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From the article > In the last financial year the most used cryptocurrency was Bitcoin. We have never held cryptocurrency, and spot-convert donations daily int

From the article > In the last financial year the most used cryptocurrency was Bitcoin. We have never held cryptocurrency, and spot-convert donations daily into fiat currency (USD), which doesn’t have a significant environmental impact. Every Proof-of-Work system consumes energy, whether you make transactions on them or not (a graveyard of barely used POW blockchain systems that are all still being mined prove this). So really, this is just symbolism politics...

WorldMaker 5y ago
Yeah, the spot-conversion itself guarantees at least one transaction that needs to be mined into a block, which implies all of the energy consumption that it takes to mine a single block, paid up front immediately. (On top of the energy consumption of the transaction that resulted in the donation as well.) They'd almost have a stronger case if they explicitly were holding on to the cryptocurrencies without transacting them as a rainy day fund, and their plans to minimize energy usage were to sell the wallet (private key) all or nothing in an off-chain exchange with no on-chain transactions to complete the sale. That still doesn't solve the massive energy usage of the transactions that "donated" those funds into the wallets in the first place. It sequesters some amount amount of transactions in theory, briefly while things aren't moving in that specific wallet, but doesn't solve for the massive future energy needs of whatever the next person expected to transact with that wallet either.
- nybble41 5y ago
  > Yeah, the spot-conversion itself guarantees at least one transaction that needs to be mined into a block, which implies all of the energy consumption that it takes to mine a single block, paid up front immediately. (On top of the energy consumption of the transaction that resulted in the donation as well.) Transactions per se do not have any notable "energy cost". The block would have been mined whether there are transactions to include in it or not, and adding a transaction does not measurably increase the energy cost of mining the block. If a fee is included then this slightly increases the amount of energy miners are willing to spend to obtain that fee, but transactions fees at this point are trivial compared to the fixed block rewards, and more than offset by the fact that they are selling the bitcoins immediately upon receipt and thus putting downward pressure on the price.

WorldMaker 5y ago

Yeah, the spot-conversion itself guarantees at least one transaction that needs to be mined into a block, which implies all of the energy consumption that it takes to mine a single block, paid up front immediately. (On top of the energy consumption of the transaction that resulted in the donation as well.) They'd almost have a stronger case if they explicitly were holding on to the cryptocurrencies without transacting them as a rainy day fund, and their plans to minimize energy usage were to sell the wallet (private key) all or nothing in an off-chain exchange with no on-chain transactions to complete the sale. That still doesn't solve the massive energy usage of the transactions that "donated" those funds into the wallets in the first place. It sequesters some amount amount of transactions in theory, briefly while things aren't moving in that specific wallet, but doesn't solve for the massive future energy needs of whatever the next person expected to transact with that wallet either.

nybble41 5y ago
> Yeah, the spot-conversion itself guarantees at least one transaction that needs to be mined into a block, which implies all of the energy consumption that it takes to mine a single block, paid up front immediately. (On top of the energy consumption of the transaction that resulted in the donation as well.) Transactions per se do not have any notable "energy cost". The block would have been mined whether there are transactions to include in it or not, and adding a transaction does not measurably increase the energy cost of mining the block. If a fee is included then this slightly increases the amount of energy miners are willing to spend to obtain that fee, but transactions fees at this point are trivial compared to the fixed block rewards, and more than offset by the fact that they are selling the bitcoins immediately upon receipt and thus putting downward pressure on the price.