Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption

Electricity is too cheap for these uses.

Why is commercial power so cheap and residential so expensive? We could fix two problems by balancing that back.
- Because companies people in the eyes of the state.
- My understanding is tha some commercial/industrial users will get a highly variable tariff. This may be cheaper much of the time, but can get ridiculously expensive at times of high demand.
  The difference is that a bitcoin farmer can shut down at those expensive times, but a home user still needs to heat/cool their house, run their fridge etc, so the savings cancel out. Because of this, averaging the costs works out easier/better for most home consumers

They don't produce anything except some numbers. A total waste of energy. I had to laugh when this guy I know who is very "progressive" and environmentally concerned got pissy when I pointed out how much energy was wasted on bitcoin mining just because he was into it.

My comment here is a much better use of energy
- [removed]
- My lower-down comment is an even better use of energy
Right this is the fundamental problem. There needs to be some value to the Blockchain application which the crypto tokens support beyond just token speculation.
- no. it just needs to end, as does pretty much our entire economic system, worldwide. and the social systems that support wasteful, destructive living. transform or die. that's the point we're at. is humanity up to it? well know within our own lifetimes.
You should check out the impact of gold production also.

fuck crypto shit ffs

More like fuck crypto mining. There are cryptos that dont need mining.
- If there's no demand for a particular crypto then people mining it can't sell it and go out of business. People mine this stuff because other people will pay them for it.
- Which ones? I’m curious since I don’t follow the scene and only know of mainstream stuff.
This is as useless as saying "fuck currency shit ffs".
- Crypto isn't a currency, it's a commodity for trading. One that doesn't physically exist. No inherent use and no inherent value.
- Except it's not really a currency is it? Nobody actually uses this stuff for buying goods and services, they treat it as a stock. Usually short-term trading that's essentially just gambling.
  Normal currency also doesn't use more than 2% of the power generation of a massive country.
- Real currencies use significantly less power despite orders of magnitude higher transaction volumes. They also have physical exchange options that incur no transaction costs and require no digital infrastructure. Crypto is just bad as a currency.
- LOL wake me up when you're circulating currency instead of just speculating against the bag holders.
- Yes, all those dollars that get pulled out of the earth by the blood sweat and tears of miners?
  What are you talking about. If there are coins that don’t need mining why are we wasting electricity (or anything really)on the ones that do.
- Centralised banking Stockholm syndrome is real.

JFC how long do we have to wait for a carbon tax

- That's. That's the whole point. Things costing their true value.
  Business exist to make money (even non profits need to make enough money from either sales or donations to cover operating costs). If something costs them more, it's going to cost their customers more. This way negative externalities aren't swept away to become an unmanageable problem in the future. The true cost of consumption is reflected in the price we pay.
  What you're describing as a bad thing is really the system working for good, as it was intended.
- I'm Canadian and I support the carbon tax.
  I would like to see our government stop subsidizing the fossil fuel companies and establish a national oil fund too.
- And you get CAIP now, which, for most Canadians, especially lower income Canadians, CAIP is greater than the additional cost you pay for goods and services due to the carbon tax.
  The carbon tax is quite literally a tax on the rich that gets given to the poor, while at the same time making high carbon intensity products more expensive incentivizing choices that lower carbon emissions.
  Only the very rich lose.
  The people who speak out against it, are either rich, or they are useful idiots, people who are ignorantly shilling to scrap the tax to their own detriment because they were told by their rich tribe leader it’s bad.
  Which one are you?
- I love how downvoted you are and how many people can see through this BS.
- That sucks. It's not like climate change is everybody's problem.
- The tax will just be the cost of doing business. But surely "tHe MarKeT" will correct this by finding cheaper non carbon transport sell a cheaper product.
  Personally I support tax of fossile and subsidization of alternatives. Worked like a charm to electrify Norways car park.
  The cons are however that increased demand for electricity means building wind, hydro, solar power, with a huge cost to local environent both in most land and the diesel used by construction euipment
- There's still market incentive for reducing emissions. Either lets you charge the same and for higher margins, or reduce prices and be more appealing to consumers.
- What does the government do with all the extra revenue? Theoretically it should be able to reduce other taxes proportionally so that those with low carbon usage come out ahead instead of just being a negative for everyone.
- Any suggestions on how we can actually make corporations pay for the carbon they emit if a carbon tax isn't it?
  Doing nothing is what we have been doing and it isn't working.

There is no good reason why this isn't illegal.

Not a good reason, but money.
- Not even real money, tech bro phantom bullshit.

Crypto is the digital coal of our times.

- With the disadvantage of large stakeholders dominating the network and undermining the decentralization.
- Primecoin wants to have a word having done useful PoW for over a decade.
- Hybrid pow/pos has been worked on since the beginning. Peercoin is still alive.

Whoever Satoshi was, I wonder how he's responding to the thought that he's personally contributed more to global warming than the average billionaire.

Satoshi is estimated to have wallets totaling as much as 1.1 million btc. That would make them the 26th richest person in the world.
If, Satoshi and the wallets actually still exist. Most of those wallets have been completely idle since they were mined
I imagine that “Satoshi’s Wallet” is the stuff of legends among cryptographic security researchers.
- The ONE PIECE is real /s
- It's a bit more than just an estimate. If you want to know more, have a look here: https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/
  The keys to the addresses exist. Whether someone is in control of them is unclear. It can't be proven that they've been lost.
Probably not thinking about it on his yacht that he doesn’t pilot or maintain, having built the most successful grifter scheme of all time
- I feel like calling bitcoin a grifter scheme is kind of like calling fiat currency (edit: in general) a grifter scheme. Which I guess isn't entirely untrue...
It's a drop in the ocean compared to how much energy the banking industry uses.
- Watch out! Lemmy is full of Fudd that are not part of the cult. You need actual data to convince them and not even just the comparison of 2 numbers but something that takes into account the comparative size of both industries.
  Don't worry, you will be able to laugh at them after your gambling addiction pays up.
  (Jk you might not even be a line goes up guy but you do seem to have a lot of the crypto bible memorized)
- Banks use negligible electricity lmao
- The banking industry uses at least 50x more, right?

Modern day gold rush.

Digging up more and more dirt for diminishing returns while destroying the environment.

Bitcoin using more and more power for essentially the same.

You'd think with all of the money they're pulling in, they'd invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.

Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?

It's Bitcoin, of course common sense isn't involved.
- I mean, fair, but still. People should push them to go green.
Solar panels give about 100 watts per square meters best case, practically you'll be on half of that.. With the amounts of electricity they use, they'll need to cover entire nature reserves with solar panels to feed their miners. It's simply not practical
- Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
  Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that's slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
  Don't misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I'd rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
  I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.
- Wind turbines? Solar thermal? Nuclear in exchange for all of those Bitcoins, perhaps?
they should be doing that, otherwise I don't get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn't worth it to mine cryptocurrency.
- no, that's the magic of speculative market financing
Maybe pay off would be so far into the future that they don't want to risk it? Who knows how long crypto will be a thing.
- You can get solar panels for like $100-$200 on Amazon right now. Nice ones. The price of them dropped like a fucking rock since China got involved.
With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don't know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you're walking by one of the coin ATMs that's at one of my local stores I've watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks
Vs. Banks. That have offices, branches, atms, data centers... banking does use more energy yearly. So why not both invest in renewables
- Sure, but how much of the global financial market does crypto represent?
  I susptect that the energy consomption per transaction is considerably higher for crypto than for a normal financial transaction.
- I agree with you. That still means Bitcoin is on the hook though.

Misleading title - the problem is not "crypto", it's pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top 10 9 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.

dogecoin is top10
- ah yes the 10th place - still, Doge is estimated to use ~1% of the energy Bitcoin uses and it's been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
two of the top 10 by market cap ar stable coins.
- what's your point?
Isn’t it strange no one gave a shit about this a year and a half ago when the price was lower? It appears everyone’s concern for the environment and energy consumption only increases when the price goes up. Interesting correlation or may be causation.
- Everyone already gave a shit about this a long time ago. It's also one of the reasons Ethereum switched from proof of work to proof of stake.
- I've been hearing about the stupid amount of energy usage for years and years. You just created a straw man that isn't based on reality.
- can always just pump up more oil out of the ground.
  No, this is actually exactly the fucking problem
- You mean proof of work? And I disagree, Ethereum moved from PoW to PoS and gained market cap since then. The high costs are just a consequence of the consensus mechanism in use.
- bitcoin has got to be invented by an alien or something so that we would terraform for them...

Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).

Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.

Don't forget the opportunity cost of achieving orbital velocity.
I'd say ban it but the cat is out of the bag. Tax it and provide alternatives and hopefully it will die.
- dude you can totally ban it, it's not even difficult, you just don't let them suck up infinite power
Mineral resource mining as well
- What year do you think we'll get the first product mined and manufacturered in space? And how about the first space grown food sold commercially?
  I would guess 2040 and 2050 respectively, we'll have the automation tools to get started by 2030 with government science projects then a decade for it to mature into something a company can try to create a market with, probably something that can only be made in low gravity like solve form of novelty such as space glass spheres or a special use material.
  I think food will be fast behind because people will pay a lot for it and there's already a lot of research into it for use in space based living facilities.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Wait till you find out how much energy banking uses...
- Per transaction?
- Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.
- How much? How much of total US power is used by banks? You have a number, right?

Just a PSA that the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (ETH) is no longer proof of work, and in the process, reduced their power consumption by ~98%.

That's why I prefer Cardano, it has a good PoS (unlike Ethereum) and uses thousands of time less energy than Bitcoin.

And father.

"Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity"

"Traditional banks' total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. Totaling 139 TWh."

Not to mention banks impact on people's lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class.. to purchase disposable products

https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks

Compare Wh vs # transactions. PoW is unsustainable and irresponsible. We need a different way.
I've always been a fan of having the USPS provide banking services to everyone. Make it a public service and it is no longer exclusionary.
Ok fine lets look closer at those numbers, I don't think they mean what you think they mean....
On their own these numbers are completely useless, we need to compare something that exists in both crypto and in traditional banking.
I found this page: https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-mining-statistics/
One Bitcoin transaction can spend up to 1,200 kWh of energy, which is equivalent to almost 100,000 VISA transactions.
I suspect that is on the extreme end of the scale, so let's be kind and slash 50% off of it, even then the energy consumption would be 600kWh per bitcoint transaction, and if we use the same data for VISA transactions, this is the equivalent of 50 000 VISA transactions, if these numbers are correct, crypto is insanely energy inefficient.
So I kept looking and found this page:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/
This page claims that one Bitcoin transaction used about 700kWh in 2023, and 100 000 VISA transactions used about 150kWh in total at the same time.
So we have two sources showing that Bitcoin is an absolute disaster for energy use and therefore the environment.
So I kept looking, and found some data about Etherium, which claims that one etherium transaction consumes 0 kWh, which I naturally doubt...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/
I will make no secret that I dislike crypto, but I did try and find objective data and summarize it objectively, I will also note that while I dislike crypto, I am not blind to the issues with traditional banking, they absolutely needs to clean up their act, environmentally and otherwise.
- nah the power use numbers you gave are not on an extreme scale, the point of how the bitcoin and most cryptos work is designed to keep using more and more power
- That doesn't make any sense unless it's the only transaction in a block
Proof of work is not even scalable to the level of current bank transactions. Ethereum network didn't have enough compute to clear the backlog created by some niche cat NFT "game" a few years ago when people still gave a shit about NFTs.
Limited purchasing power of the poor and middle class is a political problem, not a problem solved by tech, no matter what crypto gurus and tech messiahs will tell you. The most prolific crypto miners are the ones that already have more "traditional" capital to invest. So crypto is not solving the wealth divide, it is just making it worse.
I hate banks as much as anyone, but crypto is not the solution.

Elon Musk's private jet uses energy equivalent to 980 average American households a year. What's your point?

the point is we need to stop all this kind of ish or we die. our species is at a crossroads.
- Ah, but we won't all die. Just the poor. The majority will just live worse, much worse lifes.
  The important people like Elon will be mostly fine though and isn't that what counts?
How does this logic make sense in your head? Does this suddenly not become an issue because something irrelevant is also bad? How does that make sense??

I've always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like "Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy" and we're supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn't say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.

Also, we don't make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don't go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.

There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me

Air conditioning literally saves lives, especially medically vulnerable people, the hell are you on about?
As others have pointed out, ~2% of the entire US's energy output is absolutely insane. According to the eia.gov, the US produced around 100 quadrillion BTUs worth of energy in 2022 (I don't fully know why they chose BTUs to measure the total energy output, they explain on the website, but that's besides the point). 2% of that is 2 quadrillion BTUs. According to psu.edu (I googled these sites on my laptop so don't have exact urls on my phone at the moment), the entirety of US households in 2017 used 4.58 quadrillion BTUs.
Think about that. Bitcoin/PoW coin miners are using enough electricity to power around half of all homes in the US. According to statista.com, in 2022 there were 144 million homes. These miners consume 72 million homes worth of energy. And for what? To solve math problems that benefits no one but Bitcoin/PoW coin investors?
We're literally seeing our weather patterns become more and more extreme every year due to climate change, which is also killing our oceans which is causing a severely negative chain reaction in the rest of our ecosystems... But, you know, fuck all that, I need to use an extremely inefficient method of generating currency that no one but enthusiasts/speculators/investors asked for. I'm not inherently against cryptocurrency; however, fuck Bitcoin and other extremely wasteful PoW coins.
And yes, printing dollar bills/other fiat currencies creates pollution, too. I agree that process should be modernized as well. And in some ways, it already has been undergoing modernization as more and more people use electronic payments vs cash, thus decreasing the need to print more bills.
Dude. It's 2.3% of a massive industrialized nation where most citizens have access to some luxury goods. A nation with nearly 350 million people being the 3rd most populous country.
It does NOT fucking matter if it's """"""waste"""""" energy. And no, we don't fucking make that arguement about things like ac because you know why? Someone is getting comfort out of it instead of burning seals to make a line go up.
- It does NOT fucking matter if it's """"""waste"""""" energy
  Sounds like you don't actually care about the energy use, you just hate this for moral reasons. Using excess energy has zero externalities
It's a lot of energy for a global (!) maximum of around 7 transactions per second.
Unless you want to use the replica of traditional finance called Lightning Network. Then you have more transactions per second and a whole new set of drawbacks.
- Holy shit. 7 transactions a second is horrible and pretty much definitively proves (to me) that it's not currently used as a currency
  By chance, do you have a source for that or know where I would go looking?
- Oh yeah there are many criticisms of Bitcoin one can make, I just don't think the energy one is very convincing if you think about it a bit

The miners are taking power from the same grid as everyone else. Miners don’t emit carbon. Electricity generation from fossil fuels does.

The focus should be on moving to a renewable and abundant energy grid. Then let people use it for whatever the fuck they want.

Even if it was green energy (which doesn't generate zero pollution over its lifetime by the way, we still need to produce the equipment to generate electricity and that's a source of pollution), that's extra power that needs to be generated that wouldn't need to be otherwise and it's used for something intentionally inefficient.