4 ms·

You don't use a wash dryer I assume. Or Christmas lights? Plugged out all standby appliances? Never drive a car? Working without a laptop? Comparing energy usa

You don't use a wash dryer I assume. Or Christmas lights? Plugged out all standby appliances? Never drive a car? Working without a laptop? Comparing energy usage of a global system with the total energy usage of a country is absurd, and people doing it should feel ashamed they didnt rationally think about what they said/wrote.

lkrubner 4y ago
A dish washing machine is useful. A clothes washing machine is useful. Christmas lights help celebrate a tradition that's important to billions of people, some of whom see deep religious meaning it. Cars are useful. Laptops are useful. As such, none of these things can be compared to blockchain. You're making an invalid comparison. To take one use case of blockchain, Bitcoin debuted in 2009. It's been 13 years, about half the age of the commercial Web. If blockchain was going to lead to something useful, then that would have happened already. Its failure to find a use case suggests that this is pure hype.
Beldin 4y ago
It is absurd, but such absurdity is needed to make the energy waste relatable. You could compare a blockchain transaction's energy use to that of a credit card payment. But that would not convey the scale difference.
NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
How about we compare the energy usage of a single transaction against the entire home electricity costs of a two-person household, then? A single bitcoin transaction uses more electricity than my apartment does in two months (at least during the spring).
Mordisquitos 4y ago
The fundamental difference between (proof-of-work) blockchains and the examples that you mentioned is that (pow) blockchains not only must consume ever increasing amounts of electricity by their very design, but they also incentivise doing so as much as possible, the only limit being whether you can afford it. Let's take Bitcoin for instance. I'm pretty sure that the electricity required to perform one single BTC transaction has grown by multiple orders of magnitude since Bitcoin first appeared, regardless of the possible efficiency improvements in GPUs or ASICs, and will continue to grow—hence, profitability will always scale linearly with the willingness and capability to waste. On the other hand, dryers, Christmas lights, appliances, cars and laptops etc. have, if anything, all become more energy-efficient in the past decade, being able to perform the same funcion or better while using less power. On top of that, there's only so much washing you want to dry, or so many places you want to drive to—you don't want to indefinitely scale up the size of your dryer, or the number of cars you drive. And if you were to find a reason to scale up either of them, it would be because there is a business opportunity in providing a material service to customers, either laundry or transport. In that case, your profitability would be limited by how many people want their clothes dried or to be driven somewhere, and not just by how big you can afford the dryer or how many cars you can accumulate.

lkrubner 4y ago

A dish washing machine is useful. A clothes washing machine is useful. Christmas lights help celebrate a tradition that's important to billions of people, some of whom see deep religious meaning it. Cars are useful. Laptops are useful. As such, none of these things can be compared to blockchain. You're making an invalid comparison. To take one use case of blockchain, Bitcoin debuted in 2009. It's been 13 years, about half the age of the commercial Web. If blockchain was going to lead to something useful, then that would have happened already. Its failure to find a use case suggests that this is pure hype.

Beldin 4y ago

It is absurd, but such absurdity is needed to make the energy waste relatable. You could compare a blockchain transaction's energy use to that of a credit card payment. But that would not convey the scale difference.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago

How about we compare the energy usage of a single transaction against the entire home electricity costs of a two-person household, then? A single bitcoin transaction uses more electricity than my apartment does in two months (at least during the spring).

Mordisquitos 4y ago

The fundamental difference between (proof-of-work) blockchains and the examples that you mentioned is that (pow) blockchains not only must consume ever increasing amounts of electricity by their very design, but they also incentivise doing so as much as possible, the only limit being whether you can afford it. Let's take Bitcoin for instance. I'm pretty sure that the electricity required to perform one single BTC transaction has grown by multiple orders of magnitude since Bitcoin first appeared, regardless of the possible efficiency improvements in GPUs or ASICs, and will continue to grow—hence, profitability will always scale linearly with the willingness and capability to waste. On the other hand, dryers, Christmas lights, appliances, cars and laptops etc. have, if anything, all become more energy-efficient in the past decade, being able to perform the same funcion or better while using less power. On top of that, there's only so much washing you want to dry, or so many places you want to drive to—you don't want to indefinitely scale up the size of your dryer, or the number of cars you drive. And if you were to find a reason to scale up either of them, it would be because there is a business opportunity in providing a material service to customers, either laundry or transport. In that case, your profitability would be limited by how many people want their clothes dried or to be driven somewhere, and not just by how big you can afford the dryer or how many cars you can accumulate.