New research estimates that the 34 largest Bitcoin mining operations in the United States consumed more electricity in 2022 than all of Los Angeles combined. 85% of the electricity came from fossil fuels and exposed 1.9 million Americans to more than 0.1 μg/m3 of additional PM2.5 pollution.

[u/shiruken]

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58287-3

[u/torukmakto4]

Ban crypto.

Ban AI (except research institutions).

Or else mandatory 100% renewable or nuclear energy and waste heat recovery.

[u/Devilnaht → u/torukmakto4]

Forcing them to use renewable energy wouldn’t help, unfortunately, unless you obligated them to construct their own power plants as well. If all the energy referenced in the article had been connected to renewable energy sources, it would have still resulted in a similar amount of fossil fuels burned. Think of it in terms of a kind of power grid budget. Let’s say we have 20 units of renewable generation and 100 units of total demand. To make up the gap, we use 80 units of fossil fuels.

Now, someone hooks up their crypto/ AI farm to the renewable sources. They’re “environmentally conscious”, so they just use the 20 units of renewable capacity. But the grid already had 100 units of demand, so we have 120 total demand, and we have to kick on 100 units of fossil fuel power (20 more than in the first scenario). Comparing the two situations, even though the crypto / AI farms are on “100%” renewable power, they’ve caused just as much fossil fuel usage as if they weren’t.

[u/punio4 → u/torukmakto4]

Or else mandatory 100% renewable or nuclear energy and waste heat recovery.

No, because that energy could better be used for other cases.

[u/JustDiveInTimberLake → u/torukmakto4]

Not all crypto uses proof of work there are plenty of energy saving options like proof of stake

[u/Mynsare → u/JustDiveInTimberLake]

Consuming more than 0 is still wasteful for something that serves no purpose at all.

[u/JustDiveInTimberLake → u/Mynsare]

Banks and payment providers like visa are using crypto like visa using solana

[u/Harfatum → u/Mynsare]

If you napkin-math the economic gains of having most assets tokenized (and thus interoperable and automatable), you will probably find gains in the tens of trillions of dollars GDP.

The first light bulb sucked, but what we do with light-producing technology now is much more useful.

[u/Wyvernz → u/Harfatum]

If you napkin-math the economic gains of having most assets tokenized (and thus interoperable and automatable), you will probably find gains in the tens of trillions of dollars GDP.

Where are any of these supposed gains coming from? I can transfer money to and from my bank effortlessly land with a lot of protections against fraud. Crypto is slow, expensive, volatile, and has no protection against fraud.

[u/Harfatum → u/Wyvernz]

Better capital efficiency, increased investment, reduced costs, capital velocity. I tried asking all the major AIs and they independently came to similar figures, please try yourself and let me know if you get something different!

[u/grundar → u/Harfatum]

I tried asking all the major AIs and they independently

There's nothing independent about that, they're all the same general technology and trained on broadly the same corpus of data. It's like saying you searched with Google, Bing, and Ask Jeeves and got similar results -- it's entirely expected.

There's also no indication it's correct, as LLMs just piece together their input data, so you're going to get back whatever sentiment is common in their input corpus. If there's a lot of pro-crypto writing online, that's what they'll parrot back to you.

"I asked an LLM" is not persuasive evidence in a scientific context.

[u/Harfatum → u/grundar]

It's just napkin math, but the core idea is convincing to me - it allows for greater access to automation of assets, capital efficiency, equity availability for smaller enterprises, interoperability, integration with identity services, automation of taxation and legal compliance, ease of proving solvency, the list goes on.

A parallel to the fantastic value that we enjoy having the internet vs. just intranets or paper documents.

BTW, I think you'll eventually see that LLMs are smarter than that. The new research out of Anthropic recently showed how they actually plan rather than just "finding the next word", for example.