[danShumway]

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.

[hrhrhrhrhr]

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.

[danShumway]

> 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.

[hrhrhrhrhr]

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.

[danShumway]

> 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.

[hrhrhrhrhr]

>If proof-of-work chains are putting out the same amount of energy as the total energy expenditure of gaming, then proof-of-work chains are not an environmentally feasible solution at scale.

Chain capacity does not scale as new miners are added. Bitcoin/Ethereum does not consume more energy as more people use it.

>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.

Not really, you're trying to include subjective value into the simple issue of wasting energy. From my point of view, videogames are less important than having a decentralized monetary system. Now what?

[danShumway]

> Bitcoin/Ethereum does not consume more energy as more people use it.

Eh... you are correct that capacity is separate from the number of miners. You are incorrect that the number of miners don't increase as chains get more attention, and incorrect that miners don't increase as new chains get created.

Somewhat worse, we're both kind of glossing over the fact that mining cost/profit is what puts a limit on the number miners more than anything else including demand. That means that widely available cheap electricity becomes something of an impossibility under this system because as electricity gets cheaper, more mining operations get set up. As coins go up in value, the cost/benefit of mining changes, and more miners get set up.

There isn't really a version of this world where coins become tremendously valuable or renewable electricity becomes cheap and widely available, and we don't have any new miners entering the system. In fact, quite the opposite, the system relies on that not happening -- if electricity and GPUs get too cheap, the network has to scale or it becomes vulnerable to attacks from rich actors.

> videogames are less important than having a decentralized monetary system. Now what?

What's now is that you haven't got a decentralized monetary system, all of it has been a pointless waste.

Bitcoin's fees are too high for normal transactions and the transaction speed is too low, the Lightning Network hasn't really worked out the way people hoped it would and has helped re-centralize parts of the chain and make it less secure. The ecosystem is fragmented because people fork chains when they're not high-enough capacity and build new ones, and the vast majority of Bitcoin holders are treating Bitcoin as a speculative asset, not as a daily currency -- which the government has bowed to and now recognizes for the purposes of tax returns, making the 'currency' wildly complicated to use legally as a normal transaction method.

Far from being a general-purpose asset, NFTs commonly have double-digit transaction fees to work with or mint, making them unsuitable for the vast majority of artists who are interested in them. They're plagued with copyright issues and asset theft, which has demonstrated that these so-called decentralized systems actually rely a lot on traditional centralized power-structures like governments to force legal norms and to prevent scams. And half of your community is running around saying things like "energy is security", which really does not bode well for the future of blockchain or the environment.

So you've spent all of this energy and wasted all of this power and you didn't even get the subjective thing you wanted out of it. At least the rest of us can actually boot into Crysis today with our GPUs.