this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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The economic drivers of Bitcoin mining make it so that the cost of the electricity needed to mine a Bitcoin will always be just a bit less than the value of a Bitcoin.
Every time speculators hype up the value of Bitcoin the amount of money wasted on electricity increases.
Bitcoins are mined at a preset rate of 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. Which does at least get cut in half every few years. But this waste of energy is going to continue so long as there’s a market for Bitcoin.
Somehow Ethereum 2 exists with Proof of Stake and everybody is still using Bitcoin. That tells me that nobody important (for this context) cares about wasted electricity.
It's more that noone cares about the actual use cases of crypto and are just using it as speculative gambling.
Bitcoin is the literal equivalent of a horse and carriage while cars exist. If any crypto survives it should be the proof of stake crypto not the badly designed bitcoin (noting of course, for its time it was amazingly innovative, just that it's no longer actually useful).
Not to mention the whole design flaw that it's meant to be completely private/anonymous but ironically is one of the most public and traceable things ever created.
Bitcoin was never meant to be that, people were/are just idiots.
Monero on the other hand... Something made possible because Bitcoin came first.
FYI there's no such thing as "Ethereum 2." It's just called "Ethereum."
And you're right, every time these mainstream articles mention the power consumption of crypto, they never mention ETH. Weird.
Because crypto is only used by people who want to get rich out of it.
There is no money to be found in Ethereum 2, at least not like with Bitcoin.
So if the userbase is full of selfish pricks, then they wouldn't care about energy use either.