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It uses orders of magnitude more energy than the "legacy" financial institutions it competes with, to process a fraction of the transactions, and has tenuous practical benefits unless you're a ransomware gang or an early mover getting rich from the hype.


In an absolute sense it uses much less energy. If you divide that by the current rate limit of transactions, it looks bad comparatively in that sense, on a per-transaction basis. But the energy usage of Bitcoin isn't related to the transaction rate, and the rate could be increased without affecting the energy consumption at all. There just hasn't been enough demand for that increase.




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