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1. There's no need to compare to traditional banking. 2% of all US power is a lot -- the comparison is to all other uses of electricity. (But per-transaction tr

by eli 3y ago

1. There's no need to compare to traditional banking. 2% of all US power is a lot -- the comparison is to all other uses of electricity. (But per-transaction traditional banking is orders of magnitude more efficient.) 2. "I haven't read the study but maybe it's wrong and maybe the real number is way way less"? C'mon. Give me a break. Trusting that an EIA report is generally accurate is not evidence of being "emotional." Handwaving it away without even reading it is. 3. It's interesting and newsworthy that a small number of players are using a tremendous amount of electricity. The article is about bitcoin mining. "Video games" probably use a lot of electricity too, but dispersed across hundreds of millions of users. 4. You're entitled to that opinion, but I assure you that caring about massive energy consumption is not evidence of an anti-bitcoin conspiracy.

digging 3y ago
> "I haven't read the study but maybe it's wrong and maybe the real number is way way less"? C'mon. Give me a break. Trusting that an EIA report is generally accurate is not evidence of being "emotional." Handwaving it away without even reading it is. That's not what I said. I said the author of the article did read the study and describes it as possibly wrong. In fact the article does actually mention a range given, "0.6% to 2.3%", which isn't orders-of-magnitude huge but nearly a 1:4 ratio. Usually if someone says, "I have this big scary number," and you find out the actual number is 25% of what they told you, you're allowed to be skeptical of the conclusions they draw from their math.
- eli 3y ago
  With all due respect, maybe you should read the report. The 137 facilities they are talking about use an 2.3% of US electricity when run at capacity. Separately they use CEBCI data to come up with a top-down estimate of bitcoin mining at 0.6% to 2.3% of US electricity. Putting the two together suggests the true number is at the high end of the range.

by eli 3y ago

digging 3y ago

> "I haven't read the study but maybe it's wrong and maybe the real number is way way less"? C'mon. Give me a break. Trusting that an EIA report is generally accurate is not evidence of being "emotional." Handwaving it away without even reading it is. That's not what I said. I said the author of the article did read the study and describes it as possibly wrong. In fact the article does actually mention a range given, "0.6% to 2.3%", which isn't orders-of-magnitude huge but nearly a 1:4 ratio. Usually if someone says, "I have this big scary number," and you find out the actual number is 25% of what they told you, you're allowed to be skeptical of the conclusions they draw from their math.

eli 3y ago
With all due respect, maybe you should read the report. The 137 facilities they are talking about use an 2.3% of US electricity when run at capacity. Separately they use CEBCI data to come up with a top-down estimate of bitcoin mining at 0.6% to 2.3% of US electricity. Putting the two together suggests the true number is at the high end of the range.