I see news stories that will give examples of how much energy a type of technology uses (usually AI or crypto). They’ll claim very big numbers like the whole ecosystem using “as much as a small country” or one instance of use being “as much as an average home uses in a year.”
With the crypto ecosystem being so big and I’m less inclined to defend it, I haven’t thought as much about the claims. But with AI while it still has problematic aspects, it also has a lot of useful applications. When I run a single query the idea it’s the same energy as driving my car ten miles or whatever doesn’t seem to pass the smell test.
How are these numbers generated? Historically media doesn’t do great with science reporting (“a cure for cancer was just invented” etc) so just trying to get some context/perspective.
You are wrong, cryptocurrency replaces money, not digital transactions. Bitcoin has its own value, independent of dollar or gold, it’s not meant to be used instead of MasterCard, but instead of dollars. If you only look at a small fraction of what cryptocurrencies do the energy consumption will look huge, it’s like using a supercomputer as a calculator and complaining it consumes too much power.
That’s not exactly how it works, more adoption doesn’t necessarily increases price, ethereum and Bitcoin Cash are a lot more used than BTC yet their price is lower. Price is determined by speculation, and the vast majority of people have only heard of Bitcoin, so that’s what they invest in. Also Bitcoin can’t grow any more, essentially everyone with an ASIC profitable in Bitcoin is already pointing it to Bitcoin, so it becoming more popular couldn’t possibly make more ASICS point to it, and if difficulty starts to increase the less profitable ones would mine something else and difficulty would fall again. If on the other hand any other coin became the most popular then part of those ASICS would look to that.
Don’t you think if some other currency surpassed Bitcoin as the best known and universally adopted currency that people would start speculating on the new currency instead of Bitcoin?
The issue is both proof of work and limited number of coins. As more people use a limited number of coins, the price will go up and so mining difficulty will go up, and so energy use goes up.
I think the future of cryptocurrency is inflationary coins that use proof of stake. (Also with anonymity built in instead of pseudonymity)
If a coin is used the speculating goes down, same reason people don’t speculate with dollar value, if X coins buys you a hot dog it gets a lot harder to speculate, the price becomes what people who use it give it. This is similar to gold, while it was used like money it was quite stable, but as people started to use dollars and the dollar decoupled from gold, actual gold became a lot more speculative.
Again no, the more coins people hold the more the value goes up, people actually using the coins doesn’t interfere in their price, unless you get to a point where there aren’t enough coins for everyone. But even if it got to the point that the price increases because everyone wants to use it and there aren’t enough coins for everyone to use, I don’t see how that would make mining more expensive. Like I said, processing 1 or 1000 transactions has a similar difficulty. The price of the coin going up could affect profitability, but the amount of ASICS is constant, so the power is already being consumed to mine other coins and would just be pointed here instead of there but would still have been consumed regardless.
I agree inflationary PoS coins, especially ones with smart contract capabilities such as Ethereum are way more useful. I understand the appeal for anonymity, but I disagree on the importance of it, I think most cryptocurrencies are anonymous enough even though like you pointed out they’re not fully anonymous.