[Yuioup]

I keep hearing bitcoin apologists saying "Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly but... check this out" as if that would solve the record temperatures we're having at the moment.

How about we stop using cryptocurrency completely. Time for the UN to get together and get this banned.

[notch656a]

You can't ban it. I mean you can say you've banned it, but you can't ban crypto. It's way harder than banning the drugs found everywhere in the world (I guess not a lot in Singapore, you willing to start chopping heads off for your goal?)

The best you can do is decide you don't like it, tell people not to use it, choose not to accept it, not to buy it, and rally your friend not to. That's all cool with me. But you can't stop crypto. If it dies it will be because something that replaces the advantages it presents comes along and people can't help but switch over to that.

[matheusmoreira]

Cryptocurrency's not responsible for even 1% of global energy consumption.

> How about we stop using cryptocurrency completely.

> Time for the UN to get together and get this banned.

How about we get the developed nations to stop trading with China instead? How about we get them to stop burning fossil fuels?

They're the ones ruining this world. Cryptocurrency is merely a little raindrop compared to that ocean.

[squarefoot]

> Cryptocurrency's not responsible for even 1% of global energy consumption.

1% is huge, especially considering the trend: Bitcoin alone tripled their energy consumption during last year. Source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Why shouldn't I think that 5 years from it could become 25% or more?

[matheusmoreira]

That's the figure responsible for my "less than 1%" statement and I'm not even sure how accurate that estimate is. Honestly it makes no sense to me.

> The index is built on the premise that miner income and costs are related.

> Since electricity costs are a major component of the ongoing costs, it follows that the total electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network must be related to miner income as well.

> To put it simply, the higher mining revenues, the more energy-hungry machines can be supported.

So BTC price shoots up all the way up to nearly $70k. This means miner profits will also increase proportionally since they get paid in BTC.

The problem is they try to correlate energy consumption with miner income. Profits are up so energy consumption must have risen proportionally as well? I'm not sure I buy that. When BTC prices rise, profits must be higher and therefore the costs will represent a smaller percentage of miner income, not the constant 71.44% that's apparently assumed by this study.

The way they estimate the minimum energy consumption does make lot more sense.

[donkarma]

What is your issue? If my dog bites a dog, do we need to ban all dogs? Cryptocurrency is not even that much responsible for emissions in comparison to countries or corporations. Who told you that crypto is bad?

[nmz]

The problem is mining, its a good idea, but bitcoin is basically an alpha project that is being treated as a fully fledged solution.

[cbxyp]

It's afraid.