This assumes that climate change/ CO2 is a significant impact on the gorilla populations.

In reality, bushmeat consumption, logging, farming, and mining are the main drivers or gorilla population losses.

Creating a token does not consume any additional energy. Transaction volume does _not_ scale with mining so it's a really bad comparison.

The energy is spent to secure the network regardless of how many transactions are processed (in practice, transaction volume is pretty much fixed in terms of "bytes of transactions")

Bitcoin alone currently pollutes about the same as half the global airline industry. If cryptos really are the future, I weep for the planet.

The thing is, it doesn't have to.

Bitcoin (and all other Proof-of-Work cryptos, which is basically all the major ones) only consume tons of power because the incentive to mine creates an arms race where whoever has the most hashing power makes the most money.

Bitcoin could be run on a single computer mining on a 10 year old CPU, but then it would be highly centralized, and decentralization is touted as one of the greatest features of Bitcoin. But with the incentive to run your own miner(s), and make it/them as powerful as you can to get the largest piece of the block reward pie, it ends up being a massive energy sink.

That's why people are pushing for the change to Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum. By taking away the incentive to waste tons of power on mining, it drastically reduces the carbon footprint of it.

Luckily mining with renewables is much less difficult technically than flying with renewables.

Energy is fungible. Bitcoin using renewables just means that other electricity consumers are using fossil fuels.

Energy is extremely difficult and expensive to store, it's not fungible over a time period. This is why energy rates fluctuate during the day. It's also not fungible between consumers not connected to the same grid.

When generating energy (either with fossil fuels or renewables) energy is often wasted because there is no immediate consumer or way to store it.

What you say _can_ be true, for example additional consumers of energy on the national grid, during times of high demand, will likely result in more energy production. It is not true as a rule though.

Also much less useful.

How is that lucky?

Lucky for Bitcoin, there's a clear path to reducing environmental impact.

Or we could use that power for something a little more practical which we can’t do without.

Are you advocating for some sort of central authority who regulates what individuals use power for?

We already have that for large classes of equipment.

And you want to extend that to any device that plugs into an outlet?

Just trying to get your position straight here.

It already does, if a particular regulated activity involves plugging devices into outlets.

> Just trying to get your position straight here.

What else might we think you were doing?

> It already does, if a particular regulated activity involves plugging devices into outlets.

Can you be more specific about the existing regulated activities you're talking about? I don't get your point but I might just be missing something here. AFAIK, the reasons for existing regulations on "activities or devices" are not related to electrical usage..

What we? These are individuals, each with their own goals. Give them some other business opportunity and I'm sure they'll jump on it - it just needs to be as good as Bitcoin.

My (and others) livelihood depends on the existence of crypto currency. Seems pretty practical to me.

Is that true? That's shockingly more than I would have imagined

The network is not secured if you just offload the externality to the international electrical grid. You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.

Not sure I understand your argument, because there are externalities the network is not secured? All consumption of power created by fossil fuels has negative externalities. Also, there's no requirement that miners are on the grid (lots of mining operations use off-grid excess power that cannot be stored).

> You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.

What? I'm not sure what models you're referring to

Has there been any movement in the crypto world (that isn’t just creating new coins) towards switching algorithms such that BTC et al don’t use proof of work anymore?

Stellar (https://stellar.org/) uses a novel Byzantine agreement protocol (https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol?lo...) which practically eliminates it in comparison.

It is also insanely cheap (like $1... and even that is just "held" in the account and can be released later) to "mint" a new coin and thus is practically perfect for NFTs.

It's seen as sort of a joke in the crypto world by those who are only trying to make a buck (price of XLM, used for paying transaction fees, is relatively stable compared to others) but I think it's one of the few cryptos out there that has a chance of making a real difference in the world long term.

Stellar is centralized though, so it completely misses the point.

Anyone can participate in consensus, but you do have to be trusted by someone else who already participates in the trusted consensus, so you're right that it's not completely decentralized (but is also not strictly centralized either).

Here's a current visualization of how many participants there are: https://stellarbeat.io/

Ethereum is switching to proof of stake. AFAIK (not a crypto guy) it's the second largest blockchain.

More relevant to the question at hand, Ethereum is also where all the NFTs are.

Bitcoin is extremely resistant to change.

Ethereum is what all the articles about costly NFTs are written about. The proof of stake (low energy consumption) chain is already live and the proof of work chain will is scheduled to be shut down in 2 years. Faster if the miners try to revolt

Tezos using PoS has been up and running for more than a year i think. You can mint NFTs here: http://nftz.fun/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/

Cardano – the 3rd largest currency by marketcap[1], after Bitcoin and Ethereum – uses proof of stake.

[1] - https://coinmarketcap.com/

That's like saying that if my lamp uses 3W when I'm at my desk, surely it'll use 6W when I call someone over.

Blockchain energy usage is not really proportional to transaction volume, they're only connected in very indirect ways (more usage -> more adoption -> higher price? -> reward for mining a block increases in value -> miners can pay for more energy while still turning a profit)

I think that was for 6 and for running the auction.