Are you saying that people playing video games are more energy intensive than literal warehouses full of GPU's running 24/7 mining ethereum? Nobody talks about that because it's a horrible comparison.
Does one person playing a game on their PS5 for a few hours a day really have the same footprint as one crypto miner running a swarm of several hundred or even thousands of GPUs for the same period of time (ignoring the reality that those things are mining 24/7)?
I don't really know how you can equate the two and also say that an individual person has no incentive to keep their househould energy costs at a minimum. Especially when you consider the socioeconomic status of the average gamer or their family, compared to the average owner of a crypto mining enterprise.
Do you think there are more GPUs running Ethereum than the total addressable market of gamers multiplied by hours played?
There are thousands of Ethereum nodes. It was as high as 12.5k earlier this year estimated [1]. Meanwhile, on November 29th, there were 27 million simultaneous people playing on Steam alone [2].
Even if you multiply the peak number of Ethereum nodes by every hour in the entire year, that still only hits ~100,000.
That's the point though. 27 million people playing on Steam alone is not comparable to 12.5k Ethereum nodes as a direct comparison.
When you think about it, it's kind of wild that a system with only 12.5k nodes (plus other chains with presumably similar sizes) is using comparable levels of energy to an activity that is satisfying (at least) 27 million people simultaneously before we even factor in other platforms like consoles. I don't think that's really a comparison crypto-propononets should be proud of.
It's a bit like if a local restaurant chain cost an obscene amount of money to run, and the owners try to play it off to their stakeholders by saying, "well, the entire global McDonald's franchise costs more to run when we look at the raw numbers."
Some rich dude spends $300k on physical security. That hires 3 guys with guns that are at his side at all times. Suddenly, due to bad business decisions, rich dude has 500 people that want to see harm come to him. Those 3 guys are not going to cut it! He need to hire 300 guys (at least!) to protect him!
Arguments against energy usage are saying "You dont need to hire 300 guys! That is a waste!". Well, no, it is actually highly rational from the perspective of rich dude.
Energy is Security. How much is enough? When you can outspend your adversary.
If you're arguing that the energy usage of cryptocurrencies are justified because they provide security, that's a different argument than that they're equivalent to the energy usage from games.
They're not, those security guards you're hiring have an outsized impact on the environment. Argue that the impact is justified if you want, but don't pretend it doesn't exist or that it's comparable to the energy output of much larger systems that service more people.
Cryptocurrencies on proof-of-work chains use a massive amount of energy; when you break down the energy-to-output, it dwarfs other systems like traditional gaming. The argument that cryptocurrency energy usage is the same as gaming usage really kind of flies out the window when you say things like "energy is security."
I mean, that's a pretty big difference between cryptocurrency and gaming. In gaming, we don't feel better about the ecosystem or more secure specifically because we're spending more energy, the energy is not security for us.
The comparison changes when you look at them in aggregate, so if we want to see how they stack up in terms of energy consumption, it would probably be useful to see how many gamers it would roughly take to use the same amount of energy as the person running a full scale crypto mining operation.
After that there is the subjective analysis about what we get out of those in terms of value since, externalities aside, you can't compare gaming as an activity vs. the activities that require crypto. I'm sure there are plenty out there who would claim that video games are a net loss to society the same way many folks think that about crypto.
Personally I think this is just the next in what will be a long line of trends as wealth consolidates upwards and the people attaining it keep looking for new and novel ways to spend or invest.
One-on-one I have no idea which is bigger energy cost, but last time I tried to do a Fermi estimate, it looked like gaming collectively was similar to crypto collectively.
But I agree with you that individual gamers have the same general incentives from a need to reduce household electricity bills.
Eh, I don't think it's the same. People don't run games on warehouses of GPUs 24x7. They boot up games for a couple of hours and then turn them off.
A big reason why these comparisons fall flat is because the only way people can make gaming and crypto energy use look the same is by comparing a niche activity to a mainstream one. Gaming overall takes up a lot of energy because a lot of people do it. When we ignore that fact and only compare the global numbers then NFTs look a bit better than they should, they look like they're maybe competitive by some metrics. But that's because they're an incredibly niche product with double-digit transaction fees that people don't really spend much time interacting with.
When we break things apart into a per-person comparison, there's basically no way I've been able to find to make proof-of-work energy usage look good. Just think about it from a purely physical perspective, every transaction on the blockchain uses GPU time spread across multiple actors. Of course that uses more power than a single person's GPU running for their own personal gaming system. Distributed systems pretty much always use more power because they duplicate work.
We know this, it's the entire foundation of proof-of-work systems, they're impossible for a single actor to keep up with and that's why they have security guarantees. But the other side of that is that a distributed network of multiple GPUs that needs to be run for every chunk of transactions on the chain is of course going to be more expensive per-transaction then the equivalent "play-session" of an individual playing a game.
Maybe if everyone did their gaming on Google Stadia the comparison would be more accurate (although even there I bet Google's less-decentralized system would still probably be more efficient than a network of GPUs duplicating the same work). But that's not the case right now, most GPU work for graphics for games are happening locally, and those GPUs get powered down afterwards. There's no way someone playing a Switch for an hour is using the same amount of energy as an NFT transaction.
Transactions don't consume energy. If everyone suddenly stopped making transactions, miners would still be there, running their machines to mine empty blocks.
So thinking in terms of "energy per transaction" is wrong, you should look at total consumed energy by mining industry as a whole and compare it to other industries energy usage also as a whole.
> If everyone suddenly stopped making transactions, miners would still be there, running their machines to mine empty blocks.
That's worse, not better. What you're telling me is that a gaming "transaction" doesn't make sense as a comparison because Ethereum never stops making transactions.
In which case... yeah, a person who's invested into video games is unquestionably doing something better for the environment than someone who's invested into NFTs on a proof-of-work chain, because the person playing video games has the ability to turn their console off when they stop playing.
A system that requires miners to run their GPUs 24x7 is worse for the environment than a system that requires you to run a GPU just for an hour or two.
I was not talking about better or worse, I was pointing out the flawed way to compare crypto mining energy usage with other industries.
>In which case... yeah, a person who's invested into video games is unquestionably doing something better for the environment than someone who's invested into NFTs on a proof-of-work chain, because the person playing video games has the ability to turn their console off when they stop playing.
The issue is energy consumption, not the moral feel goods of the gamer. It doesn't matter if you can turn off the gaming console if all the consoles as a whole consume more energy than mining.
> if all the consoles as a whole consume more energy than mining.
It does matter if you're advocating for mining and chain capacity to scale to the point where it can replace a financial institution. If proof-of-work chains are putting out the same amount of energy as the total energy expenditure of gaming right now as a niche system that isn't used by most people for daily transaction or as common assets, then proof-of-work chains are not an environmentally feasible solution at scale.
If your niche product uses the same amount of energy as one of the largest global entertainment mediums on the planet, then your niche product isn't scalable or environmentally friendly. Because you're going to keep adding more miners as you scale, as new chains are built, as mining becomes more competitive, and the problem is going to keep getting worse.
Looking at total energy expenditure and ignoring the actual amount of usage that energy expenditure allows is just a flawed way of thinking about these comparisons. Use some other substitute for transactions if you don't like thinking about playtime or sessions, but any comparison that takes usage into account is going to conclude that cryptocurrency is heckin inefficient: more inefficient than other technologies like games.
If you’re a miner, and you’re able to halve your power consumption without sacrificing any hash rate, you’re absolutely going to double your processing capacity to maintain your original power consumption, because it makes you more money.
A cab driver can’t do twice as much driving if they double their vehicle’s energy consumption.
Miners make a profit, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. If you can suddenly double your hash rate without changing your power consumption there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do that. You’re incentivized to maintain or grow your power consumption to make more or the same amount of crypto per kWh.
my gut feeling is that the blockchain is more energy intensive. but i am curious how much energy is consumed by a global online multiplayer game like fortnite or similar.