• LWD@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    It matters a ton what system you use.

    Yes, globally the entirety of the banking industry consumes a lot of power, and a non-trivial portion of that is waste that could be better allocated. But it’s also the global banking industry for seven billion people, and not the hobby horse of a few hundred thousand gambling addicts.

    So just to head all this off at the pass, Bitcoin and proof-of-work cryptocurrency aren’t incentivizing a move to green energy sources, like solar and wind, they are offsetting it. Because electrical consumption, electrical waste, is the value that underpins Bitcoin. Miners spend X dollars in electricity to mine a Bitcoin, they expect to be able to sell that coin for at least X plus profit. When new power sources come online and the price of electricity goes down, they don’t let X go down, they build a bigger machine.

    Line goes up