The True Cost of Cryptocurrency
What’s the true cost of cryptocurrency and bitcoin? Support this channel directly by becoming a Patreon backer:
In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I look at the true cost of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Specifically, I look at how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are built to fail, not necessarily in the monetary sense, but in terms of the impact Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies have on the environment. Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are not viable solutions to the current financial system because cryptocurrency’s blockchain proof-of-work model requires a massive amount of electricity consumption. Essentially Bitcoin miners or other miners of cryptocurrencies use specialized computers to solve math problems and the end result is more Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. This process of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining, however, is environmentally destructive and unsustainable because it demands a huge amount of energy. There are some potential solutions to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency’s energy and environmental cost. Switching to a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency model could drastically reduce cryptocurrency’s environmental harms. That being said, switching models still doesn’t address the rise of crypto-colonialism in places like Puerto Rico.
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Timestamps:
Intro – 0:00
What is Cryptocurrency? – 0:44
The Problem With Cryptocurrency – 1:50
The Promise of Cryptocurrency? – 4:27
A Word On Crypto-Colonialism – 6:49
The Future of Crypto – 8:39
Support OCC on Patreon! – 10:22
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#Bitcoin #Cryptocurrency #Crypto
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💡Do you own any Bitcoin or Cryptocurrencies? What are your thoughts on them?
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I recommend watching this : https://youtu.be/b-7dMVcVWgc . Bitcoin is greener than you think.
Recommend that the uploader watching this again. And maybe making another video about it.
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Yeah, blame bitcoin for colonial capitalism and its contribution to global climate change. Because that's entirely fair and accurate. *eyeroll
These videos and arguments always miss the biggest point, how much do the USD or any other currency cost to keep operational (aka banks etc) and all the people needed to run all these brick and mortar places. I'm sorry, but Crypto is not by anyways a worse technology and in many ways is the better for a global currency with no political ties. This argument FEEEELS like what BP used to say about climate change…
It's interesting to see crypto people throwing environmental shade at traditional banks. The whole point of proof-of-work is to prevent fraud by requiring a whole bunch of miners to brute-force math problems at huge energy costs as part of confirming transactions, making it nigh-impossibly expensive to fake them. The system is inefficient by design as a security feature. So it's interesting what kind of stats they can present to make themselves more attractive than the significantly-less-secure conventional banking.
This should have millions of views but because of YouTube of course not
My ad for this video was for coinbase. How ironic
Your Nebula video cuts off the last 2+mins of the video… I had to come here to watch the rest~ Just so you are aware. ^_^ Thanks for the videos!
Great video man. Really enjoy watching and learning with your content. Thank you
ADA
The video on Nebula is cut at 9:14. Can you do something about this? @Our Changing Climate
Proof od stake is bad as it will allow fraud from forking by the strongest
I checked out mining a bit with my gaming PC, and while gaining a few euros in exchange for running my comp all day is nice, coal and gas are the main sources of electricity here so I feel bad about doing it and probably won't bother much.
Bitcoin WILL replace fiat currencies in the next 10 years. There’s actually no question about it.
to be fair, every other thing that we see on the internet has data centres, multiple of them behind it usually from companies like aws, google cloud or Facebook. and yes that includes this video. Definitely crypto uses a lot of power but it's new technology, it'll take time to transition to a cleaner mining operation especially considering the whole world still runs on fossil fuel. Plus cryptos do have benefits, the mining operations means there is no need for 5-7 centralised data centres which require a lot more energy than these comparatively smaller centres as huge data centres require a lot more cooling and air conditioning.
Ok. Now compare it to traditional banking and its millions of buildings that leave the lights on 24/7, auxiliary facilities, e-waste, energy consumption, water use , physical space requirements and on and on. All for buildings that are only occupied 6 hours a day.
I mean, if you are gonna do a video like this then cover the whole topic so people understand the entire situation.
Such an interesting and well researched video! 🙌🏽
😱😱😱
How much energy does the banking system requires?
These numbers are already huge, but it needs to also be known that this is all while less than 1% of the population uses cryptocurrencies. It was last estimated the highest number was somewhere in the 1.1 – 1.2 million transactions. By comparison total digital transactions of any kind in 2020 were around 760 BILLION individual transactions. Now imagine if the entire world attempted to run on cryptocurrencies exclusively (nevermind the actual security concerns, such as permanently losing money)… and especially if more than one existed and we had to do conversions as well? Yeah…
Here's my comment. Hope it helps your video get some traction.
Hydro may be cheap, but it isn't clean Charlie! Only Pumped Storage or Run of the River hydro should be considered "clean". River-wide damns, like the one you showed around ~7:50, should not be considered that way because of the vegetation it drowns upstream (or kills downstream for that matter), the possible displacement of communities whose towns flood or whose rivers ran dry, and all of the biodiversity lost.
Edit: grammar
I wish more people knew about the environmental impact of cryptocurrency
Crypto is wallstreet 2.0. It is a huge bobble that will burst soon.
Good video. One thing though. Transitioning from PoW to PoS not could reduce energy requirements, it DOES reduce the energy requirements to nothing. That's why Bitcoin is old tech and needs to die. It is the Myspace of crypto space. BTC as digital gold narrative will die with it. It has too.
Cryptocurrency is dumb
Cryptocurrency in the future will make us all slaves. people who are involved in something like that, they don't know what they are doing. Cryptocurrency will take our last drop of freedom.