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yam wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by !deleted20335 in Buying a Tesla in Bitcoins cancels 4 times the CO2 savings for its whole lifetime by moonlune

It's a silly calculation but only because Bitcoin is so unimaginably terribly wasteful that it's beyond silly. A Bitcoin transaction uses 500.000 times the electricity of a Visa transaction, so this is not a both of them are wasteful type of issue. Currently Bitcoin uses more electricity than all of Netherlands.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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naut wrote

I am curious to see what happens to the currency when or if (diminishing returns and all) the mining is completed. Proof-of-Work algorithms are also used for validating transactions on the blockchain (as I understand it) and it would still mean much larger energy costs than alternatives like PoS, but do you think such a fundamental part of the software would be modified?

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yam wrote

but most of it is all mined up already and existing now so

Okay, maybe you can fill me in, because I don't know too much about Bitcoin, but those stats I posted, aren't they quite recent (2020) stats? That would indicate that this enormous power usage is not a thing of the past.

newer cryptocurrencies are using PoS proof of stake instead of proof of work

Does that mean that they are a bit like Bitcoin without the energy usage? That sounds great, because clearly there are some important uses for cryptocurrencies, like when Paypal froze Wikileaks donations. Have you tried using any of those PoS currencies?

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