Quote from: Tylev on April 12, 2019, 04:02:32 AM

In fact, Bitcoin does not consume so much energy for its production as compared to our other types of activity, in particular, for example, for the work of banks. In reality, this problem does not exist.

I mean, the centralized nature of banks means that they need much less computing power per transaction - WAY less than what we're using right now.

Quote from: senin on April 12, 2019, 04:56:52 AM

Therefore, I do not think that we have a serious problem with the consumption of electricity for mining Bitcoin.
I agree that this problem is more contrived than it deserves to be discussed.

Quote from: Tylev on April 12, 2019, 04:02:32 AM

In addition, mining Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency is not harmful to the environment. At the same time, only heat is released, which is sometimes even used to heat residential buildings.

The means as to which the electricity is produced certainly has and will continue to have a mark on the environment if this mentality is all we've got. Any objections to mere discussion just shows that you're unwilling to make positive changes.

Quote from: franky1 on April 12, 2019, 10:35:42 AM

next. large amount of hashrate is powered via renewable energy. so feel free to cut the co₂ number down by more than half of what the topic post wrote.

by the way, pepsi lease out their logo'd refrigerators to fastfood restaurants and the electric utility to just keep pepsi cool. far exceeds keeping bitcoin secure.

so here is a question. for a beverage that just ends up being body temperature urine eventually. vs bitcoin which is an immutable international currency. which is wasting more electric

Thanks for the numbers, franky. I agree that "calculating" the electric consumption of bitcoin as a whole is arguably something that is incredibly difficult to do within a simplistic method, and can't be accurately pinpointed.

However, in regards to your Pepsi comment - I believe the best approach would instead be to contrive methods to cut down on the carbon footprint of BOTH, rather than trying to weigh each and eliminate one, which was the purpose of this discussion - I wanted to see if there were any movements against this quite large carbon footprint we're contributing as an ecosystem.

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on April 12, 2019, 11:00:48 AM

Your links quote that as being 0.24% of the world's total electricity consumption, and the study I linked quotes it as less than 0.01% of the world's total energy production. Very interesting how a slight change in wording, which most readers would gloss over, gives such a drastic difference in percentages. Data can be always be manipulated or presented in such ways to give a bias towards what you want to prove.

The report I linked to suggests around 30% of mining energy is renewable, so that would have an effect on the final CO₂ numbers. It's perhaps also worth nothing that the metric of energy consumption/CO₂ production per transaction isn't the most useful, as the amount of energy spent on the bitcoin blockchain is independent of the number of transactions it is processing.

That's an interesting observation; thanks for pointing that out. Wording can be tricky!

Quote from: dothebeats on April 12, 2019, 11:49:43 AM

Just a thought as well, if this would be the aftermath of large-scale industrial mining, shouldn't nations which house a lot of miners mandate mining farm operators to plant a tree, or at least help plant one per machine that they are using? Not a very bright idea but people should be doing this if they really want to help. Sure we can always switch to the cleaner and greener type of algorithm (PoS and other stuff) and use renewable energy sources to power up the machines, but that would take long or perhaps be more costly to the end of operators, so why not use conventional energy methods, but in turn they need to plant a tree to at least lessen the impacts of their operations?

Idk, not the brightest idea out there but surely one that's worth considering and noting anyway.

I'm sure that the details on enforcing such a rule would be finicky and potentially give rise to some sort of centralization or complaints of such. I wish that application would work, though, because I am all in favor for anything that helps.

Quote from: Beerwizzard on April 12, 2019, 01:17:47 PM

Everything is producing different kinds of waste: factories, nature (during any cataclysms), or even cows when they fart (and by the way cows have 2nd largest population among mammals and their fart is really harmful). If people give up mining BTC it doesn't mean that everyone will invest their money into some green stuff and start planting some trees.
If people stop mining cryptocurrencies they can start using even more harmful technologies.

That's the same mindset that we've been holding all the way until now - since X is producing way more than we are, why stop? It certainly wouldn't hurt us to take a step back and reevaluate practices that could be changed - whatever they could be - in order to do our fair share of cutting down environmental issues.