The Environmental Cost of Bitcoin - Youtube Video

The Environmental Cost of Bitcoin - Youtube Video #bitcoin

The main flaw in his reasoning comes in when he calculates the energy consumption of a single Bitcoin transaction (5...10 kWh), extrapolates that to all of Germany's electronic transactions (17 billion) and concludes that Bitcoin would need 85...170 TWh of electricity for Germany alone. This logic is flawed because the energy cost is per block and never per transaction. In theory you could stuff a billion transactions into a single huge block and it would still use about the same energy to find the corresponding hash, as it does for a single transaction (at a given difficulty level). The reasoning is about as sound as multiplying the value of all financial transactions in the EU by the weight of a single Euro coin and concluding that there's simply not enough metal in the world to run an economy on the Euro. Also, the Bitcoin network currently greatly subsidizes mining by ...

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