[ljm]

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.

[samtheprogram]

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.

[1]: https://ethernodes.org/history [2]: https://www.archyde.com/steam-exceeds-27-million-simultaneou...

[danShumway]

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."

[rfd4sgmk8u]

Let me give you another perspective.

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.

[danShumway]

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.

[ljm]

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.

[ben_w]

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.