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A comment on Proof of work is temporarily illegal in New York. Parent comment

Re:Proof of work is temporarily illegal in New York by 0x62 on Thursday November 24, 2022 @11:33AM (#33733207)
YouTube used over 175 times more energy watching Gangnam Style in 2019 than Ethereum uses per year. Paypal uses 100x the power consumed by PoS Ethereum in a year [0].

This argument was (and still is) valid for PoW algorithms, but energy consumption is now barely a factor for Ethereum, which is the main network we take payments on [1].

[0] https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

[1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

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Re:Proof of work is temporarily illegal in New York by dekhn on Thursday November 24, 2022 @11:57AM (#33733483)
I am not opposed to proof of stake but your arguments that youtube and paypal are more wasteful isn't super convincing- after all, you picked a video that's been watched billions of times, and paypal provides a very important service.
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Re:Proof of work is temporarily illegal in New York by 0x62 on Thursday November 24, 2022 @12:14PM (#33733694)
My argument isn't that Paypal is more wasteful necessarily, it's more pointing out the inconsistencies in how value vs sustainability is weighed up.

Ethereum is currently doing 30 TPS [0], and Paypal ~200 [1]. Assuming that energy usage scales linearly (a naive assumption, but for arguments sake), it could deliver similar value with 10x lower energy consumption, I don't find arguing against the adoption of PoS crypto solely based on sustainability very credible either.

[0] https://ethtps.info/

[1] https://www.ing.uc.cl/en/boletines/engineering-student-scale....

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