Yes, believable, from all the payment methods available, Greenpeace would choose the most fucking inefficient one, that wastes 700 kWh for a single transaction, that’s 100 households!

  • Magnetic_dudOPEnglish
    83·
    2 days ago

    It’s a conservative estimate, it’s even higher than that

    Crypto-biased source: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/08/18/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-use/ (you would expect they downplay the number)

    You can just take a calculator and do by yourself the math from publicly available stats https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/

    In the past 24 hours a block contains in average only 3500 transactions. Then that block needs to be validated by many other nodes in following calculations.

    This is why it’s the most inefficient payment method, very slow (only 3500 transactions in ten minutes instead of few seconds), expensive for the user (transfer fees are high) and power hungry

    • PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      55·
      2 days ago

      You have no idea what you’re talking about, or else you’re intentionally misleading people. Transferring Bitcoin in a single transaction takes nowhere near as much power as mining it. Yes, BTC is stupid and terrible for the environment, but you don’t need to lie about the stats.

      • Magnetic_dudOPEnglish
        51·
        2 days ago

        please explain how to transfer bitcoin without mining a block, since the transactions are contained there.

        You need to take the energy required to mine a block and validate it (a lot, could power a small town), then divide for the few transactions that could be included in just 1 mb.

        They impose a size limit on the transactions that can be included, so even if tomorrow the transactions increase 10x, each block could contain the same limited number. Of course, if you only count the electricity used by your machine to send the transaction, it’s just a few milliwatts. The problem is all the garbage calculations that need to be done to actually validate it.