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Cake day: Jul 24, 2023

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Exactly, if we do a back of the napkin calculation:

Bitcoin

Users

There are 200 million bitcoin wallets, let’s be generous and say those are all owned by unique individuals.

Total energy consumption

Bitcoin used about 114 TWh in 2021[1]

Bitcoin currently uses about 150 TWh annually

Energy consumption per user

150 TWh / year 
————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
200 million users

Banking system

Users

There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.

Total energy consumption

The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]

If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.

Energy consumption per user

348 TWh / year 
————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
4.000 million users

With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.

There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.

1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.


That seems more sensible.

But they still can track some of the things you do (same with any untrusted wifi network):

  • all data of http traffic (i.e. non-https)
  • ip addresses you connect to
  • hostnames you connect to (if SNI is not working correctly)

The best thing is to use a different device, period.

Since the company is lord and master over the device, in theory, they can see anything you’re doing.
Maybe not decrypting wireguard traffic in practice, but still see that you’re doing non-official things on the device that are probably not allowed. They might think you’re a whistleblower or a corporate spy or something.

I have no idea where you work, but if they install a CA they’re probably have some kind of monitoring to see what programs are installed/running.

If the company CA is all you’re worried about, running a browser that uses its own CA list should be enough.