this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
989 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
59669 readers
2708 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 are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You'd think with all of the money they're pulling in, they'd invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.
Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?
It's Bitcoin, of course common sense isn't involved.
I mean, fair, but still. People should push them to go green.
they should be doing that, otherwise I don't get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn't worth it to mine cryptocurrency.
no, that's the magic of speculative market financing
Solar panels give about 100 watts per square meters best case, practically you'll be on half of that.. With the amounts of electricity they use, they'll need to cover entire nature reserves with solar panels to feed their miners. It's simply not practical
Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that's slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
Don't misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I'd rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.
They'd still need some type of battery to make solar work though. They want to mine 24/7.
Wind turbines? Solar thermal? Nuclear in exchange for all of those Bitcoins, perhaps?
Maybe pay off would be so far into the future that they don't want to risk it? Who knows how long crypto will be a thing.
You can get solar panels for like $100-$200 on Amazon right now. Nice ones. The price of them dropped like a fucking rock since China got involved.
With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don't know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you're walking by one of the coin ATMs that's at one of my local stores I've watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks
Vs. Banks. That have offices, branches, atms, data centers... banking does use more energy yearly. So why not both invest in renewables
Sure, but how much of the global financial market does crypto represent?
I susptect that the energy consomption per transaction is considerably higher for crypto than for a normal financial transaction.
no, it is exorbitantly higher for a single crypto transaction
I did find some information about this, and have posted about it in the thread, and you are absolutely right about this in regards to Bitcoin, I did not find a lot of information about other crypto apart from Etherium, which claimed that the energy use of one Etherium transaction would not consume any power at all, which I doubt.
Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, there is no "mining" in a traditional sense, so its power consumption is more akin to e-mail than mining crypto. But proof-of-stake leads to centralization over time, which is antithetical to what Bitcoin people want.
I agree with you. That still means Bitcoin is on the hook though.