[deadmetheny]

>Why is everyone obsessed with bitcoin electricity consumption? I wonder how much energy is required by the banking system to operate

People care because Bitcoin is, by design, massively wasteful. The banking system's energy use can be curtailed with green tech. Bitcoin's entire ledger is powered by proof of work, which by definition requires computers to grind at maximum power calculating millions of hashes. And the difficulty goes up if more people are mining. And on top of that, the Bitcoin network is extremely slow and several orders of magnitude less efficient than other banking systems in terms of transactions per second.

Everyone is obsessed because we're wasting damn near 1% of the world's energy so nerds can speculate on Dunning-Krugerrands and it's not doing anyone any favours in the long run.

[enkiie]

> People care because Bitcoin is, by design, massively wasteful. The banking system's energy use can be curtailed with green tech.

Still does not explain how the current banking industry along with others, such as the entertainment industry is not "massively wasteful" by design. Sure, maybe a small portion of the banking system's energy can be curtailed with green tech, but what about the 24 hour ATM, the light posts at the banks, the AC units in each branch, the massive skyscrapers in which all of the banks corporate offices operate? and the energy required to build all of that infrastructure? As stated already, there are countless number of things that "waste energy", and in some cases "by design". Check out "b.s. jobs" on wikipedia.

[deadmetheny]

>Still does not explain how the current banking industry along with others, such as the entertainment industry is not "massively wasteful" by design

a) The entertainment industry is irrelevant to the discussion of Bitcoin vs traditional banking systems. It's a red herring. Cut it out.

b) Bitcoin is using an amount of electricity comparable to the country of Ireland. The banking system might use that much power, but they're doing millions of card transactions a minute - there's actual returns and actual business being done. And literally everything you described is an externality that costs the system money - ATMs exist because they're cheaper than human tellers, the lightposts can use more energy-efficient bulbs, etc etc. None of these are explicitly designed to burn power.

On the other hand, if you add mining power to the pool, it makes it harder to get hashes, using more power. Bitcoin is regressive in its power usages. The traditional system does not actively set out to use more power. While due to inertia it may not make active strides to reduce it, but that's not the point here. It's not by design like Bitcoin is.

[TeMPOraL]

> Sure, maybe a small portion of the banking system's energy can be curtailed with green tech, but what about the 24 hour ATM, the light posts at the banks, the AC units in each branch, the massive skyscrapers in which all of the banks corporate offices operate? and the energy required to build all of that infrastructure?

The point is, that waste is all upkeep. Something the system tries to minimize, as it bleeds money through it. If ATMs can be made more efficient, the system saves money. In Bitcoin, OTOH, waste is not upkeep but a feature, which the system tries to maximize.

[lostmsu]

> which the system tries to maximize

How exactly the system is trying to maximize waste?

In fact, miners did more progress on efficiency in terms of pure hashrate/watt with a million time improvement in past 10 years, than banking industry ever.

It is demand, that is driving the energy usage, not the system on its own. I agree with the person above, that it is basically justified by increasing consumption of the service.

[SlowRobotAhead]

>but what about the 24 hour ATM

:D how many hours of an ATM running do you think it takes to get to 300kW or 1 single bitcoin transaction?

I’m going to guess that a single ATM might not hit 300kW in a year.

Your sense is scale is way wrong.

[enkiie]

You're right, I didn't keep scale in mind when listing examples. Didn't think it mattered since there are hundreds of relevant things that consume energy at different scales. Next time I'll avoid listing things that can be cherrypicked to make a relevant counter argument.