The Bitcoiners were wrong | Unfathom.ing
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    • @alekwithak@lemmy.world
      -19•2 months ago

      How much energy is used by our current financial system? How much energy is consumed serving ads to every human on every platform every second of every day?? No one ever questions that totally necessary use of our limited resources 🙄

      Edit: Didn’t realize you guys like ads.and the federal reserve so much. That’s gonna be a pretty major Yikes from me, Bros.

      • Corgana
        19•2 months ago

        How much energy is used by our current financial system?

        Orders of magnitude less than Bitcoin requires, which is the criticism.

        • @alekwithak@lemmy.world
          -14•2 months ago

          That’s quite a claim to make without a source?

          *It’s a wonder the rest of Lemmy hates this instance, y’all are insane.

    • The Bard in GreenA
      -4•2 months ago

      I always find these breakdowns to be a little bit disingenuous. Like, you could do this same analysis on the whole email system, or on the whole world wide banking system, including ATMs, or on the energy usage of all DNS queries or even on global ActivityPub activity, not to mention shopping on Amazon or browsing Facebook. People DO do these kinds of breakdowns on generative AI, for exactly the same reasons, and reach the same kinds of conclusions.

      Having a global computer network is INCREDIBLY energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. It’s not shocking that a given application of that network is energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. These kinds of analysis are put together by people who already don’t like cryptocurrencies (for all kinds of reasons both valid and ridiculous) who then go cherry picking MORE reasons not to like them.

      • Corgana
        17•2 months ago

        A better comparison would be energy utilized per user, in which case the energy requirements for Bitcoin are miles and miles ahead of what the average person produces using a computer in the same amount of time. Even a gamer, playing 4k 120fps ray traced games 12 hours a day would use a fraction of the energy of someone mining bitcoin.

        • @unlawfulbooger@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          10•2 months ago

          Exactly, if we do a back of the napkin calculation:

          Bitcoin

          Users

          There are 200 million bitcoin wallets, let’s be generous and say those are all owned by unique individuals.

          Total energy consumption

          Bitcoin used about 114 TWh in 2021[1]

          Bitcoin currently uses about 150 TWh annually

          Energy consumption per user

          150 TWh / year 
————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
200 million users

          Banking system

          Users

          There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.

          Total energy consumption

          The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]

          If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.

          Energy consumption per user

          348 TWh / year 
————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
4.000 million users

          With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.

          There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.

          1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.

    • @massivefailure@lemm.ee
      3•2 months ago

      Also the fact Bitcoin is essentially a pyramid scheme. Get more people into it to artificially inflate its value, take the profits, leave everyone else with diminished value, build it up again, get rich, repeat forever.

      Crypto should be illegal.