5 ms·
It is an issue, you have to compare it to other forms of payment, and it's several magnitudes worse than any alternative. > A single bitcoin transaction alone
by throwaway9936 6y ago
It is an issue, you have to compare it to other forms of payment, and it's several magnitudes worse than any alternative.
> A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment.
Read for instance this: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064 https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064
- knuthsat 6y agoBut other forms of payment are also non-issue. It's like trying to optimize my internet usage. Instead of having 200Mbit downlink active all the time (because I'm streaming random bits), I'll reduce it to 2Mbit because of energy consumption. Compared to everything else I'm doing, internet usage is a non-issue. We need to think about optimizing environmental destruction, water pollution, air pollution. Bitcoin consuming as much electricity as Argentina still does magnitudes less damage with that electricity than Argentina. I really do not see the issue. This Bitcoin environmental/energy footprint subject is getting so much attention and I really can't grok why. I can't believe someone would try to optimize the fastest functions first, instead of slow ones.
- dralley 6y agoWe are "optimizing the slow ones" so to speak. Per-capita electricity consumption peaked in 1979 and has been going down ever since due to improvements in efficiency. The same is true of per-capita oil consumption. And if you see a "fast function" that's just obviously unnecessary, which is trivial to get rid of, then of course you do that. I do that all the time.