398
Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
(arstechnica.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
398 points (94.8% liked)
Technology
58151 readers
8102 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
You need the same infrastructure for any electronic payment system.
What you don't need for anything is crypto "mining", which is almost pure overhead. That's what the article is about.
It's not pure overhead. It's the means of initial distribution and also mining is the backend for handling transactions. Not that I think it's efficient by any means. It's just that it was necessary for Bitcoin to ever become something that mattered.
Mining is barely transactional in nature. Pretty much all of it is calculating hashes, which, on one hand, is super important as part of Proof-of-Work consensus, the most decentralized one we have, but on the other we have other reasonably secure options that waste two orders of magnitude less power.
It's not necessary to perform any of the functions of crypto, including money laundering. That makes it pure overhead; pure waste. There are offshore banks that facilitate tax fraud and other criminal activity. Crypto, somehow, allows exchanges to escape the scrutiny that falls on these banks. Objectively, there is no good reason why all this waste should let you avoid scrutiny of regulators or police.