Gold is a requirement for industrial purposes, for jewellry, for chemical processes for medication.
Visa/Mastercard perform many hundred of thousand transactions per second.
BTC is limited to 350k per day, and consumes the equivalent CO2 impact as Austria. It can't and won't ever scale, which leaves it open to market manipulation and centralization as transactions move off-chain.
It's not a small amount of energy wasted, and there are significantly more valuable uses for that energy, such as aluminum production or water desalination.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
That might be true but 46.64% of gold demand is for "investment", and a further 8.58% is for "central banks". In other words, most gold produced is hoarded and not used for anything productive. If you're against bitcoin because you think it's a non-productive use of energy, you should also be against investment/central bank use of gold.
Bitcoin is intentionally wasteful, and I say this as a technical admirer. Its genius is the extremely simple idea of making writes to a distributed database so unimaginably harder than reads, so that untrusted network peers behave themselves and don't invalidate the state of the shared ledger. The network literally just asks you to spend your time counting to N at the top of your lungs so you don't cheat, if that's not waste then I don't know what is waste.
This 'waste' is necessary when you don't trust your peers, you're buying trust with it, cold hard trust, as rock solid as P != NP. But look at the sheer hype crypto has amassed since 2017 and tell me with a straight face that all those "applications" need trustless distributed peers. NFTs literally store the actual data of the token on centralized servers that can go down or go wild with your data at any moment they goddamn please, the NFT on the blockchain is merely a thin reference.
The ideal path for distributed trustless blockchains would have been as a small niche, an "elite shock trooper" technique when distributed trust among trustless peers is absolutely necessary. Ideally, miners would understand the simple fact that it's of no use to keep bringing better and better silicon to the arena, as the network swallows all in its big mouth anyway, and the network would then grow naturally so that it's approximately the power of NETWORK_SIZE * CURRENT_PC_POWER at any current year, instead of a never ending race to the bottom of sacrificing more and more silicon to the God Of The Hash.
Alas, from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
Silicon and other electronic parts also get dumped into this market, when the capacity used to build those devices could be used for other things.
That is an unbelievable statement just on the face of it.
But if we say: "What is the energy use per transaction?" what then?
The inefficiency of crypto currency is legendary.
"likely"? What do you mean?
And that illustrates how incredibly inefficient crypto is
Gold mining and bitcoin are currently roughly on-par. But gold's energy usage isn't just mining. It's the entire supply chain from Cash 4 Gold stores, long term storage, smelting/recycling, etc. I don't have a good reference for the total cost of gold.
However, the point still stands. Datacenters in the US use total energy less than 2 bitcoins. How many of those datacenters are moving fiat around? Way less than half?
Things like brewing tea and heating houses take a ton of energy. Moving money around doesn't!
Crypto is a huge waste, and that site does not suggest otherwise.
When you buy/sell crypto - money changes hands. That money wasn't really "allocated" to crypto, beyond miner fees, just redistributed. That cash still exists.
The resources being allocated are graphics cards, human time, and electricity AFAICT.
The power usage of crypto is relatively small compared to other active human endeavors. It's power usage doesn't approach other arbitrary value stores like gold and government backed fiat markets. Could it go somewhere else? Yeah - but could we reasonably produce enough to offset it in a positive sum game - definitely. As long as renewables are cost efficient (read: truly competitive with non-renewables) and are net-zero on emissions this misallocation of resources would be allocated to renewable power production in an efficient market.
Graphics cards being misallocated... I'm not sure saying markets are inefficient because a financial market is outbidding video gamers is a compelling argument. Scientific use of graphics cards seems like a small part of the market, but I may be mistaken here.5