PoW is different to all other categories of energy usage and should be feared more. Ill let you have a think about what the reason for this is. If you need a hint,
read the bitcoin whitepaper.
That sounds like fearmongering to me. And also condescending fearmongering, as you assume I need 'hints'.
Going back to your argument about all other categories of energy usage, transport using ICE should be feared more, in particular the way huge ships not only pollute the atmosphere but also the oceans.
In fact, I believe you intended to mean only electricity in your comment, but the condescending got the best of you.
With PoW energy usage is roughly proportional to the $ price of the asset regardless of the number of transactions it can process. A successful Bitcoin means higher and higher energy usage. Whereas anything else success means making it more efficient not less.
And every four years it will double in price, and right now it consumes 0.5% of all electricity, which means in 56 years it will consume 82% of all electricity, assuming we produce roughly the same electricity as today.
Not really. It is more
immediate than that. Right now we heavily rely on CO2 emitting power generation. And if bitcoin becomes wildly successful, or simply gets into another bubble, while trying to combat climate change, and it stays on PoW that is an issue.
Huge ships are multiple times more efficient than the equivalent transport would be on roads — so, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
We should obviously try to cut back on transports of such huge distances, but when necessary, ships are currently the best way even with all the pollution they do. Nonetheless, their current use is still incomparably more effectful on our lives and live quality than cryptos that it can’t be taken at face value.
Yes and no. Because of the pandemic, and now the invasion, we have realized the world has too many unnecessary imports which could be produced locally.
They were cheaper because all this contamination is called "externalities", which is a code word for "someone else's problem"; and because short term profit is king and responsibilities be damned. Also dumping, tariffs, dominant countries imposing free trade treaties on weaker countries, and so on.
They still have a huge cost. There are of course things that need to be transported these distances, and with or without oil these need to be moved, but also a considerable percent is cheap plastic stuff from China.
This remains a far better usage of energy than ETH. It's not optimal but at least it's preserving some food. You can hardly do worse than consuming energy just to eventually get a proof that you burned a big amount of energy.
I think my iPhone SE has a ~7 Wh battery. It needs about 80% extra charge each day, which means its consumption is roughly 5.5 Wh per day or about 2 kWh/year.
At the previous 112 TWh/year ETH was using before the merge, that would be the equivalent of 56 billion iPhone SE's. Think about that.
The energy usage of ETH's POW used the equivalent power of 50B smartphones.
Come on, do you seriously compare something that you and nigh everyone use multiple hours each day and effects you on a physical basis to something as useless as cryptos?
As these cryptocurrencies have provided utility to the miners in the past.
My point is, everyone is arguing here thinking only about their own particular self-interest, while pretending to be arguing about some abstract universal good.
And cryptocurrency energy usage is now a low-hanging fruit argument. If we really cared, we would cut much more than just that.
