What article is claiming is based on a misunderstanding of how Bitcoin works, this really is an odd way of thinking about it.<p>If half of all people stop sending bitcoin around, the amount of electricity used doesn't go down by 50%. So you sending or not sending bitcoin doesn't impact the electricity spend by miners at all.<p>Miners mine to secure the network, there is not a certain amount of electricity needed per transaction.
here we go again, they use a faulty understanding and a faulty source<p>> Each Bitcoin transaction consumes around 2,150 kWh as of the time of this writing.<p>This is wrong because Proof of Work blockchains use the same amount of energy whether any individual makes a transaction or not.<p>Doesn't anyone else find it ironic that actually understanding how that blockchain works could bolster that particular anti-energy use reaction?<p>Ah! but the same people don't want to spend any of their own energy understanding how blockchains work because they've already made up their mind that its not worth doing that!
One bitcoin transaction costs two orders of magnitude less than my monthly power bill, yet the author claims one transaction uses 2.5 household-months worth of electricity. Something seems way off with the numbers.
I don't think the method is correct. There is no "energy cost for transaction" in Bitcoin, it's an energy cost per block. And it's a global constant, it doesn't make sense to say that you making 26 transactions a year will be worst for the environment than 1, or 0 for that case.
The title should be: <i>'Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are worse for the climate than you think'</i>. The author knows it as described in the footnote [0], but why not put in some clickbait anyway and hide the fact that the study they linked to are related to all PoW cryptocurrencies [1].<p>Not all cryptocurrencies are PoW like Bitcoin. XRP, Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Stellar and Algorand to name a few with over $1B market cap are not 'burning the planet'. Maybe by that logic, every single car (including electric ones) is worse for the climate than you think. Is that a safe generalization? Does that mean you should stop driving your car, truck, etc? No.<p>Greener alternatives to petrol and diesel actually exist for such vehicles. The same is true for some 'cryptocurrencies' (coins) that have over a billion market cap which are greener alternatives to PoW cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.<p>But nice try with the clickbait headline and sweeping generalization to all cryptocurrencies though. How comes this petition, led by many critics also know this difference? [2] They tried to ban mining in the UK and it appears to have failed to get attention and enough signatures for a discussion in parliament in the UK.<p>[0] <a href="https://rollen.io/blog/crypto-climate/#footnote:1" rel="nofollow">https://rollen.io/blog/crypto-climate/#footnote:1</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7402366/table/tbl1/?report=objectonly" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7402366/table/t...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/601629" rel="nofollow">https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/601629</a>
Not all cryptocurrencies are proof-of-work, which are the ones that use lots of energy.<p>EDIT: PoS is a dumpster fire. But PoW and PoS are not the only games in town.
"omg bitcoin's 0.5% of global energy use (while being a smaller footprint than all these other industries) is the same amount of energy as countries!"<p>which means <i>everything</i> that uses 0.5% or more of global power uses the same amount of energy as many countries<p>seems like an irrelevant metric, and it is. this isn't about "pointing out worse things to justify bitcoin's energy use", its about this just being a bad metric to begin with.
Yes , proof-of-work crypto is a terrible idea for the environment.<p>But also, this article gets so many things wrong I don't even know where to start. For one, it confuses a "transaction" with "mining a block". A single block can facilitate around 500 transactions on the bitcoin chain, so if an end user wants to "send a bitcoin" as the article states, divide that monstrous energy usage by 500, and suddenly the graphs are not quite as emotionally charged anymore.<p>The other part is that not all energy is created equal. A third of the time, the world has a surplus of energy that can't be efficiently used or stored (daylight for solar, wet season for hydro...) — miners have taken advantage of that years ago and most mining is done when and where energy is cheap because it's a surplus. Doesn't mean that this nullifies the impact, but any comparisons of bitcoin energy use to that of a physically constrained country are incredibly misleading.
If we end cryptos today, in the grand scheme of things, we are going to see no real difference proportional to the global energy consumption of everything else as, while enormous quantity wise, consumption is still below 0.5% or so (so really not that big of a deal percentage wise). How did the predictions and articles from a few years ago on how Bitcoin was going to take, by 2020, the global energy share of consumption pan out? Obviously they were wrong, as consumption of everything else grew as fast or faster than it.<p>The drama against cryptos and their energy consumption is unproductive and is imho going to yield no change (in the grand scheme of things), as the field can't really be tamed the same way other industries can due to its decentralized approach of doing things. Instead of wasting time with this approach, we should be pushing for and incentivizing cheap green energy sources, as that is where the real issue comes for every industry.<p>As long as the source is green, which it already is fo a huge chunk of the energy behind cryptos, and as long as it is not messing with the availability for the demand in the grid for other industries/consumers, then who cares how much it consumes?