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According to a press release carried by Eurekalert
In the first rigorously peer-reviewed article quantifying Bitcoin's energy requirements, a Commentary appearing May 16 in the journal Joule, financial economist and blockchain specialist Alex de Vries uses a new methodology to pinpoint where Bitcoin's electric energy consumption is headed and how soon it might get there.
The abstract of the article says
The Bitcoin network can be estimated to consume at least 2.55 gigawatts of electricity currently, and potentially 7.67 gigawatts in the future, making it comparable with countries such as Ireland (3.1 gigawatts) and Austria (8.2 gigawatts). [...]
The author offers a caveat:
[...] all of the methods discussed assume rational agents. There may be various reasons for an agent to mine even when this isn't profitable, and in some cases costs may not play a role at all when machines and/or electricity are stolen or abused.
[Other] reasons for an agent to mine Bitcoin at a loss might include [...] being able to obtain Bitcoin completely anonymously, libertarian ideology [...] or speculative reasons.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @02:52PM (8 children)
Apparently a little less than 1700 TWh is wasted on IT per year:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320225452_Total_Consumer_Power_Consumption_Forecast [researchgate.net]
Now think about all the servers, phones, computers, etc using that energy. If I go to the cell.com page to read this article I downloaded 1.7 MB worth of stuff. However when copying the article text and saving it to disk it is only 22 KB. So that page is ~99% fluff, and its a pretty light page (eg cnn.com is ~ 5 mb). So just trying to use the internet to get basic info about something leads to wasting 99% of the energy.
Other stuff going on on the internet like playing stupid games, looking at pron, sending selfies to each other, serving ads, blocking ads, etc is completely unnecessary. So it seems to be the case that almost all that energy being used by IT devices is going to waste.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 21 2018, @03:06PM (5 children)
Looking at pr0n is not a waste.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday May 21 2018, @03:10PM (4 children)
Every sperm is sacred.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday May 21 2018, @03:15PM (2 children)
Perhaps he is watching for the awesome acting and the deep and meaningful stories?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 21 2018, @03:23PM (1 child)
Shit no. I'm watching for the naked chicks. Being able to see boobies on demand is something I value quite a bit though, thus not a waste.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @05:03PM
I think that gets to the real issue here. Some people just don't like bitcoin or have some kind of trading scheme so they came up with this energy-usage concern trolling.
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 21 2018, @03:25PM
I shudder to think how holy my bedroom trashcan was as a teenager.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 21 2018, @03:10PM
194 gigawatts across the year, less than 10% of global electricity use, comprising of multiple industries that underpin advanced economies. According to the Global Scope slide, it includes all client devices, including TVs and game consoles, as well as data centers and production facilities. Not merely inefficient and redundant networking.
At least the carbon footprint of blocking ads is less than displaying them. And browsers can cache bulky scripts after loading them.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:48PM
Not exactly, there's a high baseline of energy usage that's not correlated with bytes of data transfer, but... point well made nonetheless.
Bitcoin is pretty frugal with bytes stored in the blockchain, but Bitcoin Cash aims to change all that...
🌻🌻 [google.com]