There are some valid points here, and I agree that the energy could be used elsewhere and that green energy is not entirely green.
I even agree that for most cryptocurrency as they are now the cost per transaction is higher than alternatives. However the technology for cryptocurrency, especially with PoC can be a lot more efficient in scale. To get an idea of it you can look at Visa, which processes 1700 transactions per second, BCH can do 178, so 10% of it, ETH2 is supposed to be able to process at least 20k, so 10x that amount. I imagine either of those coins pollute a comparable amount to visa when you consider everything that visa needs to operate (machines, cards, servers, etc). I feel that people don’t take these sort of stuff into consideration when they talk about the energy consumption of crypto. There is a discussion to be had here, but blankly stating that it’s an environmental disaster is fear mongering.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 2 months ago
exactly, and also saying our houses use more energy than crypto as a justification is just relative privation. yes our houses use energy because we need to survive. that doesn’t mean we should just give a blank energy check to whatever inefficient new technology comes along.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I didn’t even get to that, house energy usage can’t be compared to crypto energy usage, they’re not used for the same thing!