Re:Crypto lobbying is going ballistic
by tsimionescu on Thursday December 09, 2021 @08:28AM
(#29497065)
1 billion devices each consuming 200W for 3h every day is waaaay over estimated. The PS4 has sold 115 million devices over its entire lifetime (2013-now), being the most popular modern console; and it consumes closer to 150W while gaming. Consoles are famously more popular than gaming PCs, so the total amount of high-power gaming devices is probably much closer to 300million than 1 billion.
So, let's say 300 million devices, running 3h/day at 150W, that's closer to 50TWh/year, less than even your smaller estimate for Bitcoin.
Perhaps, perhaps not, this is an explicit limit of Femi estimates.
But you do also have to include the power cost of displays when the game machine doesn’t have one built in, adding 10-120W.
And the older consoles didn’t all vanish into the ether when new models arrived; my brother still has an original Xbox 360, and not for lack of money to upgrade. So I expect many of its contemporaries to also contribute to the total number of gaming units, not just total sales of most recent Xbox + most recent PlayStation + most recent Nintendo console.
EU nations may be a poor comparison, as it has many tiny nations as members as well as a few big ones.
The first Google hit I got said Bitcoin uses 80 TWh/year which puts it around Belgium (9th in EU) for pure electricity, the second said Bitcoin was using about 177 TWh/year (bit more than Poland, 5th in EU, again just for electricity).
I don’t have exact figures for game consoles or power usage per console or gaming PCs, so I will do a Fermi estimate: 1 billion active gaming devices (PCs and all consoles combined), 200 W per device, each used for 3 hours per day. This is 219 TWh/year. As a Fermi estimate, take with a grain of salt.
(I don’t accept the general claim that BTC actually has real value; conversely I think most gaming does, including gambling although for gambling the value is much less than the cost, but that’s not the focus of this comment).