> Amazon Alexas burn more energy in a year by sitting idle in people's homes than the entire Bitcoin network does
From googling and "This Machine Greens" docu:
> American always on devices: 1375 TWh per year
> Cruise ships: 250 TWh per year
> Bitcoin: 116 TWh per year
> Online advertising: 106 TWh per year
> American Alexas: 1.52 TWh per year
As a north european techie spending power on quite a few always on things (respberry pis, a nas, a router, wifi, ps5 etc)- but also freezer, fridge, cooking - and lightning for half the year and a little extra heating, I have used around 2500 kWh year to date, which is roughly 320 watts in total (or half that stated figure for always on devices alone...)
EDIT: I remembered the american population size wrong, the right figure is 475 watts @330 Mln people, but my point stands..
I'd also say cruise ships are more egregious, which no one seems to care about despite them definitely not using clean energy or being remotely useful, using 2.5x the amount of energy as Bitcoin - or as much as Spain!
Crypto has a lot of real problems like the current markets which seem to just be re-enforcing the worst aspects of capitalism; and other issues like: costs, scalability, lack of connection to physical objects/systems (the NFT problem), dispute resolution, etc.
These problems are huge, especially if blockchain tech ever becomes mainstream. The problem is that discussion of these topics - in casual discussions at least - gets derailed by ideological flag waving. To me it's like Occupy Wall Street being derailed by wokeists; they weren't able to mobilize anything meaningful because they were bogged down by delusional anxieties.