Ummm if you follow the links to the EIA’s report, it does not show their method of calculating so we are basically taking their word for it. It says between 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption is used on cryptocurrency. Feels like an article written by the establishment to make you feel negative about cryptocurrency as it is a big threat to them. Don’t fall for the propaganda. If you are mining, seek green sources of energy as then it is a moot point. Same if you have an EV or other high power electrical devices. The issue is not uses of power, it is how it was generated.
Eth has moved to staking, which is good for the environment because it doesn’t have a bunch of computers competing for transactions, unlike bitcoin - instead the network picks a computer for the transaction and takes staked coin if the computer does something nefarious to the transaction. The problem though is that staking requires coins / money. Mining requires electricity and can make money (albeit pennies depending on your setup and electricty costs). For this reason, it’s not just bitcoin that’s a problem, but a whole bevy of other mining-based coins like bitcoin cash, cudos, etc. That problem (the desire for folks to spin up new farms to mine crypto coins which they can mine using the spare CPU/GPU cycles) is likely not going to go away soon.
Does someone feel like giving me an ELI5 why Bitcoin mining eats up so much electricity these days? Is it just because the problems the machines need to solve have gotten more complex? Do other cryptos tax the resources as bad? Is there a viable crypto that would be considered “green” at this point?
Sorry for overboarding my questions if anyone even attempts to answer this lol
To those that say this is a waste and has no good purpose, you should know that most energy used by miners is renewables because renewables (especially during off-peak hours) are the cheapest source of energy.
Bitcoin’s value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There’s a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it’s actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that’s bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it’s a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you’d be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it’s available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are “unbanked” and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.
Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That’s to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it’s 1910. You just don’t see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it’s not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.
The energy used by miners is needed to secure the Bitcoin network. Historically, we have built currencies of incredibly inequitably distributed resources: precious metals, stable governments, etc. Bitcoin was the first one to build an economy based on pure energy. This stuff literally falls from the sky. While it is not perfectly equitably distributed, it is the most equitably distributed resource on earth that can be used for this purpose.