A bit off topic, but this sort of transparency is why I don't mind paying $6 / mo for a vpn when mullvad's competitors are much cheaper. Their wireguard support is great, and their speeds are much faster than what I got through openVpn on pia.
OTOH, did anyone ever consider the average pollution of the banking system? 10.000th of banks, 200+ central banks, BIS, IMF, ECB, etc, etc. Millions of employees, millions of desktops & servers, day-in-day out. Anyone with a link to a guestimate?
This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash fire for plenty of reasons, but of course it's fairly energy intensive. It's massive. If it were replaced entirely by Bitcoin, it would be even more intensive.
not on a per transaction basis, which is the only relevant measure because the banking system supports a lot more people than bitcoin does.
A single bitcoin transaction uses 610.20 kWh right now, which is comparable to the energy consumption of an average US household over 20 days.[1]
Also for a comparison of scope, Tenpay, Tencents payment service processes about 1.2 billion transactions per day, Bitcoin does about 300k. If all financial transactions conducted in China alone would consume the amount of energy that a bitcoin transaction does, it would roughly eclipse the energy the country consumes in a year, in one day.
And then everyone gets "too cheap to meter" fusion power? There is not a /lot/ of headroom there, we surely can't go to outputting as much waste heat again as the planet gets from The Sun - and before you say "solar", you already said "fusion".
Still, I think that's the proper comparison—human processes are the analogue to keeping a blockchain online and mining.
All the energy in bitcoin is not wasted on keeping and organizing that tiny ledger (barely 300 GB of data!), it's wasted on brute forcing hashes, with the energy required ramping up exponentially with interest in bitcoin.
As ingenious as bitcoin is, that is a fatal flaw. Using bitcoin is like rolling coal, only worse for the environment.
If you have an issue with how the energy is generated take it up with your local government.
I mean we don't really have that in the case of bitcoin, which is predominantly mined in China these days probably precisely because state subsidised energy projects have created a ton of useless energy surplus, on which bitcoin lives.
Which is ironic in and of itself, the libertarian currency de jure runs on the misallocated resources of a state planned economy lol.
Just imagine if the transactions actually costed as much as their energy consumption suggests and environmental damage priced in.
A Bitcoin transaction uses about 1,005 kWh, while 100,000 VISA transactions use 169 kWh, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...
If a transaction costs half as much power every 4 years that's only 193 years until it's cheaper than visa[0]! Truly the financial instrument of the (distant) future!
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%5E2+%3D+%281005%2F%2...
These are not alternatives to cash, they're alternatives to checks. The actual cash is held in accounts at centralized third parties (banks) who must be trusted to maintain accurate records, remain solvant, and not interfere with transactions legitimately approved by the account holders. What we see, however, is that the records are not always accurate, and banks do interfere with account holder-approved transactions, based on either their own policies or legal constraints. As for solvency… let's just hope that particular house of cards is never really put to the test.
Bitcoin, like physical cash, does not depend on trusted third parties. There are technological measures in place to guarantee accurate record-keeping, and while the sender of an "illegal" payment may be prosecuted after the fact (if they can be identified) there is little anyone can do either to prevent the payment from going through or to claw back the funds once they have been confirmed by the network.
* Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity, 7 transactions per second.
* THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION, FINANCIAL SYSTEM AND ALL: 99.9% of electricity, a heck of a lot more than 6,993 transactions per second.
It's the only way they can reliably prevent abuse like a thousand people using one number - because this way you can just track the number of open connections per account number.
This is superior to tracking IP-addresses to detect fraud for obvious privacy reasons. I do a similar thing for a service I run.
Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely.
For that use case, I can't justify paying double/triple the price as other providers that offer 2/3x the devices for the same price. The provider I use now, Surfshark, offers unlimited devices for about 1/3 of the price, and also recently started offering WireGuard, it would be financially irresponsible for me to choose Mullvad which would effectively 10x what I'm paying right now for the same number of devices.
FWIW I understand that their account number mechanism is superior from a privacy perspective, and that there's no way to support unlimited devices while combating fraud using that mechanism. It's just not the right set of tradeoffs for my use case.
I’m not GP and I certainly don’t take GP’s stance about limiting to 5 devices (I think it makes sense), but claiming it’s unlikely that someone owns more than five devices is silly, especially if someone has a family. My non-tech sister’s family of four has two phones, three iPads, two laptops, etc. As another example, I literally own over an order of magnitude more devices than just five devices for private use (yes, I’m an outlier).
No I specifically said use, not own. You can own more than 5 devices with your mullvad account number, you just can't be connected on all of them at the same time. Also I wasn't expecting people would share their accounts with their family, which is already questionable.
> No I specifically said use, not own.
These two verbatim quotes from you seem to be in conflict with each other.
> Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely.
One sentence is a question, the other is a statement which I consider to be true (and explains how I arrived at that question).
Also it was quite clear from my argument that I was talking about people singular, and you responded pretending I was saying that an entire family owning more than 5 devices is unlikely.
I can't imagine why you'd be arguing like this, I just hope it's not on purpose.
Seriously? OP never said just me and only me uses all five plus devices. I and others gave you multiple examples of how that could be very possible realistically, and then you shift goal posts and say it’s us being argumentative. I’m done, have a good life!
Do families not already share Netflix, iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Prime, etc etc? I’m not sure why it would be such a leap for them to share a VPN, especially if the reason they are using the VPN at all is simply to get around GeoIP restrictions (which I’m not condoning, but obviously many do it).