1 Bitcoin transaction = 645kg of CO2

I think it’s interesting that this very much depends on the coin. This article compares Bitcoin to Monero, and here are the figures (per transaction per year):

• Bitcoin - ~95 TWh per year
• Monero - ~1.5 TWh per year

So Monero is ~63x more efficient than Bitcoin at transactions, and that’s with all the overhead Monero bakes in to its transactions to maintain privacy (each transaction generates a bunch of fake transactions to mislead snoops, and it’s notoriously ASIC/GPU inefficient).

I’m guessing the same is true for different AI models, some models will be a lot more wasteful than others in their training and queries.

I agree, the opposition to LLMs is misplaced. There are legitimate reasons to dislike it, and there are certainly policy changes we should make, but attacking it for energy use in the weakest way to oppose it. If LLMs ran on 100% green energy, would you still oppose them? Probably, so figure out why you oppose it and attack LLMs over that, and perhaps policy can alleviate the worst of those concerns.