The unsustainable use of digital technologies

Hi,

it is a lot in the news and i found it to be an interesting topic worth discussing too. More and more people think about the environment. I stumbled upon this article

And would like to share it with the community leaving this quote from the paper:

Digital technologies now emit 4% of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), that is to say more than civil aviation. This share could double from now to 2025 to reach 8% of all GHG emissions, i.e. the current share of car emissions. Reducing the threat of climate change requires drastically reducing global greenhouse gas emissions in the next few years; however, the energy consumption required for digital technologies is increasing by 9% a year.

And also this is a nice article

“When will the energy used for PoW stop growing? Precisely when enough energy producers have started doing PoW directly that the marginal return from burning a kWh of energy through PoW = the marginal return from selling that kWh to the grid — when the “premium” on PoW is reduced to zero. I call this equilibrium the “Nakamoto point.” I suspect PoW will use between 1–10% of the world’s energy when this equilibrium is reached.” — Dhruv Bansal

Happy discussing

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Also a nice table around mining on Bitcoin

Quote from the article above:

Bitcoin’s PoW is the buyer of last resort for all electricity, creating a floor that incentivizes the building of new energy producing plants around disparate energy sources that would have otherwise been left untapped.