Ask Lemmy

I'd actually be curious to see the comparison between the power consumption/ecological impact of physical money and digital banking systems vs crypto. I assume the latter is way worse because the proof-of-work model is painfully inefficient and literally just a waste of energy (proof-of-stake is better but still wasteful), but I'd be interested to see actual numbers for comparison. Is crypto twice as bad? Or ten times? Or even worse?

Just thinking of all the things traditional money and banks require (just for the US):

• Growing and harvesting cotton and flax for paper bills (and manufacturing linen from the flax plant)
• Physical buildings need to be constructed to hold money, so all the materials required to build a bank need to be manufactured and then constructed in many places all over the country
• Mining and then refining and forging gold and silver bars for places like Fort Knox
• Power consumption from all the banks' servers that handle all of the digital wiring of money all over the world
• Mining copper/nickel/zinc/manganese for minting coins, and then the manufacturing process to mint them
• Fuel consumption moving physical money from place to place

Prolly more stuff I'm not thinking of. I wonder if any studies have been done to add it all up. At least a lot of the stuff traditional money requires creates jobs, too. Farmers, construction workers, miners, etc.