Energy efficient cryptocurrency still emits as much carbon as 2-3 coal plants

[gracchus]

@geissler

And your point is??

My point is that cryptocurrency is more energy-intensive than other forms of digital cash due to the the various proofs – esp. proof of work --required by those systems. You made a distinction only between physical currency (banknotes, coins) and digital currency (which I pointed out isn’t limited to cryptocurrency).

[gracchus]

@anon85524460

happening in this one.

Along with articles about Elon Musk and Julian Assange and Jordaddy, cryptocurrency articles really bring out the fanbois on BB.

[anon85524460]

@gracchus

Along with articles about Elon Musk and Julian Assange and Jordaddy, cryptocurrency articles really bring out the fanbois.

I wish mods and what not would just use that as a way to run through and sweep up the riff-raff.

[gracchus]

They’re not breaking the rules, though in my experience it’s only a matter of time.

[smulder]

@geissler

I bet digital cash will always come out as emitting less GHG

This is a bait-and-switch argument where “digital cash” means proof-of-competitive-energy-waste?

[catsidhe]

@geissler

Where is the context? How much energy goes into creating coins and ‘folding’ money?

Coins and folding money are actual physical objects, which, once created, have zero energy requirements. “Digital cash” requires an ongoing energy expenditure just to continue existing, and an increasing amount of energy to make a transaction with them.

I suspect the comparison you’re demanding isn’t going to come out looking particularly rosy for your side of the argument.

[Otherbrother]

@catsidhe

I suspect the comparison you’re demanding isn’t going to come out looking particularly rosy for your side of the argument.

To be fair, if we were making all of our cash transactions in pennies it might be a valid comparison.

Here’s the one currency worse for the environment than bitcoin

It’s long past time to end penny production. Stupid zinc lobby.

Mining actual gold is less energy intensive than bitcoin mining though.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07283-3

[Jesse13927]

@geissler

How much energy goes into processing your Apple Pay transaction.

Those transactions are designed to be as efficient as possible, while cryptocurrency transactions are designed to be as inefficient as possible because the energy intensiveness of transaction processing scales to reward whoever uses the most energy to process transactions.

[jerwin]

The Crank Handle
The Crank was a mechanical handle which prisoners were forced to turn thousands of times, for absolutely no reason. The slang term ‘Screw’ for a prison officer has its origin in the fact that officers were able to tighten the mechanism that makes the prisoners work harder

• The Treadwheel
  The treadwheel was a large cylinder with steps around its circumference. The prisoner would stand in a stall facing the outside of the wheel and tred on the steps. This action caused the wheel to turn, forcing the prisoner to keep walking on the spot whilst getting nowhere. The average number of steps a prisoner would make was 57,000 a day.

Victorian Crime and Punishment - Oxford Castle & Prison

[jerwin]

@Jesse13927

Those transactions are designed to be as efficient as possible, while cryptocurrency transactions are designed to be as inefficient as possible because the energy intensiveness of transaction processing scales to reward whoever uses the most energy to process transactions.

Someone likes Jevon’s paradox, and has based their code on this idea.

[anon77190095]

Also the elephant in the room, PoS is just the same as a bank, you’re a guarantor, you have to have ETH to get more (or allow someone else to generate them). How you get to the state where there are these guarantors without PoW (maybe PoA, but that has problems too) do you buy them?

[Doctor_Faustus]

@Kevin_Dick

A few use cases:

1. Settlement. Currently done by a cabal of banks in an automated clearing house that allows banks to rearrange transactions to cause overdrafts, and two large credit card companies that control all point of sale transactions. You might notice a wire transfer costs $30, Visa and Mastercard take 5% commission from small point of sale to just transfer money back and forth. Lots of offices with people and proprietary databases. Trillions of dollars in annual transactions.
2. Property tax liens and mortgage transactions, and other transactions involving government servcies. If you’ve ever closed on a house, you’ll notice there are title companies that get paid to make the payment transfer - about $250 to update a database. Have you sold a car and had to go to the DMV to show a person proof that you need to update the title, and they give you an official looking piece of paper? You could easily write software to automate this through a smart contract at the click of a button. Since the blockchain is permanent and distributed, you don’t need a DMV to provide this service with paper.
3. File storage for the distributed web, or public-goods like Wikipedia that require donations to keep afloat. Currently we pay for the internet by giving our data away for free and are served ads. Projects like Filecoin and Brave are working to pay directly for services using crypto currencies. With Brave you can now get paid to be served ads if you choose to do so, and no one tracks your movement on the web as the Brave browser blocks it as a default.
4. Retirement plans. We currently pay brokers a commission to connect us to public markets per transaction, and then we pay them again to provide a website where we can look at how our funds are doing. This amounts to tens of thousands of dollars by the time you retire. Stock certificates can easily be put into smart contracts.

Your points 1,2 and 4 are “solving” specifically American problems. I would suggest investing in a proper government that doesn’t let private companies do all these essential services or at least regulates them in such a way that they don’t exploit consumers. The solution to unregulated capitalism isn’t a slightly different version of unregulated capitalism. The problems you mention don’t exist where I live or were solved before American companies muscled in on the market

[thomdunn]

@anon61221983

@Kevin_Dick

but the future iteration of the most popular one is going to be more energy efficient than our current system of settling accounts

We don’t know that… and the future is far too late to deal with these issues

I mean, this is it. I was sharing information from a new report about Ethereum energy use. I wasn’t doing a massive deep-dive into the overall energy usage and coefficient of performance of all blockchain technologies. This isn’t a white paper; it’s literally a blog.

[anon61221983]

@thomdunn

I wasn’t doing a massive deep-dive into the overall energy usage and coefficient of performance of all blockchain technologies. This isn’t a white paper; it’s literally a blog.

Indeed! it’s weird how so many people don’t seem to get that this is a blog, not a newspaper or academic journal. Whatever the future holds, this is the situation right now and it’s clearly not helping our environmental crisis.

[anon87143080]

[DocPop]

Eth2 has been coming soon for years, they just keep throwing dates out. At this point Eth2’s release date is just a joke in the community.

[DocPop]

Thanks for writing about this. I wish there was more coverage of the environmental impact of Bitcoin and Ethereum. It’s a massive problem for NFTs too. 97% of all NFT sales in October were powered by Ethereum. The “eco-friendly” chains out there barely make up a fraction of the actual market.