Thread: End of Crypto?
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Old 13 November 2022, 12:09 PM   #119
huncho
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Quote:
Originally Posted by joeychitwood View Post
The amount of energy needed to “mine” crypto is astounding. One bitcoin transaction takes 1,449 kWh to complete, the equivalent of approximately 50 days of power for the average US household. All to basically solve a puzzle on a computer.
this is extremely misleading and how the media gets people. a "single" bitcoin transaction can include hundreds of payments. the electricity is spent validating a block which rewards bitcoins to the miner. the block itself doesn't contain one transaction

Quote:
“The popular ‘energy cost per transaction’ metric is regularly featured in the media and other academic studies despite having multiple issues.

“First, transaction throughput (i.e. the number of transactions that the system can process) is independent of the network’s electricity consumption. Adding more mining equipment and thus increasing electricity consumption will have no impact on the number of processed transactions.

“Second, a single Bitcoin transaction can contain hidden semantics that may not be immediately visible nor intelligible to observers. For instance, one transaction can include hundreds of payments to individual addresses, settle second-layer network payments (e.g. opening and closing channels in the Lightning network), or potentially represent billions of timestamped data points using open protocols such as OpenTimestamps.”

–Cambridge Centre For Alternative Finance, Cambridge University
the carbon footprint argument has been debunked many times but people just pretend like the facts don't exist. it'll be a lot more efficient once the chase for profits pushes more initiatives and technology for reusable energy (which already started), assuming btc lasts

more info : https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business...-is-misleading

Quote:
“What would be Bitcoin’s environmental footprint assuming the absolute worst case? For this experiment, let’s use the annualised power consumption estimate from CBECI as of July 13th, 2021, which corresponds to roughly 70 TWh. Let’s also assume that all this energy comes exclusively from coal (the most-polluting fossil fuel) and is generated in one of the world’s least efficient coal-fired power plants (the now-decommissioned Hazelwood Power Station in Victoria, Australia). In this worst-case scenario, the Bitcoin network would be responsible for about 111 Mt (million metric tons) of carbon dioxide emission, accounting for roughly 0.35% of the world's total yearly emissions.”

–Cambridge Centre For Alternative Finance, Cambridge University
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