this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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And it's not like the traditional banking industry is energy efficient. I would argue that they use more power especially if you consider the lifestyle of banking executives.
The energy usage was criticized not in absolute terms, but in relation to the numbers of transactions. Cryptocurrencies are criticized for consuming more energy while being much lower in volume.
That said, we do need projects like Monero now. At least at the present moment, it is the closest we have to "digital cash".
Thats before u account for building a branch in every town/city, the cost of the employees driving to work, the driving of physical cash from place to place etc etc.
I'm sure a single mainframe consumes considerably more that some mining farms.
Define mainframe, because modern mainframes are just sets of regular rack servers (or rack form factor chassis servers). If you mean the old ones then yes, because they're far less power efficient.
You're dead wrong.
Have you ever heard of Bitcoin mining farms? Their electric energy consumption dwarfs a league of mainframes.
Am IBM Z16 may need several dozen kW at full load: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/systems-hardware/zsystems/Z16M-A01?topic=requirements-general-electrical-power
Fully equipped with 8 PDUs and 4 BPAs a single mainframe is limited to an electric power of 173 kW.
Well, the Bitcoin miners are estimated to use around 175 TWh of energy annually, which equals an electric power of around 20 GW : https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin-energy-consumption/
This is several orders of magnitude above that of all the mainframes in the world - unless there are more than 116 million mainframes of that type in operation and running at full load.