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> We could allocate resources When you buy/sell crypto - money changes hands. That money wasn't really "allocated" to crypto, beyond miner fees, just redistrib

> We could allocate resources When you buy/sell crypto - money changes hands. That money wasn't really "allocated" to crypto, beyond miner fees, just redistributed. That cash still exists. The resources being allocated are graphics cards, human time, and electricity AFAICT. The power usage of crypto is relatively small compared to other active human endeavors. It's power usage doesn't approach other arbitrary value stores like gold and government backed fiat markets. Could it go somewhere else? Yeah - but could we reasonably produce enough to offset it in a positive sum game - definitely. As long as renewables are cost efficient (read: truly competitive with non-renewables) and are net-zero on emissions this misallocation of resources would be allocated to renewable power production in an efficient market. Graphics cards being misallocated... I'm not sure saying markets are inefficient because a financial market is outbidding video gamers is a compelling argument. Scientific use of graphics cards seems like a small part of the market, but I may be mistaken here.5

pclmulqdq 4y ago
IIRC, the energy use for crypto as a whole is on par with the energy use of the fiat currency system, if not higher. I don't know how gold mining ranks, but it may be well below crypto mining in energy use or well above. Mining energy use depends a lot on asset price, and gold prices are comparatively low (compared to other asset classes). Silicon and other electronic parts also get dumped into this market, when the capacity used to build those devices could be used for other things.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  A good reference to compare bitcoin to gold mining (and other human endeavors like brewing tea): https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index Gold mining and bitcoin are currently roughly on-par. But gold's energy usage isn't just mining. It's the entire supply chain from Cash 4 Gold stores, long term storage, smelting/recycling, etc. I don't have a good reference for the total cost of gold.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Oh, that is only for bitcoin mining. Is there a source for the entire crypto ecosystem since you want to compare bitcoin mining to the entire gold supply chain? I would suspect that if you include shipment and storage, you are still under bitcoin mining for the entire gold supply chain. However, the point still stands. Datacenters in the US use total energy less than 2 bitcoins. How many of those datacenters are moving fiat around? Way less than half? Things like brewing tea and heating houses take a ton of energy. Moving money around doesn't! Crypto is a huge waste, and that site does not suggest otherwise.
- worik 4y ago
  > the energy use for crypto as a whole is on par with the energy use of the fiat currency system That is an unbelievable statement just on the face of it. But if we say: "What is the energy use per transaction?" what then? The inefficiency of crypto currency is legendary.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I meant total energy spend for both systems. Despite the transaction volume being minuscule, crypto likely burns a similar amount of energy to the energy consumption of the global finance industry today.
    - worik 4y ago
      > crypto likely burns a similar amount of energy to the energy consumption of the global finance industry today. "likely"? What do you mean? And that illustrates how incredibly inefficient crypto is
kd913 4y ago
Those other endeavors scale significantly more efficiently and are a necessity. Gold is a requirement for industrial purposes, for jewellry, for chemical processes for medication. Visa/Mastercard perform many hundred of thousand transactions per second. BTC is limited to 350k per day, and consumes the equivalent CO2 impact as Austria. It can't and won't ever scale, which leaves it open to market manipulation and centralization as transactions move off-chain. It's not a small amount of energy wasted, and there are significantly more valuable uses for that energy, such as aluminum production or water desalination.
- gruez 4y ago
  >Gold is a requirement for industrial purposes, for jewellry, for chemical processes for medication. https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-industry-sector-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in... That might be true but 46.64% of gold demand is for "investment", and a further 8.58% is for "central banks". In other words, most gold produced is hoarded and not used for anything productive. If you're against bitcoin because you think it's a non-productive use of energy, you should also be against investment/central bank use of gold.
  - dotopotoro 4y ago
    Even if hoarded at the moment, energy spent mining the gold was not lost. Gold can be sold tomorrow for its practical uses. Energy powering Bitcoin transactions is gone. (Like the the energy powering bank servers)
Banana699 4y ago
A quick trip to Wikipedia's bitcoin page yields[1], which, among other comparisons, compares bitcoin's consumed energy to countries. At 145.9 TWh yearly, it's less than Egypt and Poland and greater than Ukraine and Norway. This is up from the 2021 estimates[2] of 121 TWh yearly, larger than the countries of Argentina and Netherlands. Bitcoin is intentionally wasteful, and I say this as a technical admirer. Its genius is the extremely simple idea of making writes to a distributed database so unimaginably harder than reads, so that untrusted network peers behave themselves and don't invalidate the state of the shared ledger. The network literally just asks you to spend your time counting to N at the top of your lungs so you don't cheat, if that's not waste then I don't know what is waste. This 'waste' is necessary when you don't trust your peers, you're buying trust with it, cold hard trust, as rock solid as P != NP. But look at the sheer hype crypto has amassed since 2017 and tell me with a straight face that all those "applications" need trustless distributed peers. NFTs literally store the actual data of the token on centralized servers that can go down or go wild with your data at any moment they goddamn please, the NFT on the blockchain is merely a thin reference. The ideal path for distributed trustless blockchains would have been as a small niche, an "elite shock trooper" technique when distributed trust among trustless peers is absolutely necessary. Ideally, miners would understand the simple fact that it's of no use to keep bringing better and better silicon to the arena, as the network swallows all in its big mouth anyway, and the network would then grow naturally so that it's approximately the power of NETWORK_SIZE * CURRENT_PC_POWER at any current year, instead of a never ending race to the bottom of sacrificing more and more silicon to the God Of The Hash. Alas, from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. [1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952

pclmulqdq 4y ago

IIRC, the energy use for crypto as a whole is on par with the energy use of the fiat currency system, if not higher. I don't know how gold mining ranks, but it may be well below crypto mining in energy use or well above. Mining energy use depends a lot on asset price, and gold prices are comparatively low (compared to other asset classes). Silicon and other electronic parts also get dumped into this market, when the capacity used to build those devices could be used for other things.

r3trohack3r 4y ago
A good reference to compare bitcoin to gold mining (and other human endeavors like brewing tea): https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index Gold mining and bitcoin are currently roughly on-par. But gold's energy usage isn't just mining. It's the entire supply chain from Cash 4 Gold stores, long term storage, smelting/recycling, etc. I don't have a good reference for the total cost of gold.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Oh, that is only for bitcoin mining. Is there a source for the entire crypto ecosystem since you want to compare bitcoin mining to the entire gold supply chain? I would suspect that if you include shipment and storage, you are still under bitcoin mining for the entire gold supply chain. However, the point still stands. Datacenters in the US use total energy less than 2 bitcoins. How many of those datacenters are moving fiat around? Way less than half? Things like brewing tea and heating houses take a ton of energy. Moving money around doesn't! Crypto is a huge waste, and that site does not suggest otherwise.
worik 4y ago
> the energy use for crypto as a whole is on par with the energy use of the fiat currency system That is an unbelievable statement just on the face of it. But if we say: "What is the energy use per transaction?" what then? The inefficiency of crypto currency is legendary.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I meant total energy spend for both systems. Despite the transaction volume being minuscule, crypto likely burns a similar amount of energy to the energy consumption of the global finance industry today.
  - worik 4y ago
    > crypto likely burns a similar amount of energy to the energy consumption of the global finance industry today. "likely"? What do you mean? And that illustrates how incredibly inefficient crypto is

kd913 4y ago

Those other endeavors scale significantly more efficiently and are a necessity. Gold is a requirement for industrial purposes, for jewellry, for chemical processes for medication. Visa/Mastercard perform many hundred of thousand transactions per second. BTC is limited to 350k per day, and consumes the equivalent CO2 impact as Austria. It can't and won't ever scale, which leaves it open to market manipulation and centralization as transactions move off-chain. It's not a small amount of energy wasted, and there are significantly more valuable uses for that energy, such as aluminum production or water desalination.

gruez 4y ago
>Gold is a requirement for industrial purposes, for jewellry, for chemical processes for medication. https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-industry-sector-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in... That might be true but 46.64% of gold demand is for "investment", and a further 8.58% is for "central banks". In other words, most gold produced is hoarded and not used for anything productive. If you're against bitcoin because you think it's a non-productive use of energy, you should also be against investment/central bank use of gold.
- dotopotoro 4y ago
  Even if hoarded at the moment, energy spent mining the gold was not lost. Gold can be sold tomorrow for its practical uses. Energy powering Bitcoin transactions is gone. (Like the the energy powering bank servers)

Banana699 4y ago

A quick trip to Wikipedia's bitcoin page yields[1], which, among other comparisons, compares bitcoin's consumed energy to countries. At 145.9 TWh yearly, it's less than Egypt and Poland and greater than Ukraine and Norway. This is up from the 2021 estimates[2] of 121 TWh yearly, larger than the countries of Argentina and Netherlands. Bitcoin is intentionally wasteful, and I say this as a technical admirer. Its genius is the extremely simple idea of making writes to a distributed database so unimaginably harder than reads, so that untrusted network peers behave themselves and don't invalidate the state of the shared ledger. The network literally just asks you to spend your time counting to N at the top of your lungs so you don't cheat, if that's not waste then I don't know what is waste. This 'waste' is necessary when you don't trust your peers, you're buying trust with it, cold hard trust, as rock solid as P != NP. But look at the sheer hype crypto has amassed since 2017 and tell me with a straight face that all those "applications" need trustless distributed peers. NFTs literally store the actual data of the token on centralized servers that can go down or go wild with your data at any moment they goddamn please, the NFT on the blockchain is merely a thin reference. The ideal path for distributed trustless blockchains would have been as a small niche, an "elite shock trooper" technique when distributed trust among trustless peers is absolutely necessary. Ideally, miners would understand the simple fact that it's of no use to keep bringing better and better silicon to the arena, as the network swallows all in its big mouth anyway, and the network would then grow naturally so that it's approximately the power of NETWORK_SIZE * CURRENT_PC_POWER at any current year, instead of a never ending race to the bottom of sacrificing more and more silicon to the God Of The Hash. Alas, from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. [1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952