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Are you saying that people playing video games are more energy intensive than literal warehouses full of GPU's running 24/7 mining ethereum? Nobody talks about

Are you saying that people playing video games are more energy intensive than literal warehouses full of GPU's running 24/7 mining ethereum? Nobody talks about that because it's a horrible comparison.

nyolfen 5y ago
it is literally the exact same thing distributed over a larger area. at least miners are incentivized to use cheap renewable sources.
- lwansbrough 5y ago
  Miners are incentivized to maximize their energy consumption. The fact that they're able to extract more value with energy efficiency is irrelevant.
  - nyolfen 5y ago
    miners pay energy bills, ergo seek out cheap energy. the cheapest energy is usually hydro. the efficiency directly impacts their bottom line.
    - lwansbrough 5y ago
      Miners make a profit, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. If you can suddenly double your hash rate without changing your power consumption there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do that. You’re incentivized to maintain or grow your power consumption to make more or the same amount of crypto per kWh.
  - hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
    That's like saying that cab drivers are incentivized to maximize their gas consumption. No, miners are actually incentivized to minimize their energy consumption while maximizing output.
    - lwansbrough 5y ago
      If you’re a miner, and you’re able to halve your power consumption without sacrificing any hash rate, you’re absolutely going to double your processing capacity to maintain your original power consumption, because it makes you more money. A cab driver can’t do twice as much driving if they double their vehicle’s energy consumption.
- blondin 5y ago
  i am interested in this comparison. my gut feeling is that the blockchain is more energy intensive. but i am curious how much energy is consumed by a global online multiplayer game like fortnite or similar.
- ljm 5y ago
  Does one person playing a game on their PS5 for a few hours a day really have the same footprint as one crypto miner running a swarm of several hundred or even thousands of GPUs for the same period of time (ignoring the reality that those things are mining 24/7)? I don't really know how you can equate the two and also say that an individual person has no incentive to keep their househould energy costs at a minimum. Especially when you consider the socioeconomic status of the average gamer or their family, compared to the average owner of a crypto mining enterprise.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    One-on-one I have no idea which is bigger energy cost, but last time I tried to do a Fermi estimate, it looked like gaming collectively was similar to crypto collectively. But I agree with you that individual gamers have the same general incentives from a need to reduce household electricity bills.
  - samtheprogram 5y ago
    Do you think there are more GPUs running Ethereum than the total addressable market of gamers multiplied by hours played? There are thousands of Ethereum nodes. It was as high as 12.5k earlier this year estimated [1]. Meanwhile, on November 29th, there were 27 million simultaneous people playing on Steam alone [2]. Even if you multiply the peak number of Ethereum nodes by every hour in the entire year, that still only hits ~100,000. [1]: https://ethernodes.org/history https://ethernodes.org/history [2]: https://www.archyde.com/steam-exceeds-27-million-simultaneous-players/ https://www.archyde.com/steam-exceeds-27-million-simultaneou...
    - ljm 5y ago
      The comparison changes when you look at them in aggregate, so if we want to see how they stack up in terms of energy consumption, it would probably be useful to see how many gamers it would roughly take to use the same amount of energy as the person running a full scale crypto mining operation. After that there is the subjective analysis about what we get out of those in terms of value since, externalities aside, you can't compare gaming as an activity vs. the activities that require crypto. I'm sure there are plenty out there who would claim that video games are a net loss to society the same way many folks think that about crypto. Personally I think this is just the next in what will be a long line of trends as wealth consolidates upwards and the people attaining it keep looking for new and novel ways to spend or invest.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Eh, I don't think it's the same. People don't run games on warehouses of GPUs 24x7. They boot up games for a couple of hours and then turn them off. A big reason why these comparisons fall flat is because the only way people can make gaming and crypto energy use look the same is by comparing a niche activity to a mainstream one. Gaming overall takes up a lot of energy because a lot of people do it. When we ignore that fact and only compare the global numbers then NFTs look a bit better than they should, they look like they're maybe competitive by some metrics. But that's because they're an incredibly niche product with double-digit transaction fees that people don't really spend much time interacting with. When we break things apart into a per-person comparison, there's basically no way I've been able to find to make proof-of-work energy usage look good. Just think about it from a purely physical perspective, every transaction on the blockchain uses GPU time spread across multiple actors. Of course that uses more power than a single person's GPU running for their own personal gaming system. Distributed systems pretty much always use more power because they duplicate work. We know this, it's the entire foundation of proof-of-work systems, they're impossible for a single actor to keep up with and that's why they have security guarantees. But the other side of that is that a distributed network of multiple GPUs that needs to be run for every chunk of transactions on the chain is of course going to be more expensive per-transaction then the equivalent "play-session" of an individual playing a game. Maybe if everyone did their gaming on Google Stadia the comparison would be more accurate (although even there I bet Google's less-decentralized system would still probably be more efficient than a network of GPUs duplicating the same work). But that's not the case right now, most GPU work for graphics for games are happening locally, and those GPUs get powered down afterwards. There's no way someone playing a Switch for an hour is using the same amount of energy as an NFT transaction.
  - hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
    Transactions don't consume energy. If everyone suddenly stopped making transactions, miners would still be there, running their machines to mine empty blocks. So thinking in terms of "energy per transaction" is wrong, you should look at total consumed energy by mining industry as a whole and compare it to other industries energy usage also as a whole.

nyolfen 5y ago

it is literally the exact same thing distributed over a larger area. at least miners are incentivized to use cheap renewable sources.

lwansbrough 5y ago
Miners are incentivized to maximize their energy consumption. The fact that they're able to extract more value with energy efficiency is irrelevant.
- nyolfen 5y ago
  miners pay energy bills, ergo seek out cheap energy. the cheapest energy is usually hydro. the efficiency directly impacts their bottom line.
  - lwansbrough 5y ago
    Miners make a profit, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. If you can suddenly double your hash rate without changing your power consumption there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do that. You’re incentivized to maintain or grow your power consumption to make more or the same amount of crypto per kWh.
- hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
  That's like saying that cab drivers are incentivized to maximize their gas consumption. No, miners are actually incentivized to minimize their energy consumption while maximizing output.
  - lwansbrough 5y ago
    If you’re a miner, and you’re able to halve your power consumption without sacrificing any hash rate, you’re absolutely going to double your processing capacity to maintain your original power consumption, because it makes you more money. A cab driver can’t do twice as much driving if they double their vehicle’s energy consumption.
blondin 5y ago
i am interested in this comparison. my gut feeling is that the blockchain is more energy intensive. but i am curious how much energy is consumed by a global online multiplayer game like fortnite or similar.
ljm 5y ago
Does one person playing a game on their PS5 for a few hours a day really have the same footprint as one crypto miner running a swarm of several hundred or even thousands of GPUs for the same period of time (ignoring the reality that those things are mining 24/7)? I don't really know how you can equate the two and also say that an individual person has no incentive to keep their househould energy costs at a minimum. Especially when you consider the socioeconomic status of the average gamer or their family, compared to the average owner of a crypto mining enterprise.
- ben_w 5y ago
  One-on-one I have no idea which is bigger energy cost, but last time I tried to do a Fermi estimate, it looked like gaming collectively was similar to crypto collectively. But I agree with you that individual gamers have the same general incentives from a need to reduce household electricity bills.
- samtheprogram 5y ago
  Do you think there are more GPUs running Ethereum than the total addressable market of gamers multiplied by hours played? There are thousands of Ethereum nodes. It was as high as 12.5k earlier this year estimated [1]. Meanwhile, on November 29th, there were 27 million simultaneous people playing on Steam alone [2]. Even if you multiply the peak number of Ethereum nodes by every hour in the entire year, that still only hits ~100,000. [1]: https://ethernodes.org/history https://ethernodes.org/history [2]: https://www.archyde.com/steam-exceeds-27-million-simultaneous-players/ https://www.archyde.com/steam-exceeds-27-million-simultaneou...
  - ljm 5y ago
    The comparison changes when you look at them in aggregate, so if we want to see how they stack up in terms of energy consumption, it would probably be useful to see how many gamers it would roughly take to use the same amount of energy as the person running a full scale crypto mining operation. After that there is the subjective analysis about what we get out of those in terms of value since, externalities aside, you can't compare gaming as an activity vs. the activities that require crypto. I'm sure there are plenty out there who would claim that video games are a net loss to society the same way many folks think that about crypto. Personally I think this is just the next in what will be a long line of trends as wealth consolidates upwards and the people attaining it keep looking for new and novel ways to spend or invest.
danShumway 5y ago
Eh, I don't think it's the same. People don't run games on warehouses of GPUs 24x7. They boot up games for a couple of hours and then turn them off. A big reason why these comparisons fall flat is because the only way people can make gaming and crypto energy use look the same is by comparing a niche activity to a mainstream one. Gaming overall takes up a lot of energy because a lot of people do it. When we ignore that fact and only compare the global numbers then NFTs look a bit better than they should, they look like they're maybe competitive by some metrics. But that's because they're an incredibly niche product with double-digit transaction fees that people don't really spend much time interacting with. When we break things apart into a per-person comparison, there's basically no way I've been able to find to make proof-of-work energy usage look good. Just think about it from a purely physical perspective, every transaction on the blockchain uses GPU time spread across multiple actors. Of course that uses more power than a single person's GPU running for their own personal gaming system. Distributed systems pretty much always use more power because they duplicate work. We know this, it's the entire foundation of proof-of-work systems, they're impossible for a single actor to keep up with and that's why they have security guarantees. But the other side of that is that a distributed network of multiple GPUs that needs to be run for every chunk of transactions on the chain is of course going to be more expensive per-transaction then the equivalent "play-session" of an individual playing a game. Maybe if everyone did their gaming on Google Stadia the comparison would be more accurate (although even there I bet Google's less-decentralized system would still probably be more efficient than a network of GPUs duplicating the same work). But that's not the case right now, most GPU work for graphics for games are happening locally, and those GPUs get powered down afterwards. There's no way someone playing a Switch for an hour is using the same amount of energy as an NFT transaction.
- hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
  Transactions don't consume energy. If everyone suddenly stopped making transactions, miners would still be there, running their machines to mine empty blocks. So thinking in terms of "energy per transaction" is wrong, you should look at total consumed energy by mining industry as a whole and compare it to other industries energy usage also as a whole.