Yet you rolled out the standard crypto talking points flawlessly.
> Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist
Again, I suspect you aren't an environmentalist either. Please just be straightforward with your motivations here.
POW is the wasteful one.
Actually, there are lots of other ones, but Proof of Work is the only one that is designed to add security by requiring a lot of hashrate (which translates to a bunch of energy) to submit blocks ("mining" in proof of work)
Proof of work was a brilliant innovation at the time, but as it turns out, smart people iterate on technology over time to improve it. The fact that bitcoin didn't sink like a stone after being improved upon (just from a resource-usage perspective) by most other blockchains really highlights the greed and single-mindedness of most crypto speculators.
Nicely put. PoS is still around a million times more wasteful than the effective work it does, though.
Transactions in 2023:
Bitcoin: 174310000
Ethereum: 583530000
Visa: 212600000000
Bitcoin: 167.8 TWh/yr
Ethereum: 0.0067479963 TWh/yr
Visa: 197.57 TWh/yr (2021?)
Bitcoin: 962.652745 kWh
Ethereum: 0.011564 kWh
Visa: 0.929304 kWh
Bitcoin on the other hand is 3 orders of magnitude worse than visa on a per-transaction basis. I suspect both Bitcoin and Ethereum also transact more value in USD per transaction (if you're willing to consider funny crypto money at spot prices) on average, than Visa, by virtue of them having a much higher transaction fee which is also borne by the address making the transaction.
If you don't consider Ethereum transactions to be "effective work" than this isn't a relevant metric of course, but I'm curious how you're arriving at your figure.
Hi, sure. The nodes in the EVM do not collaborate to split the work, rather, they all perform (basically) the same work. So, you could instead run Ethereum with one node that connects to the net and receives transactions, processes them (around 20 per second - it's not exactly a lot of processing), puts them into blocks, and sends out the complete blocks. It would perform exactly the same as the current network, and would consume, say, 4 W (a Raspberry Pi, say).
The one difference is that it would have to be trusted, which is the big no-no. But that's the effective work being done.
But the validators burn around 1 MW (that lines up with your figure approximately) and are paid $5m a day to do that work. And 1 MW / 4 W is a factor of 250k, which I rounded up to 1m considering all the other activity around Ethereum, though feel free to round it down to 1e5.
Also just get some Bitcoin :)
1. The banking industry is thousands of times more important that crypto for everyday Americans. It's what literally makes our entire economy run. Crypto is used for speculation. What you should be comparing bitcoin against is the energy it takes to list a few ETFs on an exchange, which is essentially the cost of a few hundred servers, aka nothing. Bitcoin is ungodly inefficient and will only become more inefficient.
2. "It could be less, much less, or much less," This is a filler argument. Study says "around" a number, so you're arguing it could be a really broad definition of "around"? Not a serious take.
3. The absolute number matters because it's showing the economic activity is being concentrated in the pockets of just 137 entities. This is NOT a broad-base economic phenomenon that helps employ people in communities around the country, like say running gas stations (another polluting industry). If you're going to use 2% of the nation's electricity, you'd want the benefits spread across at least 2% of the population. Not 0.00002%.
4. Net energy consumption pulls from our current energy grid. Within a grid, if you use more clean electricity in one area, it'll pull more supply from dirtier sources elsewhere. Saying that bitcoin mining helps "green" the grid is a myth because you have to mine it 24/7/365, which means intermittent sources like wind and solar are at a big disadvantage. Battery storage tech is not there yet, thus gas plants and dirtier sources have to kick-in to keep up with 24/7 consumption.
> "It could be less, much less, or much less," This is a filler argument.
Actually my argument is, "This article claims it could be much less, and that we aren't even sure of the range given, but the title definitively claims the maximum value." I'm saying this article is bad and is FUD, that's why I said the thing about specifically criticizing the article. (Yeah I don't think I was that unclear actually.)
I'm actually ambivalent on the rest of your arguments. They would have made good talking points in TFA, which made none of them.
I also somewhat disagree with (3) because it's ambiguous how many people constitute these mining facilities referenced in the article. You write it as though it means 137 individuals.
But overall I only dislike crypto because it has become a space for charlatans and people who want to get rich quick. Any original principles behind creating a new currency outside of fiat and actually using that for transactions have been forgotten since then and crowded out by people who pretend those principles still mean something but really just want XCOIN to moon.