My understanding is tha some commercial/industrial users will get a highly variable tariff. This may be cheaper much of the time, but can get ridiculously expensive at times of high demand.
The difference is that a bitcoin farmer can shut down at those expensive times, but a home user still needs to heat/cool their house, run their fridge etc, so the savings cancel out. Because of this, averaging the costs works out easier/better for most home consumers
They don't produce anything except some numbers. A total waste of energy. I had to laugh when this guy I know who is very "progressive" and environmentally concerned got pissy when I pointed out how much energy was wasted on bitcoin mining just because he was into it.
Right this is the fundamental problem. There needs to be some value to the Blockchain application which the crypto tokens support beyond just token speculation.
no. it just needs to end, as does pretty much our entire economic system, worldwide. and the social systems that support wasteful, destructive living. transform or die. that's the point we're at. is humanity up to it? well know within our own lifetimes.
If there's no demand for a particular crypto then people mining it can't sell it and go out of business. People mine this stuff because other people will pay them for it.
Except it's not really a currency is it? Nobody actually uses this stuff for buying goods and services, they treat it as a stock. Usually short-term trading that's essentially just gambling.
Normal currency also doesn't use more than 2% of the power generation of a massive country.
Real currencies use significantly less power despite orders of magnitude higher transaction volumes. They also have physical exchange options that incur no transaction costs and require no digital infrastructure. Crypto is just bad as a currency.
I feel like calling bitcoin a grifter scheme is kind of like calling fiat currency (edit: in general) a grifter scheme. Which I guess isn't entirely untrue...
Watch out! Lemmy is full of Fudd that are not part of the cult.
You need actual data to convince them and not even just the comparison of 2 numbers but something that takes into account the comparative size of both industries.
Don't worry, you will be able to laugh at them after your gambling addiction pays up.
(Jk you might not even be a line goes up guy but you do seem to have a lot of the crypto bible memorized)
Solar panels give about 100 watts per square meters best case, practically you'll be on half of that.. With the amounts of electricity they use, they'll need to cover entire nature reserves with solar panels to feed their miners. It's simply not practical
Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that's slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
Don't misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I'd rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.
they should be doing that, otherwise I don't get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn't worth it to mine cryptocurrency.
With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don't know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you're walking by one of the coin ATMs that's at one of my local stores I've watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks
Misleading title - the problem is not "crypto", it's pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top 10 9 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.
Isn’t it strange no one gave a shit about this a year and a half ago when the price was lower? It appears everyone’s concern for the environment and energy consumption only increases when the price goes up. Interesting correlation or may be causation.
Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).
What year do you think we'll get the first product mined and manufacturered in space? And how about the first space grown food sold commercially?
I would guess 2040 and 2050 respectively, we'll have the automation tools to get started by 2030 with government science projects then a decade for it to mature into something a company can try to create a market with, probably something that can only be made in low gravity like solve form of novelty such as space glass spheres or a special use material.
I think food will be fast behind because people will pay a lot for it and there's already a lot of research into it for use in space based living facilities.
Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.
What makes it less real than other fiat currencies, if I may ask? If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I'd argue it is "real money".
Just a PSA that the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (ETH) is no longer proof of work, and in the process, reduced their power consumption by ~98%.
"Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity"
"Traditional banks' total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. Totaling 139 TWh."
Not to mention banks impact on people's lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class.. to purchase disposable products
One Bitcoin transaction can spend up to 1,200 kWh of energy, which is equivalent to almost 100,000 VISA transactions.
I suspect that is on the extreme end of the scale, so let's be kind and slash 50% off of it, even then the energy consumption would be 600kWh per bitcoint transaction, and if we use the same data for VISA transactions, this is the equivalent of 50 000 VISA transactions, if these numbers are correct, crypto is insanely energy inefficient.
I will make no secret that I dislike crypto, but I did try and find objective data and summarize it objectively, I will also note that while I dislike crypto, I am not blind to the issues with traditional banking, they absolutely needs to clean up their act, environmentally and otherwise.
nah the power use numbers you gave are not on an extreme scale, the point of how the bitcoin and most cryptos work is designed to keep using more and more power
Proof of work is not even scalable to the level of current bank transactions. Ethereum network didn't have enough compute to clear the backlog created by some niche cat NFT "game" a few years ago when people still gave a shit about NFTs.
Limited purchasing power of the poor and middle class is a political problem, not a problem solved by tech, no matter what crypto gurus and tech messiahs will tell you. The most prolific crypto miners are the ones that already have more "traditional" capital to invest. So crypto is not solving the wealth divide, it is just making it worse.
I hate banks as much as anyone, but crypto is not the solution.
How does this logic make sense in your head? Does this suddenly not become an issue because something irrelevant is also bad? How does that make sense??
I've always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like "Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy" and we're supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn't say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.
Also, we don't make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don't go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.
There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me
Air conditioning literally saves lives, especially medically vulnerable people, the hell are you on about?
As others have pointed out, ~2% of the entire US's energy output is absolutely insane. According to the eia.gov, the US produced around 100 quadrillion BTUs worth of energy in 2022 (I don't fully know why they chose BTUs to measure the total energy output, they explain on the website, but that's besides the point). 2% of that is 2 quadrillion BTUs. According to psu.edu (I googled these sites on my laptop so don't have exact urls on my phone at the moment), the entirety of US households in 2017 used 4.58 quadrillion BTUs.
Think about that. Bitcoin/PoW coin miners are using enough electricity to power around half of all homes in the US. According to statista.com, in 2022 there were 144 million homes. These miners consume 72 million homes worth of energy. And for what? To solve math problems that benefits no one but Bitcoin/PoW coin investors?
We're literally seeing our weather patterns become more and more extreme every year due to climate change, which is also killing our oceans which is causing a severely negative chain reaction in the rest of our ecosystems... But, you know, fuck all that, I need to use an extremely inefficient method of generating currency that no one but enthusiasts/speculators/investors asked for. I'm not inherently against cryptocurrency; however, fuck Bitcoin and other extremely wasteful PoW coins.
And yes, printing dollar bills/other fiat currencies creates pollution, too. I agree that process should be modernized as well. And in some ways, it already has been undergoing modernization as more and more people use electronic payments vs cash, thus decreasing the need to print more bills.
Dude. It's 2.3% of a massive industrialized nation where most citizens have access to some luxury goods. A nation with nearly 350 million people being the 3rd most populous country.
It does NOT fucking matter if it's """"""waste"""""" energy. And no, we don't fucking make that arguement about things like ac because you know why? Someone is getting comfort out of it instead of burning seals to make a line go up.
It's a lot of energy for a global (!) maximum of around 7 transactions per second.
Unless you want to use the replica of traditional finance called Lightning Network. Then you have more transactions per second and a whole new set of drawbacks.
Even if it was green energy (which doesn't generate zero pollution over its lifetime by the way, we still need to produce the equipment to generate electricity and that's a source of pollution), that's extra power that needs to be generated that wouldn't need to be otherwise and it's used for something intentionally inefficient.