<story><title>El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/el-salvador-adopts-bitcoin-official-currency-first-country-rcna1910</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hsavit1</author><text>what an awful waste of energy. Each bitcoin transaction uses the energy equivalent the entire lifespan of a tree. Effectively, each bitcoin transaction is cutting down of tree... in this case, for a hamburger</text></item><item><author>vavooom</author><text>Found this interesting deck[1] on El Salvador&amp;#x27;s digital climate while looking for smart phone adoption statistics. It would appear that there are more than enough smart devices to allow for such a transition successfully. Already on Twitter we&amp;#x27;re seeing crypto-punks there using Bitcoin to pay for their McDonalds, paying something like 0.000002 Bitcoin. I can&amp;#x27;t help but wonder what the outcome +1 year &amp;#x2F; + 5 years will be.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;datareportal.com&amp;#x2F;reports&amp;#x2F;digital-2021-el-salvador&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;datareportal.com&amp;#x2F;reports&amp;#x2F;digital-2021-el-salvador&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>option_greek</author><text>They are using lightning wallets. So no on chain settling. No (extra) trees were harmed for hamburgers (though obviously opening and closing of channels and initial mining it self is energy intensive).</text></comment>
<story><title>El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as official currency, first country to do so</title><url>https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/el-salvador-adopts-bitcoin-official-currency-first-country-rcna1910</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hsavit1</author><text>what an awful waste of energy. Each bitcoin transaction uses the energy equivalent the entire lifespan of a tree. Effectively, each bitcoin transaction is cutting down of tree... in this case, for a hamburger</text></item><item><author>vavooom</author><text>Found this interesting deck[1] on El Salvador&amp;#x27;s digital climate while looking for smart phone adoption statistics. It would appear that there are more than enough smart devices to allow for such a transition successfully. Already on Twitter we&amp;#x27;re seeing crypto-punks there using Bitcoin to pay for their McDonalds, paying something like 0.000002 Bitcoin. I can&amp;#x27;t help but wonder what the outcome +1 year &amp;#x2F; + 5 years will be.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;datareportal.com&amp;#x2F;reports&amp;#x2F;digital-2021-el-salvador&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;datareportal.com&amp;#x2F;reports&amp;#x2F;digital-2021-el-salvador&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drdeca</author><text>How do you reach that number? (CO2&amp;#x2F;block) &amp;#x2F; (transactions&amp;#x2F;block)?&lt;p&gt;I imagine these transactions are being done over the lightning network or something like that(I could be wrong on this though), in which case that calculation wouldn’t give the right answer.&lt;p&gt;In addition, I think I would evaluate the CO2 costs per transaction based on the contributions to the mining reward (because this is the part of transaction which has an influence on how much power people use to mine), which I think for bitcoin is still relatively small compared to the block reward part?
Well, there’s also the influence on the price that making transactions has.</text></comment>