I immediately found this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bit...

"One Bitcoin transaction would generate the CO2 equivalent to 706,765 swipes of a Visa credit card,"

Another way to look at it:

Bitcoin uses over 0.5% of the world's electricity: https://interestingengineering.com/why-bitcoin-mining-consum...

With that, Bitcoin does about 300,000 transactions a day. https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b...

But there are over a billion daily credit card transactions alone - 3000 times as much.

So if each credit card transaction were replaced by a Bitcoin transaction, we'd use 30 times as much electricity as the entire planet produces.

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These numbers are so grossly lopsided and so widely bandied about that when I hear someone say, "I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost" I think, "Perhaps you don't want to hear it."

Meanwhile, we're burning coal to produce bitcoin whose only value is that number gets green and goes up. Eth is slightly better on that point, but still wasted multiple TWh of electricity while it was in PoW mode, and it still is today.

Waste would be an incandescent bulb that throws away the majority of its energy generating heat that isn't used for any purpose.

This should be obvious when you consider proof of work systems that generate less waste heat by using a memory bound rather than a computationally bound algorithm. They both operate on the principle of wealth destruction as all proof of work algorithms do, but you get different externalities.

Interestingly, if you found something really useful to do with the waste heat of crypto then the systems would become roughly equivalent.

PS: The idea of a memory bound algorithm is 1 million dollars of RAM consumes less energy than 1 million dollars of ASIC’s.

..which in the case of the average crypto, is overshadowed many times over. One block mined equates to $333K worth BTC generated alone, and that's not counting the value of every transaction included in that block. A block happens every 10 minutes give or take, so in an hour, that's about 2 million worth of coin generated and 13K transactions.

There's no way on earth every bitcoin miner, combined, is using $2M+ worth of electricity every hour, even factoring in negative environmental externalities (which in the case of crypto mining, will be lower than most people think given their proximity to renewable, hence cheap, energy.)

It is, objectively speaking, not a waste.

Similarly, as I just pointed out different algorithms would use more or less energy and therefore be more or less efficient. Thus the heat produced is a waste byproduct mining, and electricity is the fuel. A more efficient process simply uses less fuel though it may have higher capital costs.

The same is true of say cars, you’re burning gas because driving is useful. But, increasing efficiency means less fuel while creating identical value etc etc.

It seems to me that crypto is being unfairly singled out. Things that are digital have meaningful existence.

It’s directly offensive to many people in the field that an inefficient first implementation is maintained because people’s investments in hardware are considered more valuable than anything else. Not latency, not transactions per second, not environmental costs, just maximize the value of their hardware investments.

Completely understandable, yet still horrific.

That’s not meant as an attack, it’s simply a ballpark comparison. For those pro crypto take it a sign of possible future growth.

Of course even if you count all that, the power consumption per transaction will be at least five orders of magnitude lower than the 0.6MWh per transaction in BTC.