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Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

It was the wrong question and I just guided you on how it was wrong. For it to be the correct question you should have qualified what you meant by using that phrase. I'm sorry you didn't understand that.

The post headline is "each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water". This generalisation is based on one Bitcoin mining operation which upon cursory inspection is actually a LNG electric company. I'm speculating but likely the reason they mine Bitcoin is to make it worth keeping the gas fire on during off-peak.

If you're going to use a single operation to generalise about the whole network, why use this small weird outlier and not the bigger companies like Riot, Bitfarms, Genesis? I could turn around and say "each bitcoin transaction is fully renewable" based on the operations of any of those companies, and the claim would be even more substantiated than that headline is by that report. But it would still be wrong. Neither example is representative of the energy required by Bitcoin.

Now, I'm not coming to the party trying to push Bitcoin as a transactional currency, like you seemed to have a notion of it trying to compete as. I don't think it's much good for that. But I'm not about to go believing some made up shit about how a computer solving some cryptographic puzzles has a comparable environmental impact to filling an entire swimming pool. Gimme a break dude.