Monero is mining-resistant, which means mining farms are going to be unprofitable. The people mining Monero are regular enthusiasts, so that should mean there’s less wasted energy from a ton of people competing over the same number of coins. Oh, and Monero has no maximum block-size, which keeps transaction costs low (which means even less competition over mining).
I don’t know of a good way to estimate Monero electricity usage, but I’m guessing it’s way less than Bitcoin has per transaction, or at least it would be if they had a similar number of transactions. Monero is a lot more complex currency (so one transaction will actually spawn a bunch of “fake” transactions), but that mining-resistance is doing some work.
Here’s Monero’s webpage, which has some discussion on energy usage, which I think I’ve summarized well above.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Fine, go after the industries that are doing more, such as industrial processing for making glass and other things that require high temperatures, the global transportation industry, etc.
cygnus@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Why would I “go after” an industry producing something useful, rather than grifters powering GPUs to do absolutely nothing of value? We can get to the glass industry once we’ve culled the useless garbage first.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Monero is CPU based. And actually we are providing something of value in that we are providing a private currency not controlled by any government where no government can tell you you can or cannot use it because they have no power to stop you from doing so. Now, whether you believe that is something we need in this world or not is a different value set.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I mean they can kick down your door and seize or hack your PC. That threat is enough to stop most people, making the currency pretty useless in countries that have cracked down on it.