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Certainly not a fan of crypto currencies since I don't see any good use in them but how come you only see comments like these in a crypto currency thread and no

Certainly not a fan of crypto currencies since I don't see any good use in them but how come you only see comments like these in a crypto currency thread and not in a, lets say, computer games one? Games certainly are more wasteful and as useless as crypto currencies are.

croes 4y ago
Games have an positive impact on the gamer relaxation. I wouldn't call that useless.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  And crypto does not have a positive impact on people "playing" crypto?
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    Sure, just as gambling does. You should compare energy usage of Bitcoin to gambling, not gaming.
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    Isn’t it a zero sum? If one wins money, one lose some.
  - croes 4y ago
    You can still be relaxed after losing a game, after losing crypto not so much.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Sure but the energy expenditure per-person isn't balanced per person for crypto, it's balanced to the amount of energy and money willing to be spent on the thing. If I "enjoy" crypto to the tune of a $1 million dollar server farm, that'll burn ridiculously electricity than the biggest possible monitor and the most powerful GPU available to power one computer for one gamer's enjoyment.
- tasuki 4y ago
  From my personal experience, playing computer games is a dopamine hit, but they don't result in me feeling particularly relaxed afterwards - often I'd play too long and feel tired, a kind of a hangover.
  - latexr 4y ago
    Try a different style of game. One which doesn’t reward stress. Alto’s Adventure added a zen mode so it would be even more relaxing to those who are playing it to chill: https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11785058/altos-adventure-zen-mode-photo-mobile-snowboarding-game https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11785058/altos-adventure-z...
hailwren 4y ago
The environment claim is total bs. Crypto uses 0.5% of global energy supply. It's beaten by things such as residential television use, and only the wasted light from outdoor lighting (0.85%). It's also the only time that people try to blame an energy consumer for the sins of energy producers. The environmental damage of energy is caused by coal plants, not how many people are watching the simpsons at the same time.
- wiseowise 4y ago
  > It's beaten by things such as residential television use, and only the wasted light from outdoor lighting (0.85%). TV usage is a contribution of billions of people. Same with outdoor lighting. Both are necessary, unlike Bitcoin.
  - hailwren 4y ago
    No, it's not outdoor lighting @ 0.85%. It's only the waste from outdoor lighting. Outdoor lighting is far higher. [1] But now we're playing a game where you tell me the thing you like and the things you don't like and I can either present a counterargument of things I like and don't like and we can both get mad that we have different preferences... Or, we can design a system that allows people to have different preferences without trying to regulate our preferences on each other. The math: (residential power %)(lighting %)(lighting % wasted) (21)(.13)(.35) = 0.9555% (oh, it was higher than I remembered) 1 - https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/energy-waste/#:~:text=IDA%20estimates%20that%20least%2030,plant%20875%20million%20trees%20annually https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/energy-waste/#:~:tex....
    - Aunche 4y ago
      "Mostly by lights that aren't shielded." Overall, the lighting is still necessary, it's just not as efficient as it could be. By that standard, over 99% of Bitcoin mining is waste because because most of the power goes into solving artificial difficulty. The only people who genuinely care about PoW are miners and a handful of enthusiasts. I'll generously estimate that 1 million people fall into this category. So you have a million people using .5% of the world's electricity just for one of their interests. Contrast that with the billions of people who enjoy videogames or outdoor lighting.
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Video games don’t consume as much electricity as modern western countries.
wiseowise 4y ago
You can make the same argument about any type of entertainment. It won't make it less invalid, though. Games are entertainment, and average gamer certainly doesn't consume electricity on a scale of Bitcoin farm 24/7.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Neither does any single bitcoin user? Miners should be compared to data centers, like those massive ones powering cloud games?
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    > Miners should be compared to data centers, like those massive ones powering cloud games? Data centers host more than cloud games.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      Which you consider a rebuttal because…? Its fairly useless as solely an observation, mining farms often also do other things with byproducts, so even if the crux of this conversation relies on a futile effort of comparing relative utility of "entertainment" or "bitcoin", it would be inaccurate either way
  - pred_ 4y ago
    If there were no users, presumably there would be no network (at least if "users" include people who are in it for the financial speculation), so it is meaningful to attribute energy usage to users. But how to quantify that? One reasonable approach that shows up a lot is to say that usage is making transactions, and just consider the energy usage of all transactions to be that of the entire network (since mining exists to add credibility to transactions). Then estimates will say that on average, any transaction uses more than 1 MWh of electricity.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      All of those presumptions are wrong. The network uses the same amount of energy whether a block has transactions or not. Surely you see how that would actually help your “I hate energy use” argument if you actually made that one. Your argument is a common argument though, its incompatible with the more accurate argument. Secondly, trading for speculation occurs offchain, meaning most speculators are not transacting on the network.
pkulak 4y ago
I’m not going to do the math, but mining probably uses several orders of magnitude more electricity than gaming. And one is art and entertainment. I don’t even know how to respond here…
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  >And one is art and entertainment This does not give you a pass for being wasteful.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    It's not wasteful. The energy is used for something, not deliberately wasted.
beAbU 4y ago
Video games are entertainment. Are you suggesting we shut down tv, radio, theatre, movies, theme parks, tourism because they are all wasteful and useless?
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  Well if we're trying to save the environment and make a better life for future inhabitants of this planet why not shut down all of these? Why shut down just crypto currencies?
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Because video games scale with the number of human beings (with access to that technology). Even the most dedicated gamer can only play so much video game at a time. Cryptocurrency, however, scales to globally available power and cost. Because of the inherent competition between mining pools, the amount of electricity dedicated to mining just grows and grows.
TheDong 4y ago
Plenty of things with "no value" use electricity, but these other things don't use electricity in an adversarial way related to it's monetary cost. Let's take the example of video games: bitcoin uses about 150TWh of electricity. From EIA.gov's stats, it looks like residential computer usage is estimated at 36 TWh across the usa (2.4% of residential usage, 1.5T kWh residential [0]). Let's assume all residential computer usage is video games, so it's using a nice 1/4th bitcoin. So, what's different about these uses? Well, let's say that we manage to make electricity 5 times cheaper by, say, building a fusion reactor or a ton of solar panels. In that scenario, those computers playing video games still use the same amount of electricity, and their power bill goes down. Not a problem for computers/games. However, if the price of electricity goes down, that's actually a problem for bitcoin. Bitcoin is using 150TWh of electricity, which sorta means to perform a 51% attack, you need 75TWh of electricity (I know, it's more complicated than that). Now that electricity is 5 times cheaper, cool, someone can attack bitcoin for 5 times cheaper right? Well, we can't have that, so bitcoin now has to use 750TWh to have the same security it had before. The same thing happens for improvements to ASICs or any other improvements pretty much. If bitcoin is cheaper to mine, that just means more mining happens and the cost of mining stabilizes back out. On the other hand, if a game can be optimized to take less electricity, or use fewer servers, of course that'll happen. Like in almost any venture, accomplishing the same work for cheaper is good when it comes to video games. That is the difference I see. Crypto isn't just wasteful, it's adversarial to the point where it resists improvement. If we reached some energy utopia where electricity could fulfill 100% of all non-crypto uses on the planet at no meaningful cost, bitcoin would have to use so much energy that electricity still couldn't be free, or else it could be attacked with the free electricity. I cannot think of any other use of electricity that has this adversarial property. [0]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...
- hapticmonkey 4y ago
  You need more than just access to electricity to mine. You need the hardware, somewhere to run and maintain it, as well as the whole supply chain leading back to chip fabrication. These are all limited. You'd need a multi hundred-billion dollar covert operation to do all of that and it would take years to build.
baby 4y ago
Because it's not a cryptocurrency issue, it's a bitcoin issue. Most cryptocurrencies are green.
- chx 4y ago
  Please elaborate how "most" cryptocurrencies are green.
  - baby 4y ago
    They don’t use proof of work, they’re similar to distributed database protocols
jayd16 4y ago
Maybe you don't like games but in what sense are they "more wasteful"? By what measure? Crypto is considered wasteful because you can compare it to cheaper, more traditional means of exchange. Games are entertainment or art that you can't really quantify in the same way. People enjoy the games themselves, not for any utilitarian purpose.
teapowered 4y ago
crypto is the only game where the person who burns the most coal wins
TomSwirly 4y ago
Because computer games do not consume 1% of the world's electric power. Because computer games give entertainment to three billion people. Because no one pretends that their computer games are going to overthrow the world's economic systems, and then try to sell them to some greater fool for much more money.
irusensei 4y ago
Not yet. I expect gaming and high end personal computing to be targeted sooner or later by the ever moving goalpost of environmental activism. Maybe in a dark timeline triple A gaming might be only available from cloud desktops as a service from licensed ESG and DRM friendly cloud providers. Crunching numbers and cryptographic calculations being a ToS violation. So I’m not a big fan of having people often with obvious hysterical political bias dictating what I do with the equipment and energy I paid for. This goes the same for mining or gaming. The idea that rendering realistic grass is okay but not SHA256 hashes is preposterous and borderline medieval. I’d say if there is a concern about energy usage please price it accordingly.
pnt12 4y ago
One is not like the other. Art and entertainment are not useless to society, just because they don't have a utilitarian aspect. You can see that millions of people enjoy art/entertainment in some form and pay for it. There are also big scams like predatory IP enforcement and micro transactions, which we should fight against. Cryptocurrencies were a revolutionary idea which has mostly resulted in crap results. Scams and random ware are rampant. Transactions are slow and expensive, unless you centralize them and lose all advantages of a decentralized platform. The environment pays huge costs with PoW, and PoS is always mentioned but never implemented by any of the big players. Also contributed to a shortage of chips and GPUs which affected the rest of the world. So no, one is not like the other.

croes 4y ago

Games have an positive impact on the gamer relaxation. I wouldn't call that useless.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
And crypto does not have a positive impact on people "playing" crypto?
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Sure, just as gambling does. You should compare energy usage of Bitcoin to gambling, not gaming.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Isn’t it a zero sum? If one wins money, one lose some.
- croes 4y ago
  You can still be relaxed after losing a game, after losing crypto not so much.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Sure but the energy expenditure per-person isn't balanced per person for crypto, it's balanced to the amount of energy and money willing to be spent on the thing. If I "enjoy" crypto to the tune of a $1 million dollar server farm, that'll burn ridiculously electricity than the biggest possible monitor and the most powerful GPU available to power one computer for one gamer's enjoyment.
tasuki 4y ago
From my personal experience, playing computer games is a dopamine hit, but they don't result in me feeling particularly relaxed afterwards - often I'd play too long and feel tired, a kind of a hangover.
- latexr 4y ago
  Try a different style of game. One which doesn’t reward stress. Alto’s Adventure added a zen mode so it would be even more relaxing to those who are playing it to chill: https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11785058/altos-adventure-zen-mode-photo-mobile-snowboarding-game https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11785058/altos-adventure-z...

hailwren 4y ago

The environment claim is total bs. Crypto uses 0.5% of global energy supply. It's beaten by things such as residential television use, and only the wasted light from outdoor lighting (0.85%). It's also the only time that people try to blame an energy consumer for the sins of energy producers. The environmental damage of energy is caused by coal plants, not how many people are watching the simpsons at the same time.

wiseowise 4y ago
> It's beaten by things such as residential television use, and only the wasted light from outdoor lighting (0.85%). TV usage is a contribution of billions of people. Same with outdoor lighting. Both are necessary, unlike Bitcoin.
- hailwren 4y ago
  No, it's not outdoor lighting @ 0.85%. It's only the waste from outdoor lighting. Outdoor lighting is far higher. [1] But now we're playing a game where you tell me the thing you like and the things you don't like and I can either present a counterargument of things I like and don't like and we can both get mad that we have different preferences... Or, we can design a system that allows people to have different preferences without trying to regulate our preferences on each other. The math: (residential power %)(lighting %)(lighting % wasted) (21)(.13)(.35) = 0.9555% (oh, it was higher than I remembered) 1 - https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/energy-waste/#:~:text=IDA%20estimates%20that%20least%2030,plant%20875%20million%20trees%20annually https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/energy-waste/#:~:tex....
  - Aunche 4y ago
    "Mostly by lights that aren't shielded." Overall, the lighting is still necessary, it's just not as efficient as it could be. By that standard, over 99% of Bitcoin mining is waste because because most of the power goes into solving artificial difficulty. The only people who genuinely care about PoW are miners and a handful of enthusiasts. I'll generously estimate that 1 million people fall into this category. So you have a million people using .5% of the world's electricity just for one of their interests. Contrast that with the billions of people who enjoy videogames or outdoor lighting.

aaronbrethorst 4y ago

Video games don’t consume as much electricity as modern western countries.

wiseowise 4y ago

You can make the same argument about any type of entertainment. It won't make it less invalid, though. Games are entertainment, and average gamer certainly doesn't consume electricity on a scale of Bitcoin farm 24/7.

yieldcrv 4y ago
Neither does any single bitcoin user? Miners should be compared to data centers, like those massive ones powering cloud games?
- wiseowise 4y ago
  > Miners should be compared to data centers, like those massive ones powering cloud games? Data centers host more than cloud games.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    Which you consider a rebuttal because…? Its fairly useless as solely an observation, mining farms often also do other things with byproducts, so even if the crux of this conversation relies on a futile effort of comparing relative utility of "entertainment" or "bitcoin", it would be inaccurate either way
- pred_ 4y ago
  If there were no users, presumably there would be no network (at least if "users" include people who are in it for the financial speculation), so it is meaningful to attribute energy usage to users. But how to quantify that? One reasonable approach that shows up a lot is to say that usage is making transactions, and just consider the energy usage of all transactions to be that of the entire network (since mining exists to add credibility to transactions). Then estimates will say that on average, any transaction uses more than 1 MWh of electricity.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    All of those presumptions are wrong. The network uses the same amount of energy whether a block has transactions or not. Surely you see how that would actually help your “I hate energy use” argument if you actually made that one. Your argument is a common argument though, its incompatible with the more accurate argument. Secondly, trading for speculation occurs offchain, meaning most speculators are not transacting on the network.

pkulak 4y ago

I’m not going to do the math, but mining probably uses several orders of magnitude more electricity than gaming. And one is art and entertainment. I don’t even know how to respond here…

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
>And one is art and entertainment This does not give you a pass for being wasteful.
- nicbou 4y ago
  It's not wasteful. The energy is used for something, not deliberately wasted.

beAbU 4y ago

Video games are entertainment. Are you suggesting we shut down tv, radio, theatre, movies, theme parks, tourism because they are all wasteful and useless?

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
Well if we're trying to save the environment and make a better life for future inhabitants of this planet why not shut down all of these? Why shut down just crypto currencies?
- fragmede 4y ago
  Because video games scale with the number of human beings (with access to that technology). Even the most dedicated gamer can only play so much video game at a time. Cryptocurrency, however, scales to globally available power and cost. Because of the inherent competition between mining pools, the amount of electricity dedicated to mining just grows and grows.

TheDong 4y ago

Plenty of things with "no value" use electricity, but these other things don't use electricity in an adversarial way related to it's monetary cost. Let's take the example of video games: bitcoin uses about 150TWh of electricity. From EIA.gov's stats, it looks like residential computer usage is estimated at 36 TWh across the usa (2.4% of residential usage, 1.5T kWh residential [0]). Let's assume all residential computer usage is video games, so it's using a nice 1/4th bitcoin. So, what's different about these uses? Well, let's say that we manage to make electricity 5 times cheaper by, say, building a fusion reactor or a ton of solar panels. In that scenario, those computers playing video games still use the same amount of electricity, and their power bill goes down. Not a problem for computers/games. However, if the price of electricity goes down, that's actually a problem for bitcoin. Bitcoin is using 150TWh of electricity, which sorta means to perform a 51% attack, you need 75TWh of electricity (I know, it's more complicated than that). Now that electricity is 5 times cheaper, cool, someone can attack bitcoin for 5 times cheaper right? Well, we can't have that, so bitcoin now has to use 750TWh to have the same security it had before. The same thing happens for improvements to ASICs or any other improvements pretty much. If bitcoin is cheaper to mine, that just means more mining happens and the cost of mining stabilizes back out. On the other hand, if a game can be optimized to take less electricity, or use fewer servers, of course that'll happen. Like in almost any venture, accomplishing the same work for cheaper is good when it comes to video games. That is the difference I see. Crypto isn't just wasteful, it's adversarial to the point where it resists improvement. If we reached some energy utopia where electricity could fulfill 100% of all non-crypto uses on the planet at no meaningful cost, bitcoin would have to use so much energy that electricity still couldn't be free, or else it could be attacked with the free electricity. I cannot think of any other use of electricity that has this adversarial property. [0]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...

hapticmonkey 4y ago
You need more than just access to electricity to mine. You need the hardware, somewhere to run and maintain it, as well as the whole supply chain leading back to chip fabrication. These are all limited. You'd need a multi hundred-billion dollar covert operation to do all of that and it would take years to build.

baby 4y ago

Because it's not a cryptocurrency issue, it's a bitcoin issue. Most cryptocurrencies are green.

chx 4y ago
Please elaborate how "most" cryptocurrencies are green.
- baby 4y ago
  They don’t use proof of work, they’re similar to distributed database protocols

jayd16 4y ago

Maybe you don't like games but in what sense are they "more wasteful"? By what measure? Crypto is considered wasteful because you can compare it to cheaper, more traditional means of exchange. Games are entertainment or art that you can't really quantify in the same way. People enjoy the games themselves, not for any utilitarian purpose.

teapowered 4y ago

crypto is the only game where the person who burns the most coal wins

TomSwirly 4y ago

Because computer games do not consume 1% of the world's electric power. Because computer games give entertainment to three billion people. Because no one pretends that their computer games are going to overthrow the world's economic systems, and then try to sell them to some greater fool for much more money.

irusensei 4y ago

Not yet. I expect gaming and high end personal computing to be targeted sooner or later by the ever moving goalpost of environmental activism. Maybe in a dark timeline triple A gaming might be only available from cloud desktops as a service from licensed ESG and DRM friendly cloud providers. Crunching numbers and cryptographic calculations being a ToS violation. So I’m not a big fan of having people often with obvious hysterical political bias dictating what I do with the equipment and energy I paid for. This goes the same for mining or gaming. The idea that rendering realistic grass is okay but not SHA256 hashes is preposterous and borderline medieval. I’d say if there is a concern about energy usage please price it accordingly.

pnt12 4y ago

One is not like the other. Art and entertainment are not useless to society, just because they don't have a utilitarian aspect. You can see that millions of people enjoy art/entertainment in some form and pay for it. There are also big scams like predatory IP enforcement and micro transactions, which we should fight against. Cryptocurrencies were a revolutionary idea which has mostly resulted in crap results. Scams and random ware are rampant. Transactions are slow and expensive, unless you centralize them and lose all advantages of a decentralized platform. The environment pays huge costs with PoW, and PoS is always mentioned but never implemented by any of the big players. Also contributed to a shortage of chips and GPUs which affected the rest of the world. So no, one is not like the other.