Even if the base layer of Bitcoin is using energy, one can argue that the functionality it offers (trustless, borderless, permissionless, programmable, digitally-native money) is worth the energy cost.
I can't come up with any reasonable measure by which Christmas lights use more energy than Bitcoin mining. The reports that suggest this seem to extrapolate US figures across the world, which looks unrealistic. And they're old enough that they don't account for the switch to LEDs.
Even if a billion households had 50 strings of LED lights each and kept them lit 24/7 for all of December, they'd still use less energy than the annual usage of Bitcoin.
> Even if a billion households had 50 strings of LED lights each and kept them lit 24/7 for all of December, they'd still use less energy than the annual usage of Bitcoin.
On the final math, at 5 watts per strand, you'd wind up with 182.5 TWH. Bitcoin at 150TWH-250TWH puts it into the ballpark. Nice.
Per an ancestor comment you replied to:
> Reversibility is one example of a design requirement that undoes the claimed advantages of permissionless blockchains that are meant to justify their inherent downsides.
If we need reversibility on a permissionless blockchain, why have a blockchain? A postgres database would do fine. You could even broadcast the write-ahead log to allow any party to verify that history isn’t silently rewritten.
You even said it yourself:
> Do you not want to transact on the base layer because of lack of reversibility or fees? Move to a higher layer solution that sacrifices some characteristic of Bitcoin to enable something new.
If we’ve established that reversibility is a table stakes requirement for a financial system, the thing you’re “sacrificing” is the very thing that makes PoW essential. Since PoW is planet-melting, can’t we just use a database instead?
It's not a worldwide phenomenon. There are orders of magnitude more Christmas lights and wash dryers than mining servers. And yet...
The idea that Bitcoin (#23) is worth as much or more as all the economic and general human activity of Poland (25), Thailand (24), or Vietnam (22) is highly suspect:
This claim appears to be untrue -
https://charlesarthur.medium.com/does-bitcoin-use-less-energ...
tl;dr - the claim appears to be based on a combination of pre-LED figures in the US, and just plain wrong figures from other countries, and is probably out by a couple of orders of magnitude.