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by walkhour
1159 days ago
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A non biased article would've mentioned how much Bitcoin mining accounts for the total energy used in US. And that would've been compared to the energy used in other industries. Take videogames for example. Just that datum would've changed the whole narrative of the article. The article does mention something in passing about how other industries at least bring jobs. I guess that's a net positive then. Were the authors aware of how tiny Bitcoin usage is and how much waste there is going around? Of course they were. Was this datum useful to the reader? Yes. Did the authors purposefully decide to exclude this datum because it didn't fit the narrative? Of course. Just imagine your average reader, if at the end of the article they were told, that we can't even agree on whether Bitcoin mining consumes more power than Christmas lights. Apparently that was not the case using the 2008 Christmas lights usage, and we don't know now, because both sides of the argument get wildly different values. Your average reader leaves the article thinking they know everything they need to know about Bitcoin: it's bad because it makes energy more expensive, and people have died, possibly because energy was expensive. |
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How would this be useful? Just comparing it to random things that also use electricity?
You need to do a like-for-like comparison. Bitcoin's ostensible purpose is as a currency, or some sort of financial trading instrument for speculation, so it should be compared to the energy efficiency in other financial systems.
It is, of course, woefully, embarrassingly inefficient when compared on energy use basis. The only thing that matters is: what does this energy inefficiency give you in return? The answer is 'decentralisation'.
As always, the question is about whether or not 'decentralisation' is useful, important, valuable, whatever. For most people, today, it simply is not, as evidence by the fact that absolutely nobody uses Bitcoin for any sort of practical transactional stuff.