This releases a bunch of C02 and other much nastier stuff like silicon tetrachloride and radioactive uranium into the environment, and out comes purified polysilicon for making "green" PV panels. :P
In contrast Bitcoin can run on green hydro or nuclear power.
Air travel is considered one of the biggest polluters, and reducing air travel is considered one of the highest impact ways that individuals can reduce their carbon footprint. It only stands to reason that Bitcoin should therefore be considered far worse for its impact. The only saving grace is that people don't actually use it to pay for much, else we'd likely be in a much worse place.
Edit: source is here https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption - the 450kg was from 2018, it's currently 310kg (or 685,000 VISA transactions), 651kWh (or 22 days of household energy), and nearly 100g of electronic waste.
Bitcoin is essentially destined to be electricity price arbitrage in the long run, and that's a dangerous proposition.
It looks like transaction fees are ~8 dollars right now [1], lets call it 10 dollars for easy math.
The cheapest state/kwh is Louisiana [2], at 7 cents per kwh, let's assume that the cost of mining bitcoin is just electricity, and that you can get it at 10c/kwh for easy math.
You now have 100kwh/transaction... that's 1/6th of what's reported on that site... but the same order of magnitude and the above analysis ignores block rewards...
[1] https://privacypros.io/tools/bitcoin-fee-estimator/
[2] https://www.energybot.com/electricity-rates-by-state.html
The entire bitcoin mining network which processes all transactions does 120 Exahashes (120,000,000 terahashes) per second. Were all mining done on comparable asics this would be 4.56 GW to run the whole network, which in turn means electricity consumption would be 4.56 million kwh per hour. At the time of this writing bitcoin is averaging 14,814 transactions per hour, meaning the average electricity consumption per transaction is 308 kwh. I could easily see the average hash efficiency for the whole network being half of what a 2020 dedicated mining rig can do.
Do note that this is transaction processing on bitcoin proper, which is artificially limited to processing less than 7 transactions per second. There are lots of things that we would think of as transactions that don't have to go into this number. For example if you have a trusted marketplace, you can have all the transactions which take place within the marketplace in a given time period lumped together as a single transaction, and thus you only need to do a "real" transaction when you deposit or withdraw money from that market. This is the concept behind many cryptocurrencies meant to "speed up" bitcoin. So really it's not so much a 5 hour flight every time you use a credit card, but a 5 hour flight every time you get a new credit card - still inefficient, but far less extreme.
That would move my estimate of 100kwh to 1000kwh... still the same order of magnitude as the original claims.
That doesn't seem right.
You do realize that bitcoin transactions are secured by hashrate right?
It's one of the largest distributed computing projects in the world.
You get about one block and 2000 transactions every ten minutes.
Figures don't lie, but liars will figure.
The mining-power relationship essentially creates a price arbitrage opportunity between electricity prices and Bitcoin mining fees. This is a very bad thing for the global economy as it ties all other uses of electricity to the Bitcoin mining fees in a very direct way. I can't think of another relationship this direct to energy prices, it could be catastrophic for entire industries. Oh and also it's emitting as much emissions as Argentina at the moment.
A friend of mine called Bitcoin a candidate for The Great Filter, and I'm inclined to agree.
Oh purified silicon like also used in making all the computers that people use to mine Bitcoin with a bunch of other resources.
Since you say Bitcoin can run on nuclear, why do you think that generates less “radioactive uranium”, one of your concerns for pv mfg, and other radioactive pollution than pv manufacturing? Does the uranium not get mined, concentrating and releasing its decay products into the env?
How much of the power for Bitcoin is generated by nuclear and hydro right now? How much will that increase in the next 20 years?
You could add carbon capture equipment and use nuclear or hyrdo electricity to break down the CO2 back into carbon, and this carbon could be reused instead of fresh coal which would also limit the emission of other pollutants. This is a substantial additional cost though, and the conversion of an existing plant to run this way is non-trivial.
And with the rapidly falling price of PV, it's unlikely we'll see expensive investments that do not reduce costs.