A quick google seems to turn up that this claim is from thefactsource.com based on the internet uses 10% of global power. And YouTube is 11% of internet traffic. So 1% of global power.
VS
An estimate of Bitcoin power consumption by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
I know which one I’m more prepared to believe.
Even if this were true. I go on YouTube and can learn things: recipes, FreeCad tutorials, coffee nerdery, harmonica lessons.
That article assumes that if YouTube is 11% of total internet bandwidth then YouTube is 11% of total internet electricity usage. That's a very dubious assumption.
But again, read what the person you are responding to wrote. YouTube provides something of value to millions. PoW is not required for cryptocurrency to function. PoW provides no value. It wastes time and energy for the sake of wasting processor cycles.
There is no subjectivity here. We are not discussing the perceived value of cryptocurrency. We are talking about the value of the PoW algorithm. It is objectively wasteful. It is wasteful by definition. It's entire purpose is to force computational resources to spend cycles on computationally expensive problems that provide no value to society. It is an interesting an novel idea but it does not scale and that is a problem since there is a very real cost to society in expending significant amounts of the planet's resources for no gain.
Bitcoin is like gold. It’s valuable because other people say it’s valuable. But nothing useful happens when you mine crypto. Was I entertained? Did I learn something? Are they producing a widget? Even gold can be made into jewellery or used in electronics. Crypto literally just uses power.
Come on... PoW provides no value? So the almost $1 trillion in Bitcoin is just, nothing? Not worth anything? I think the people invested would beg to differ.
There is no need for Bitcoin to use PoW. Bitcoin can continue to exist using a different algorithm to establish distributed trust. But since you brought up Bitcoin, yes, I would say that it provides little value to society in it's current state. It operates primarily as a speculative investment rather than a true currency.
What would you propose the Bitcoin core team should switch to? Have you looked into the other algorithms, the feasibility of migrating of the existing network, etc.? It sounds more to me like you've just written off cryptocurrency in general.
As far as I can tell PoW is the most proven consensus mechanism so far. PoS may be promising though. ETH2 successfully switching will be telling.
YouTube also promotes conspiracy theories, racism, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, anti-vaxxing, and so on. These things pretty severe negative externalities, to put it mildly. So let's not pretend that YouTube's existence is a net-positive for humanity; that remains to be seen.
I think the difference is that a means of building green buildings and green cryptocurrencies have been proven viable. Once the same happens for the category of product YouTube falls into (which goes beyond just video distribution), the non-green way can be eliminated.
"the internet uses 10% of the total electricity consumption worldwide. How much of that is consumed by Youtube? After Netflix and embedded videos, Youtube is the third biggest global internet bandwidth eater. About 11.4% of global internet traffic is consumed by Youtube"
That figure assumes that the electricity usage of the internet is exactly related to the amount of bandwidth - so if YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total bandwidth, that means that YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total electricity consumption.
No that isn't all YouTube does thank you very much. It's one of the greatest treasure troves of educational video content. It has helped my life, career, and those of my friends. It has probably contributed far more to humanity's advance, in efficiency alone, than most other websites of its kind.
That you only use it to watch videos that bring zero gain to your life is a You problem.
VS
An estimate of Bitcoin power consumption by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
I know which one I’m more prepared to believe.
Even if this were true. I go on YouTube and can learn things: recipes, FreeCad tutorials, coffee nerdery, harmonica lessons.
Bitcoin literally does nothing.