Let's take the example of video games: bitcoin uses about 150TWh of electricity. From EIA.gov's stats, it looks like residential computer usage is estimated at 36 TWh across the usa (2.4% of residential usage, 1.5T kWh residential [0]). Let's assume all residential computer usage is video games, so it's using a nice 1/4th bitcoin.
So, what's different about these uses? Well, let's say that we manage to make electricity 5 times cheaper by, say, building a fusion reactor or a ton of solar panels. In that scenario, those computers playing video games still use the same amount of electricity, and their power bill goes down. Not a problem for computers/games.
However, if the price of electricity goes down, that's actually a problem for bitcoin. Bitcoin is using 150TWh of electricity, which sorta means to perform a 51% attack, you need 75TWh of electricity (I know, it's more complicated than that). Now that electricity is 5 times cheaper, cool, someone can attack bitcoin for 5 times cheaper right? Well, we can't have that, so bitcoin now has to use 750TWh to have the same security it had before.
The same thing happens for improvements to ASICs or any other improvements pretty much. If bitcoin is cheaper to mine, that just means more mining happens and the cost of mining stabilizes back out.
On the other hand, if a game can be optimized to take less electricity, or use fewer servers, of course that'll happen. Like in almost any venture, accomplishing the same work for cheaper is good when it comes to video games.
That is the difference I see. Crypto isn't just wasteful, it's adversarial to the point where it resists improvement.
If we reached some energy utopia where electricity could fulfill 100% of all non-crypto uses on the planet at no meaningful cost, bitcoin would have to use so much energy that electricity still couldn't be free, or else it could be attacked with the free electricity. I cannot think of any other use of electricity that has this adversarial property.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...
Bitcoin will, in order to secure the assets on the chain, need to have an adversarial amount of resources wasted. That's the point of proof of work, to prove that you wasted a lot of energy. It's an energy wasting contest.
There are physical limits which mean the waste in this contest-of-waste can only increase so quickly (i.e. manufacturing limits), but I think the fundamentals of the system are as I describe. It is "working as intended" that proof of work must take more energy if energy is cheaper. Practically no other systems work this way.
Crypto is considered wasteful because you can compare it to cheaper, more traditional means of exchange. Games are entertainment or art that you can't really quantify in the same way. People enjoy the games themselves, not for any utilitarian purpose.
Games are entertainment, and average gamer certainly doesn't consume electricity on a scale of Bitcoin farm 24/7.
Miners should be compared to data centers, like those massive ones powering cloud games?
Data centers host more than cloud games.
Its fairly useless as solely an observation, mining farms often also do other things with byproducts, so even if the crux of this conversation relies on a futile effort of comparing relative utility of "entertainment" or "bitcoin", it would be inaccurate either way
The network uses the same amount of energy whether a block has transactions or not. Surely you see how that would actually help your “I hate energy use” argument if you actually made that one. Your argument is a common argument though, its incompatible with the more accurate argument.
Secondly, trading for speculation occurs offchain, meaning most speculators are not transacting on the network.
First games waste a lot of electrical power. A modern GPU is what at its peak? 500 watts? A modern CPU isn't too far off. That's 1kwh that per gamer that gets turned into heat and lootboxes.
2nd technological game progress means that computers/gpus are considered obsolete too fast. Back in the day your home computer would last over a decade until you had to throw it away and buy new hardware.
3rd (young) people wasting a lot of time in computer games. Teenagers waste their youth infront of a screen over going out and enjoying the world in their prime. Leading to adults that lack life experience and get depressed/anxious easily. (Mental health crisis)
4th modern game design makes games pretty much a gateway drug to gambling addiction.
5th spending all that time sitting means it's an enormous health care crisis. Pair that with the deregulated dopamine cycle in game addicted people and you can easily see how this leads to over eating and obesity. Which is even more of a cost to society.
The miners got a few architecture jumps where everything older became obsolete as well. It's not much different from the availability point of view. On the other hand, unless you're chasing AAA titles, you don't really need to upgrade much - I can play all my game library with 4yo hardware and I'm sure I could go further back. And that's ignoring console gamers who use the same generation for ages.
> Teenagers waste their youth infront of a screen over going out and enjoying the world in their prime.
"that's like, your opinion man". You seem to assume online interactions don't improve life experience, or don't provide enjoyment of the world - that's just a set of your values. That's ok, but it's not universal.
> modern game design makes games pretty much a gateway drug to gambling addiction
You're missing a lot of qualifiers. There's a tonne of games with no lootboxes. There's likely more of them than those with. This is not "modern design", but rather "late stage capitalism in game design" - it's very related to some genres and producers - not to modern games in general. For every lootbox-heavy AAA released in a year there's a gamejam that results in some new creative indie title.
> spending all that time sitting
Are you assuming that removing games would not cause people to find entertainment that still involves only sitting? Do you remember how the same line was used about the TV?
Basically it sounds like you know about games and have opinions about them, but don't really have much experience with various genres or how people interact and don't enjoy them yourself. It's ok... but that's a lot of personal opinions.
> First games waste a lot of electrical power. A modern GPU is what at its peak? 500 watts? A modern CPU isn't too far off. That's 1kwh that per gamer that gets turned into heat and lootboxes.
Majority of gamers are smartphone users and mid to low machines.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
> 2nd technological game progress means that computers/gpus are considered obsolete too fast. Back in the day your home computer would last over a decade until you had to throw it away and buy new hardware.
??????
> 3rd (young) people wasting a lot of time in computer games. Teenagers waste their youth infront of a screen over going out and enjoying the world in their prime. Leading to adults that lack life experience and get depressed/anxious easily. (Mental health crisis)
Bitcoin users waste their life chasing gambling schemes and then killing themselves.
https://www.jumpstartmag.com/are-crypto-related-suicides-a-r...
> 4th modern game design makes games pretty much a gateway drug to gambling addiction.
What's "modern game design"? Gachas existed for a long time, single player games exist and are wildly popular.
> 5th spending all that time sitting means it's an enormous health care crisis. Pair that with the deregulated dopamine cycle in game addicted people and you can easily see how this leads to over eating and obesity. Which is even more of a cost to society.
Got something to back that up?
You should compare energy usage of Bitcoin to gambling, not gaming.
This does not give you a pass for being wasteful.
The environmental damage of energy is caused by coal plants, not how many people are watching the simpsons at the same time.
TV usage is a contribution of billions of people. Same with outdoor lighting.
Both are necessary, unlike Bitcoin.
But now we're playing a game where you tell me the thing you like and the things you don't like and I can either present a counterargument of things I like and don't like and we can both get mad that we have different preferences...
Or, we can design a system that allows people to have different preferences without trying to regulate our preferences on each other.
The math: (residential power %)(lighting %)(lighting % wasted) (21)(.13)(.35) = 0.9555% (oh, it was higher than I remembered)
1 - https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/energy-waste/#:~:tex....
The only people who genuinely care about PoW are miners and a handful of enthusiasts. I'll generously estimate that 1 million people fall into this category. So you have a million people using .5% of the world's electricity just for one of their interests. Contrast that with the billions of people who enjoy videogames or outdoor lighting.
This is circular reasoning. The difficulty adjustment is part of the protocol, and the purpose of the protocol is to secure the network from attacks. You might think that’s useless, I don’t.
Yes, and the completely fixable loss in efficiency has a significantly greater impact on our consumption than the entirety of cryptocurrency yet I have yet to see someone complaining about the perils of unshielded lighting.
General populace would disagree.
1. You mean consumption?
2. That's _huge_. Incredible. I just hope it doesn't rise further.
3. References for your claim that more energy is spent on TV use than on crypto mining.
4. For every person mining crypto, there are, oh, maybe 1,000 people who watch TV? 10,000?
> Results from EIA’s 2015 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) show that televisions and related peripheral devices—such as digital video recorders (DVRs), video game consoles, and streaming devices—consumed 7% of the electricity used in American homes in 2015 [1]
quick edit: I derped the math. I think American residential is 21% so that's ~1.48% of total supply. You'd need a 33% efficiency increase in residential TV efficiency to match the energy saved by abolition of crypto. That's without taking into account that crypto is on average produced from _more_ renewable energy than the average.
1 - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37032
2 - https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
(2.)-(4.) According to this page:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/electrici...
US electricity consumption is ~1/6.5 of global electricity use (and the ratio has probably dropped since 2017). So, 7% of electricity used in American homes is ~1.48% of total US electricity consumption, but only 0.23% of total consumption. Granted, TV is in wide use throughout the world, but not nearly as much as in the US, I believe. So instead of 6.5, let's divide by... say... 2.5 instead? That's about 0.5% of total consumption. Similar to crypto then :-)
Further, even a multiple of 2 isn't really reasonable [1] [2] [3]
1 - https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-country-watches-th... 2 - https://china.usc.edu/resources/average%20day#:~:text=ON%20A.... 3 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-televisio...
Art and entertainment are not useless to society, just because they don't have a utilitarian aspect. You can see that millions of people enjoy art/entertainment in some form and pay for it. There are also big scams like predatory IP enforcement and micro transactions, which we should fight against.
Cryptocurrencies were a revolutionary idea which has mostly resulted in crap results. Scams and random ware are rampant. Transactions are slow and expensive, unless you centralize them and lose all advantages of a decentralized platform. The environment pays huge costs with PoW, and PoS is always mentioned but never implemented by any of the big players. Also contributed to a shortage of chips and GPUs which affected the rest of the world.
So no, one is not like the other.
Because computer games give entertainment to three billion people.
Because no one pretends that their computer games are going to overthrow the world's economic systems, and then try to sell them to some greater fool for much more money.
Maybe in a dark timeline triple A gaming might be only available from cloud desktops as a service from licensed ESG and DRM friendly cloud providers. Crunching numbers and cryptographic calculations being a ToS violation.
So I’m not a big fan of having people often with obvious hysterical political bias dictating what I do with the equipment and energy I paid for. This goes the same for mining or gaming. The idea that rendering realistic grass is okay but not SHA256 hashes is preposterous and borderline medieval.
I’d say if there is a concern about energy usage please price it accordingly.