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Comment by dfee | Hacker News Reader

I don’t follow. Can you explain?

gold mining uses a ton of energy, more than bitcoin mining. To the extent that people substitute gold for bitcoin in financial portfolios, this is positive since net energy waste is lower.

How do you know that gold mining uses more energy than bitcoin mining?

I mean, I don't know it for sure, that's why I said "to the extent..." but here is one article

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-i...

Gonna need a lot of citations to believe that

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-i...

It seems like a bad comparison, since you don’t need to mine gold just to move it around. Transferring ownership can be accomplished for the amount of energy it takes to send a small electronic message.

to move it around you need trucks which use gasoline

You don’t need to move it to transfer ownership of it.

by that logic, same thing applies to bitcoin. on a centralized exchange ownershp is just an entry in the database

It would apply to bitcoin if that were the usual way to transfer it, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case.

what do you mean? most bitcoin volume is done on centralized exchanges, so that's exactly the usual way of trading it.

From some quick searching around, volume on the exchanges is around 500,000/day while volume on the blockchain is over a million. If that’s accurate (and it may not be, I’m not an expert on this and the sources I found might suck) then most volume is on the blockchain by a pretty good margin.

I don’t know how much gold is actually shifted around physically, but the trading volume in a year is several times the actual amount of gold that has been mined, so I suspect the proportion of that which involves physical movement is tiny.

https://blockchain.info/stats

total USD transaction volume according to above about $1.3bln

trading volume, according to https://coinmarketcap.com/ - 6.7 bln

most bitcoin volume is virtual, not generating actual transactions, by 5 to 1 margin. Not sure where you got your numbers

What is the difference between “Total Output Volume” and “Estimated Transaction Volume”? The former is pretty close to what I found.

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