I find the article a bit alarmist and pedantic. I don't think it would convince anyone outside our filter bubble, and might even backfire.
Most BBC readers wouldn't understand the distinction between transaction and payment. Using FOIA seems complete overkill.
I don't know why Forbes took it down, that's bad journalistic practice: they can put a notice at the top if they feel there's a serious issue with it. I very much doubt there's anything to it, e.g. I don't think the BBC threatened to sue them. But who knows.
That said, De Vries articles do need debunking, but that should focus on the bigger picture. E.g
1. the fact that it's utterly ridiculous to use water consumption as a metric without any consideration of the local context. Is the miner draining an aquifer that millions of people depend on for drinking water? Or using a giant river?
2. the fact that both "per transaction" and "per payment" are dubious metrics when applied to mining. The energy and water are used to secure the network, that includes but also value at rest.
The water use per transaction can be reduced to a single molecule by a bunch of lightning nodes running on AWS making trillions of transactions in a circle.
provoost / Sjors Provoost
npub1s6…dwk4c
2024-09-05 12:12:24
in reply to nevent1q…g9em
Author Public Key
npub1s6z7hmmx2vud66f3utxd70qem8cwtggx0jgc7gh8pqwz2k8cltuqrdwk4cPublished at
2024-09-05 12:12:24Event JSON
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