• Corgana@startrek.website
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    6 months ago

    A better comparison would be energy utilized per user, in which case the energy requirements for Bitcoin are miles and miles ahead of what the average person produces using a computer in the same amount of time. Even a gamer, playing 4k 120fps ray traced games 12 hours a day would use a fraction of the energy of someone mining bitcoin.

    • unlawfulbooger@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      6 months ago

      Exactly, if we do a back of the napkin calculation:

      Bitcoin

      Users

      There are 200 million bitcoin wallets, let’s be generous and say those are all owned by unique individuals.

      Total energy consumption

      Bitcoin used about 114 TWh in 2021[1]

      Bitcoin currently uses about 150 TWh annually

      Energy consumption per user

      150 TWh / year 
      ————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
      200 million users
      

      Banking system

      Users

      There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.

      Total energy consumption

      The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]

      If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.

      Energy consumption per user

      348 TWh / year 
      ————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
      4.000 million users
      

      With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.

      There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.

      1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.