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Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

The energy use / ecological impact of crypto makes it nothing short of unethical.

much of ideas behind bitcoin itself was to replace traditional financial system. and traditional financial system is not zero energy use industry. in fact it uses a lot of energy. rough comparison from 2017 - https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-vs-visa-electricity-consu...

granted - having both traditional and crypto financial system at the same time is net negative, but we can't really switch one on and another off instantly.

I mean, you can drive a Bugatti Chiron 500km for the same amount of energy as a single bitcoin transaction. The cost of a single transaction using e.g. visa is utterly negligible in comparison.

Edit: Some truly depressing figures here [1] including this

> Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction: 16.54

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

the author is making a point about the comparison to a transaction on a visa network. transaction on a visa network cannot happen without the rest of the traditional financial industry. I think the closest blockchain tech to a visa network will be lighting network, which is still WIP.

EDIT: Lightning Network potentially will be able to process much-much more transactions per second than visa network with the same usage of underlying bitcoin blockchain. Essentially Lighting Network allows you to create easily scalable and distributed version of visa network.

It could use vastly less power. The power consumption is a result of so many miners raising the difficulty. Lower difficulty == lower power use.

more difficulty is better - more protected network is. where efficiency will come from is better mining hardware and introduction mass adoption of the lightning network.

Do you guys literally not understand how the network works?

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