Software Is Polluting the World

Re:Software Is Polluting the World by fbelzile on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @11:18PM (#23014935)

> If the Internet was a country, it would be the 6th largest polluter in the world.

This is a pretty interesting claim, so I tried to follow the source to see how they arrived at this. It links to this article by Nature [1] but it doesn't have the the quoted text the author seemed to have quoted.

I'm not trying to dispute the claim, I'm just interested in learning more about the data which led to it. Anyone have a peer reviewed article about this?

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y

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Re:Software Is Polluting the World by saagarjha on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @11:30PM (#23015004)

I wonder how much of it is cryptocurrency mining.

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Re:Software Is Polluting the World by ashilfarahmand on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @12:47AM (#23015476)

I heard that all of crypto mining uses a similar amount of electricity as Serbia but it is probably more now.

Source from Dec 2017 -> https://newatlas.com/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-power-consumptio...

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Re:Software Is Polluting the World by mirimir on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @12:22AM (#23015328)

From the Nature article:

> The energy-efficiency drive at the information factories that serve us Facebook, Google and Bitcoin.

I'm guessing less, although I failed at parsing the article.

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