Stripe is also working on crypto, with no mention of disallowing proof of work types
It's something I personally think about a lot, and I know many others do. Here's a community of people that discuss this topic a lot if you're interested: https://climateaction.tech/
When you game on your 3080 GTX at max graphics in VR, you wouldn't call that wasted computation because it provided utility to a human in the form of entertainment.
Proof of work provides utility in the form of trustless proof, allowing a decentralized network to actually work. The computational work carries meaning which is valued by network participants.
The reason mining consumes so much aggregate energy is because it is the most profitable use of energy at the moment. Part of this is because the cost of energy for fossil fuels in not accurately represented in its price.
Tax payers / governments subsidize the fossil fuel industry in billions every year, including coal which is used in coal power plants. A carbon tax is also not implemented. So externalities are not captured in price.
It should fairly obvious how energy sources change once those issues are addressed.
It will be hella regressive, but that’s the reality. Most poor people are polluting the planet disproportionately to their output.
I bet if the internet was invented today we would hear the same energy arguments.
Global Financial System: 263.72TWh
Bitcoin: 113.89TWh
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GFS deposits: US$404.1 trillion
Bitcoin: US$1.1 trillion
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GFS energy per US$: 0.65 Wh
Bitcoin energy per US$: 103.53 Wh
And this is calculated just for the value of deposits, if we do it again for number of transactions it's even more scathing.
We should do an attempt with just US dollars. It looks like there is about $40 trillion in actual physical/digital circulation (i.e. not investments in things like crypto, buildings, stocks).
Driving even an electric vehicle uses ~250-300 Wh per mile (we can round down to 250Wh).
Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup have about 738k (we can round down to 700k) employees and the average US commute is 32 miles (we can round down to 25). We'll assume ~235 days of work a year.
25 * 0.250 * 700000 * 235 = 1,028.1 TWh to commute for bank employees of the top four US banks per year
Which is about 25.7 Wh / $. We can safely assume this is significantly lower than reality already since we only counted the top four US banks and rounded all of our figures down. This also doesn't count any other industry required to keep USD working (like datacenters, as referenced in the paper you linked).
Edit: I'm not trying to prove you wrong or anything, I'm just genuinely curious if this "bitcoin is worse" statement is correct.
Your calculation comes out to 1.028 TWh
1 TWh = 1,000,000,000 KWh
Commute: 1.028 TWh
Data centers: ~3.3TWh per trillion (for USD) = 132 TWh
ATMs: 470,135 independent in the US (1.27MWh each per year) = 0.597TWh
Banks: ~98,000 in the US (PDF wasn't clear, using 60MWh each per year) = 5.88 TWh
Card networks: ~1TWh/yr (just assuming "half" of global)
Total: 140.5TWh/yr
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FB.CBK.BRCH.P5?location...
https://blog.sfgate.com/lifestyle/2020/08/31/its-electric-ho....
I think your calculation of 3.5 Wh/$ is closer to the real number. When I put $70Tn instead of $404Tn in I get 3.71Wh/$
The incentives are very different, I don't think you can compare them like that.
Miners and companies like Google both make more money the less power they use. However, in the case of Google power consumption is a side effect of their business.
To put it another way: if you overnight doubled Google's datacenter capacity you would not double their revenues. But if you doubled a bitcoin miner's capacity there would be an immediate change in the amount of revenue being made.
This means that for miners there's a very clear incentive to use whatever resources you can at your disposal, because the more power and hardware you have the more profit you can make.
And please don't say PoS. PoS is centralized by default. If you are going to be centralized, why do crypto at all?
Let's burn the planet down for that, hell yeah.
I know scores of people who hold ETH. I know like 2 people that have tried mining it.
BTC is old, the possibilities have been proven but I think it's totally fair that we try to get somewhere more efficient than what we have now.
This is patently false. The Netherlands has an aluminium smelting plant[1].
Why would you say something so obviously disproven?
[1]:https://aldel.nl
Netherlands uses 108,800 GWh per yer. Global aluminum smelting is 8x that, but no single smelter comes close to producing 1/8th the worlds aluminimum.
Every time I see a thread on HN about crypto it makes me want to buy BTC or w/e because people are so unbelievably disingenuous on here that it probably still has a lot of steam left. The side that needs to be misleading to make their point is rarely the correct side to be on in my experience.
In contract, PoW cryptocurrencies have pure waste built in as a necessary component. They're literally waste incarnate, made into code and used to provide trustless consensus. It's a feature, that has to scale with the size of the network, and participants are encouraged to create more waste.
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[0] - Let's for the moment ignore the negative-sum game cancer the advertising industry is. But even advertising tries to be efficient at micro level.
[1] - In fact, it's a major source of modern problems with the market economy. Companies optimize way past the point it makes sense, because the consequences are borne by someone else (e.g. customers). See e.g. the whole field of value engineering.
Market might be a minimizing function of some sort but it's a blind one. Very often groups could do 4x more for 4x less just with a change of mindset alone.
It's telling that the bitcoin defense is 99% whattaboutism – but have no fear readers, I scream into the void about those other things too.
ps: I'm trying to go from screamer to proactive these days. I was already frugal and dropped car use, I'm also thinking into starting clubs to make more walk/bike use, recycling/upcycling repair shops and the likes. Do you have similar ideas ?
I also complain a lot at community meetings for new development in my immediate area (things like reducing parking in new buildings, including bike storage, EV charging, better public transit infrastructure)... I've found some of this stuff more fulfilling in that the impact tends to extend beyond what I'd be capable of doing alone... sometimes it's fruitless, but sometimes it works.
Have you seen the average enterprise's stack?
That is not an exaggeration, and is more likely to be a severe understatement.