I can already imagine some people reading this and thinking what one dude said in a comment discussing this very topic. Before that tho, if you want to see more about the energy usage and where I got this from click here.
It's storing endless useless videos and if you add other endless useless video platforms like TikTok and Snapchat it's probably 700% the energy usage
And on one part I have to agree, a lot of youtube videos might be classified as useless depending on whos looking at it. Entertainment, which is 90% of what youtube is, is for some people useless cause it gives no knowledge or any other particular useful thing besides taking 5-60 minutes of your time that you wanted to waste. And in the case of Tiktok the % is even larger since 99% of that is people dancing and trying to be funny, that 1% might actually be wholesome people talking about smn educational. Snapchat is entirely useless tho, like it has no educational value so... that part is correct.
On the other hard... it's a controversial opinion that I don't actually agree on (the Youtube part at least). I can see why others might think so but in my eyes comparing Bitcoin and Youtube in particular is like comparing black and white... The first thing is, currently, BTC is nowhere near the number of use cases it needs to be to actually be comparable to Youtube. There aren't enough people actively using BTC besides trading and investing in it, while Youtube has billions of people watching content on their platform every - single - day, for free. And as one person mentioned
The fact that it uses only 250% of BTCs energy is astonishing
The second thing would be the fact that there is a lot of educational material on Youtube as well as entertainment and no one can call entertainment useless since if someone uses a platform as much as people use Youtube it obviously has some use to them. And I doubt there is a person in this world that doesn't use any type of entertainment at all... So the videos being useless is also a stupid thing to say.
This comparison also has one mayor flaw... It counts the energy that people use when they visit Youtube, so like every person ever to have visited youtube is counted towards this rather than just the Youtube servers and stuff like that... The fact that people chose to click those videos is their use of energy, if we counted that for every sit we can all say "we should stop using so much energy" and I think we all know how stupid that sounds. Not because we should use that energy but rather the fact that that energy would be used either way just depends where... (I might be in the wrong here tho feel free to disagree)
In a sense the only thing I get from this is yes, Youtube could also lessen their impact in some ways and the article I linked to talks about their plans to do exactly that so I'm glad that that is at least happening.
And here is a bit of comedy at the end. Thanks for reading!
