It can consume electricity that is lost (by transport through power lines, batteries full on off grid PV systems) or sold at a loss due to weak demand.
I'm sure it seems like that if you don't understand that the energy consumed has almost no correlation to the number of transactions being put through.
The article seems to imply that a 1BTC transaction requires 200kWh of energy.
First, what is the source for that number?
Second, what is the business interest of the quoted individual? Are they promoting competing services?
Third, how much energy does the supposed alternative really take, by comparison?
How much energy do these aspects of said business operations require:
- Travel to and from the office for n employees
- Dry cleaning for n employees' work clothes
- Lights for an office of how many square feet
- Fraud investigations in hours worked, postal costs, wait times, CPU time and bandwidth to try and fix data silos' ledgers' transaction ids and time skew; with a full table JOIN on data nobody can only have for a little while from over here and over there
- Desktop machines' idle hours
- Server machines' idle hours
With low cost clean energy, these businesses are profitable; with a very different cost structure than traditional banking and trading.
Anyone want to guess how much the quoted concerned party has invested in cryptocoins / cryptocurrencies? Guy's prolly just sitting at home, shorting it, just waiting for the price to move.
By comparison, with an ICO, there's less back-and-forth on the cap table.
Those who missed the boat and now hope everyone else's fun will be spoiled fail to notice through their already shaky logic that this problem is being solved. Proof of stake means we don't have to waste nearly as much electricity for a functioning cryptocurrency. There are already coins using PoS successfully (Lisk, Peercoin). Ethereum plans to move to proof of stake. Can we stop beating this dead horse?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 41.5 ms ] threadbitcoin could consume as much electricity as Denmark by 2020
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-co...
First, what is the source for that number?
Second, what is the business interest of the quoted individual? Are they promoting competing services?
Third, how much energy does the supposed alternative really take, by comparison?
How much energy do these aspects of said business operations require:
- Travel to and from the office for n employees
- Dry cleaning for n employees' work clothes
- Lights for an office of how many square feet
- Fraud investigations in hours worked, postal costs, wait times, CPU time and bandwidth to try and fix data silos' ledgers' transaction ids and time skew; with a full table JOIN on data nobody can only have for a little while from over here and over there
- Desktop machines' idle hours
- Server machines' idle hours
With low cost clean energy, these businesses are profitable; with a very different cost structure than traditional banking and trading.
By comparison, with an ICO, there's less back-and-forth on the cap table.
"My job is to feed the machines."