We're talking about just keeping track of who owns what amounts of a commodity. That part is using terawatt hours per year! I am very doubtful that the "keeping track of who owns what amounts" part of the stock market is anywhere near that.
Determining who has the rights to make changes to what data, auditing changes, auditing ever-changing access control rights, systematically changing these rules to adapt to technological advancements, etc. is the function which Bitcoin accomplishes that you are discounting from your perceived cost of the traditional stock market.
The financial sector is 20% of global GDP. Bitcoin is much less than 20% of world carbon emissions.
Further, fiduciary duty of corporations to maximize shareholder profit has led to almost every environmentally harmful exploit of externalities. I'd argue that the stock market is fundamentally responsible for 99% of all pollution.
Financial sector does not produce 20% of carbon emissions. They are maybe 0.1%. The act of trading on exchanges is significantly more efficient than the act of trading on blockchain. Because there really is no need for an untrusted ledger when there is the USG certifying that the NYSE and NASDAQ will not execute erroneous trades.
Bitcoin does not eliminate the idea of fiduciary duty. Bitcoin holders still expect bitcoin loanees to trade and operate in their financial interest.
for processing/validating transactions? couple hundred MWH. How much do you think the Nasdaq/NYSE mainframes really eat?
bitcoin numbers don't include the off-chain stuff either, lol.
Bitcoin energy is literally expended on a massive, inefficient mainframe that processes a couple hundred transactions a second. That's all - everything else is additional to that.
I have similar feelings, but if you apply this attitude uniformly it's nearly impossible to participate in the economy at all, since it's mostly riding on fossil fuels in one way or another.
At least with bitcoin you could theoretically throw up a pile of solar panels and directly convert that clean electricity into money.
Same here but I left because of the high transaction costs and low anonymity. I prefer privacy coins. Only problem is not many people use the smaller market cap coins for buying/selling stuff.
Depends on the hardware, mining difficulty, block reward. Right now? Something like 0.15 per kw/h is the break-even point, and if you're not getting below 0.10 you won't get the cost of your hardware back fast enough
In other words, you should mine if you're in China where you can get those rates
Pays zero what? They have to buy the hardware so I assume you mean electricity, pretty sure bribing allows them to operate, it doesn't cover electricity costs.
pays zero electricity costs, yes. A couple grand a year can buy you all the electricity you want. tens or hundreds or of grand per year, or millions. A couple grand is a lot in terms of China salaries.
you'll never find a systematic article on it, but these aren't the first or the last incidents.
they also pay much lower hardware costs than the US does, because it all happens off the books. Chinese mining farms with internal hardware/super cheap power are nothing new.
china doesn't and never has played fairly in terms of hardware or power costs. crypto as a whole has been embraced because it's a good system to move value past chinese capital controls, you just are getting your beak wet as that money moves.
just like those 2 million dollar houses in vancouver or whatever. Sure, it's great to be trading in that current, or providing property management services, or to be holding the asset as it's pumped up by that money moving under the chinese capital controls!
I'm not "smart enough" to calculate that acurately, but if the "cost per transaction" is high enough to get a couple of articles written about it, I won't participate into that.
Wow that's really noble of you, have you considered logging off permanently and living in a tent in the woods? You realize none of the world's problems ever get solved if you bury your head in the sand and ignore things right? I mean we could all go back and start living in caves again, that would certainly solve the climate crisis wouldn't it?
Greed creates waste in all venues.