In the case of BTC at least, they had people in areas with industrial hydro contracts going online to mine in old factories and stuff. That's mass-scale energy consumption. Not everyone was overly-pleased with that.
Yeah we do burn a lot of energy on frivolous stuff like . . . movies or video games. Also, nobody has said how much power it takes to run existing currency exchange technology, like SWIFT or trucking around paper currency.
Exactly. And if you look at my comments, it's not saying people shouldn't be allowed to mine, but rather that it's a shame that SO very much compute power is going largely to junk math.
It's not even close to a 1:1 for gaming either. Mining GPU rig setups can vary from one to dozens for a home user, to hundreds of thousands with the larger outfits, running 100% 24/7/365.
I have an 8086k/1080ti, and 2700x/Vega56 pair of rigs. I game if I'm lucky 1-2hrs a week, but more often 1-2hrs a month.
Compare that to 168hrs/week, or 670+hrs/month for mining.
Now I do believe the values in blockchain will more effectively harness this type of resource in the future. At least that's my sincere hope.
One can be a fan of crypto and mining while still admitting it's currently pretty wasteful on the energy side of things, and without the need for strawmanning or false equivalency.
Wired