7 ms·

A quick search finds that a single bitcoin transaction consumes around 773.80 kWh. That's enough to power a video game console, like a PS5 for example, for arou

A quick search finds that a single bitcoin transaction consumes around 773.80 kWh. That's enough to power a video game console, like a PS5 for example, for around 3100 hours. So the simple act of buying the video game to play would cost vastly more electricity than playing it ever will. Whether or not gaming as a whole consumes more power than crypto as a whole isn't the question, it's whether or not crypto would consume more power per person using it than per gamer playing games. As in, give everyone a ~fixed power consumption quota - where is that power "better" spent, gaming or crypto?

madrox 6y ago
I honestly don't know where the power is better spent. There are quite a few industries I personally find superfluous in the world according to my personal set of values. Ironically for this context, I consider bitcoin to be among them. But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do. We do this for blockchain because calculating this is easy. We don't even have these numbers for, say, the stock market, so we don't even know how good or bad that is. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  > We don't even have these numbers for, say, the stock market, so we don't even know how good or bad that is. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis. Crypto isn't competing against the stock market, it's competing against something like Visa. And we can answer that comparison: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/#:~:text=Average%20energy%20consumption%20per%20transaction%20for%20Bitcoin%20and%20VISA%202020&text=This%20was%20significantly%20more%20compared,transaction%20than%20100%2C000%20VISA%20transactions https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co.... 1 bitcoin transaction takes more power than 100,000 Visa transactions. > But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do. That's exactly what I think we as a society should do. We are limited on the amount of sustainable power generation, so looking at cost vs. value is exactly what we should be doing. Especially when something comes along that does the same basic thing as an existing system, but 100,000x more expensive.

madrox 6y ago

I honestly don't know where the power is better spent. There are quite a few industries I personally find superfluous in the world according to my personal set of values. Ironically for this context, I consider bitcoin to be among them. But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do. We do this for blockchain because calculating this is easy. We don't even have these numbers for, say, the stock market, so we don't even know how good or bad that is. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis.

kllrnohj 6y ago
> We don't even have these numbers for, say, the stock market, so we don't even know how good or bad that is. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis. Crypto isn't competing against the stock market, it's competing against something like Visa. And we can answer that comparison: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/#:~:text=Average%20energy%20consumption%20per%20transaction%20for%20Bitcoin%20and%20VISA%202020&text=This%20was%20significantly%20more%20compared,transaction%20than%20100%2C000%20VISA%20transactions https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co.... 1 bitcoin transaction takes more power than 100,000 Visa transactions. > But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do. That's exactly what I think we as a society should do. We are limited on the amount of sustainable power generation, so looking at cost vs. value is exactly what we should be doing. Especially when something comes along that does the same basic thing as an existing system, but 100,000x more expensive.