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
    93·
    9 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·
      9 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.

        • PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          7 days ago

          He is wildly incorrect because he phrased it in an intentionally deceitful manner. It does not require 700 kilowatt hours of energy to transfer one Bitcoin one time. The verbiage quote “single transaction”, is the entire problem with OPs post.

          • hitwright@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            5 days ago

            I understand lightning network exists to somewhat reduce intermediate transactions. But the actual transaction to be written into the blockchain a lot of energy must be used to calculate the hash. Still difficult to follow you on how the number is wrong, mate.

      • Magnetic_dudOPEnglish
        62·
        9 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.

        • PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          7 days ago

          You’re arguing in bad faith and I’m not going to put up with your stupid straw man. Your statement was that it requires 700 kilowatt hours for a single transaction and that is blatantly false. You seem to ignore the obvious fact that Bitcoin can be transferred unlimited number of times and you do not have to re-mine the Bitcoin every single time you transfer it. As I said earlier, I already agree with you that Bitcoin sucks and you’re wasting your time arguing with me over semantics.