Tracking electricity consumption from U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
www.eia.gov

Assuming the share of global activity in the United States remains approximately 38%, we estimate electricity usage from Bitcoin mining based in the United States to range from 25 TWh to 91 TWh. That estimate represents 0.6% to 2.3% of all United States electricity demand in 2023, which was 3,900 TWh.13 This estimate of U.S. electricity demand supporting cryptocurrency mining would equal annual demand ranging from more than three million to more than six million homes.14 The low end of the range would equal annual electricity usage for entire states such as Utah and West Virginia, among others.15 Note that the CBECI-based estimates provided here are only based on Bitcoin and do not include other proof of work cryptocurrencies.

  •  Sonori   ( @sonori@beehaw.org ) 
    3•1 year ago

    1. Yes, but reduceing demand spent on frivolous projects also cuts down on waste immediately, instead of the decades it take to physically make things.

    2. Electrical waste is the fundamental value that underpins the entrity of Bitcoins exsistance. Bitcoin has a per transaction energy cost of 767kwh per transaction. That is enough to physically drive an electric suv like the Ionic 5 from Seattle WA, to Jacksonville FL, for every single transaction. Visa can handle nearly a million transactions for the same energy cost, and is part of a global banking system that handles the needs of billions of people, not a hobby project for a few tens of thousand of speculators.

    3. While chasing very cheap energy is critically important to miners given the vast amount of energy consumed, most poor countries would like to phase out more expensive sources of energy like coal and gas in favor of cheaper solar already, but cannot do so because they need to supply the demand of miners who generally need to be operating for as much of the day as possible to make the cost of the back. If these electrical grids really were to that point, then they would be consistently running with or at least hitting zero fossil input, something which is incredibly rare even in developed nations withs decades of building out renewables.

    4. While transactions are secure in a technical sense, as far as any user is concerned they are vastly less secure than traditional transactions because they inherently cannot be reversed or disputed in any way, unless your a whale and can convince everyone to fork the entire monetary system of course. Anyone who gains access to an account can take all its contents and you have zero recourse, not to mention that disputing transactions is the primary security against fraud and deception, and hence why a system that eliminates all aspects of it has been overrun with fraud and deception.

    Bitcoin is a massively centralized system. Not only because it is a single central system, but over fifty percent of that system is controlled by just five groups, who by definition have complete control over that system and are accountable to exactly no one.

    Market cap is irrelevant, just the current price people are willing to pay times the total amount of bitcoin to ever exist. It has nowhere near that liquidity, and no fundamental value to hold beyond its speculative nature.

    1. People who are unbanked are unbanked because they have no need for one. Typically, becuse either they lack enough money to be worth storing it or because a household or family has only one account they share because again, they get paid in and buy things in cash, useing the internet or finding anything not in cash requires a two hour bike trip, and because they can’t afford to leave it laying around.

    No bank is going to have a money holding money for someone, the problem is that the someone doesn’t have money or any need to spend it beyond a five minutes walk around thier village. You would know this if you actually researched the reason poor people in remote and developing areas might be unbanked instead of just using it as a talking point to liquidity into a speculative asset.

    Moreover, most major cell providers in poor nations also already allow customers to store and transfer funds directly from their account to others. Other nations like India have things like their Universal Payment Interface, which allows any two business, customers, or people to make instant free transactions.

    1. The average per transaction cost of a bitcoin transaction is 4.87 USD with it having spiked to over 37 USD per transaction within the last three months. I mentioned spiked because the transaction fee changes by the minute depending on how many people are competing to make a transaction at any one time, and this is the same price given to everyone throughout the entire system, this makes it unreliable to anyone who doesn’t want to randomly pay a major premium in order to buy something in the next ten minutes. That’s a lot of pennies and is a minimum pre tax floor on top of every single transaction made with it.

    It is also inherently only as reliable as ones internet connection, and in many developing nations that is no where near 100% uptime. If the power or internet go out, all acess to your money does aswell, as you can’t make changes to an allways online database without acess to the internet.