[tripzilch]

> with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands

Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so

It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page).

Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work.

It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina.

Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway.

My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago.

Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.

[jacobjjacob]

The value of air conditioning is much more than 20x the value of bitcoin. It might be more than 20,000,000x the value.

[KetoManx64]

> Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does.

Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.

[inigyou]

That's not correct. The complaint isn't about data processing energy, it's about the energy purposely wasted in the "how much energy can I waste today" e-dick contest that gives you the right to print new bitcoins. Of course everyone is wasting as much energy as they can.

[AnthonyMouse]

It isn't "as much as they can", it's as much as is profitable. Which currently means that if you're paying more than about $0.08/kWh for electricity, it isn't profitable and there is no financial incentive to do it.

Of course, this means that people with access to cheap electricity still have the incentive to do it, but now who are they? Well, the places with the cheapest electricity fall into two categories. First, the ones like Iraq that heavily subsidize the cost of electricity, but those countries tend to ban cryptocurrency mining because their intention isn't to subsidize it and that's otherwise what they would be doing.

Second, the places with a large amount of hydro or renewable generation, which then have cheap electricity whenever the intermittent sources have high output. So for example, the country that does the most Bitcoin mining by a fair margin is the US, and the top US state for it is Texas, which despite its reputation actually uses significantly more renewable generation than both the US and world average.

Moreover, cryptocurrency mining instantaneously becomes unprofitable when the price of electricity increases, so when those places with a lot of renewable generation see a period of low output and increase the price because they have to switch on fossil fuel peaker plants instead, the Bitcoin miners immediately shut down because paying the higher prices would be losing money. But loads that disappear quickly in response to higher prices like that are exactly what you need to increase the amount of renewable generation in the grid. You have 1GW of Bitcoin miners and 1GW of ordinary consumers and you can use 2GW of solar generation without needing to backstop it with anything because when solar output is at 50% the price goes up some and the Bitcoin miners drop out until the clouds clear.

With the result that mining tends to happen using excess renewable generation and funds and supports the increase in renewables as a percentage of the grid.

[allarm]

> Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain.

Which is a waste of energy.

[KetoManx64]

You know what's a real waste of energy? The federal reserve increasing the money supply by 50% in the last half decade and inflated away the savings of hundreds of millions of people that spent tens of thousands of hours of their lives earning that money through blood, sweat and tears.

[AnthonyMouse]

Who is keeping significant savings as cash in a mattress? Anyone holding investment assets sees nominal asset prices increase along with inflation.

The thing that really screws them is that the government calls the nominal but not real asset price increase a capital gain and wants to collect tax on it.

[allarm]

I see no contradiction here.