Why do you stop taking into account scale? Gaming as a whole does provides entertainment to a large number of people and thus consumes large amount of energy. While bitcoin is providing benefits (real or imagined) to a very small fraction of people and consuming more electricity than a _whole country_. If red dead redemption was played by 10 people but consumed electricity equivalent to 100 people's daily life then we would be talking about regulation there too.

BTW, afaik bitcoin has 5million users and Argentina's population is 44 million. Also, this energy consumption by 44million people includes all the activities you can think of to add to this argument.

Scale does not inherently excuse. Energy for gaming could be routed to feeding/warming the poor; should 100 die of starvation/hypothermia so that 1,000,000 can play Fortnite? do you really want to continue such reasoning?

Yes I do. This is why my country had a space program before we solved all our social issues. You need to look at how much good an activity actually does vs how much resources it will consume. Entertainment is a good thing so is space exploration. But ISRO did not consume more resources than all other social improvement plans combined. Bitcoin is consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country. _Combined_

Gaming is also consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country __Combined__. Entertainment is a good thing, but watching a movie consumes a lot less resources than playing games so why are games acceptable? What about VR? VR uses a lot of GPU computations for something a small fraction of people use. Surely people playing VR could use some other form of entertainment that is less resource consuming.

Or then we let people use their own resources the way they see fit.

I would like to redirect you to @africanboy's analysis[1] of how much energy gaming uses. He did it well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26091220

Gaming uses vastly less energy per person.

in your example 100 bitcoin users would let a million of people die of starvation/hypothermia so that they can play blockchain.

scale in general does not excuse, but consumption per capita should.

A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour

If you keep it on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is 876 KW/year.

Which is not very much.

At 120Tw/year with 5 million users BC consumption per capita is an astonishing 24,000kw/year (or 24Mw)

Every bitcoin user consumes 27 times the energy consumed by a (quite powerful) gaming console turned on non stop (which is never the case)

That's why there have been campaigns around the World to replace incandescent bulbs with the energy efficient ones.

Compared to the traditional ones the new light bulbs can save up to the 80% of the energy, compared to a bitcoiner, a non bitcoiner can save ~97% of the energy by simply playing videogames.

> A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour

You need to take in the manufacturing costs, costs to develop software, costs to run servers too, otherwise you're only measuring marginal energy consumption for a new user.

Marginal energy consumption for a new Bitcoin user is probably small too.

The website linked is actually measuring the amount of energy that BC is using right now to operate.

It's not the total amount of energy used to create the BC network, the software, the HW and everything else.

https://cbeci.org/

> The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) provides a real-time estimate of the total electricity load and consumption of the Bitcoin network. The model is based on a bottom-up approach initially developed by Marc Bevand in 2017 that takes different types of available mining hardware as the starting point.

> The first number refers to the total electrical power consumed by the Bitcoin network and is expressed in gigawatts (GW). This figure is updated every 30 seconds and corresponds to the rate at which Bitcoin uses electricity. The second number refers to the total yearly electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network and is expressed in terawatt-hours (TWh). We annualise Bitcoin’s electricity consumption assuming continuous power usage at the aforementioned rate over the period of one year. We apply a 7-day moving average to the resulting data point in order to make the output value less dependent of short-term hashrate movements, and thus more suitable for comparisons with alternative uses of electricity.

Do you think the bitcoin mining rigs materialize themselves out of thin air? Those things get constantly replaced because they get inefficient due to the rising hashrate and advancements in chip efficiency.

that's simply because a PS4 is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than BC and was designed to be like that

BC on the other hand are very expensive in terms of energy consumed, by design

BTC don't make any sense energy wise and in the end don't make any sense to invest in something designed to burn energy in the long run, especially now that we are trying to fix the mistakes of the past

No you really can't. Gaming employs large amounts of people, sustaining economic growth as well as innovation (GPU development was originally sustained by demand related to gaming) . Bitcoin has little economic impact relative to its energy use.

The money spent by interested parties indicates otherwise.

Feel free to present a case where the economic impact of gaming is less than Bitcoin (feel free to include every crypto-currency ever made in that comparison).

Market caps in speculative, unregulated markets aren't indicators of economic relevance. Gaming facilitates billions in production on a yearly basis. Crypto related activity produces very little in comparison. And no, someone buying billions worth of Bitcoin doesn't count (just like people buying GameStop stock doesn't reflect the economic impact of the gaming industry).

Don’t move the goalposts. Bitcoin has little economic impact relative to its energy use you wrote. Oh, but it does. Miners created something of value, others bought with real money substantially greater than the cost of creation - and durable enough to resell indefinitely (with mundane care & handling). The only ones fit to establish “economic relevance” here are those who actually bought Bitcoin, with an estimated total resale value of $650B. Picasso's Les femmes d'Alger was sold for $179.4 million in May 2015; the economic impact of Pablo painting for a few days was indeed enormous. Those vs gaming, where while making/marketing games is profitable the tremendous energy going into playing them produces no lingering resale value of any form.

So no actual arguments then (just more pumper nonsense around prices). If you have no interest in economics, why attempt to pretend you do (see your Pablo reference as an example of why you might've not paid attention in Econ 101). Why not just say: "buy bitcoin because moon money" and move on.

Your point is true until it's not true, or Bitcoin fails.

You could make the same argument about any nascent technology that hasn't succeeded or failed yet.

Asset values don't reflect economic impact/relevance (as in a $100MM Picasso doesn't indicate $100MM of economic activity). That's why GDP is used as an indicator for economic growth, not market caps.

Market cap is an estimated resale value under current/predictable conditions. GDP is a total of cumulative annual transactions. We can measure Bitcoin both ways, and each is remarkable.

Hopefully anyone reading this will take a minute to look up GDP.

The comment above, in a nutshell, is what's enveloping the current crypto environment. Maybe one day we'll get past it (or maybe this is just it).

As it happens I just listened to a long talk by him, perhaps this one. He kept arguing that "bitcoin isn't volatile, because the price of various things measured in bitcoins keep falling".

Either he doesn't know what volatility means or he is trying to scam people.

Money spent by interested parties only indicates that there is money to be made. It doesn't mean anything about the usefulness of bitcoin.

I think video games are a silly waste of time but I don't necessarily want to outlaw it. If playing one round of Mario Kart consumed several megawatt hours of energy though, I don't think anyone would want it to be allowed.