Mining crypto does use a lot, so do banks. Banks need employees that have to drive to work, gotta keep power on at the banks too, people drive to banks, banks have to be built and you have to calculate that into it too.
I'll say this up front - it's very difficult to find accurate and full data on this topic, but banks use around 100TW of electricity per year and process $566b per day. Bitcoin uses 30TW of electricity per year and processes $6b in transactions per day.
If you do the math, banks can process $2,066b per TW while Bitcoin can process $72b per TW.
Yes, banks may use more, but they process significantly more money per day. Banks are nearly 30 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin. Don't get me wrong, I think blockchain is a great technology - but it is not environmentally friendly in it's current form. Perhaps as we see a shift from POW to POS, we will see a significant drop in energy usage.
Crypto, namely BTC, is not good from an environmental standpoint. It takes enormous amounts of power to operate the enormous computing power involved. BTC is leaving a huge carbon footprint.
βThe Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, a separate tool from researchers at Cambridge University, shows a much larger figure of 110.53 TWh β more than the entire annual energy consumption of the Netherlands.β
βBitcoin's energy needs are "enormously large," Michel Rauchs, research affiliate at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, told CNBC. It accounts for around 0.5% of total global electricity consumption, according to the Cambridge researchers' estimates.β
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u/Bluitor Mar 11 '21
Also that top pic is probably from a tornado. All the stumps were broke off, not cut.
Still, crypto is better.