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Is Bitcoin Mining a Real-World Environmental Problem?
First time accepted submitter HeadOffice writes "Mark Gimein points out that Bitcoing mining uses a lot of power, enough that it is a real world problem: 'About 982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact. That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 US homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider. If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically. If that makes you think of the vast efforts devoted to the mining of precious metals in the centuries of gold- and silver-based economies, it should. One of the strangest aspects of the Bitcoin frenzy is that the Bitcoin economy replicates some of the most archaic features of the gold standard. Real-world mining of precious metals for currency was a resource-hungry and value-destroying process. Bitcoin mining is too.' However, not everyone is convinced that virtual mining is as bad for the environment as the real thing."
"About 982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact"
982 MWh/day / 24 = ~41 megawatts
Come on reporters, convert brain-dead units into normal units.
On where the power is coming from. Wind Powered bittcoin mining wouldn't be so bad right?
The Blade Itself
982 MWH/day costs approximately $100,000 per day. Is the marginal utility of mining bitcoins worth more than $100,000 per day to the world economy? If so, carry on. If not, everybody please stop.
Hard to say how bitcoin compares to mining gold and silver when you don't even know how much bitcoin is worth. If bitcoin gains enough value, they might be better for the environment than printed paper money.
How much is bitcoin worth? There was an interview recently with some 'bitcoin millionaires', people who had a million dollars worth of bitcoin. That of course raises the question: if they sold their bitcoin, would there be enough buyers to actually get them a million dollars? Or would such a large sale cause the market to collapse?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's "41 megawatts" for those of you who prefer it in non-retarded units. In case you were wondering, that's 0.003% of the US's electrical generation capacity. Yeah, that's a real environmental disaster, there. It's not a problem, it's a rounding error.
Bitcoin mining does not replace traditional mining. So, the fact that bitcoin mining has a smaller impact on the environment is irrelevant. It still counts as added impact.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
ASIC miners are the near future of bitcoin mining and they have drastically reduced power requirements for drastically higher Gh/s mining rates.
So we take a controlled monetary system and try to create a better monetary system and then spend effort analyzing how it fails?
.. you're kidding yourself. Quit wasting time analyzing why bitcoin isn't going to get anywhere and just accept it.
The problem with the existing monetary system isn't that it's controlled by a small group of people, it's that those people are corrupt and are manipulating the system. Bitcoin has the same problem, it's just obscured because the people 'mining' the system aren't a central group, they're a distributed group.
This is crowd sourced corruption, nothing more. If you didn't expect there to be costs related to tens of thousands of people running resource intensive software to game a system designed to protect people from responsibility
If you're able to game the monetary system, then it's lost it's value.
Digital mining has one massive advantage over real-world mining - Moore's Law. In 5 years when FPGAs and GPUs are churning out 2-3x the current bitcoin rate at far less power requirements per bitcoin less power will be required to do the same work.
Continuing my tradition of using Hydro-Québec's installed capacity as a unit of measurement, this "environmental problem" is only consuming 0.0011 Hydro-Québecs.
"enough to power roughly 31,000 US homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider."
Holy cow the LHC uses a ton of electricity! What a waste!
One thing I don't really understand is this:
> The number of bitcoins in existence will never exceed 21 million.
So once 21 million is hit...no more power is needed, because you can't generate more?
When I read that, I thought 21 million is not a lot of coins for the whole world to use. It seems screwy to me. You run into the issue that you run into with gold, if that is the case. You can't buy a loaf of bread with gold because it is worth so much.
> While the number of bitcoins in existence will never exceed 21 million, the money supply of bitcoins can exceed 21 million due to Fractional-reserve Banking.
I've tried and tried to wrap my head around this, but it makes no sense to me. How can you have fractional-reserve banking if the coins have to match a digital signature? Fractional-reserve banking creates money out of thin air. How can you create bitcoins out of thin air? And if they are just used as backing for a fiat currency, who is to say that someone kept enough bitcoins in stock to cover the fiat money?
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
You'll need to look at the economic value of mining, and also compare the numbers to the cost of the infrastructure those of current currency/payment systems. I have no substantial information on both, but let's not pretend cash and credit cards are cheap to maintain...
45% of all toxics released by all USA industry come from hard rock metal mining. 14 of the 15 largest Superfund Sites are hard rock mines. Mining of tanatalum for electronics (coltan) is responsible for the disappearance of half of the lowland gorillas. It kind of bothers me when "environmentalists" have zero depth perception, no ability at all to prioritize risks.
Gently reply
And how much energy does it take to make, say, minted currencies? Surely many orders of magnitude more...
The cost to mint a penny is 0.02 USD. The cost to mint a nickel is 0.10 USD. The total loss in value from printing those pennies and nickels in 2012 was a whopping 109 million USD. That's about 298,000 USD per day that it costs the US Treasury in losses to issue pennies and nickels into the market.
Is bitcoin economical from a cost perspective? In comparison to pennies and nickels obviously yes.
If washing your hands takes 2 liters of water, isn't that an environmental problem if it could be done using just 1/10th that amount?
Perhaps, but is that a problem? If that amount of water costs $100: probably. If that amount of water costs $0.01: probably not.
I know so-called externalities can blur the picture, but in general the cost of things reflects how much effort was needed to produce them. So if Bitcoin mining is profitable, that probably means a produced Bitcoin is worth more than the effort it took to produce the required energy. No doubt Bitcoin market developments, and efficiency improvements (FPGA / ASICs) will change the actual numbers here.
Problem much, why? There are so many human activities that require energy, and (often) don't produce results that would be considered useful or valueable. So if you spend (for example) $10 worth of energy to find (is that the correct description?) $100 worth of Bitcoins, you could have spent that energy worse.
Btw: article would do good to report how many/what worth of Bitcoins were mined using the stated amount of energy.
With the advent of specially design ASICs to perform bitcoin mining, the new miners will mine 100 fold better than conventional GPU and FPGA methods currently used. The new ASICs use a fractional amount of power compared to current mining. Once the new ASICs are on the network, they will push the GPUs and FPGA miners off the network because the proportion of mining work being done will be low enough to make it not worth mining with these devices. Multiple manufacturers such as Butterfly labs and Avalon are scheduled to ship in a couple months.
But as more Bitcoin fans adopt mining ASICs, the Bitcoin network will increase the difficulty toward the point where the power needed to run all the ASICs is close to the power needed to run all the current GPU miners.
I don't think many critics actually understand the dual purpose of mining. It's not only to govern the supply of new money, but also to protect the block chain. Many attacks require that the attacker control more computational power than 50% of the network, which is a lot of hardware.
Eventually mining slows down and transaction fees become the dominant reward for mining new blocks. So transaction fees will essentially be the "security cost" for protecting the network against a centralized attack. It's anyone's guess where they'll eventually stabilize.
So once 21 million is hit...no more power is needed, because you can't generate more?
The 21 million BTC figure is asymptotic. The reward for a successful hash halves every so often as the total minted value approaches 21 million. But each Bitcoin transaction can include a voluntary "transaction fee", a tip paid to the miner who includes the transaction in the next block. After that point, miners will seek tips rather than newly minted bitcoins.
although there are 21 million bitcoins there is an endless fractal 0.00000001 of a bitcoin
1e-8 BTC is nicknamed a "satoshi" after the pseudonym of Bitcoin's creator. Why not call it an "ash" outside Japan? It'd make sense on two levels: an "ash" is a very small particle, and Ash is the name for the Pokemon character Satoshi outside Japan.
It's so it's much harder for those that join in the pyramid late and to give the early adopters a deliberately designed very major advantage so long as the pyramid grows.
Shut down antiquated banks.
I'm sure we can save a fair wack of power by pissing them off.
" If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically"
No, because there is only a set limit to the number of bitcoins that can ever exist and there is a point where the marginal mined coin will be worth less than the price of mining it.
Can we please just try to avoid the most blatant, egregious errors of fact in submissions here?
What does the Winklevii having USD11M in bitcoins say?
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/as-big-investors-emerge-bitcoin-gets-ready-for-its-close-up/
There's several trillion with a T dollars flowing through electronic systems every hour all over the world. I suspect there's a carrying cost of 'making' that. Are these tools suggesting we end all electronic trading systems and revert to what? Pebbles? Ruuuuhhhhhhhtards.
With the advent of specially design ASICs to perform bitcoin mining, the new miners will mine 100 fold better
You appear to make the same mistake as Anonymous Coward and Bananatree3. Please read replies to their comments.
It's not like the existing currencies don't take any power to produce, maintain, transaction, ect... Just saying that mining costs power is just a means of cutting down the idea of digital mining. The same could be said about SETI@Home and a hundred other distributed computing projects.
It would be interesting to see what it would take to run a bitcoin mining server farm with solar power.
Of course, even if you did there would be stories like this about how much power could be used for other purposes. Cue the helpless children and scandalized women praying for someone to think of them.
Slashdot has become People Magazine.
Seastead this.
I wonder how much power the millions of Visa and Mastercard point of sale card swipers consume in comparison?
Anyone have access to one they can plug into a Kill-A-Watt for a few minutes?
Cheers!
That 982 MWh or 41 MW sounds impressive or 31000 homes sounds impressive until you realize that 5 - 7 million homes are built in the US alone every year.
I'm all for finding more efficient ways to do things but we can likely realize much greater benefit from the traditional financial institutions cleaninp up their act than from halting the wasteful mining of bitcoins.
If it'll make you happy, perhaps Bitcoin mining can be done only when power is cheapest.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
So you are saying this is a pyramid scheme?
It's the 21 million Bitcoin Pyramid. Can "Tuning Up Again" be the theme song of Bitcoin? Pretty please?
there is a point where the marginal mined coin will be worth less than the price of mining it.
After newly minted coins stop being the primary reward for mining, transaction fees will. Miners gonna mine, be it in Minecraft or Bitcoin.
A fucking load of crap and an insult that Slashdot would actually assist in spreading this SCAM. The thing that pisses me off most, is how much time -- not money -- people will waste trying to understand this crap because a REAL decentralized currency is not such bad idea. The three things that are essential in any currency system are : authenticity(is it real?), accountability(how much?) and trust( what's its value). None of these items entail a currency based on any type of limited resource. This is in fact money's single point of failure because it means that it can be regulated by the people who have their hand on the tap. Limitation is precisely what a decentralized, independent currency should be moving AWAY from. It really is a good thing the arse holes who wrote that paper used a pseudonym, but it's no wonder why they did. Greedy shit bags.
If ever miner was using the best equipment (Butterfly labs ASIC currently), thats about 1 watt per Gh (giga-hash). Current total network hash rate is about 6500 Gh, so thats 65k watts.
982 MWh/day / 24 = ~41 megawatts
65k/41mw=0.00158536585
So, according to TFA, people are mining at about 0.16% efficiency compared to the good ASICs, on average. Most of those miners must be loosing money, or maybe the article is using old power consumption numbers, and applying them to the new vastly increased ASIC powered hash rates.
That said, the idea that bitcoin uses proof of work, and thus necessitates doing lots of extra work is correct. This ultimately gives bitcoin a competitive disadvantage against when it comes to keeping transaction fees lower, since the network wastes work. Now, if visa and paypal beat bitcoin for lower transaction fees, you know what to blame, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Perhaps some web of trust based version that pays well performing nodes could replace mining, though that would be a different currency, not bitcoin. This would pay the people running the network directly, not some other guys (the miners). It might be possible, but it would be hard. Any volunteers?
I saw this and went 'LOL'. ... /. seriously needs to let the bitcoin drama drop. It goes up, it goes down, it'll never be a real currency. LET IT GO.
According to Wikipedia, if that power was generated by coal alone, that would produce nearly 1000kg of CO2 A DAY. that's not exactly an environmentally friendly number, but then the CO2 emmisions from all the complete unconstructive computer games many of us play must be a hell of a lot more in comparison....
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
IMO, that's arguably the BEST part of the whole bitcoin thing! It's a working experiment in creating a new, world-wide currency free of any central banking controls.
Right now, we're seeing ALL of the quirks and roadblocks one could imagine, ranging from security hacks and issues to questions about when a currency truly becomes a currency versus an investment (like a stock purchase). For that matter, there are still some who propose the suggestion that the entire thing could even be a gigantic scam. (After all, nobody seems to know who really created the whole thing. It's a complex enough system that, I suppose, it's at least theoretically possible that there's a component of all of it we don't know about yet; some way for its creator to manipulate the currency flow in a way to benefit him financially when he decides the time is right to pull the trigger on it.)
Complaints about the environmental impact of CPU/GPIU time used to keep it going are very premature, IMO, since it's probably a great investment in running the experiment, so far. By the time bitcoin goes completely mainstream as a primary source of currency (if it even does?), we'll be generations ahead in computer power, as always happens with time. Perhaps as bitcoin demand rises, the whole mathematical model would even be adjusted to make mining new coins a little less processor intensive, to prevent massive deflation.
There is a lot of unused energy off-peak.
So, instead of shutting down generators, heating water, or pumping water uphill, energy companies could run on constant load and mine bitcoins during off-peak hours. With the newly acquired bitcoins they could then buy farmland to expand on fracking.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my amateur knowledge of Bitcoin, doesn't mining both find coins in new blocks, as well as verifying transactions in exchange for a portion of the fee set aside for such? ie. when a transaction is performed, a small amount (under 1%) is typically marked as compensation for those who verify the transaction, which is needed as otherwise no-one would waste power on verifying transactions.
According to that understanding, the mining process makes sense, as it's providing an incentive for early adopters to adopt. It will gradually taper off to zero, at which point all miners are paid by the transaction fees, which is the ultimate goal of the system.
And honestly, computers verifying Bitcoin transactions has to be a lot more eco-friendly than the number of people needed to watch over credit and debit card transactions.
for the data centers that process credit cards or the petroleum needed to make the plastic cards and mail them to people? This is just more anti-bitcoin propaganda/FUD being spread because the big boys started to get worried when bitcoin broke $1 billion market cap. They run the price up into a bubble using media hype hoping the crash would be fatal. It wasn't. Bitcoin isn't going anywhere but the attacks against it and FUD are just going to increase as it starts to effect the staus quo.
I've told this to several of my friends, that mining Bitcoins is a mechanism to convert carbon into currency. Where I live, that life cycle looks like coal -> electricity -> Bitcoin. Of course you have to pay for that electricity, which pretty much guarantees that while you're melting the polar caps due to your mining, you're also loosing money at the same time.
Of course, you're probably not paying for the electricity. Your parents, or employer, or some other unwitting person probably is. Which means your shitting on the environment and stealing at the same time. Way to go!
If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically.
It doesn't work that way.
Bitcoin mining is set up to be a diminishing-returns thing, as the maximum number of Bitcoins, 21 million, is approached. Over half of those have already been generated. The "difficulty level" is already high enough that "mining" with an ordinary CPU is futile, mining with GPUs is marginal (currently, it seems to pay for the power used but not new hardware), mining with custom FPGAs is still profitable, and mining with custom ASICs is just becoming available. This last threatens to make everything else unprofitable.
There's a fixed number of Bitcoins generated per unit time, and the system increases the "difficulty" to adjust that rate. The more computational effort put into mining, the less cost-effective it becomes. This is completely independent of the number of users.
I would say it's just finally begun rebalancing to a sane pricing range.
Price stability is important to it's long term feasibility, so the bubble was really a bad idea.
Reminds me of the movie of the musical 'Paint Your Wagon.'
Seems these day our hapless gold-diggers will tunnel the town yet again on their quest for 'derivatives'.
"Got-a dream boy, Got-a song
Paint your wa-gon, and come along
How will I get there, I don't know
What will I find there, I'm not certain
All I know is I am on my way."
Yeah :D
Outdated bullshit. The new ASIC mining chips run a 2 watts and are 12x faster than my 220W graphics card. This is a non-issue.
That would be where the growth curve would resemble a hockey stick.
It's hard to believe how many people don't understand there's an equivalence between value and environmental impact. I don't care what you're doing, or making or conserving or proving, if it has value, it eventually breaksdown into something that gets spent in one way or another. Value = consumerism = environmental impact. This applies to banking, baking, art, green energy, entertainment, oil, war, you name it. Why would a virtual currency be any different?
Maybe this whole Bit-Mining thing is an elaborate and effort by environmentalists to get us techies to ramp down on our big irons and blinken-lights.
Everyone's in on it.
- GreenPeace.
- Al Gore.
- That hipster evironmentalist chick at the corner of the road trying to elist me into her crusades...
Unlike most energy consuming systems, it will level off once it starts to reach it's goal. Also, since it uses processing power as an explicit way of generating currency, this can't be unexpected. Of course, 21 million seems a bit short if it actually starts getting adopted as a regular currency, so who knows what will happen. The main problem with an unregulated currency is that there is no way to adjust it if usage changes. There have been times when a non-produced currency's usage has surpassed a produced one, because the non-produced one does not suffer from inflation.
The value of a Bitcoin plummeted more than $160 yesterday after hitting a new high of $266. It continued to fall on other exchanges Thursday, trading below $100 in many.
PPCoin addresses this problem by using proof-of-stake rather than Bitcoin proof-of-work. It also reduces the risk of a 51% attack on the network.
For those interested:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake
When people, especially young people, consider mining bitcoins as a business, they aren't properly considering all of the costs.
Like a real physical business, people that enter this business must take into consideration all of the costs of operation, including the electricity costs.
Kids (such as mine) decide to go into the bitcoin business and increase their parent's power bill without having to pay it. Our power bill has gone up 30% since our kids decided to enter the fray, but I really don't want to dissuade their venture into their own business.
That being said, the costs should be considered by anyone wanting to get into this field of endeavor.
On the other hand, if your house uses electric heaters, you could mine Bitcoins in the winter with no additional waste of energy. You might as well get some computation out of your electricity before it turns into heat.
We're right on the cusp of a paradigm shift in mining technology where GPU mining is about to be phased out and power efficient ASIC miners are about to ship (and in some cases already shipping). Not to mention the short lived glory of the FPGA miner. This post seems like slander.
Not to mention the total damage to the environment caused by real mining is lightyears beyond the damage caused by cryptocoin mining. I'm just as much to blame for environmental damage as a bitcoin miner for living in a house with electric heating/cooling and energy inefficient appliances.
You can't mine gold using renewable energy. Regardless of what you do; most of the time you're still pouring a shitload of acid into the ground.
Granted, most people don't mine Bitcoin using renewable energy either, but that's not an inherent property of the process.
Dear Sir,
I humbly invite you to study the definition of the Pyramid Scheme in Wikipedia, @ the following link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
I reckoned it ain't the best description of the Pyramid Scheme but I do hope that you would gain an understanding of the difference between how Bitcoin works and that of the Pyramid Scheme
Thank you !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
anyway. One person in Quebec where electricity is cheap and used to heat houses in the winter pointed out that his GPU bitcoin miner just means that he gets a couple hundred $ back from heating his home in the winter.
`That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 US homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider.' Hmmm, so we are worried about bitcoins which provide fun and money to many, while ignoring something that wastes much more money on just one teeny weeny little particle...
Eventually the mining reward is due to be phased out, so your only reward from processing block will be the transaction fees...
Coupled with that, is the creation of new custom hardware designed specifically to process bitcoin, this custom hardware uses orders of magnitude less power than generic GPUs.
And also consider for a moment how much power the existing banking industry consumes, each bank operates hundreds if not thousands of servers not to mention all the high street branches and atms which consume power too.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically."
Why?
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad!
If you think Unit 8200 and NSA has not already gutted Bitcoin and manipulating its value for the greater good of the bankers, then I have a draw-bridge to sell you, complete with a moat and castle...
And still bitcoins add more real value than all the derivate automatic traders...
How much electricity do the Stock Exchange Robots use btw?
Last time I checked they were running FPGAs and other stuff...
Now, I'm not saying Bitcoin won't become an energy problem in the future, but I think we might want to look at high-frequency trading first.
The dozens of enormous data centers that are used for this probably consume a LOT more energy than Bitcoin mining does at the moment.
It doesn't convert because it's describing power consumption over time (MW.h) and not used capacity (MW). Dividing by time is pointless since that's making the faulty assumption of continuous 24 hour use. It only looks weird because it's expressed as over a day instead of over a quarter of a year or other time period where people see their bills listing the number of kilowatt hours of power consumption. It seems like there are dozens here that misunderstood, tried to oversimplify, and some here even called the reporter an idiot for reporting things correctly.
It is isn't a pyramid scheme, it is just ruined by speculators. And the worst kind of speculators, the dumb kind that buys gold from vending machines because prices are at record heights.
If you know ANYTHING at all about successful speculation, you know that you buy LOW and sell HIGH. The dumb speculators are however slow as well as dumb and only dive on say speculating in gold when prices are already high. Buy Apple stock 10 years ago. Smart. Buying Apple stock right now. Dumb.
Bitcoin is seen as having a high value right now, like say comic books had a while ago and dumb people think that this is then worth investing in with the logic that if you buy high, you can sell at even HIGHER! And really cleanup!
It doesn't tend to work that way. Instead, you can buy high because smarter speculators are SELLING high and they are selling because they don't think it is going to go any higher. Bitcoin as a anonymous paypal alternative has some merrit. As an investment, not so much. As a currency, none whatsoever. It would be like creating a currency out of comic books or bottle caps.
Fallout fans may be familiar with that idea, it is silly but do you fully understand HOW silly it is? Bottle caps were garbage once. How can you put a real world value on an item someone may at any point find a whole stockpile off, or worse, the machines that make them in the millions? North Korea has its defacto currency, the US dollar. Even loyalty taxes to the state have to be paid in it. NK ALSO had projects to create huge piles of counterfeit US dollars. Some ended up in the rest of the world but the majority of counterfeit US dollars is in NK circulation. NK has flooded its own economy with counterfeit currency they can't even hope to spend anywhere because if you had any brains and a North Korean handed you a wad of dollars you check every note individually.
Almost anything can be used as a currency, and has. Stamps have been used as currency almost exactly as Terry Pratchett described it in one of his latest books. In fact, paper money is an alterntive not that different from bitcoin to using real precious metals as barter counters. Nobody has a need for gold however, it was just for thousand of years convenient to barter for goods with a in between mechanism of gold/silver. I trade you my chickens for X gram of precious metal I have no need off because I know that I can barter that for clothes with that other guy.
ANYTHING will do for that, and has. There have even been cases of shops creating their own low currency for giving chance to small for real currency. You give me your silver coin and I give you produce and a chit saying that you still have some spending power left in this shop.
But what you NEED for a currency to be usable is some stability. Deflation is bad because it causes people to hoard and to much inflation hurts as well because if you pay me now, I will have far less tomorrow. Rampant speculation causing a currency to go rise and fall thousands of percent are useless. How am I going to price my goods when every second the currency has a different value.
Say you are going to sell beer for REAL (and not just as a novelty value, bars can afford to "sell" some beer just for a smile if 99% of the customers buy it for hard cash) for 1 bitcoin you might get within a day get anywhere between a dollar and a 400 dollars.
There is a reason people talk about HARD cash. Hard cash needs to be hard, have a consitent value. Salt worked once because people had a stable need for salt, a stable market existed so it could be reliable used to barter with. Comic books, baseball card, tulip bulbs and bitcoins don't.
It makes no sense to invest in it, you can only speculate in it if you understand what buying low, selling high really means AND until the idiot speculation stops it is even useless as a paypal alternative because you can't mark your products in bitcoins when that goes up and down per minute.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Why don't we use the generated heat for warming up water to be used in homes, for example? I've always wondered why we don't have huge power-consuming computers in our homes to generate heat AND do something useful while generating heat. Of course, this means less bitcoins or SETI or whatever in the summer, but I have better things to do in the summer anyway.
"I'm cold, honey. Could you turn up the bitcoin miner?"
In my humble opinion this article is bulls**t and it should not be on front page of Slashdot. Why should anyone care how much time/energy someone uses on his own computer? Bitcoin bubble bursts, so journalist must create some brain-dead articles about it, but why you post in on Slashdot???
Bitcoin is a pyramid as any other central banking fiat money scheme. Miners or bankers mint (loan, print) the coins and reap the benefits first before the inflation hits the less lucky suckers.
have you used bitcoin?
No
Number One piece of evidence: people in scheme denying vehemently that it's a pyramid scheme.
What kind of unit is that supposed to be? I find it horrible enough when people talk about Gigawatt hours a year, but seriously? Why not get creative? Horse-Power weeks per minute, anybody? Note that I'm talking about imperial horse powers, not european horse powers, which is quite the difference.
You had me until you said nobody nobody needed gold. If that were true then there would be no gold recycling.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"If you know ANYTHING at all about successful speculation, you know that you buy LOW and sell HIGH"
Oh come on, people aren't *that* stupid. BTC have zero intrinsic value so their price at some point in the future is completely unknown. I mean people who bought houses in 2000 and sold them in 2006 bought high and sold high, and made good investments. You can't tell how high the market will go until after the fact, so "buy low and sell high" regarding speculation must be some kind of joke since you can only judge it after the fact. After the fact, though, it is obviously the law of successful speculation, but it's no use to the speculator beforehand.
Please link to the primary source, blockchain.info/stats
Bloomberg just copied those numbers and filled the rest of the article with one-sided, negative statements (I dare you to find a single positive one).
There has been vastly more waste from powering TVs, but nobody's crying about that because it doesn't offer freedom to the masses.
While nobody knows what hardware mining is done with, the source (blockchain.info/stats) assumes a cost of 650 Joules/GH, which is about equal to the efficiency of an AMD graphics card.
However, if most of the mining is currently done using ASIC miners, the power consumption would be only one percent of that.
If most of the mining is done by Javascript miners against the will (or knowledge) of the users, the cost could be 1000 times that.
So, the actual value could be anything from 400 kilowatts to 40 gigawatts, and there is no way to know.
However, bloomberg still states that it is '982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact'
Why was it set up so that bitcoins have to be mined? Why couldn't they all have been created virtually on day 0, and then allocated?
Bitcoins derive 100% of their value from the shared agreement among the participants in the marketplace that they have value. Bitcoin's energy-wasting mining scheme was merely a poorly-conceived way to allocate the coins, and thus doesn't contribute to their value.
There must be a better way to design a virtual currency.
I wonder what percent of bitcoins in existence have been created in university dorms (aka places that have flat electricity bills)?
How much electricity does the credit card network require?
how EXACTLY is Bitcoins not a pyramid scheme?
When Bitcoin is done mining all of the coins in the chain, there will be a usable digital currency (assuming no flaws are discovered).
When a pyramid scheme is done building, all of its value collapses.
Both share the aspect of rewarding the early investors, but let's not make a composition error here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Are fast cars an environmental problem? People don't need them, ban them.
Is gaming an environmental problem? People don't need to do that, ban it.
Is eating meat an environmental problem? People don't need that either, ban it.
Is central heating an environmental problem? People can be cold, ban it.
Is any food stuff that isn't produced locally an environmental problem? Ban all of that too.
And flying is bad for the environment. Ban that as well.
Actually ban everything and make the whole world one big North Korea.
Stuff your stupid story and go moan to VISA, Mastercard, or even beloved Google about their power usage.
They destroy ecosystems and pollute groundwater,
The statement about gold was said in the context of "thousands of years" when gold was not used primarily for its metallic properties and more for its attributed monetary value instead.
Industry needs gold. The average consumer does not.
The overwhelming majority of individual participating entities in a mature economy has no practical use for any "precious metal" material exchange token. In a sense, paper bills is more useful day-to-day than a stack of gold coins. You can wipe your nose or your butt with a $1 bill. You can burn it for kindling or light. You can scribble that cute girl's phone number on it. (Just don't buy the condoms with that bill.)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I let others do the mining, say the energy consumption and environment destruction is their responsibility and not mine while I make the profit.
Fossil oil, minerals, wood, palm oil, rice, corn. Think about it.
Privacy is terrorism.
People are eating food as joules of energy that consumes oil so they can repeatedly punch the air with xbox kinect, engage in mechanized talk to mechanized tweets that are not really real, and paying to build a ponzi economy around them using bitcoin which as you say wastes the energy we already can't afford, whilst funding a private federal reserve bank to bankrupt the real economy. We're not just architects of out own demise, we're passionate architects of our own demise.
How prevalent are industrial bitcoin mining operations? That is - people setting up racks of optimized servers that only run when the very lowest electricity rates are available. Does anyone know anything about this? Such an operation would not seek to hold bitcoins. but merely produce them and cash them in to collect pay the bills and make a profit in conventional currency. Of course the could hold their bitcoins, but that would be combining a separate line of business with the mining.
If the cost per bitcoin some are estimating here (~$30) is correct then this would be a compelling business opportunity. Once the servers are paid for, a crash in bitcoin value only leads one to turn the servers off until the value rises again (making running them profitable), much like oil wells that only produce when oil prices are high.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_mining_is_a_waste_of_energy_and_harmful_for_ecology
Industry needs gold. The average consumer does not.
The average consumer has stuff in which gold plays a functional role, so you're wrong. They do, in fact, need gold.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is in line with Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's view of bitcoin as gold currency as expressed in his article Adam Smith Hates Bitcoin"
To highlight a paragraph from the op-ed piece, in which he quotes Smith:
"The gold and silver money which circulates in any country, and by means of which, the produce of its land and labour is annually circulated and distributed to the proper consumers, is, in the same manner as the ready money of the dealer, all dead stock. It is a very valuable part of the capital of the country, which produces nothing to the country."
The purpose of bitcoin isn't to hold coins for investment, but to use them for transactions, because they have useful properties for anonymousish internet payment that other payment processing systems don't have. Except for a few silly applications, transactions aren't priced in Bitcoins, they're priced in dollars or Euros or RMB or whatever, and you buy $x worth of Bitcoins on an exchange, use them to order easily shipped illegal pharmaceuticals or send money to your parents back in the old country, and the recipient sells them back on an exchange to get ~$x of locally useful currency.
You're not buying Bitcoins to hold them until they appreciate or the latest bubble bursts or the pyramid crashes, you're buying them to use for half an hour for a transaction, and they're almost always stable enough that any price fluctuation is within your tolerance for money transmission service fees (i.e. hopefully cheaper than Western Union, possibly competitive with Paypal, and certainly much smaller than the 90% markup the dealer is getting for a sheet of LSD or the 50% markup they're making on other drugs, and even if it's more expensive than Visa, the lack of record-keeping is a feature, not a bug.) And yes, if you're using it for illegal transactions, the lack of record-keeping is also a risk, because your dealer might not actually ship you the products, but you're probably only buying a $100 retail quantity, or if you're buying more you can structure it as multiple phases so you don't pay for the third 25% chunk until you've received the second one. And it wasn't like the credit card $50 loss limit was going to reimburse you if your sheet of "psychedelic artwork" arrived but didn't actually have any acid in it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Not money or an accepted medium of exchange either so number one is out. Do you really think circular definitions are going to fool many potential victims? You appear to be angry because people are not demonstrating the stupidity you require in the marks you wish to con.
Whatever power mining consumes you could save by less electricity used for heating. Viewed that way, they are just very high tech and expensive radiators :)
But it is kind of amusing to see how several branches of industries desperately try and find arguments against BitCoin ;)
Bitcoin should be pegged to an asset e.g. OPEC oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar
Bitcoin must be REGULATED to prevent scams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
Casteism
Look, if you're trying to be pedantic, you have to at least be on-point.
Consumers need products which contain gold. They don't need the gold itself, only the functional attributes that the gold fulfills in a product.
Try not to intentionally miss the point so obviously next time.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
about half the roof of this house is solar panels (chinese model, cheap with just as much lifetime expectancy put there while the govt still subsidised it) so how does that translate into carbon footprint ? i have no clue but it should be less, right ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
If true, it would mean that nearly 1/1000 of the total energy use in the US is currently devoted to bitcoin mining. That is preposterous. According to wikipedia, the total usage in the US is 3,886,400,000 MW-h/yr. The stated value for mining is 358,000MW-h/yr. The ratio between them is 9.23e-4. That energy usage figure includes all industrial activity, all computers running in the US, all street lights, all TVs, all electric stoves, etc. Everything. So, I simply don't believe the figure given.
The figure probably originates from http://blockchain.info/stats. I'm guessing it is either made up, or using bogus energy figures.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
tell that to my girlfriend. she likes gold in any form, apparently.
That is indeed my point. I buy products, not gold. Some products contain gold, some used gold in the process but I do not need a 100 gram bar of gold.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, what you say is correct, that is the way it was intended. It is not the reality. With hoarders, miners spending fortunes for creating more bit coins, the original idea has been lost.
If I wish to make a purchase in dollars through bitcoins, I first have to transform real currency in bitcoins, then perform the transaction and the other party has to transform them back. If the value changes during this, bitcoins are useless as a payment mechanism.
SAME as if I did it through paypal and during the transaction the value of the currency changed massively.
Bitcoins hasn't been stable for half an hour consistently. And that hurts because people ARE buying/mining them as an investment.
Original idea: Good.
Ruined by: Greed.
Well, that never happened before.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
My wife wont let me keep mining rigs in our garage anymore. The heat was ridiculous and so were the electricity bills. I have opted to outsource my bitcoin mining for now www.cloudhashing.com. I have bought some 20 Gigahashes from them. they are a tad pricey but it should pay off especially if bitcoins keep rising.
Great article. If you're wondering what bitcoins actually are, http://biticoin.com has a good dummies guide.