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Scale does not inherently excuse. Energy for gaming could be routed to feeding/warming the poor; should 100 die of starvation/hypothermia so that 1,000,000 can

Scale does not inherently excuse. Energy for gaming could be routed to feeding/warming the poor; should 100 die of starvation/hypothermia so that 1,000,000 can play Fortnite? do you really want to continue such reasoning?

newswasboring 6y ago
Yes I do. This is why my country had a space program before we solved all our social issues. You need to look at how much good an activity actually does vs how much resources it will consume. Entertainment is a good thing so is space exploration. But ISRO did not consume more resources than all other social improvement plans combined. Bitcoin is consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country. _Combined_
- ha4fsd3fas 6y ago
  Gaming is also consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country __Combined__. Entertainment is a good thing, but watching a movie consumes a lot less resources than playing games so why are games acceptable? What about VR? VR uses a lot of GPU computations for something a small fraction of people use. Surely people playing VR could use some other form of entertainment that is less resource consuming. Or then we let people use their own resources the way they see fit.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    Gaming uses vastly less energy per person.
  - newswasboring 6y ago
    I would like to redirect you to @africanboy's analysis[1] of how much energy gaming uses. He did it well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26091220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26091220
africanboy 6y ago
in your example 100 bitcoin users would let a million of people die of starvation/hypothermia so that they can play blockchain. scale in general does not excuse, but consumption per capita should. A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour If you keep it on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is 876 KW/year. Which is not very much. At 120Tw/year with 5 million users BC consumption per capita is an astonishing 24,000kw/year (or 24Mw) Every bitcoin user consumes 27 times the energy consumed by a (quite powerful) gaming console turned on non stop (which is never the case) That's why there have been campaigns around the World to replace incandescent bulbs with the energy efficient ones. Compared to the traditional ones the new light bulbs can save up to the 80% of the energy, compared to a bitcoiner, a non bitcoiner can save ~97% of the energy by simply playing videogames.
- thebean11 6y ago
  > A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour You need to take in the manufacturing costs, costs to develop software, costs to run servers too, otherwise you're only measuring marginal energy consumption for a new user. Marginal energy consumption for a new Bitcoin user is probably small too.
  - africanboy 6y ago
    The website linked is actually measuring the amount of energy that BC is using right now to operate. It's not the total amount of energy used to create the BC network, the software, the HW and everything else. https://cbeci.org/ https://cbeci.org/ > The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) provides a real-time estimate of the total electricity load and consumption of the Bitcoin network. The model is based on a bottom-up approach initially developed by Marc Bevand in 2017 that takes different types of available mining hardware as the starting point. > The first number refers to the total electrical power consumed by the Bitcoin network and is expressed in gigawatts (GW). This figure is updated every 30 seconds and corresponds to the rate at which Bitcoin uses electricity. The second number refers to the total yearly electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network and is expressed in terawatt-hours (TWh). We annualise Bitcoin’s electricity consumption assuming continuous power usage at the aforementioned rate over the period of one year. We apply a 7-day moving average to the resulting data point in order to make the output value less dependent of short-term hashrate movements, and thus more suitable for comparisons with alternative uses of electricity.

newswasboring 6y ago

Yes I do. This is why my country had a space program before we solved all our social issues. You need to look at how much good an activity actually does vs how much resources it will consume. Entertainment is a good thing so is space exploration. But ISRO did not consume more resources than all other social improvement plans combined. Bitcoin is consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country. _Combined_

ha4fsd3fas 6y ago
Gaming is also consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country __Combined__. Entertainment is a good thing, but watching a movie consumes a lot less resources than playing games so why are games acceptable? What about VR? VR uses a lot of GPU computations for something a small fraction of people use. Surely people playing VR could use some other form of entertainment that is less resource consuming. Or then we let people use their own resources the way they see fit.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  Gaming uses vastly less energy per person.
- newswasboring 6y ago
  I would like to redirect you to @africanboy's analysis[1] of how much energy gaming uses. He did it well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26091220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26091220

africanboy 6y ago

in your example 100 bitcoin users would let a million of people die of starvation/hypothermia so that they can play blockchain. scale in general does not excuse, but consumption per capita should. A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour If you keep it on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is 876 KW/year. Which is not very much. At 120Tw/year with 5 million users BC consumption per capita is an astonishing 24,000kw/year (or 24Mw) Every bitcoin user consumes 27 times the energy consumed by a (quite powerful) gaming console turned on non stop (which is never the case) That's why there have been campaigns around the World to replace incandescent bulbs with the energy efficient ones. Compared to the traditional ones the new light bulbs can save up to the 80% of the energy, compared to a bitcoiner, a non bitcoiner can save ~97% of the energy by simply playing videogames.

thebean11 6y ago
> A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour You need to take in the manufacturing costs, costs to develop software, costs to run servers too, otherwise you're only measuring marginal energy consumption for a new user. Marginal energy consumption for a new Bitcoin user is probably small too.
- africanboy 6y ago
  The website linked is actually measuring the amount of energy that BC is using right now to operate. It's not the total amount of energy used to create the BC network, the software, the HW and everything else. https://cbeci.org/ https://cbeci.org/ > The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) provides a real-time estimate of the total electricity load and consumption of the Bitcoin network. The model is based on a bottom-up approach initially developed by Marc Bevand in 2017 that takes different types of available mining hardware as the starting point. > The first number refers to the total electrical power consumed by the Bitcoin network and is expressed in gigawatts (GW). This figure is updated every 30 seconds and corresponds to the rate at which Bitcoin uses electricity. The second number refers to the total yearly electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network and is expressed in terawatt-hours (TWh). We annualise Bitcoin’s electricity consumption assuming continuous power usage at the aforementioned rate over the period of one year. We apply a 7-day moving average to the resulting data point in order to make the output value less dependent of short-term hashrate movements, and thus more suitable for comparisons with alternative uses of electricity.