Most of the discussion here centers around utility and human benefit vs consumption.
What’s really striking about crypto using 16% of the power usage of data centers is the population served and utility provided.
The internet has roughly 5.2 billion users, all of which utilize the cited datacenters.
Bitcoin, as one example, has an all time high of 568k daily transactions.
US adults on average do 2.3 financial transactions per day.
Bitcoin, in the busiest day on the network ever, powered enough transactions for the economic activity of a small US city.
Anyone can look at a block explorer for [pick a network] to find that, at best, the total number of worldwide crypto users is roughly 0.5% of the internet population.
So 16% of the power for 0.5% of the users - and who knows what value/utility is achieved with whatever those crypto users are doing (not much).
Yikes... digiconomist. Literally zero credibility there. His name is Alex de Vries and he works for the dutch central bank. To my knowledge, very little of his blog posts have made its way to peer review and academic publication. For some reason that doesn't stop his work from being distributed widely as an authoritative source on this topic.
This paper has it's own problems with conflicts of interest, but it has gained traction recently and is worth a read to see things from another perspective.
Could also look into the work of Troy Cross, Margot Paez, and Daniel Batten who are climate activists and pro-Bitcoin because of the incentives it provides around building out renewable energy and mitigating methane emissions.
And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have to ask, "do they have an agenda"?
> This paper has it's own problems with conflicts of interest, but it has gained traction recently and is worth a read to see things from another perspective.
Like most defenses of bitcoin’s carbon footprint, the paper you linked makes the case that theoretically maybe bitcoin could be carbon negative in the future if certain things happen. If you look at the actual current source of power for miners weighted by hashrate in the US, it’s mostly coal and natural gas. Among companies that don’t have to report this, such as miners in Russia and Kazakstan, it’s likely as bad or worse.
> And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have to ask, "do they have an agenda"?
They have also published a lot of things that have been criticized as being too pro-crypto (such as the Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto).
What’s really striking about crypto using 16% of the power usage of data centers is the population served and utility provided.
The internet has roughly 5.2 billion users, all of which utilize the cited datacenters.
Bitcoin, as one example, has an all time high of 568k daily transactions.
US adults on average do 2.3 financial transactions per day.
Bitcoin, in the busiest day on the network ever, powered enough transactions for the economic activity of a small US city.
Anyone can look at a block explorer for [pick a network] to find that, at best, the total number of worldwide crypto users is roughly 0.5% of the internet population.
So 16% of the power for 0.5% of the users - and who knows what value/utility is achieved with whatever those crypto users are doing (not much).
It’s disgusting.