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One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses As Much Energy As Your House In a Week (vice.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader SlaveToTheGrind quotes Motherboard:
Bitcoin's incredible price run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency. An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.
This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
And Germans are using 10X as much as natives hiding in the Amazon rain forest. Shame on Germany!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
>"So ... just like gold or diamond mining."
Both have intrinsic value. Just like coal, copper, or uranium, or any other actually mined materials have intrinsic value. A "bitcoin" or whatnot, however, has no actual value whatsoever, just a conceptional value that people artificially place on it. It is a lot like actual fiat currency which has no actual value; except fiat money costs very little resources to create.