I suppose one could say video games are a net positive as they entertain humans.

Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.

Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it. The mining provides no value, it is not a good usage of the compute power. Evening finding ET would be better than what it’s currently doing. That power could be used for all kinds of things, versus solving a block of data with trial and error.

Gold mining, which is primarily open pit strip mining, is massively more polluting than just measuring its carbon footprint.

Gold mining completely destroys large tracts of land, poisons enormous water supplies and leaves huge areas completely uninhabitable for basically ever.

Gold mining has polluted 40% of US rivers and 50% of lakes.

If Bitcoin could replace gold’s store of value use case and environmental footprint, it would be a massive win for the environment.

https://www.gao.gov/blog/gold-rush-rot-lasting-environmental...

> Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.

Most use of gold is speculative as a store of value, some is decorative, and a little bit is actually used to build products.

> Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it.

Of course, for transactions. But people don't want to use national currencies as a store of value. For good reasons.

If we could replace gold with bitcoin as the store of value, it'd be a net positive.

Any energy usage seems like a waste if you don't understand the benefits.

Bitcoins energy input is used to protect the monetary energy it contains from being stolen, by anyone. The value in the monetary units of fiat currencies is continuously being stolen through supply inflation which dilutes the same value across more units, halving the value every decade. This is what always happens when money is proof-of-work for most, but not for a select few who can create it effortlessly (the banking system).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

What is money if it's not proof of work?

> Abraham broadly estimates the gaming industry produced between 3 million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020 to create video games. That includes energy bought from local grids and used to keep the lights on and computers powered as developers make games.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/features/video-games-are-fi...

Compare this to the linked wiki article:

> A 2022 non-peer-reviewed commentary published in Joule estimated that bitcoin mining resulted in annual carbon emission of 65 Mt CO2, representing 0.2% of global emissions, which is comparable to the level of emissions of Greece.

So, bitcoin mining results in CO2 emissions comparable to twice that of the entire video game and movie industries combined.

That's just the energy that goes into making them, what about the energy that goes into playing them? Has to be at least an order of magnitude greater

That's a good point, but I'm not sure it's quite as drastic as you think.

There are about 400 million current and last-gen consoles that have been sold, all-time. I'd wager most of them spend 95% or more of their time unused.

Steam shows about 20-30 million players online at any given point. Let's pretend this represents 50% of the PC gaming population (a vast underestimate of Steam's market share in the US and EU, not sure about other markets like China). What fraction of those are gaming PCs? Gaming laptops? Laptops with integrated graphics that really aren't meant for gaming?

Let's say that your typical PC gamer uses 300W when playing video games. That's probably on the low end for a gaming PC, but an overestimate for any laptop. 300W * 24 * 365 * 60 million is about 160 billion kWh. That translates to, um, 33000 tons of CO2? So like 3 orders of magnitude smaller?

I'm not even going to bother with the mobile game population because the power draw on those is like single-digit watts so even if there are 100x more players, the numbers are around the same order of magnitude.

Even if my estimates of number of PC gamers at any moment and the wattage of the typical device are both off by 10x, that's still way smaller than the estimate of how carbon-intensive it is to make games.