You care about 1 in 1000 ? Did you know that 660 out of 1000 watts of primary energy used to create electricity are wasted by the time the electricity arrives at the customer meter? (source: https://www.enerdynamics.com/Energy-Currents_Blog/How-Much-P... )

Logically, you should be 660 times more "horrified" by this waste than by cryto mining, and yet you are not. In fact most likely until today you were not even aware of such waste. This is what bothers me the most about these discussions. People have priorities in the wrong places. You want to show you care about waste? Then start caring about the most important problems instead of being laser-focusing on 0.1%.

Your 66% number includes generation losses. You're literally arguing that we should be horrified that solar panels don't produce 1 watt of electricity for every watt of light which hits them.

Would it be great if solar panels and wind turbines and nuclear reactors converted 100% of the heat/light/wind energy into useful electricity? Sure. But that's also not something we have the technology to achieve, and likely never will. People are constantly researching ways to improve power plants, but they will never reach 100% efficiency.

What we _do_ have the technology to achieve, however, is turning off things which use a ton of energy but provide no value. Saving 1‰ of earth's global electricity consumption just by turning off a useless gambling toy is a huge win, and the fact that it was allowed to use 1‰ of our global energy use in the first place is horrifying.

0.1%, but I do agree.

1‰ is 0.1%: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mille

The transmission losses are something inherent in the system that can’t be avoided, and if someone could solve that problem they’d help a great deal with greenhouse emissions and I’d certainly applaud that.

But this 1 in 1000 watts going to ethereum mining is entirely useless, contributing nothing to society except a Ponzi scheme that, like most Silicon Valley bullshit, only exists because regulations haven’t caught up yet. I don’t care that 1 in 1000 watts is a small number. The wattage going to Finland actually gives tens of millions of people electricity to live their lives. Crypto mining is just tech bros playing with funny money, robbing people of real money in the process.

«are something inherent in the system that can’t be avoided»

Firstly they aren't inherent. Losses can be minimized. But you don't seem to care, even though losses account for orders of magnitude more energy waste than mining. Your position is illogical.

Secondly, this isn't only about transmission losses. The link explains, for example, that some of this waste comes from incandescent light bulbs that waste 90% of electricity as heat. Again, logically you should be "horrified" by this, but you aren't because media doesn't write click-baity articles about incandescent light bulbs "boiling oceans".

> Firstly they aren't inherent. Losses can be minimized

“Can be minimized” and “Inherent” are not antonyms. It can be both. And yes, I care.

> some of this waste comes from incandescent light bulbs that waste 90% of electricity as heat. Again, logically you should be "horrified" by this

I am. Every reasonable human being would look at incandescent light bulbs and say “yes, those are wasteful”. Because a reasonable alternative exists, and if you’re still burning incandescent light bulbs, you’re being wasteful.

PoW cryptocurrency however, is a system that is designed to be wasteful, and if the crypto bros had their way, we’d do all transactions this way. When an obvious alternative exists: Don’t fucking use cryptocurrency. Crypto solves zero problems, has zero benefits, and wastes electricity. The faster we abandon it, the better for literally everyone.