"Mostly by lights that aren't shielded." Overall, the lighting is still necessary, it's just not as efficient as it could be. By that standard, over 99% of Bitcoin mining is waste because because most of the power goes into solving artificial difficulty.
The only people who genuinely care about PoW are miners and a handful of enthusiasts. I'll generously estimate that 1 million people fall into this category. So you have a million people using .5% of the world's electricity just for one of their interests. Contrast that with the billions of people who enjoy videogames or outdoor lighting.
> Overall, the lighting is still necessary, it's just not as efficient as it could be
Yes, and the completely fixable loss in efficiency has a significantly greater impact on our consumption than the entirety of cryptocurrency yet I have yet to see someone complaining about the perils of unshielded lighting.
> By that standard, over 99% of Bitcoin mining is waste because because most of the power goes into solving artificial difficulty.
This is circular reasoning. The difficulty adjustment is part of the protocol, and the purpose of the protocol is to secure the network from attacks. You might think that’s useless, I don’t.
The only people who genuinely care about PoW are miners and a handful of enthusiasts. I'll generously estimate that 1 million people fall into this category. So you have a million people using .5% of the world's electricity just for one of their interests. Contrast that with the billions of people who enjoy videogames or outdoor lighting.