this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Since it's a common mistake when discussing cryptocurrency energy use, I should point out that it's really only Bitcoin specifically that uses significant amounts of electricity these days. Most other cryptocurrencies have switched to proof of stake systems, which uses negligible energy.
Just to expand on this, While eth is 99.99% less energy use than Bitcoin, it still added 2.8 kilotonnes of co2 last year which is equal to about 2000 average houses for a year.
It's a negligible amount in the scheme of things, but a lot for a virtual currency especially when you add up all the various cryptocurrencies out there.
It wouldn't hurt to make all the POS ones use green energy, but probably wouldn't impact anything by itself.
Changing Bitcoin to green energy alone probably would however.
There's an estimated 2.2 billion residences on earth. That's a pretty small percentage 😅