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Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption

www.tomshardware.com Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption

The U.S government wants to crack down on the ballooning energy consumption of Bitcoin miners.

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www.tomshardware.com /tech-industry/cryptomining/just-137-crypto-miners-use-23-of-total-us-power-government-now-requiring-commercial-miners-to-report-energy-consumption

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Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

www.tomshardware.com /tech-industry/cryptomining/just-137-crypto-miners-use-23-of-total-us-power-government-now-requiring-commercial-miners-to-report-energy-consumption

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Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption

www.tomshardware.com /tech-industry/cryptomining/just-137-crypto-miners-use-23-of-total-us-power-government-now-requiring-commercial-miners-to-report-energy-consumption

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Misleading title - the problem is not "crypto", it's pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top 10 9 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.
- dogecoin is top10
  
  ah yes the 10th place - still, Doge is estimated to use ~1% of the energy Bitcoin uses and it's been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
  
  it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
  it got a pretty big bump from elon a couple years back, but dogecoin is nearly perfect money. it isn't deflationary, it's cheap to transact, and the on-ramps are ubiquitous.
  
  the entire Bitcoin block chain could be run on the phone I'm using to write this. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.
  and dogecoin merge mines with all the other script coins so how can you even calculate its independent usage?
  
  there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.
  Yes there is, massive power use is the entire point of proof-of-work. If Bitcoin blocks could be produced without massive power use then the blockchain's system of validation would fail and 51% attacks would be trivial.
  
  the hash rate for the first blocks was achievable with a pentium 3. the protocol functioned then. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates more hashpower is used. a 51% attack is the protocol functioning properly.
  
  That's because there were just a handful of people mining the first blocks and there was no demand, so the price was basically zero.
  The protocol is meant to promote decentralization, so I have no idea how a 51% attack would be an example of the protocol functioning properly. A 51% attack is a demonstration that the protocol is controlled by a single entity.
  
  a 51% attack means that 51% of the hashpower has agreed on a certain chain. this happens every 10 minutes.
  
  That's not an "attack."
  
  no, it's the protocol functioning properly.
  
  Right. Which is not what I was talking about. This was about how a PoW chain would become useless if there was no cost involved in making blocks, ie, if the "W" part was missing. It would allow anyone to add blocks. There'd be no way to distinguish forks from each other and decide on a canonical one. Being able to agree on a particular fork as being the "valid" one in a decentralized manner is the fundamental secret sauce of what makes cryptocurrency work. All the various protocols boil down to ways of solving that one particular problem.
  
  idk their methodology - source
  
  if they don't explain their methodology, there is no reason to believe they got it right
  
  then there's no reason to believe they got it wrong.
  also they're vague estimates, even bitcoin has a huge margin for error.
  
  there is every reason to not believe them. they clearly have a motivation to paint power consumption as worse than is true, and the complexity of extracting the use of dogecoin mining from the rest of the mergedmine is, personally, unfathomable. maybe i'm dumb and there is a simple calculation that can be done, but without evidence of their methodology, i'm not going to believe them, and no one should.
  
  what's the problem of estimating based on mined blocks and difficulty?
  
  it's a bit like clocking your gas mileage to and from work, and then saying thats how much gas it took you to get out of your driveway.
  
  not everyone is merge-mining and even those who do may only be merge-mining specific chains.
  
  the work that goes into mining those blocks should be discounted by the amount of energy that goes into mining every other merge-mined chain
  
  ok, so either ~1% figure already discounts this energy due to merge-mining, or it doesn't discount and the effective energy consumption of Doge is lower. The original point remains: Bitcoin is pretty much the energetic problem of crypto, .
- two of the top 10 by market cap ar stable coins.
  
  what's your point?
  
  that market cap is a dumb metric to use to dictate protocol specifications
  
  wtf are you even talking about? What protocol specs? Who's dictating what?
  
  the specifications of the bitcoin protocol require proof of work. using the market cap to dictate what the protocol specification should be is absurd.
  
  and who's proposing that? I picked the top in market cap to illustrate what most relevant coins are doing because most of them are irrelevant shitcoins.
  
  seems like you undrestand that market cap is irrelevant to the protocol design.
  
  Want to suggest a better one?
  
  uh... adoption, stability, code commits, forks....
- Isn’t it strange no one gave a shit about this a year and a half ago when the price was lower? It appears everyone’s concern for the environment and energy consumption only increases when the price goes up. Interesting correlation or may be causation.
  
  Everyone already gave a shit about this a long time ago. It's also one of the reasons Ethereum switched from proof of work to proof of stake.
  
  Yes but only when the price was high did anyone care and ethereum switch. Barely a peep for the last 2 and a half years
  
  I've been hearing about the stupid amount of energy usage for years and years. You just created a straw man that isn't based on reality.
  
  I’ve been keeping a close eye on the news about crypto and there has been virtually no stories about any crypto for the last 2 years, prior to that when the price was high there were a lot of stories about it which is my point. They only started to come back into circulation about 6 months ago. If you remember otherwise you are wrong.

359 comments