As reported in the Evening Standard, the Bank of International Settlements published an annual report with four criteria to continue economic growth. However, it was rather overshadowed by a statement in the appendix (reported here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere) where cryptographic currency was described as a "combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster".
I agree and so does a Canadian electricity company.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 27 2018, @02:32PM
Have you done any research or do you just blindly consume what the media tells you? It costs about 5 kWh per GB, a movie is about 3 GB and lasts about an hr[1], so assume a streaming rate of ~3 gb/hr. One billion hours of content is streamed per week just on netflix. [2]
Here is another one claiming 24 million TB streamed by netflix in 4 months[3]:
Its claimed bitcoin mining uses ~ 71 TWh/yr [4], which is ~1/10th of that used for entertainment via netflix alone. Netflix is about 40% of total streaming viewership [4], so the total is going to be ~ 1200-2000 TWh/year. And that is just entertainment via streaming.
[1] https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf [aceee.org]
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/11/netflix-users-collectively-watched-1-billion-hours-of-content-per-week-in-2017/ [techcrunch.com]
[3] https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/netflix-streamed-over-24021900-terabytes-of-data-in-the-4th-quarter-of-2014/ [cordcuttersnews.com]
[4] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [digiconomist.net]
[5] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/05/u-s-cord-cutters-watch-more-netflix-than-amazon-video-hulu-and-youtube-combined/ [techcrunch.com]