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Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 6 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[-] fwygon@beehaw.org 13 points 6 months ago

Not only is the science underlying all these findings completely non-existent, they only "guesstimate" what the water usage of what every thing that uses water is; then blindly divide that by the transaction volume per time period.

Not only is that method highly flawed; it's incorrect. Computers do more than mine crypto; and 1 transaction typically costs not even 1 tenth of a percent of most miners' overall computer resources. This is due to the fact that many miners are utilizing either a GPU or FPGA style device to power optimize and optimize the mathematics necessary to secure a transaction.

[-] JWBananas@startrek.website 7 points 6 months ago

That might have been true a decade ago. But GPUs and FPGAs have long been obsolete for mining Bitcoin.

Mining is happening on custom silicon in large-scale operations. They specifically observed several of those large-scale operations in multiple nations and extrapolated out. I don't see how that methodology is flawed.