if this is a dumb comment, but my understanding is that bitcoin's footprint is largely due to mining, correct? But bitcoin itself is considered an asset (in the US, at least). So in theory, it's possible to just trade bitcoins off-chain (either on another blockchain or just using boring centralized tech) without necessarily incurring a corresponding increase in mining-related costs, right? IIRC Polkadot st…
> So in theory, it's possible to just trade bitcoins off-chain (either on another blockchain or just using boring centralized tech) without necessarily incurring a corresponding increase in mining-related costs, right?
The mining-related costs are mostly unrelated to whether the bitcoins are traded on-chain or off-chain. The mining-related costs are more directly related to the price of bitcoin, or rather, how much a miner can earn with the block rewards and transaction fees. By trading bitcoin, even off-chain, you increase the demand for bitcoin, and therefore indirectly increase its price; the only difference is that by trading off-chain, the miners don't receive the transaction fees (which are currently less than 2% of the block rewards).