this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Ok, I was in agreement with you (the concept of NFTs is great, what people do with it is dumb) until the environment part
Crypto, even proof of stake, isn't energy efficient and never will be, the banking sector uses more energy but it also manages quadrillion in funds and transactions, crypto's value as a whole is orders of magnitude less than that and there's more energy spent per transaction than in the traditional financial sector. Crypto replacing banks and cash would be an environmental disaster.
Next, even if mining is done using green energy, it means that this energy isn't used to reduce emissions in other, actually essential, sectors. There's an environmental cost to green energy (what do you think was under the dam's reservoir?) so having to produce more infrastructure just for crypto is wasteful.
exactly, and also saying our houses use more energy than crypto as a justification is just relative privation. yes our houses use energy because we need to survive. that doesnβt mean we should just give a blank energy check to whatever inefficient new technology comes along.
I didn't even get to that, house energy usage can't be compared to crypto energy usage, they're not used for the same thing!
There are some valid points here, and I agree that the energy could be used elsewhere and that green energy is not entirely green.
I even agree that for most cryptocurrency as they are now the cost per transaction is higher than alternatives. However the technology for cryptocurrency, especially with PoC can be a lot more efficient in scale. To get an idea of it you can look at Visa, which processes 1700 transactions per second, BCH can do 178, so 10% of it, ETH2 is supposed to be able to process at least 20k, so 10x that amount. I imagine either of those coins pollute a comparable amount to visa when you consider everything that visa needs to operate (machines, cards, servers, etc). I feel that people don't take these sort of stuff into consideration when they talk about the energy consumption of crypto. There is a discussion to be had here, but blankly stating that it's an environmental disaster is fear mongering.
Visa can process a maximum of 24k TPS
Crypto energy usage goes up the more it's being used and the more decentralized it becomes. Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.
Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.
You can just stop, there's no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There's benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it's not and never will be.
That's wrong, crypto energy consumption has to do with how hard is the PoW difficulty, it does not correlate at all with usage or centralization, it's only related with security, i.e the more energy it consumes the more energy someone would need to use to attack the technology.
But the energy needed to mine 1 transaction or 1000 is the same. There are problems at scale, but power consumption is not one of them.
Not really, they need more servers to process more transactions, but cryptocurrency can scale up much more easily because the whole infrastructure from consumer to miner is decentralized.
That's what most people fail to see, the infrastructure for a scale at the size of visa is already in place for crypto. So there wouldn't be an increase in power consumption by mass adoption, only by miner adoption, and that's a difficult thought to grasp, it's like if everyone could borrow their computer to visa or Mastercard to process their transactions, the amount of people wanting to offer their computer to visa/master would define how much resources they use, but an increase in visa users doesn't mean an increase in visa borrowed servers and vice-versa.
I'm not trying to green wash, but crypto is not the environmental disaster the person claimed, especially not when you take into consideration PoS and newer coins with different validation methods.
From the get go, you're wrong
https://www.coindesk.com/learn/bitcoin-mining-difficulty-everything-you-need-to-know/
The more people mine, the more decentralized it is, the more energy is necessary because difficulty is increased. The more transactions happen, the more blocks are required, the more energy needs to be spent to confirm all the transactions. The more it's used, the higher the value, the more people mine.
There's a limit to the number of transactions per block as well, so no, your can't just say "1 or 1000 it's the same".
Visa is already able to handle 24000 transactions per second as is, no need for more infrastructure.
Crypto uses 1% of the world's energy production for a couple trillions in assets, the financial system uses 2.5% for quadrillions in assets, multiple thousands more than crypto, no, crypto can't scale to that without a huge environmental impact.
Yes you are trying to greenwash crypto, just stop.
Did you read the link you sent? It clearly states that only the amount of miners matter like I said before, the amount of transactions has nothing to do with it, you're mixing the two.
Wrong, decentralization is hard to measure, one person with a mining farm is centralized, while hundreds of people with their personal computer are decentralized but both produce the same amount of hash power. So you can have one person investing more and more in mining rigs increasing the total amount of mining power in the pool but decreasing it's decentralization.
Yes, this is correct, if you have more computers mining you will have a higher energy spending.
Wrong, there's one blonc every 10 minutes, regardless of the amount of transactions that happen. Did you even read the link you sent?
Wrong, the energy needed to confirm 1 or 1000 transactions is the same, and it's related to the hashing difficulty established by the total amount of hash power, again, did you even read the link you sent?
Wrong, the value of an asset does not necessarily correlate with it's use, for example gold is more valuable than dollar, even though dollar is a lot more used.
Yes there is, but until that limit is hit the amount of transactions doesn't matter. Also that limit is artificial and can be easily raised if needed, as it was done on Bitcoin Cash which can do hundreds of transactions per second more than Bitcoin, but because it has less miners uses less energy, thus proving you are wrong and the two are not correlated.
And ETH2 is theoretically capable of 100k, and that's just one coin which BTW is PoS so nothing of what we talked about miners applies to it. No miners means less power consumption by the network as a whole.
Do you have a source for that? But also you're measuring environmental impact as just energy consumption, and that's very wrong, by that same standard I could say crypto is green because it produces no plastic, whereas Visa has huge factories to produce plastic for their cards, their card machines, etc. If you only focus on one environmental impact it's easy to make anyone to be the bad guy, and for some reason people only see the Bitcoin energy usage and completely ignore that the energy consumption there is the whole story, whereas for other things there's hundreds of factors pilling on top to generate the environmental impact.
Again, I'm not, I recognize that PoW is an energy hungry method of confirmation, however it's not the environmental catastrophe that the original comment said and if you take into consideration ALL of the environmental impact of alternatives (not just energy consumption) you will see that it's not as bad as people make it out to be. Which doesn't mean it's good, but it's far from an environmental catastrophe.
Also when you take into consideration that we were originally talking NFTs, and that's mostly an Ethereum thing, and Ethereum is migrating to PoS, it's even less of an environmental catastrophe.
"is migrating"
It happened years ago buddy and PoS still uses more energy than centralized solutions for the same number of transactions.
I'm done, you're brainwashed, goodbye!
Cool, I've been out of the loop on crypto for years, just checked and you are correct, now the full Ethereum network, capable of beating visa in TpS runs at 0.0026 TWh/yr, i.e. 1/100x of the energy consumption of PayPal, therefore proving my point above.