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Bitcoin Mining on Track to Consume All of the World's Energy by 2020 (newsweek.com)
16 points by throwkeep on May 20, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments



Great example of terrible journalism around a novel technology. Here, let's extrapolate a trend in a completely absurd way for an attention-grabbing headline. Throw in some pictures, some irrelevant data about cryptomining in browser, now you have enough for an article.


This seems incomplete without also posting the result of whether or not it consumed as much power as the entire planet did in 2017.


>As of mid-May, electricity demand for bitcoin is hovering around 143 terawatt-hours, significantly outpacing electricity consumption of several countries including Argentina.

source: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin...

According to enerdata [2] the world produces over 30k TWH in electricity alone. So, it's not even close. It's also worth noting that there's lots of "Bitcoin uses more energy than X countries" but it's more "Bitcoin uses more energy than each of X countries individually - not cumulatively"

[2]:https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/world-electricity-...


Pretty easy to verify that the answer is no.


By a laughable factor?


Not laughable, no. Looks like 3 orders of magnitude.


[2017]




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