Tracking electricity consumption from U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations | Annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption

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Tracking electricity consumption from U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

Assuming the share of global activity in the United States remains approximately 38%, we estimate electricity usage from Bitcoin mining based in the United States to range from 25 TWh to 91 TWh. That estimate represents 0.6% to 2.3% of all United States electricity demand in 2023, which was 3,900 TWh.13 This estimate of U.S. electricity demand supporting cryptocurrency mining would equal annual demand ranging from more than three million to more than six million homes.14 The low end of the range would equal annual electricity usage for entire states such as Utah and West Virginia, among others.15 Note that the CBECI-based estimates provided here are only based on Bitcoin and do not include other proof of work cryptocurrencies.

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TIL people still mine crypto.
The problem is that we have dirty sources of energy at all. That's the problem before you get to Bitcoin or anything else. This energy stuff is literally falling from the sky. We would have more energy than our economies would know what we do with had we utilized and invested in nuclear technology and other renewables decades ago.
Bitcoin uses less than 1% of global energy usage. The question to ask is "Is it worth it?" and "How do competitors compare?". How much energy is used by remittance services alone (western union)? Think of all the kiosks, all the offices, etc. How much does SWIFT or IBAN use? Bitcoin essentially solve that problem over a decade ago.
Much of cryptos energy comes from renewables, most miners flock to renewable energy and over-provisioned grids. Why? Because it tends to be the cheapest. In fact, crypto mining can help balance demand curve on grids and subsidize the installation of new renewable energy generation which would otherwise be economically infeasible. This is particularly important in poorer countries. Demand being wildly different at different times of the day is one of the key factors stopping total decommission of fossil fuel infrastructure in many places, mining can help solve that while making sure power generation remains profitable.
In exchange, we get the most secure, decentralized document in the world and the ability to transfer trillions of dollars of value a year. Bitcoin's market cap is 800 billion, that puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. That's the size of Switzerland's GDP. Bigger than the GDP of Israel, Sweden, Vietnam, etc.
Anybody with a cell phone and internet can access this network including the billions of people who are "unbanked" and can't access safe, reliable banking infrastructure or currency. They can use this infrastructure to engage with the global economy. It doesn't matter if their corrupt government doesn't want them to, it doesn't matter if they have a poor credit rating, it doesn't matter if their neighborhood isn't safe enough for a bank to operate in. It doesn't matter if their corrupt government or the world bank constantly manipulates the currency to take away the hard earned money of their citizens. Bitcoin gives them a way to hold, spend, and save money more securely than anything else.
Bitcoin enables you to send money internationally in under a second with fees measured in pennies. It has faithfully done this 24/7 365 days year for 15 years. It's never been hacked, it never had to close due to a bank holiday, it's fully open source, it has resisted attacks from nation-states, it's never had even an hour of downtime, and it's never changed its fiscal policy or promises.
For more analysis about bitcoin's energy use, see this website.
- Yes, but reduceing demand spent on frivolous projects also cuts down on waste immediately, instead of the decades it take to physically make things.
  Electrical waste is the fundamental value that underpins the entrity of Bitcoins exsistance. Bitcoin has a per transaction energy cost of 767kwh per transaction. That is enough to physically drive an electric suv like the Ionic 5 from Seattle WA, to Jacksonville FL, for every single transaction. Visa can handle nearly a million transactions for the same energy cost, and is part of a global banking system that handles the needs of billions of people, not a hobby project for a few tens of thousand of speculators.
  While chasing very cheap energy is critically important to miners given the vast amount of energy consumed, most poor countries would like to phase out more expensive sources of energy like coal and gas in favor of cheaper solar already, but cannot do so because they need to supply the demand of miners who generally need to be operating for as much of the day as possible to make the cost of the back. If these electrical grids really were to that point, then they would be consistently running with or at least hitting zero fossil input, something which is incredibly rare even in developed nations withs decades of building out renewables.
  While transactions are secure in a technical sense, as far as any user is concerned they are vastly less secure than traditional transactions because they inherently cannot be reversed or disputed in any way, unless your a whale and can convince everyone to fork the entire monetary system of course. Anyone who gains access to an account can take all its contents and you have zero recourse, not to mention that disputing transactions is the primary security against fraud and deception, and hence why a system that eliminates all aspects of it has been overrun with fraud and deception.
  Bitcoin is a massively centralized system. Not only because it is a single central system, but over fifty percent of that system is controlled by just five groups, who by definition have complete control over that system and are accountable to exactly no one.
  Market cap is irrelevant, just the current price people are willing to pay times the total amount of bitcoin to ever exist. It has nowhere near that liquidity, and no fundamental value to hold beyond its speculative nature.
  People who are unbanked are unbanked because they have no need for one. Typically, becuse either they lack enough money to be worth storing it or because a household or family has only one account they share because again, they get paid in and buy things in cash, useing the internet or finding anything not in cash requires a two hour bike trip, and because they can’t afford to leave it laying around.
  No bank is going to have a money holding money for someone, the problem is that the someone doesn’t have money or any need to spend it beyond a five minutes walk around thier village. You would know this if you actually researched the reason poor people in remote and developing areas might be unbanked instead of just using it as a talking point to liquidity into a speculative asset.
  Moreover, most major cell providers in poor nations also already allow customers to store and transfer funds directly from their account to others. Other nations like India have things like their Universal Payment Interface, which allows any two business, customers, or people to make instant free transactions.
  The average per transaction cost of a bitcoin transaction is 4.87 USD with it having spiked to over 37 USD per transaction within the last three months. I mentioned spiked because the transaction fee changes by the minute depending on how many people are competing to make a transaction at any one time, and this is the same price given to everyone throughout the entire system, this makes it unreliable to anyone who doesn’t want to randomly pay a major premium in order to buy something in the next ten minutes. That’s a lot of pennies and is a minimum pre tax floor on top of every single transaction made with it.
  It is also inherently only as reliable as ones internet connection, and in many developing nations that is no where near 100% uptime. If the power or internet go out, all acess to your money does aswell, as you can’t make changes to an allways online database without acess to the internet.
  
  As to whether or not Bitcoin is "useful" or "how useful" it is, those are opinions so we both have ours and the market has its opinion and those can be different and that's fine. The fundamental value of Bitcoin is it's clear unyielding fiscal policy which is has kept to for fifteen years and its network effect (the ability to send/receive txes to others and the amount of people who will willingly transact in it), same as any other currency. People speculate on other currencies, instruments, and assets as well, that's not a feature unique to Bitcoin. But I wanted to correct one notion on fees.
  The average per transaction cost of a bitcoin transaction is 4.87 USD with it having spiked to over 37 USD
  I wanted to correct one notion on fees: you are talking about main chain fees there. Bitcoin lightning payments are where I'm citing "cents per transaction". Lighting is where most transactions are moving to now, it should be used for basically all scenarios except high-value transactions and long-term storage which would justify the cost of main chain fees. Lightning uses the security provided by BTC main chain, but store transaction data off-chain. You pay one on-chain fee to lock some BTC up in a lightning channel and then you can send essentially infinite transactions between you and any other partie(s) within that channel's provided liquidity.
  Bitcoin is massively decentralized, if it's centralized, somebody at any point could have exploited that centralization by putting a gun to the heads whomever these people are who run Bitcoin and forced them to do something against Bitcoin's protocol or even shut it down entirely. Who are these five groups you're talking about? Mining pools? The mining pools simply relay the results of mining activity, the second one starts acting unethically all the mining power immediately switches to another pool. The pool itself doesn't have any mining power.
  Miners are accountable to the laws of physics, math, and economy, and they must follow the Bitcoin protocol. If they spend money on energy for mining, they have to sell some of their mined BTC to cover that expense. Additionally,if, for example, if they make a block with invalid transactions, it will get rejected by the rest of the network, even if that miners somehow had 100% of the network hashpower. The only real thing somebody can do with the majority of hashpower, which to date nobody has ever been able to obtain and gets more expensive and impossible every year, is a double-spend and the amount of resources required to obtain that much hashpower are so high that there's really no way you can feasibly use that attack to gain money because anybody accepting enough money in BTC to trade for something that valuable is going to wait for a few blocks confirmation.
  While transactions are secure in a technical sense, as far as any user is concerned they are vastly less secure than traditional transactions because they inherently cannot be reversed or disputed in any way
  This very much depends on your use case. Bank wires are irreversible at a protocol level, so is cash, yet they are a popular way to send money. Irreversibility increases security for many use cases. If I sell an item on facebook marketplace, I want irreversiblity. I don't want somebody doing a chargeback or handling a return on a $5 item, and I don't want to pay a middleman for the cost of arbitrating those kinds of decisions, so a chargeback-free system is better for me as a buyer. If I'm buying it in person, I can inspect it and clearly see whether it works for not. Oranges from someones backyard or somebody set of weightlifting weights don't need a 30-day return policy. If I am selling iPhones online, I can't sell iPhones to high-fraud countries due to the risk of fraudulent chargebacks. If they pay me in BTC? No problem.
  If you want disputability to be part of the transaction process, use a platform that supports it and pay the extra fees associated. You can use eBay, venmo, etc. It doesn't have to be baked into the currency because it isn't baked into our existing currency and that works just fine.
  Theft or loss of funds due to misplacement etc is a concern regardless of which currency you're talking about, this is ultimately a problem for the legal system to sort out. You can get robbed at gunpoint whether you have Bitcoin or USD. You can forget your wallet on the bus or lose your private key. If you are so bad at keeping track of your money that this is a recurring problem for you, have a custodian like a bank do it for you. Bitcoin can be deposited with any custodian you want. Put your BTC in a multi-sig wallet and require multiple people to sign off on every transaction. USD can't do that natively without a third-party service. Bitcoin is better at protecting against some kinds of theft or attacks and worse than others. The kind of theft done by the banking industry and a constantly inflating currency supply where your dollar's share of the whole decreases every year is perfectly legal, yet Bitcoin protects against it perfectly with it's non-inflationary economic policy. How much bread or USD you can buy with your BTC may change over time, but your 1 BTC will always be 1BTC of 21 million total.
  It is also inherently only as reliable as ones internet connection, and in many developing nations that is no where near 100% uptime. If the power or internet go out, all access to your money does aswell, as you can’t make changes to an allways online database without acess to the internet.
  So is much of modern banking and trade infrastructure, hell, some of them have entire holidays they take off where you can't access your funds! If you have funds on main chain and your internet connection goes down, it doesn't matter, Bitcoin doesn't care, your funds sit on main chain and wait for you next time you come online. You can send money to people who are offline. Even if the global internet basically splits in half, as long as there is a single node to relay information between the two halves, it continues to work. If the entire globe loses electricity for a day, nothing bad happens to Bitcoin, it just turns starts up again on the next day. It is incredibly resilient to unreliable electrical and internet situations. With lightning, as long as your wallet can access the internet once every few days, you can protect against attacks which could otherwise exploit your lack of access, though they are incredibly rare in the wild.
- Here's the thing: when you're wasting large amounts of energy on a completely pointless activity like proof-of-work, the easiest way to solve that problem is to stop wasting the energy. It means you need to do a lot less work to decarbonize in the first place.

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