[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.