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techjamie 9 hours ago

Basing off Yahoo historical price data, Bitcoin prices first started being tracked in late 2014. So my guess would be the increase from then to 2022 could have largely been attributed to crypto mining.

somenameforme 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The energy impact of crypto is rather exaggerated. Most estimates on this front are aiming to demonstrate as a high value as possible, and so should be taken as higher upper bound, and yet even that upper bound is 'only' around 200TWh a year. Annual energy consumption is in the 24,000TWh range with growth averaging around 2% or so per year.

So if you looked at a graph of energy consumption, you wouldn't even notice crypto. In fact even LLM stuff will just look like a blip unless it scales up substantially more than its currently trending. We use vastly more more energy than most appreciate. And this is only electrical energy consumption. All energy consumption is something like 185,000 TWh. [1]

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

ToValueFunfetti 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It looks like the number of internet users ~doubled in that time as well: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?end=2022...