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none of those details justify egregious waste of power

YouTube used over 175 times more energy watching Gangnam Style in 2019 than Ethereum uses per year. Paypal uses 100x the power consumed by PoS Ethereum in a year [0].

This argument was (and still is) valid for PoW algorithms, but energy consumption is now barely a factor for Ethereum, which is the main network we take payments on [1].

[0] https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

[1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

I am not opposed to proof of stake but your arguments that youtube and paypal are more wasteful isn't super convincing- after all, you picked a video that's been watched billions of times, and paypal provides a very important service.

My argument isn't that Paypal is more wasteful necessarily, it's more pointing out the inconsistencies in how value vs sustainability is weighed up.

Ethereum is currently doing 30 TPS [0], and Paypal ~200 [1]. Assuming that energy usage scales linearly (a naive assumption, but for arguments sake), it could deliver similar value with 10x lower energy consumption, I don't find arguing against the adoption of PoS crypto solely based on sustainability very credible either.

[0] https://ethtps.info/

[1] https://www.ing.uc.cl/en/boletines/engineering-student-scale....

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