Everyone in that thread acting like they’ve never seen a datacenter/server farm? This shit’s been going on a while, not just with btc. Not sure where the anger comes from.
Like i’m extremely skeptical those aren’t just stock images of a datacenter, especially the second one.
Wow. There’s a song I haven’t thought of in like two decades.
It’s like either crypto mining is consuming a significant, ever-increasing amount of electricity (for no real reason or gain), or it isn’t.
Compared to production grade datacenters btc mining is a drop in the bucket, seriously. Even if those pics are from actual btc mines. These datacenters aws and google and microsoft and a million other cloud providers have are truly ridiculous in scale.
All the more reason we need to use clean energy for this stuff. I feel like people are getting upset at the wrong thing here.
I suppose I should pay more attention to the fact that it’s mostly tech people saying it’s no big deal and playing the whatabout game. I’m all like “crypto mining literally serves no purpose” and they’re like “yea, but those data centers really don’t either.”
Anyone have use Turo? I thought about using it to rent a Tesla for a day trip in Arizona.
Oh man, I loved subtraction stew.
https://twitter.com/OfficialKat/status/1369349228665864192
One of my favorites, had no idea he was alive. Lol
I’ve seen this doc about the Pepe meme get mentioned a few times recently because some Homer Simpson Pepe NFT sold for $321k. Haven’t watched the doc but has good reviews so was going to check it out
Said doc
Homer Pepe NFT
Is this money laundering? Or just a bunch of Uber wealthy middle aged dudes who are still emotionally teenagers?
lol a bunch of us are buying and selling digital basketball “moments” in the nba top shot thread.
One of my buddies who’s big into crypto bought a digital piece of art from this digital artist for $50 and now people are offering $2.5k for it.
Just like the hundreds of different crypto markets there are markets for these NFTs
First google hit. Seems like that’s a lot of energy.
Searching for data center usage was harder, but I got 70 billion kwh.
https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-approaches-1-gigawatt-of-cloud-capacity-in-virginia/
That’s vs 121 Twh. Mwh = 1000kwh Gwh is a million Kwh, so Twh is a billion. I think. So at least given whatever years that’s more bitcoin energy worldwide than datacenter energy in the US. I think.
On a recent The Press Box pod, they talked about doing a TopShot for political moment .gifs (No New Taxes, Karl Rove fast walking to confront the Fox News Decision Desk, “You’re no Jack Kennedy”, etc.). I haven’t bothered to look to see if this exists, but, if it doesn’t, it should. I mean, who wouldn’t want to literally own the libs?
Oh man, I might buy one of Megyn Kelly walking around backstage during the 2012 election.
Not really a fair comparison - there are also a lot of cloud providers. That second link is just one region, there’s tons in the us alone. And any one of those regions will be made of clusters of these data centers… There’s also lot of infrastructure that exists off-cloud (on prem) that companies will rent space for, I don’t think those get counted either.
So like yea I didn’t check my math here but considering datacenters claim 1% of global energy consumption (or more according to who you ask) I’m highly skeptical that btc mines consume more. Maybe if you include the total energy consumption of every single machine doing mining on the entire earth but I’d still be absolutely flabbergasted by that stat and happy to admit if I am wrong.
Anyway we clearly need to have better methods of producing electricity for this stuff. I still don’t understand the anger behind the btc mines. Electricity should be cheap and plentiful and abundant if we utilize the resources we have at our disposal correctly. The fact that we’re not doesn’t mean it’s correct to point the finger at stuff that wastes it. It’s not a finite resource if we use 100% renewables like we fucking should and for some reason are dragging our feet on it. It’s so fucking feasible.
TLDR but btc consumes more energy than i realized, but still don’t see it as a problem really.
The 70 billion kwh I believe was for the whole US.
Data centers currently account for a small percentage of America’s energy use. Data centers used an estimated 70 billion kilowatt hours of energy in 2014, accounting for 1.8 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.
ETA: Obviously I’m with you on renewables. But at the very least, it’s shocking how much energy is used by bitcoin mining. It seems pretty wasteful. I compared it to gaming and found a source (below) that put gaming at 75Twh a year, which puts it in the same ballpark. If bitmining is a game, then I guess people can “waste” their energy doing what they like. Seems like a lame game though.
Data centers consume 2% of global energy production which is 500 Trillion terawatt hours a year. BTC mining uses 121 as of February.
Not arguing that either one isn’t a huge energy problem, but at least BTC can probably primarily run off renewables as location isn’t as critical as with data centers that have to be at least quasi local.
Also it’s really important to note that the cloud providers very badly seem to NOT want to talk about their power consumption. This suggests to me it could be hugely worse than they are admitting.
I get 162,000 Twh in 2017.
Yea it’s a lot - I don’t know, I’m probably pretty biased since I’m an infrastructure engineer and without datacenters or server farms I wouldn’t have much of a career left. I could take or leave btc, although, I do believe having alternative forms of currency to fiat is a good thing. I couldn’t tell you why though.
I’m seeing ~25,000 of the unit I’m using per year globally for electricity production. My guess is that world energy consumption includes things other than power generation.
But if wikipedia was right here it wouldn’t change the amount of energy consumed to mine BTC, but the data center power consumption at 2% would grow considerably making the comparison way more stark than just 4:1.