Permanently Deleted

  • TheCaconym [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Did you know a single bitcoin transaction consume as much electricity as an average American household uses in 24 days ? :cryptocurrency:

    Crypto dudes aren't just insufferable, they're actively damaging the fucking planet.

    • Wojackhorseman2 [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      One of my clients asked me my opinion on crypto and I told him my concerns about the environmental aspect and he was like “oh you’re one of those people” lmao

    • Kanna [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      This might be a dumb question, but what is it that takes that much electricity?

      • spectre [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        The premise of the entire thing is that you're rewarded for having the most comupting power wasting the most energy. That's how the "currency" is "mined/minted"

      • Wojackhorseman2 [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        The computer solves very complex computational problems to “mint”/create a coin so by its very nature it requires electricity to crunch those computations. And also verifying the validity of coins and owners and stuff requires some number crunching itself but i think, if im not mistaken, the bulk of the energy being used is for minting them

        • jabrd [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          It's amazing that capitalism has so thoroughly run against the wall of finite resources that we're creating imaginary extraction industries. Really shows what the presumption of infinite growth does to a mfer

    • Shitbird [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      its renewable energy tho bruh trust me bruh

      • TheCaconym [any]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        Every bitcoin miner out there is constantly trying to find a value called a nonce, that once combined with a set of transactions and SHA256-hashed will produce a hash that's lower than a global difficulty target. This is extremely intense in terms of computation and requires vast arrays of specialized chips to do. Once a miner out there finds such a nonce, it broadcasts a set of recent transactions made by people everywhere in a block, and as an aside also obtains 6.25 fresh newly created bitcoins - this is part of how miners make money; the other is the transaction fees users are offering for their transaction to be included in the block the miner broadcasts once he has found the nonce (the amount of transactions that can be included in a block varies but is around ~2200, so a miner that just found a new valid nonce will tend to include the transactions with the highest fees in their block).

        This block creation process is both the way transactions are validated / made official between wallets but also the source of newly created bitcoin (originally finding a block rewarded you with 50 BTC; it halves every few years). The nonce guessing process described above is how the energy I mentioned is consumed: by gigantic ASIC farms that constantly try to guess this random value to be able to broadcast the next valid block.