At full capacity, the one in Cheyenne would draw as much power as 55,000 homes.
The Times found Chinese-owned or -operated Bitcoin mines in at least 12 states, including Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming, that together use as much power as 1.5 million homes.
That’s the big environmental issue with Bitcoin — other major cryptocurrencies have moved to proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work, so they don’t need vast quantities of energy, and when you stop using all that energy, the generators with the highest marginal cost shut down, which generally means coal or gas.
A few months ago I read up on how much energy is used in a bitcoin transaction compared to a VISA transaction, it was something like 10000 times more energy for a bitcoin transaction
Because the stakeholders become the new central bank, with all the same motivations and conflicts of interest. You end up with a “staked class” and an “unstaked class”.
This is a contributing factor to why ethereum can be rolled back: because the stakeholders didn’t like it.
Bitcoin essentially has the same thing though — it’s just that the “staked class” is those who have built power-devouring ASIC facilities to compute lots of hashes. Get enough of them together, and you can roll back transactions via a Sybil attack, just as you can with organized action by stakeholders in a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency.
Currently. It’s gone back and forth a few times, with each 'ban" preceding large purchases by the Chinese government of cryptocurrencies.
But even if it is illegal in China, they can hold the money offshore and spend it as easily as anybody else.
Also, if you are politically connected or pay the government enough money and your behavior doesn’t negatively affect the CCP, then things aren’t actionably illegal in China.
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