Re:Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in...
by naturalauction on Sunday April 18, 2021 @07:14AM
(#26851514)
>It's not misleading at all. It's important to consider that a large group of human operators, using a separately large set of semi automated processes, are a large component of the current energy spend of aggregate financial activity - all those busy worker bees are using energy.
A lot of that is compliance though. Some (or maybe even most, I'm not in the industry) of that doesn't need to exist for the system to function - the banking system would work just fine without suspicious activity reports. I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison as these checks don't and can't exist in cryptocurrency.
That's just scratching the tip of the iceberg, as mentioned above the traditional financial system provides lots of services that cryptocurrencies can't provide or don't provide at any meaningful scale.
Re:Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in...
by arthur-st on Sunday April 18, 2021 @02:33PM
(#26855016)
Look up e.g. VISA corporate responsibility report for 2019. It’s been some time since I’ve seen that, but iirc Bitcoin hash power takes like 120 TWh, “Big Tech” combined is like 50 TWh, and VISA with all the nuts and bolts (and people) is like 0.2 TWh - with proven consumption of renewable energy.
Re:Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in...
by ineedasername on Sunday April 18, 2021 @01:24PM
(#26854422)
But institutions like Goldman Sachs aren't going away if Bitcoin suddenly became the world currency, so including them in such calculations is misleading.
It's not misleading at all. It's important to consider that a large group of human operators, using a separately large set of semi automated processes, are a large component of the current energy spend of aggregate financial activity - all those busy worker bees are using energy.
Not really interested in doing some super thorough calculation, hopefully this general outline makes a little bit of sense. I'm just asserting that if we are going to criticize one thing's energy spend, you need to actually define what you are measuring and determine a baseline with respect to what the current thing's energy consumption is, ideally as line items and then sources for each input component.
Looking forward to some sources. (If you are referring to the Argentina article, please just identify that as your source). No need to be antagonistic, we're all friends here.