[Feeble]

The energy is not used to handle the transactions, the energy is used to secure the network.

> Instead of being used for something useful

Bitcoin uses less energy than YouTube. Wether you think having a decentralized, global monetary system that gives everyone an opportunity to own sound money that the government cannot take away is more or less useful than YouTube is of course something everyone is entitled to have an opinion on.

It might be that you are correct, it is too early to tell, but you are no the final judge of what is useful in the world or not, so this quote is just your personal opinion and nothing more.

[upwardbound]

> Bitcoin uses less energy than YouTube

I believe this is totally wrong - I think Bitcoin uses significantly more than YouTube. Where did you get your numbers?

The 2020 Google Environmental Report [1] lists the total energy consumption of all Google/Alphabet data centers as ~12.2 TWh/year in 2019 and growing at about 2 TWh/year. (See page 32.) So in 2022 the approximate usage for all Google/Alphabet properties, not just YouTube, would be about 18.2 TWh.

Meanwhile, Statista estimates Bitcoin as consuming about 177 TWh/year [2].

So this means Bitcoin consumes about 10x as much as not just YouTube but all Google/Alphabet data centers combined!

There are some urban legends about YouTube using much more energy than it does; some of those urban legends are refuted here: [3]

[1] https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2020-e... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin... [3] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str...

[mrtranscendence]

Whether Bitcoin uses less energy today than YouTube is immaterial. (As is whether Bitcoin counts as "sound money", which I'll leave to the side.) What's important is the energy use per transaction, the total of which -- if scaled up to match what's handled by traditional banking -- would be absolutely staggering.

My lifestyle of keeping my high-end PC running all the time, cranking the AC down to 68, turning all the lights on, and so on, would of course use less energy than YouTube. But if everyone behaved as I do it'd be a bad thing (don't tell Kant).

[gnaritas99]

"If scaled up" presumes incorrectly that the costs are somehow linearly bound to the number of transactions, they are not, so that whole line of reasoning is flawed.