RE: When the Miners stop
Of course the mainstream likes to shat on Bitcoin... Here is a video with some good food for thought. Not saying that Bitcoins energy consumption is a good thing, but it may not be as bad as some people might want you to think...
In a nutshell, Mining bitcoins is not 'location dependant' like you don't have to be in a specific geographic area to mine Bitcoins, you can do it anywhere there is power and internet. And the large mining operations will of course go to where the cheapest electricity is available. And usually, that is because there is a surplus of electricity. I visited a hyrdroelectric dam last year where, even though it was built in the 1920's ... it was only utilizing like 4% of it's capacity...
Also its funny, you'll never hear about CBC mentioning about the banks, their huge office buildings, often with lights on 24/7, their massive server farms, nobody bats an eye at their energy consumption, which is also really up there.
Now having said all that, Yay DPOS!!!
CBC does a pretty good job of ripping on banks for a lot of their shady and predatory practices, but I would think that their energy consumption is a much less significant issue -- likely several orders of magnitude lower than bitcoin mining (given corporate energy consumption is -- I would imagine -- lumped in with national energy consumption; if bitcoin mining is found to be using more energy than small~medium scale nations, then office buildings using lights is probably insignificant in comparison).
I agree with you though that not enough context is given for how much energy is consumed by large tech companies, their huge campuses and server farms.
That being said -- I've written all the above without checking out the video, which I'm checking out right meow.
EDIT: Just watched the video. Anton makes a lot of good points -- and I think his case of understanding the "hidden costs" is super important. A lot of this also applies to stuff like Hydroelectric dams. While better than coal-fired plants, or other dirty power generation methods -- they still, typically, require flooding huge areas of land that were previously animal habitat or fertile farm land (Site C dam in BC suffers from these issues as well). Rivers get choked off, or materials are consumed to produce PV panel arrays.
I guess at the end of the day -- yes, the energy consumption claims of bitcoin are probably overblown and taken out of context to other products or industries. But it still stands that the world is suffering from energy shortages in certain places, as well as the effects from intense resource consumption. It certainly seems like PoW consensus is more of an energy hog than some alternatives -- so it would make sense to be striving to attain that level of efficiency where possible, practical, and secure.
EDIT 2: Thanks for the chat!
Hey, yes it's not a clearly drawn black/white issue, I do agree that the massive energy consumption isn't a GOOD thing, especially considering that those machines are running 24/7 and using energy even when not finding blocks... It must indeed be staggering, but I just wanted to bring a little bit of balance/perspective as Andreas has pointed out. I mean, there's always two sides to every story, and somewhere in the middle is the truth. Indeed though, wasting energy isn't a great thing, and I wonder because I hear a lot of China is coal-fired electricity, and lots of mining happens there(in fact, I hear the government is even giving free power to mining operations, whether or not that's true, would have to be looked in to)
One last thing, 10 minutes(if not hours) for a Bitcoin transaction? Come on... Move over BTC, come on Graphene! 😁 Definitely happy for the chat as well. I enjoy the random talks here on Steemit. 🙂