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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

Do you play video games, then? Because arguably it isn’t NFTs that consume power...it’s the GPUs. GPUs do way more than NFTs, and there is data that shows that gaming consumes way more than blockchain.

If my mom is any indicator, many consider video games stupid and pointless. Value is in the eye of the beholder.

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A quick search finds that a single bitcoin transaction consumes around 773.80 kWh. That's enough to power a video game console, like a PS5 for example, for around 3100 hours. So the simple act of buying the video game to play would cost vastly more electricity than playing it ever will.

Whether or not gaming as a whole consumes more power than crypto as a whole isn't the question, it's whether or not crypto would consume more power per person using it than per gamer playing games. As in, give everyone a ~fixed power consumption quota - where is that power "better" spent, gaming or crypto?

I honestly don't know where the power is better spent. There are quite a few industries I personally find superfluous in the world according to my personal set of values. Ironically for this context, I consider bitcoin to be among them.

But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do. We do this for blockchain because calculating this is easy. We don't even have these numbers for, say, the stock market, so we don't even know how good or bad that is. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis.

> We don't even have these numbers for, say, the stock market, so we don't even know how good or bad that is. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis.

Crypto isn't competing against the stock market, it's competing against something like Visa. And we can answer that comparison: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co....

1 bitcoin transaction takes more power than 100,000 Visa transactions.

> But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do.

That's exactly what I think we as a society should do. We are limited on the amount of sustainable power generation, so looking at cost vs. value is exactly what we should be doing. Especially when something comes along that does the same basic thing as an existing system, but 100,000x more expensive.

If you want to bring the data you mentioned we can have a conversation, however I would be very surprised if it came close to the 50-130GWh mark for just bitcoin alone[1].

[1] https://cbeci.org/

These are the sources I've used when I've gone looking, but it doesn't help that we don't actually do industry-by-industry energy consumption comparisons.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257768246_Electrici... - US energy consumption by video game consoles in the US alone was 16 TWh in 2010

[2] https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici... - Globally, PC gaming (not console gaming) was estimated at 75 TWh in 2018

Maybe this is a the case, however there are, I would guess at least a billion people on earth who play games. there is nothing even close to that using blockchains. If blockchain energy usage is even vaguely in the range of games it can still be considered an enormous --possibly-- unnecessary usage of power

Maybe this is the case, but when we start judging what constitutes unnecessary usage of power, we get in the business of telling people what they can and cannot do with hardware they own. Last I checked, the HN crowd really doesn't like that kind of thing.

> there is data that shows that gaming consumes way more than blockchain

Source?

These are the sources I've used when I've gone looking, but it doesn't help that we don't actually do industry-by-industry energy consumption comparisons.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257768246_Electrici... - US energy consumption by video game consoles in the US alone was 16 TWh in 2010

[2] https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici... - Globally, PC gaming (not console gaming) was estimated at 75 TWh in 2018

If I had to bet I would probably bet that "all the gamers in the world" are using more power than "all the crypto miners in the world".

I can't think of a way to immediately gather any evidence for this either way but it seems like a plausible position to take.

(However - I think the value > utility chain is easier to argue for with gaming. I'm not making the same argument as the parent post.)

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