Bitcoin is perhaps a rounding number today (my guess is that it is more than that due to Chinese miners not reporting energy usage correctly but could very easily be wrong), but what it solves is even less of a rounding number.

Said in a different way to do all financial transactions on the blockchain would use a lot more energy then it currently does.

BTC does not require every single transaction to be processed on-chain in the way that you describe. Please refer to the Lightning Network.

But then you are moving the goal posts, blockchain is not really needed for lighting.

That's not how it works, energy usage does not scale with the number of transactions.

Uh, why not?

Sorry, but 0.1% of global energy consumption still adds up to a lot of coal power plants.

This appears to be a semantic deflection. Are you arguing that less than 0.1% of the world's energy consumption equates to a "massive environmental impact"?

The reason why the argument that it is only using 0.1% of the worlds energy consumption so it doesn't matter is a stupid argument is because it can be used about absolutely everything. This particular coal plant only emits a 0.01% of all greenhouse gas emissions, so it doesn't matter. That is true about that coal plant too, and that one. So just leave them all because no single coal plant matters in the whole.

If we want to put it this way, yes.

140TWh out of 170000TWh is about 0.8%. relative impact is bigger than 0.08%. Coal is 36% of the power mix. Under the assumption that most bitcoin mining happens connected to the grid (seems reasonable) and that these grids contain coal powerplants (also reasonable with the exception of Iceland), that 0.08% translates to 0.22% of global coal based emissions. On a global scale, being responsible for 1/500th is a lot (for me at least)

the numbers are more relatable when looking at absolute impact. Assuming a average coal power plant of 600MW (you can find bigger, but this is a representative plant near me[1]). That’s 5TWh/yr per plant. Bitcoin then represents 28 of such coal powerplants running at 100% capacity 24/7. That - to me - seems like a massive amount of CO2 for a niche application.

And if I read your source correctly, that’s just bitcoin

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amercentrale

Coal is about 36%

Btc still uses far less energy than the banking industry. The relevant comparisons are important to consider.

The banking industry does 10000 times more things for billions more people.

I wonder how much energy is consumed via social networking on Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc?