Since it's a common mistake when discussing cryptocurrency energy use, I should point out that it's really only Bitcoin specifically that uses significant amounts of electricity these days. Most other cryptocurrencies have switched to proof of stake systems, which uses negligible energy.
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Just to expand on this, While eth is 99.99% less energy use than Bitcoin, it still added 2.8 kilotonnes of co2 last year which is equal to about 2000 average houses for a year.
It's a negligible amount in the scheme of things, but a lot for a virtual currency especially when you add up all the various cryptocurrencies out there.
It wouldn't hurt to make all the POS ones use green energy, but probably wouldn't impact anything by itself.
Changing Bitcoin to green energy alone probably would however.
Why is it "a lot for a virtual currency?" What's the typical energy usage of a virtual currency?
In 2019 Visa used 740,000 gigajoules of energy, which is equivalent to 6727 households (google dug up a figure of 110 Gj/year for that). So this really doesn't seem like a lot for this kind of thing.
By your estimate, visa used 3.4x the power of eth. I would guess visa handles much much more than 3.4x the volume of currency transactions and is way more efficient on energy.
The thing that everyone misses in these comparisons is that yes that’s the energy that VISA expended to make these transactions but for a crypto currency the energy use isn’t even to make the transaction. In the end each transaction is a few Bytes of data that have no difficulty getting across the world (much like this post or any comment). The energy use is so “high” because that’s is used to secure the currency. And of course that’s a much harder comparison to make but a fairer one.
How much energy does the the banking system actually use? How much energy is used to secure the US dollar for example?
You have to account for the entirety of it. That’s like saying that F1 doesn’t pollute all that much because they use bio fuel and the cars are very energy efficient, completely disregarding the fact that the majority of the pollution is in the constant global shipping of cars and gear, as well as R & D
Ethereum did approximately 1.1m transactions a day. Visa did approximately 660m a day.
Small difference lol
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And that's just Visa.
https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/data/2012/c&e/cfm/pba4.php
That lists the energy usage of banking and financial office space to be 18 billion kWh, or 64.8 petajoules. (About 87x that Visa figure.)
And even that is just office space. Doesn't factor in the manufacture, distribution, transport, storage, and disposal of physical money, or any other associated costs.
On the flip side, global banking processes something like 5+ orders of magnitude more transactions than ETH, so even at the low end it’s 1000x more efficient than the most well known POS coin.
Acting like 2000 average houses is a lot of power consumption for a cryptocurrency with such an unimaginably high market cap... That's basically a rounding error.
I specifically said it's negligible if you bothered to read past that line
Where did I say I was disagreeing with you, mate?
Sorry, I've had like 2 hours sleep in the last 2 days so I'm tired and grumpy lol, just ignore me
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Everything above 0% is not neglible for such uselessly decadent endeavours as cryptocurrency.
Who decides what "negligible" is? It's unnecessary and we're living in a climate crisis.
Greedy arrogant cryptobros decides that obviously.
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Green energy is still not free energy.
Every amout of green energy a crypto miner uses is less green energy for everything else. You take 3% (country consumption) of capacity from the green grid, you must up at least 3% the production in existing coal plants.
Or add 3% to the green grid
And spend it on calculating useless hashes instead of reducing coal mining?
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A law in which country? What would you do if someone in a different country doesn't want to follow that?
Then miners would siphon off renewable energy and other more polluting sources would be used to power the remainder.
They’re not gonna build more green power supply just to help out crypto miners.
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If you mean their own green energy that they have to buy, set up, and maintain on their own, then sure. Force them off grid and bring enormous financial consequences if they pollute to make their energy
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Problem is energy from the grid is just energy. You'd get crypto companies buying "green" energy leaving the dirty enegery for everyone else. It'd be meaningless.
Ultimately crypto mining is a pointless industry. It benefits the miners financially but doesn't produce anything meaningful, while expending huge amounts of energy and polluting the world as a result. It's also an extremely energy wasteful way to run the infrastructure needed to maintain crypto currencies.
It wouldn't matter if we were in some Nuclear fusion powered utopia with an abundance of energy. But we're not - we're in the middle of a climate crisis and desperately trying to move over to green energy. Growing demands for energy for crypto is countering that.
The real solution is to tax crypto mining - for example tax then on every kWh they use. Regions that entice crypto operations in are chasing fools gold - the costs out weight any local economic benefits of new data centres being built.
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It is a waste of energy either way which could have been used for actual useful purposes. So no, that is not a helpful solution.
Make a law to power everything with green energy
Like a carbon tax? We've been talking about that for years.
It could help a bit, but I think then there would just be less green energy available for the other applications.
Why not use that energy for something useful?
They would get around that with green washing the way a lot of companies are these days.
It all depends on the details, but power is a local produced good and is not something that can be escaped with laws that want to stop carbon emissions.
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Why not just pass a law that no one can generate electricity except from green sources? It sounds so easy when I put it like that.
Are you thinking that sprinkling the buzzwords "AI" and "Crypto" on an "only green energy" kind of provision would allow lawmakers to leverage hype to cut through right-wing resistence to green energy mandates in a way that a more blanket (or even just not-Crypto/AI-focused) provision couldn't?
Why not just pass a law that no one can generate electricity except from green sources? It sounds so easy when I put it like that.
Um - those laws have been passed in many countries. Usually with a reasonable approach such as "you can continue operating the coal plants that were already built, but no more can be built".
What's actually happening around the world though is those plants are becoming too expensive to run, so they're shutting down even if they are allowed to continue to operate. Renewable power is just cheaper.
About two thirds of global electricity production is zero emission now and it'll be around 95% in a 25 years or so.
Source (note: this is a "renewables" article, not a "zero emission" article. Some non-renewable energy produces zero emissions and there's not expected to be much movement on that in the foreseeable future): https://renewablesnow.com/news/renewables-produce-85-of-global-power-nearly-50-of-energy-in-2050-582235/
Um - those laws have been passed in many countries.
Yeah, I know. I just wondered what putting a "but only for AI and crypto applications" as OP said added to the conversation.
In civilized places, e.g. not the U.S. (it's cool, I'm American), where it's not a struggle to get any environmental legislation passed, adding "AI and crypto" to the conversation is unnecessary. In the U.S. where the minority of conspiracy theorists get what they want through cheating, I doubt adding AI and crypto to the conversation is going to help any.
Generally speaking, pollution etc. is what economists call "external cost". It should be penalized in some way, and the usual tool is taxation. It's not just AI and Crypto that should pay for non-green energy, but everyone. It's massively simpler that way too, and massively simpler = harder to circumvent and manipulate.
Simplicity's bad side in this is that it's difficult to slap a "correct price" on pollution. I.e. difficult to calculate how much actual damage they're causing.
In actual world, thanks to rampant corporatism and other forms of fuckery, what we're actually doing is subsidizing these fuels, which is of course completely ass-backwards. Just removing the subsidies would already help a lot, but actually penalizing those energy forms even just a little would be huge.
Force this unnecessary tech bullshit to invest in becoming self-sufficient through green energy
There is no such thing as "green" energy, all energy has an environmental extraction/capture cost. Crypto has insane per user power usage, AI isn't quite as bad but it's still much higher than normal websearch. Both should be used sparingly in cases where they actually make sense.
Something topic-adjacent is going down in BC, Canada right now.
We had a large timber company that branched out into crypto mining, augmented with solar. They made an absolute killing with this pivot, and wanted to expand. But need a metric fuck-ton of electricity. The local utility company denied them, citing their own issues with keeping up with demand in the near future. The timber company sued them, and I think it settled to this:
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Only proof of work crypto currencies require a ton of energy and the only way it's profitable is by buying energy that would otherwise be wasted like methane flaring or excess renewable generation.
I would say this is a dangerous slope to go down, since electricity is just electricity and IMO shouldn't matter how it's used as long as it's payed for. It's like the Net Neutrality situation where it shouldn't matter how/what data is being transmitted through their network shouldn't be discriminated for/against as long as it's getting payed for.
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