Country closest to #Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption: Czech Republic
Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh): 981
Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin: 6,398,945
Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity consumption: 0.31%
Carbon footprint per transaction (kg of CO2): 480.57
Source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
Bitcoin will soon surpass Chile, Austria and the Philippines. Holy fucking shit. We have to stop this.
@resist_berlin Wow, 1 transaction uses as much electricity as me in ~230 days! 😲
@resist_berlin Omg! How can I help stop it quick!
@ElWook @resist_berlin Engineer financial scams/panic to drive the price down.
@resist_berlin get this FUD outta here! 🤮🗑️
@uranther I'm not claiming that these estimates are the absolute truth. If you have other numbers, feel free to post them 🙂
I have to say though that the authors explain in detail how they calculate this, and I think they make some reasonable assumptions. No FUD intended!
@resist_berlin
Good for them. Calculating electricity per transaction is meaningless since the network energy consumption simply does not scale with respect to transaction volume. It shows a blatant lack of understanding of the technology and invalidates their analysis.
@uranther It is meaningless in the sense that one new transaction does not *cause* the consumption of 981 additional kWh. But as a measure for the inefficiency of the network - numbers of transactions divided by total energy consumption - it is still a valid indicator.
@resist_berlin @uranther no it's not because at the moment it's not being used the way it's supposed to be used. At the moment there are just mostly miners trying to make money, but few people using btc for paying day to day things. If people started paying normally with it, the electricity per transaction would be negligible
I don't understand the argument
The energy consumption maybe doesn't scale with transactions, but that doesn't make it meaningless
The total energy consumption still matters both to energy poverty and to greenhouse gas
Maybe there's no relationship with how many transactions have been made but your single transaction is still quite impactful
Isn't it ?
@catonano
No, it's not. Find some other stat to harp on as this is pure FUD.
@resist_berlin
@uranther @resist_berlin Facts U Dislike
@WAHa_06x36
You're an idiot. Even the sigfigs are fucked.
@resist_berlin
@uranther @resist_berlin Is significant figures really the best you can come up with? That is like literally the smallest mistake you can make in a number.
@resist_berlin We should use burstcoin
@resist_berlin How much is mining versus purchase or transactions?
and how would we stop it ?
@catonano I don't know any direct solution but raising awareness is a good first step 😇
Bitcoin will probably stop itself. Currently if you want to use Bitcoin and actually have confidence in it then you have to download at least 88GB of blockchain. At some point the amount of blockchain outpaces bandwidth even in well served areas and at that point the whole system becomes defacto centralized.
There's also the finite limit on transactions per second due to consensus. So it can't keep growing exponentially.
@resist_berlin as part of my phd research I looked at the global telecom power usage and it was about 1% of the total power usage. This was a few years ago so it may have changed, but that would put bitcoin by itself using about 1/3 as much power as the rest of the global telecom system combined.
@resist_berlin Start by stopping US household standby consumption, which is way more than that. Not with humanity's first decentralized, uncensorable, permissionless, borderless store of value.
@resist_berlin
Where are the numbers for regular banks? For visa or MasterCard or PayPal?
Every ATM needs electricity and all the cars bringing money to the ATM m need gasoline.
Every single cash terminal needs electricity.
This analysis is incorrect.
@rizzn Care to explain why?
@resist_berlin your data source falsely inflates electricity usage data.
@rizzn Linking to your own article (which btw is not readily available) is not very good practice. What is the point of such a report, commissioned by someone inside the cryptocurrency-biz? That is clearly not impartial analysis.
@resist_berlin would you prefer I copy and paste a full text of the report here?
It is readily available.
If you're not able to read it, that says more about you than me.
@rizzn I needlessly have to provide an e-mail address to access the article. Why don't you provide a direct link to the PDF and toot it here, if it contains valuable analysis?
I mean, I would even encourage you to do so, for the sake of transparency. The source for the other figures at least describes their methodology in detail.
@rizzn Also there is this peer-reviewed article now:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118301776
Which is also available for direct download. I'm not saying that their numbers or their methodology is infallible, but at least they provide lots of background information.
@resist_berlin it's all based on the same data set.
Look, read it or not. I don't care.
@rizzn That's fine, I just noticed that people have a tendency there of claiming the numbers are incorrect and then failing to back up their claim. Whatever. 
@resist_berlin Thank you for this interesting article.
"The model predicts that miners will ultimately spend 60% of their revenues on electricity."
I'm not an economist, but it looks like the only way to make serious money is by playing a pyramid scheme. Which maybe is what is happening.
@resist_berlin calm down chicken little. It can't use ALL the power, and rational miners will stop when it loses profitability