[thebean11]

Creating a token does not consume any additional energy. Transaction volume does _not_ scale with mining so it's a really bad comparison.

The energy is spent to secure the network regardless of how many transactions are processed (in practice, transaction volume is pretty much fixed in terms of "bytes of transactions")

[codebolt]

Bitcoin alone currently pollutes about the same as half the global airline industry. If cryptos really are the future, I weep for the planet.

[Sohcahtoa82]

The thing is, it doesn't have to.

Bitcoin (and all other Proof-of-Work cryptos, which is basically all the major ones) only consume tons of power because the incentive to mine creates an arms race where whoever has the most hashing power makes the most money.

Bitcoin could be run on a single computer mining on a 10 year old CPU, but then it would be highly centralized, and decentralization is touted as one of the greatest features of Bitcoin. But with the incentive to run your own miner(s), and make it/them as powerful as you can to get the largest piece of the block reward pie, it ends up being a massive energy sink.

That's why people are pushing for the change to Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum. By taking away the incentive to waste tons of power on mining, it drastically reduces the carbon footprint of it.

[thebean11]

Luckily mining with renewables is much less difficult technically than flying with renewables.

[colinmhayes]

Energy is fungible. Bitcoin using renewables just means that other electricity consumers are using fossil fuels.

[thebean11]

Energy is extremely difficult and expensive to store, it's not fungible over a time period. This is why energy rates fluctuate during the day. It's also not fungible between consumers not connected to the same grid.

When generating energy (either with fossil fuels or renewables) energy is often wasted because there is no immediate consumer or way to store it.

What you say _can_ be true, for example additional consumers of energy on the national grid, during times of high demand, will likely result in more energy production. It is not true as a rule though.

[jfk13]

Also much less useful.

[Supermancho]

How is that lucky?

[thebean11]

Lucky for Bitcoin, there's a clear path to reducing environmental impact.

[lostlogin]

Or we could use that power for something a little more practical which we can’t do without.

[thebean11]

Are you advocating for some sort of central authority who regulates what individuals use power for?

[emteycz]

What we? These are individuals, each with their own goals. Give them some other business opportunity and I'm sure they'll jump on it - it just needs to be as good as Bitcoin.

[smabie]

My (and others) livelihood depends on the existence of crypto currency. Seems pretty practical to me.

[skohan]

Is that true? That's shockingly more than I would have imagined

[salawat]

The network is not secured if you just offload the externality to the international electrical grid. You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.

[thebean11]

Not sure I understand your argument, because there are externalities the network is not secured? All consumption of power created by fossil fuels has negative externalities. Also, there's no requirement that miners are on the grid (lots of mining operations use off-grid excess power that cannot be stored).

> You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.

What? I'm not sure what models you're referring to