cybre:uranther #012.018 is a user on cybre.space. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.

Country closest to #Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption: Czech Republic

Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh): 981

Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin: 6,398,945

Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity consumption: 0.31%

Carbon footprint per transaction (kg of CO2): 480.57

Source: digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energ

Bitcoin will soon surpass Chile, Austria and the Philippines. Holy fucking shit. We have to stop this.

@uranther I'm not claiming that these estimates are the absolute truth. If you have other numbers, feel free to post them 🙂

I have to say though that the authors explain in detail how they calculate this, and I think they make some reasonable assumptions. No FUD intended!

cybre:uranther #012.018 @uranther

@resist_berlin
Good for them. Calculating electricity per transaction is meaningless since the network energy consumption simply does not scale with respect to transaction volume. It shows a blatant lack of understanding of the technology and invalidates their analysis.

@uranther It is meaningless in the sense that one new transaction does not *cause* the consumption of 981 additional kWh. But as a measure for the inefficiency of the network - numbers of transactions divided by total energy consumption - it is still a valid indicator.

@resist_berlin @uranther no it's not because at the moment it's not being used the way it's supposed to be used. At the moment there are just mostly miners trying to make money, but few people using btc for paying day to day things. If people started paying normally with it, the electricity per transaction would be negligible

@uranther @resist_berlin

I don't understand the argument

The energy consumption maybe doesn't scale with transactions, but that doesn't make it meaningless

The total energy consumption still matters both to energy poverty and to greenhouse gas

Maybe there's no relationship with how many transactions have been made but your single transaction is still quite impactful

Isn't it ?

@catonano
No, it's not. Find some other stat to harp on as this is pure FUD.
@resist_berlin