VS
An estimate of Bitcoin power consumption by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
I know which one I’m more prepared to believe.
Even if this were true. I go on YouTube and can learn things: recipes, FreeCad tutorials, coffee nerdery, harmonica lessons.
Bitcoin literally does nothing.
Except make those little pieces of green paper in your wallet look foolish.
The virtue of energy use argument is just dumb.
Electricity is a commodity and a utility. Who are you or I to subjectively decide that a use is valuable or virtuous?
Is YouPorn worthy? Is MLB.tv valuable? What are the criteria that you use to determine worth?
Yes because people like porn and baseball.
Bitcoin is like gold. It’s valuable because other people say it’s valuable. But nothing useful happens when you mine crypto. Was I entertained? Did I learn something? Are they producing a widget? Even gold can be made into jewellery or used in electronics. Crypto literally just uses power.
As far as I can tell PoW is the most proven consensus mechanism so far. PoS may be promising though. ETH2 successfully switching will be telling.
By enabling ransom ware attacks? Creating GPU shortages?
"the internet uses 10% of the total electricity consumption worldwide. How much of that is consumed by Youtube? After Netflix and embedded videos, Youtube is the third biggest global internet bandwidth eater. About 11.4% of global internet traffic is consumed by Youtube"
That figure assumes that the electricity usage of the internet is exactly related to the amount of bandwidth - so if YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total bandwidth, that means that YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total electricity consumption.
That is a highly dubious assumption.
That you only use it to watch videos that bring zero gain to your life is a You problem.