I have no crypto holdings and feel good everytime it goes down because it validates my decision.
That said does anyone have any real data on this or is this one of those internet talking points that just sounds good? Like what percentage of power in these countries is being used by crypto farmers. If its 25% then yeah that seems like an out of control problem. If its 0.25% then it seems like a pointless scapegoat and we would need to start looking at how much of the countries power goes into manufacturing candy or maintaining golf courses or a long list of other things that only a portion of the country consumes.
A bit of pedantry: BTC is .56% of electricity use, and .28% of energy use according to this site, though I don't grasp where the disparity of coming from other than many miners getting power directly from the energy source versus through the public electrical grid.
Other way around. There's a lot of energy us on the planet that isn't electrical (good examples being gas cooking, petrol, and biomass in the developing world).
There was a report on HN recently that said crypto’s 2021 worldwide energy usage was roughly the same as Argentina. I don’t know where that puts it as a percent of energy usage worldwide.
> The photo of a power bill with an extremely huge price tag, issued for a customer named “Iran and China Investment Company,” has gone viral in recent days. The power bill, which apparently belongs to the Rafsanjan mining farm operated by the Chinese, indicates that the miners have used 58,615,905 kWh of electricity in one month, for which they have to pay over 270 billion rials (some $1.2 million).
> In recent weeks, Iranian power plants have been forced to switch to burning low-grade fuel oil to generate power because a sharp rise in the country’s domestic consumption has led to natural gas shortages. This severely increased air pollution in Tehran and other megacities, increasing public anger toward the government.
China uses 1.5 kWh/household... and if I did my math correct again: 54,000 homes in the power use that a household China would use. Or basing it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... (note change in units) a per capita use of 20,300 people in Iran.
That said does anyone have any real data on this or is this one of those internet talking points that just sounds good? Like what percentage of power in these countries is being used by crypto farmers. If its 25% then yeah that seems like an out of control problem. If its 0.25% then it seems like a pointless scapegoat and we would need to start looking at how much of the countries power goes into manufacturing candy or maintaining golf courses or a long list of other things that only a portion of the country consumes.