Quote from: n0nce on September 28, 2022, 04:38:28 PM

Quote from: LoyceV on September 28, 2022, 12:57:08 PM

Would anyone be interested in a graph, since the beginning of Bitcoin, showing the number of oil barrels earned per day from mining Bitcoin?

Sounds good to me!

I'll make it once I've collected the data.

Quote from: NeuroticFish on Today at 09:45:29 AM

I've read today something that may be of help.
It's a comparison between Bitcoin consumption and others' (US fridges, US electricity transmission/distribution loses). It can help to show Bitcoin doesn't consume that much electricity.

Quote from: https://cointelegraph.com/news/researchers-allege-bitcoin-s-climate-impact-closer-to-digital-crude-than-gold

The University of Cambridge currently reports that the Bitcoin network currently consumes 94 terawatt hours (TWh) per year. To put this into context, all of the refrigerators in the United States alone consume more than the entire BTC network at 104 TWh per year.

Playing devil's advocate here: to me, this doesn't prove Bitcoin doesn't consume a lot of energy. If anything, the same energy consumption as about 200 million refrigerators is a lot (and the average American refrigerator is a lot bigger than they are in my country).
That brings me back to my previous point: like virtually any other industry, Bitcoin's energy consumption depends on it's profitability. Gold mining is comparable: if there's more money to be made, gold miners will burn more diesel to get the gold. If excavators become more energy efficient, they'll buy more excavators.
Refrigerators aren't operated in such a way: if your new one has better insulation and consumes only half the electricity, you're not adding another one.

Now that I did the math: 1 Bitcoin transaction consumes about as much energy as a US fridge in a year. Of course, this is mainly because of the block reward and not really because of the transaction itself. After all, if the block would be empty, it wouldn't have consumed less energy.
When arguing Bitcoin's energy consumption is worth it, how about explaining (and promoting) it's potential? Each Bitcoin block could just as well secure millions of LN transactions in the future. Maybe it can be compared to how gold used to secure the value of bank notes back in the days before they went full BRRR.
I often read the argument that one Bitcoin transaction consumes an x amount of energy, which ignores the potential that a million LN transaction could lead to a very low energy consumption per transaction. The Bitcoin blockchain could keep all those transactions secure without increasing the energy consumption per Bitcoin block.

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Furthermore, transmission and distribution electricity losses in the U.S. alone are 206 TWh per year, which could power the Bitcoin network 2.2 times over.

The numbers are no doubt true, but it doesn't mean anything. You can't use transmission losses to power a Bitcoin miner, and you can't avoid the losses either. It's a trade off between power line thickness and power losses.