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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.
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.
In short, my considered advice to anybody looking at bitcoins as a way to get rich quick:....steer clear.
That's good advice for pretty near any way to get rich quick. Especially if someone is trying to sell it to you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
Electricity is not something we can efficiently transport from places where it's abundant to places where it's needed. Unused excess electricity is a waste.
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.
They can be divided into something like 0.0000000001 BTC so that is not an issue, if the economy got huge you'd price stuff in milli-BTCs or micro-BTCs. But you're getting close to why people think it's a pyramid scheme, to fit a trillion dollar economy in 21m BTC the exchange rate would have to rise to almost $50k/BTC. Actually $100/BTC already seems crazy, it'd put the total value at $2100 millon - until anyone big tries to cash out anyway.
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?
Let's say people deposit 100 BTC in the bank, now the bank lends 90 BTC to others while keeping 10 BTC as a fractional reserve, that might appear as 190 BTC (100 deposits + 90 loaned out) but it is only an illusion. If the people wanted to withdraw their 100 BTC the bank would be bankrupt because it only has 10 BTC in reserves, it is waiting for the other 90 BTC to be paid back with interest. In reality you'd probably secure yourself against bank runs like that by offering fixed interest rates so people can't withdraw all at once and cause a cash shortage and the bank could lend somewhere else with the loan portfolio as security. As long as none of the loans are defaulting, there's no real problem with this.
The problem is when they are defaulting, like we saw now in the financial crisis, if those "90 BTC + interest" is full of rotten loans and only 80 BTC will ever be paid back then 80 + 10 (the reserve) = 90 BTC is less than the 100 BTC the bank owes people, the bank is bankrupt and the account holders lose part of their money. Really nothing of this is specific to Bitcoin, you can replace it with USD throughout and that is how fractional reserve banking works. Normal banks (that is, not the national bank) doesn't actually print any money, they just make it seem more if you count deposits and loans many times (since those money loaned can be deposited.to be loaned out to be deposited to be loan just minus the fraction in each round).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. If anyone says "Watts per time" again, I personally hunt you down and smack your uneducated hipster face.
It "costs" 41MWh per hour. Period.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
No.
41MW is a rate of flow, not a measurement of volume. This is a 2 dimensional vector. They are made up of volts, amps, without time. It is an instantaneous measurement of flow at a specific instant in time, not over a span of time.
41MWh is a volume of energy usage.
41MW per hour is the same as above. These are 3 dimensional vectors. They are made up of volts, amps, and time.
41MW hours per hour would be a rate of accelerating power consumption, this is like 9.8 meters per second per second for gravity.
Its nice of you to rant about how someone else is wrong, but next time, calm down and actually get it right yourself. In your huff and puff, you turned volume into acceleration, probably in a typo. But it left me a pedantic place to respond ;)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No, the bank can loan out 95 strawberries. If those 95 loaned strawberries are deposited in another bank, that bank can loan out (95*.95) strawberries. If those strawberries are loaned out, and deposited again, now we're up to (95*.95*.95) strawberries, and an equal number of strawberry IOUs. If this process happens an infinite number of times, eventually the number of strawberry IOUs will be 2000. But every single deposit or loan will have involved a real strawberry.
Again, the government actually can create fiat currency by taking a piece of paper and writing "$100" on it, but fractional reserve banking always balances inputs and outputs. And despite what somebody upthread implied, it's been around since the middle ages.
Like getting in early to any company stock early adopters will usually benefit.
Britain is an island and so tidal power is intrinsically more promising than wind power. The Bristol Channel actually has the second highest tidal variation in the world for a river estuary. (When I was a child it was claimed as biggest in the world but they found a bigger one in China.) It is absolutely ideal for a tidal power station. Virtually free energy. So I suppose it was inevitable that the misguided green/ecology lobby would get the project killed. Tidal Power stations are not remotely as polluting and intrusive as traditional coal or gas burning ones. It's just capturing the rise and fall of the tide. It could easily have been built with minimal damage to the mud flats and bird populations provided that was part of the spec. Yes it would end surfing upstream but so what??? Surfing off the coast of Cornwall should be unaffected.