3 ms·
How does this compare to the environmental impact of the millions of people constantly surfing sites like Reddit all day? I always hear about how bad Bitcoin i
by ravenstine 6y ago
How does this compare to the environmental impact of the millions of people constantly surfing sites like Reddit all day? I always hear about how bad Bitcoin is in terms of energy consumption, but nobody seems to perform similar analysis on actually frivolous activities we all accept in our society.
- seibelj 6y agoNo - the only things that matter for electricity are cryptocurrency. All other frivolous uses of electricity cannot be criticized.
- wruza 6y agoBut how does reddit browsing scale? We may choose all-electric activities, but we still have only 24h/day. As far as I understand it, PoW mining and its energy consumption can grow arbitrarily, the only limit is a mining economy that grows with a coin value. And it grows fast. How much energy will it take if BTC or ETH hits e.g. $1M in few years?
- Sholmesy 6y agoThere was a comment in a sister thread positing that Cryptocurrencies currently use 1/3rd of the entire data center energy use on the planet. I haven't looked into this, and I don't endorse this data or the comment, but it's likely relevant to your question: Bitcoin uses about 1/3 the energy of all datacenters in the world put together. Datacenters use about 205 TWh/year. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow https://www.networkworld.com/article/3531316/data-center-pow... Bitcoin uses about 75 TWh/year. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption And that's with everyone on the planet using normal money every day and just about no one using Bitcoin.