- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin::US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.
Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin::US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.
How much goes to the dollar?
There’s a powered device or 5 in every store connected to a credit server.
All that energy for bitcoin only supports 7 tx/s. Digital dollar payments do tens if not hundres of thousands per second.
tx/s?
Transactions per second. Bitcoin is slow and expensive to get your transaction “approved”.
Expensive is relative. It’s expensive to send a $5 transaction and pay $1 in fees. However, you can move a million dollars in value and pay that same $1 in fees. That $1 in fees can also open a lightning channel which can contain essentially infinite transactions within it. For small transactions, Lightning transactions settle in under a second for fees measured in pennies.
Compared to a bank wire, western union, or other remittance services, $1 is an absolute steal.
You need the same infrastructure for any electronic payment system.
What you don’t need for anything is crypto “mining”, which is almost pure overhead. That’s what the article is about.
It’s not pure overhead. It’s the means of initial distribution and also mining is the backend for handling transactions. Not that I think it’s efficient by any means. It’s just that it was necessary for Bitcoin to ever become something that mattered.
It’s not necessary to perform any of the functions of crypto, including money laundering. That makes it pure overhead; pure waste. There are offshore banks that facilitate tax fraud and other criminal activity. Crypto, somehow, allows exchanges to escape the scrutiny that falls on these banks. Objectively, there is no good reason why all this waste should let you avoid scrutiny of regulators or police.