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Researchers have calculated, or approximated, the cost of creating bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. Then compared said cryptocurrency costs vs the cost of real actual mining for minerals. Mining bitcoins etc requires more power then most actual mining such as actual gold. An average bitcoin-dollar, or if you will a dollar worth of a bitcoin, is calculated to require about 17 megajoule of energy, while digging up a dollar worth gold requires 5 megajoule. Aluminum is still a lot more expensive then most of the cryptocoins to produce as it requires a massive 122 megajoule to create a dollar worth of.
The Carbon dioxide creation due to cryptocurrencies mining is also estimated to be between 3 and 15 million tonnes, between January 2016 and June 2018. But a Chinese bitcoin emits four times as much CO2 as a Canadian one, so it is highly dependent on the form of energy used. I didn't find any comparable numbers to how much CO2 is created from the production of Aluminum, Gold or other metals.
Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0152-7
Bitcoin Will Burn the Planet Down. The Question: How Fast?
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-will-burn-planet-down-how-fast/
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 20 2018, @07:10PM
Difference being, that COBOL from the 60s may have had three or four self-taught programmers look at it from the time it was written until today, usually only when someone had a complaint about something. The latest javascript framework is published on multiple sites like GitHub, GitLab, etc. collaboratively developed by a large multi-national group of coders with diverse backgrounds from academically educated, through decades of experience in real world code development and maintenance, as well as plenty of the self-taught variety.
And, even with the huge difference in the human factors side of the equation, if that COBOL has processed a few billion transactions over the last 50 years without any significant user complaints, it's probably still "more mature" than the latest group-think project with 1000x the development hours invested in it to-date, mostly because it's addressing one specific problem, instead of trying to be all things to a wide audience.
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